Godfrey Chang is Hawaii’s highest-ranking player.
Chang, 81, is also known for his longtime partnership with John Sutherlin, who died in May.
“He’s as good a guy as you can ever meet,” Peggy Sutherlin says. “They really did become lifelong friends. I think John would consider Godfrey one of his five best friends.”
It began the first time they played against one another at a Hawaii Regional in the late 1960s. Chang says he had less than 50 masterpoints at the time. He was playing with Maizie Ho, who managed to endplay her partner twice in a row on the same hand. Sutherlin felt bad for Chang and offered to play with him the following year at the regional. They would play together each January for 50 years, winning dozens of pair events along the way.
Chang considers himself lucky to have been endplayed by his partner twice on the same hand that day. “That experience was worth a lot to me,” he says.
In 1999 at the Spring NABC in Vancouver, Chang finished second in back-to-back national pairs events: the Leventritt Silver Ribbon Pairs with Gerry Caravelli and the Rockwell Mixed Pairs with Anne Arndt. The Rockwell was especially hard for Chang because it was so close: He and Arndt lost to Mike and Shannon Cappelletti by 0.62 matchpoints. That’s how close he came to making Grand Life Master.
Before that Chang used to travel to one NABC per year, but since then he’s been to maybe three in the past 20 years.
“My goal was never to reach for Grand Life Master,” Chang says. “Just mental stimulation. That is the key as you get older. Keep your mind and body going because they work in harmony.”
Chang was fascinated by cardplay long before he encountered bridge. As a 5-year-old, he could spend hours watching his mother and her friends play mahjong. “I was a very strange child,” he admits. Later on Chang played trumps, a trick-taking game similar to spades.
While attending the University of Hawaii, he noticed a foursome of retirees playing bridge at a country club. “As I was watching them play, I thought, ‘This looks like trumps.’” He bought Sheinwold’s “Five Weeks to Winning Bridge,” and when he got back to the university, jumped in and started to play. “No one dragged me down and said, ‘You gotta learn this game.’”
He learned about organized bridge from a fellow student, Burton Long, who invited him to play duplicate. “The taste of winning started to come right away,” Chang says. In 1963 he and Long played in an ACBL-wide Charity Game and placed third with a 73%.
As his stature among local players increased, Chang was asked to be appeals chair for the Hawaii Regional, a position he has held for 30 years. He also served on the Hawaii Contract Bridge Units Association board for eight years and six years on the Honolulu Unit 470 board.
It took more prodding to get him to start teaching bridge. Whenever Chang received the frequent suggestions he should teach, he would smile and say he hadn’t really considered that. Eventually he relented and decided to give it a try as a way of giving back to the game. He discovered teaching to be rewarding. “The reward comes when you light up that bulb, that joy when they see,” he says. “The other joy I get, they become part of the family. The social network enlarges.”