Point of View: Looking for an Edge

Mary continues to accuse me of cheating in back­gammon, and I tell her, eyes widened, that I simply can’t count as well as she can, and that, moreover, I’m not intelligent enough to cheat.

But none of that will wash. “You’re a cheater, I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it,” she concludes, as I hang my head, mimicking, as best I can, shamefacedness.

In most other things I’m upright, the scintilla of rectitude, but backgammon’s a blood sport with us, and I’m, sometimes, to my embarrassment (see above), too competitive. She won’t let me move when she turns to go out of the room, and she always stays my hand when I go to pick up my dice so that she can recheck the count.

“Do you do this in tennis? Do you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, if you do, nobody will want to play with you.”

The fact is, she beats me 90 percent of the time, and I think it’s that that is her prime motivator. I’m a mark, pure and simple, a Sad Sack. I should just hand over my money (if we were playing for money) when I sit down. In gin we’re a little more even, but we play so infrequently that neither of us can remember the rules.

Speaking of rules — and this is what I told her the other night when she accused me of cheating — I’ve never paid much attention to them. I don’t read manuals, instructions, or rules. How can I then be a cheater if I don’t even know the rules! Ah, that’s the clincher. I’ll try that out on her the next time we play.

It’s fun, I confess, to see her in high dudgeon, as she was when I said the other night, on having recorded a very narrow and rare win, “Somebody up there must like me” and heard her riposte, “Well, somebody down here doesn’t.”

Back to the rules, we’ve alit upon Russell Bennett, a co-worker and long-suffering Dolphins fan, as the final arbiter when it comes to the ones of the National Football League that we cannot fathom. We’ve been consulting with him quite a bit of late. Basically, to my mind, any ruling that goes against the Steelers is a larcenous crime, and any call that improves their position is an evenhanded meting out of justice.

I’ve seen seeming Steeler touchdowns and huge gainers reversed because the receiver apparently, after the catch, “didn’t make a football move.” Whatever that is. If you don’t dispossess the ball, even as it bobbles a bit in your hands, then you possess it, I say — at least if you’re a Steeler.

It intrigues me that amid such vicious mayhem they cavil so.

I’d draw an allusion to backgammon here, but perhaps I better not, mindful of what happened to Mr. O’Reilly, the inept builder on “Fawlty Towers,” who told Sybil Fawlty he loved a spirited woman, and end it by wishing you all a Happy New Year.