Source:
ACBL Dictionary
A
former public official in Rome. A
creative theorist, he was the
primary inventor of the Roman
Club system and collaborated in
the invention of Super Precision.
http://www.eurobridge.org/competitions/02Torquay/Bulletins/17WedEvePg3.htm
Giorgio
Belladonna (1923-1995) of Rome,
Italy, was a public official and
bridge professional with a
long-running column in a leading
Italian daily newspaper. In his
youth, Belladonna was a useful
footballer but it was bridge
which was to be his great love
and at which he was to become one
of the all-time greats.
A leading
theoretician, Belladonna was the
principle inventor of the Roman
Club system of bidding and, with
Benito Garozzo, created Super
Precision, a complex strong club
based method.
Belladonna was the number one
ranked player in the world for
many years according to the WBF's
masterpoint scheme and for many
years would also have won a
sizable number of votes from his
peers as being the best player in
the world. Certainly, he was
regarded as being the best
technical player around. I can
also speak from personal
experience in saying that he was
one of the nicest players in top
class bridge.
The story
of Giorgio Belladonna is really
the story of a very great team,
the Italian Blue Team. There have
been other powerful teams in the
history of bridge but the Blue
Team were, without question, the
finest team the world has yet
seen and their achievements are
without parallel.
The Blue
Team consisted of eight very fine
players: Eugenio Chiaradia,
Guglielmo Siniscalco, Mimmo
D'Alelio, Walter Avarelli,
Camillo Pabis-Ticci, Giorgio
Belladonna, and Pietro Forquet
and Benito Garozzo, who are also
to be found in this volume. As
important as the players was the
non-playing captain, Carlo
Alberto Perroux.
An
international team consists of
six players, and from 1957 to
1969 six out of the above eight
players won ten consecutive
Bermuda Bowls, the Open
Championship of the world. They
also won three consecutive World
Team Olympiads, in 1964, 1968 and
1972.
After the
break-up of the Blue Team, some
of its members continued to play
internationally and three more
Bermuda Bowls were won in the
1970s. Only one man was a member
of every one of those sixteen
Italian World Championship
victories and that was Giorgio
Belladonna. He also won the
European Open Teams Championship
on ten occasions between 1956 and
1979 and the Italian Open Teams
eleven times.
Belladonna's
early successes were in
partnership with Walter Avarelli.
He played odd championships with
other partners but his other
major partnership was that with
Benito Garozzo, which was
generally regarded to be the
strongest in the world. After
retiring from international
competition Belladonna frequently
partnered Pietro Forquet in open
tournaments around Europe.
Along with
other members of the Blue Team,
Belladonna played in the Lancia
Team, a sponsored team that
toured North America in 1975
playing a series of challenge
matches against local teams. They
managed to win only one of the
four matches; good news for their
opponents as part of the
sponsorship deal was that Lancia
cars were to go to teams which
were successful against them.
Belladonna
had also been a member of the
Omar Sharif Bridge Circus, a
group of top professionals who
toured both Europe and North
America in the late sixties
playing challenge matches. In
1970, the Circus made its second
North American tour, winning
three out of seven challenges
against major city teams and also
playing a marathon 840 board
match against the Dallas Aces who
accompanied them on the tour and
played a segment of the match at
each of the seven venues. The
Aces won the match by 1793 to
1692 IMPs.
But the
results of the matches were not
as important as was the publicity
generated by the tour. Though it
was not a financial success, the
tour significantly raised the
profile of the game in the public
image for a while, though it has
to be admitted that Sharif was
the biggest attraction to the
media and the exhausting schedule
included many personal
appearances by him.
It was no
accident that Giorgio Belladonna
was involved in both the Sharif
Circus and the Lancia Team. A
truly great player and a fine
human being, he was a great
ambassador for the game wherever
he went.
The hand
which follows was attributed to
Belladonna and certainly nobody
else has ever laid claim to it,
yet, when asked by another author
many years ago, Giorgio swore
that he had never seen the hand
before and knew nothing about it!
Whatever the truth of that story,
it looks like a Belladonna hand
and is so beautiful in its
simplicity that I could find no
hand more deserving of my
selection as the Belladonna hand
for this book
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bridgeFILES
