Matt loved The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester’s book about the relationship between Murray and Dr. William Minor, a clinically insane American surgeon convicted of murder who sent nearly ten thousand citations to Murray for the OED. And Matt is the first person to tell me about Joe Leonard. Matt revels in the image of the reclusive “Word List Master General” doing nothing but scouring dictionaries. He wanted to accompany me if I tracked Leonard down. (I chose to make the visit alone.)
For Matt, as perhaps for James Murray, William Minor, and Joe Leonard, words are the objective reality of life. They are codifiable and indisputable, and the game Matt plays using them is decided by a score on a piece of paper. No one can say he sucked, the way they could on stage or at SNL, without being disproved by the won-lost record, by the intuitive brilliance, by the deep insights. The dictionary is finite, but what you can do with it in the confines of the fifteen-by-fifteen Scrabble board is boundless. And Matt is better at it than just about anybody.
But a question lingers in my mind: Did the game create the personality or was the personality attracted to the game? Was Scrabble the symptom or the cause? And how could you be sure? “I’m sitting up here memorizing Scrabble words,” Eric Chaikin told me from his Catskills retreat when we talked about Matt, “and I’m thinking, That’s the result.”
The Eastern Championships in Danbury. February 1999. Matt was glad to be getting away, and determined to get healthy. “I’m going to be washing out my brain of all the shit I take,” he promised after I met up with him, Eric, and Marlon at the hotel just off Interstate 84 where the tournament was held. “I’ve already reduced it by a third, the vitamins. I’m getting away from the city, which helps. And I’m playing fucking Scrabble. And this was a fun tournament last year.”
Eric and I shared a room, and Matt took a rollaway bed in the corner.
“I brought way less shit,” Matt said.
“Just get off it,” Eric said, referring to the drugs.
“Yeah,” Marlon said.
We all agreed Matt should just quit. But we also understood that he was physically addicted, and pressuring him wouldn’t help. The conversation moved away from Matt. Marlon was threatening to take a job, stocking trains for Amtrak, a solitary task he thought would suit him.
“I can’t work for nobody,” Marlon said. “I can’t stand people. People are just too damn stupid.”
Matt arranged his pills in the white plastic container he carries to meals. A third might have been a good start, but he still had brought about twenty bottles, including Blast-Off, the high-caffeine potion, and other smart drugs. He called Janine to check in. He paced the green carpet.
Marlon said he always expects to get fired from a job. “I’m the happiest poor motherfucker you’d ever meet in your life.”
“I do exactly what I want,” Eric said. “I do words and friends, which is exactly what I want to do. But I’ve got no friends.” He was joking; Eric has a stable of friends, but he’d been camped out in the Catskills alone for a while.
“You don’t need no friends,” Marlon said.
“I simplified so much I’m ready to complicate again,” Eric said.
“Amtrak’s looking like a fucking dream to me now,” Marlon said. “It’s not close proximity to assholes. Offices—you get into office politics, the bullshit.”
“I could get you a phat job on Wall Street if you didn’t always have to say exactly what you were thinking,” Eric said.
“I could take over Wall Street,” Marlon said.
Matt was ravenous but quiet at dinner, and so exhausted from antianxiety medication that he lost three of four games the first night. He wrapped a red T-shirt around his eyes and buried himself under the covers with two stuffed animals. The next day was no better. “My meds have me wiped out right now,” he said in the morning, before losing five of six games. At 2–8, unprecedented for him, Matt joked that you have to experience the lows to appreciate the highs. I wasn’t sure he was referring only to Scrabble.
At meals, there was none of the jovial anagramming banter that distinguished Danbury a year earlier, and we left hurriedly after eating so that Matt could get to sleep. Incredibly, on Sunday and Monday, Matt won eight of the final ten games to finish an even 10–10 for the tournament. (I went 9–11, still untutored by Edley and mired in mediocrity.) Matt was subdued as I drove him home.
12. The Owners
WHEN I SEE the denuded Scrabble boxes rolling down an assembly line at a Hasbro plant in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, I experience a giddy rush of excitement. I’m like Charlie inside the chocolate factory.
The 1.2-million-square-foot plant abuts the headquarters of Hasbro’s games division. It’s the company’s last factory in the United States. Most of its toys and games are now made at company-owned factories in Europe or, increasingly, outsourced to Asia. In 1998, Hasbro shuttered a Vermont factory that had churned out a million maple Scrabble tiles a day for twenty years, an event that prompted a wave of sentimental news stories about the loss of another American icon to cheaper, overseas labor. The tiles and racks are now made in China.
But the Scrabble box, cover label, and instructions are printed at the East Longmeadow plant, as are paper products for other Hasbro games. On the factory floor, wooden pallets stacked thirty feet high hold sheets of Monopoly money and Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards, Clue score sheets, boards for Life and Chutes and Ladders. Production on the ten assembly lines is scheduled according to demand. Monopoly is cranked out periodically on three shifts round the clock, about ten thousand games per shift. Right now, Pokemon and Star Wars products rule; when I visit, Hasbro has recently acquired the company that made Pokemon and embarked on a costly licensing deal for Star Wars items.
