A week ago or so, I promised drinks to the first person who could explain why the Dombo Tournament has been played since 1985 on Ascencion Day, this year that will be Thursday May 25. Nobody came up with the correct answer.
The short answer to the question is “the Pope”, the full and long answer is:
As you can guess from the name, the Dombo tournament is organized by the Student Bridge Club “Dombo”. That has not always been the case, “Dombo” was founded in 1986 as the successor of the "Veritas Bridge Gezelschap", or VBG. The latter was the name of the bridgeclub of the student union C.S.Veritas in Utrecht. Veritas has, since 1934, its clubhouse at the Kromme Nieuwe Gracht 54, an old street (and canal) in the center of the city. Obviously the tournament was held there, for some reason always during the second weekend of May, in 1985 that would have been May 11 and 12.
However, 463 years earlier, on January 9, 1522, Adriaan Floris Boeyens was elected as Pope Adrianus VI (in Latin, in English it is Hadrian or Hadrianus), making him the first (and to this day, the last) Dutchman to do so. Adrianus was born in Utrecht, though by the time he was elected, he was actually living and working in Spain. When the news reached Utrecht, the citizens immediately invited him to visit his home-town.
And as he had to stay somewhere during his visit, they started to build a house for him. That place became known as Paushuize (“House for the Pope”) and is located at what is known today as Kromme Nieuwe Gracht 49. Yes, that is some 100m from the Veritas Student Union.
Pope Adrianus never actually stayed in his house, as he passed away some 1.5 years after being elected as a Pope in September 1523. He was known to be very religious and lived a sober life, that didn’t make him popular in 16th century Rome. Rumor has it that he was poisoned after cutting the allowances of his cardinals for parties, women and booze.
Nobody ever bothered to withdraw the invitation to the pope to come and visit, and some 462 years later, Pope John-Paul II decided to finally take up the offer and pay the Netherlands a visit. That was actually a quite controversial move, as most the Dutch catholics didn’t agree with the conservative views of this pope and only 2% thought he should show up in the first place. Things even went that far that some extremist group put a 15000 guilders (some 6000 euros) prize on the Pope’s head. When asked, the Pope’s comment was “Non e molto”, Italian for “that’s not much”. Fortunately, for the Pope at least, the local snipers agreed.
Anyway, a visit was planned for May 11-12, 1985. The plan included a visit to Paushuize, the pope reading mass in a local stadium and more. How many people would show up, was not clear, but visits by the pope to other countries had attracted 100,000’s of spectators.
Now combine the two and you can see the conflict: a bridge tournament at number 54, and a visit of the pope (and some 100,000 of his followers) at number 49. That won’t work. In fact, the city of Utrecht declared the center of the city a red zone, basically meaning all traffic would be blocked except for access by foot.
That gave us as tournament organizers a problem. We tried switching weekends with some other events, but for various reasons this proved to be impossible. There weren’t any other slots available in the same month either. However, there was Ascension Day. This is traditionally a holiday in the country, nobody had planned a tournament for that day, so we asked (and got) permission to run our tournament that day.
Aftermath: Ascension day proved to be a huge success for the tournament, in the first year, some 15 teams extra showed up with respect to the previous years. People liked the fact that they could play on this odd day off. That made life of the tournament organizers for the next year easy: we asked for Ascension day again. And the tournament has been played on that day ever since.
The visit of the Pope wasn’t a success. Instead of a 100,000, it attracted only a couple of 1000 spectators. On the original days, the city was nice and quiet, and the policemen and other security folks spent a nice day sitting in the sun. O yes, and the politicians debated afterwards on why the government had spent some 2.5 million euro’s on security for this visit, or roughly 1000 euro’s a head.