Nightly cribbage bouts continue

The nightly cribbage games with my father continue. Lately we have nearly split our games, with the slight edge going my way. Over the weekend my father thanked me for not bragging about beating him in my column. 

 

Thursday evening, he got to the table a few minutes before me. When I walked up, he had the newspaper open to my column. His eyes were red. He thanked me for the Father’s Day gift. 

 

Saturday night, Dad didn’t answer the phone, as he usually does, during my ride home in the evening. So I stopped in to check on him. The front door was locked and the new key (my dad recently got a new door handle) did not work. So I went in the side door. 

 

“Hello?” My dad said from the basement.

 

”I could have been anyone, come to rob the place,” I answered. 

 

Dad didn’t know where his phone was. I wish my generation could imitate that disconnection from technology that my dad so absent mindedly has. People, younger generations more, I observe, are too connected to their phones. 

 

When we started playing, I made a point to look at our score tally. Dad said he wished we had kept track, year-by-year, instead of one long running tally. 

 

The running game ledger had my dad up by 72 games at the start of the night. With a total of 752 games played between the two of us. In the notebook, Dad found a quote with a date from 2016. I figure we must have started keeping track around then, which, coincidentally was the year I graduated. Dad and I have played many, many more games than that. He taught me to play when I was only 10 years old. His dad taught him to play even younger than that. 

 

In total, my dad tallied 62 “skunks” to my 39. A skunk, in cribbage, occurs when a player wins by more than 30 points, the equivalent to a ‘street.’ 

 

Cribbage is played to 121 points and is scored on a board; players advance pegs along a line of  holes to show their progress. The first one to the final hole is the winner. Each ‘street’ is 30 points. It’s a quick, easy way to measure the number of points scored throughout the game, and happens to be divided into “streets” in the same way football has quarters and baseball has innings. 

 

At the office, where we have kept track this year, I am up 14 wins. Dad has registered eight skunks to my two. 

 

Notably a skunk is worth two wins. Between the two score sheets, subtracting the extra tally win from a skunk, Dad and I estimate he’s only up about 45 wins over the past decade of games played. 

 

Notably, over that time, I am the only one of us to register a ‘double skunk.’ I beat my dad, one time, by more than 60 points. In my lifetime of cribbage games, which total thousands of games, I have only ever seen two double skunks. I was the winner on both occasions. The other came against a family friend, ‘Buddy,’ aka Waseca native Terry Bortle.  

 

During that same day of losing, Buddy said a famous quote that lives in infamy in our household.

 

Leading 120 to 114, Buddy exhaled and said, “Boy I needed that one.”

 

I proceeded to peg two points on each of his first three cards played, and one for a ‘go’ to score the game-winning 121st point, before he could count his hand. The player who is not dealing counts their points first. To peg seven points without Buddy getting any is incredibly unlikely and rare. Buddy was not having a good day, that day. At that time we used to “cut” before every game to see who deals. In that stretch, Buddy lost 17 games and 17 cuts in a row. 

 

From that day forward, Buddy and I played a lot more ping pong. 

 

I intended to write about my 4th of July. This year I spent the first half playing in a card tournament at my store. It ended in a 4-way tie for first, with me in the tie. After that, I spent the evening with my best friend, Jake. We watched four boxing matches while I worked on the newspaper. During the final fight of the night, the official called the match in the twelfth and final round. Jake and the announcers were upset. One of the TV commentators said it was the worst call he had ever seen. 

 

Jake and the announcers were wrong. The fighter who was knocked down for a second time, both during the first 30 seconds of the final round, was exhausted and done. I think the official saved this man from potentially serious harm. 

 

The two fighters were both friends and Ohio natives (the fight was in Cleveland) and had sparred together for years. The 33-year-old, the loser in the fight, had never fought a 12-round fight before. After round seven, the younger fighter, 22 years old, took control and dominated. I don’t think it was necessary for him to risk hurting his friend when the fight, from my perspective, was already done. 

 

Yes, the part of me that wants to see a good ending, the animalistic human side of me, would have probably enjoyed seeing the fight end without intervention. But the human, compassionate and logical side of me commends the official for stepping in. And like the New Richland baseball team which lost 3-2 in the Conference Championship game, the losing boxer will live the rest of his life knowing he was good enough to win a championship. (He had clearly won the first six rounds of the fight. However, he lost the final six frames, and the match and the title.) 

 

Maybe this is a good comparison to the cribbage matches between my dad and me: He is the older veteran who can no longer keep up with the young buck.

 

“I refuse to let adversity and past failures define who I am.” - Mike Tyson

 

“I consider myself blessed. I consider you blessed. We’ve all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating people up.” — Sugar Ray Leonard