Scrabble is assembled on Line 7, beneath a giant banner for the game Battleship. The average run is twenty-six thousand units of the standard cardboard version in two weekly shifts. (Deluxe Scrabble, with the rotating plastic board, is assembled occasionally on Line 4.) I watch boxes as they are “spotted” on a Scrabble label—a new redbrick color scheme designed to liven up the packaging—on which glue has been automatically applied. A giant arm plunges the box into the label and folds over the sides at the rate of thirty-three boxes a minute.
As a box travels down the hundred-foot-long conveyor belt, a worker places into one end a sealed plastic bag of tiles. Next comes an upright cardboard divider that displays the rules of the game, then four racks from a pile of thousands, then a gray plastic tile bag, then the cardboard game board, into which an information slip from the NSA is fed, and finally the cover. The box is shrink-wrapped and packed with five others, and the half-dozen games ride an elevator to another conveyor belt, where they are relocated for shipping. My tour guide, a Hasbro executive named Gary Brennan, pulls a warm box off the line and hands it to me. I notice later that it depicts inaccurate tile values on the back: six points for a J instead of eight, two for a C instead of three, eight for a K instead of five. (I tell John Williams, who tells Hasbro, and the next time I inspect a box, the errors have been corrected.)
The factory produces well over a million of the standard, travel, deluxe, and Spanish sets combined per year. Sales exceeded two million in 1998 and would do the same in 1999. As I stand watching the Scrabble boxes roll by, I wonder, Where do all those sets go? And how do they get sold with little or no advertising?
Industrywide, companies turn over their product lines at a rate of close to 100 percent for toys and 25 percent for games. But certain brands are perennials. Hasbro found that sales of Candy Land, for instance, tend to parallel the birth rate three years earlier; when kids turn three, they inevitably receive Candy Land. Scrabble sells year in and year out because parents buy it for their children and newlyweds add it to a living room bookshelf. These games are cultural talismans, signposts in an American life. For Hasbro, they are annuities. American leisure time increasingly is dominated by television and computers, but Hasbro is selling more board games than ever,
about 95 million units a year. So entrenched are its games that the company now promotes games playing rather than individual games, bunching Scrabble with other chestnuts—Monopoly, Life, Clue, Yahtzee—in a marketing gimmick called “Family Games Night.”
“It would be hard to launch some of these perennial brands today,” Mark Stark, a marketing vice president at Hasbro Games, says during my visit. Scrabble doesn’t sizzle with action, so it’s hard to advertise on television. “It’s there because it has endured the test of time and become a part of the culture,” he says.
At a meeting of “Team Scrabble”—which consists of Hasbro marketing, licensing, and promotions executives, representatives of an outside ad agency, as well as John Williams and a colleague from the National Scrabble Association—I’m asked to explain tournaments, basic rules, and the words. The Hasbro executives show me a recent analysis of Scrabble’s brand strategy which doesn’t even mention the competitive side of the game. And it strikes me that the people who own the rights to Scrabble don’t know much about the subculture around it.
Does that matter? If the competitive realm could help Hasbro sell more sets, presumably the company would take advantage of it, and executives say they do care about the tournament scene. “I’d love to see Scrabble achieve the same level as chess, where you have grand masters that are internationally known and you have the tournaments and there is funding,” Dave Wilson, now the president of Hasbro’s games division, tells me later in his surprisingly toy-free office in East Longmeadow. “I think it would be terrific to do that.”
But on a daily basis, Hasbro sees more to gain in the eye-rolling ideas enthusiastically discussed at the meeting: inflatable Scrabble furniture, an eighteen-karat-gold set, a special golf edition, a licensing arrangement with the gambling industry (Hasbro already has licensed Monopoly-themed slot machines), a deal with Pepsi to put Scrabble on soft-drink cups at movie theaters.
It’s up to John Williams to bridge the gap between the corporate and competitive worlds—a gap that doesn’t exist for any other proprietary game because no other proprietary game exists in such a competitive world. Williams tries to decommercialize Hasbro’s ownership role; for instance, he notes, the NSA’s big event isn’t known as the “Hasbro National Scrabble Championship.” It’s important to give the players, he tells Team Scrabble, a feeling that they, not some faceless corporation, control the game. Hasbro’s Stark agrees: “That degree of ownership they have is something you don’t want to disturb.”
From the perspective of some top players, though, Scrabble shouldn’t be owned by anyone. If a corporate parent is an unfortunate necessity, they believe, then it should do more to support the players. Hasbro, the complaints go, unfairly cracks down on players who want to write how-to books. It harasses Internet sites that infringe on the game’s copyright (though erratically so—Hasbro’s struggling interactive division, which the company would sell in late 2000, all but ceded cyberspace to games players). It doesn’t stage enough big-money tournaments or allow outside corporate sponsorship. It doesn’t spend enough through the NSA to support the clubs and attract new players to the game. And, at a time when cheerleading, bass fishing, and the National Spelling Bee show up on ESPN, it hasn’t managed to get the sport on television.
“We’d like it to be the PGA Tour,” the veteran Scrabble expert Merrill Kaitz tells me, pointing out another game with a burgeoning pro tour, the strategy card game Magic the Gathering, also now owned by Hasbro. “That’s an ideal world.”
The resentment stems from the fact that the players, as Lester Schonbrun once told me, “created the whole world,” and keep creating it, organizing tourneys (prize money in all events but the Nationals and Worlds comes out of player entry fees), making plastic Protiles and custom boards, writing software, creating Web sites. The players love the game, and praise Hasbro for events like the Nationals, but feel used because they generate free PR for the world’s biggest toy company.
“I and a few other of the game’s best competitive players believe it’s only fair to expect some reasonable remuneration for putting in the time and effort to become one of the best at anything,” G.I. Joel once wrote to Hasbro’s Dave Wilson. “Golfers, bowlers, tennists, and, yes, chess players all have the dollar incentive to excel, and showcasing the best players has always been good for product sales in those sports. But Scrabble still lags behind. Why isn’t this as ludicrous to you as it is to those of us who have chosen to excel at the great game whose copyright you own? And just so you know a little more about the fine art of anagramming, please note that LUDICROUS + I = RIDICULOUS.”
Of course, people who drink the Kool-Aid have little perspective. Hasbro probably devotes more time and money to the competitive Scrabble scene than to those of all of its other games combined. The reality is that network executives aren’t clamoring to televise Scrabble, and Fortune 500 companies have more productive uses for their sponsorship millions. “Where would I rather be? In fifty NASCAR events or on a banner at the Scrabble championships?” Williams asks. “There’s this myth that some company is willing to pay a million dollars to sponsor tournaments and Hasbro is holding back.”
Could Hasbro do more? Sure. But it doesn’t. “They’re not only in the Scrabble business,” John Williams told a town meeting for players at the 1998 Nationals. “You’re only in the Scrabble business.” To illustrate how far apart the concerns of the two are, Williams said he had received a letter from a player maintaining that if Scrabble adopted SOWPODS, adding thousands of British words, the game “would go into the toilet.” The same week, Williams said, he was asked by a Hasbro executive, “What do you think of a Hard Rock Cafe version of Scrabble, where if you play a rock star’s name you get extra points?”
In fact, nothing is guaranteed. Williams has to present a budget to Hasbro every year, and he’s never assured of approval, especially of late as Hasbro has struggled. “It’s dangerous to assume that they’re going to continuously pump a very big sum of money into this ad infinitum,” he says. Further downturns in the toy industry, a lawsuit by a player, a new marketing executive who really doesn’t get it—anything could lead the company suddenly to spend less on competitive Scrabble.
The players aren’t completely naive about the bottom line, or the reality of their world. “Behind it all,” Kaitz says, “[we’re] wishing our game did have more potential than it really does, that intellectual games were more valued in our society than they are.”
When Alfred B. Swift opened a toys and games wholesale business amid the horse-and-carriage clatter of lower Manhattan in 1867, the industry was in its infancy. Playing cards had been made in America since colonial times, but board games didn’t emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century. Leading the field was W. & S. B. Ives of Salem, Massachusetts, which in 1843 introduced the Mansion of Happiness, in which landing on a space denoted as a virtue (Piety, Honesty, Temperance, Gratitude, Prudence, Truth, Chastity, Sincerity, Humility, Industry, Charity, Humanity, or Generosity) advanced one toward the Mansion of Happiness, while landing on a vice (Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude) sent one back toward the start. In 1860, a struggling draftsman and lithographer named Milton Bradley created one of the first mass-produced games, the Checkered Game of Life, which had similar moral overtones.
One of the first games that Alfred Swift shipped was Parcheesi, which was almost identical to pachisi, the national game of India since at least the fourteenth century. Swift soon after acquired the copyright to the game, but when his business took a downturn he signed it and the business over to one of his creditors, a paper-box manufacturer named Elisha G. Selchow. Selchow planned to sell the company, but he was so impressed by its manager, John Righter, that he kept it going and made the young man a partner.
In 1874, E. G. Selchow & Company received a trademark, one of the first in the United States, on Parcheesi. Selchow became the sole sales representative for Milton Bradley, and sold dozens of other popular games and puzzles with names
like Pigs in Clover, Richter’s Building Blocks, and Fuld’s Ouija Board. Along with Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers, the renamed Selchow & Righter led a tide of games sales that capitalized on a changing society in which leisure had become morally acceptable and new technology enabled mass production and transcontinental distribution.
Selchow and Righter were hardworking, religious family men. “They were definitely against liquor and gambling,” a company history compiled in the 1970s says. “They definitely rejected any game or accessory that could in any way encourage gambling. No roulette wheels, no horse race games, no poker chips, no poker or pinochle type playing cards, no paper play money, no metal coin play money, etc.” (The dice in Parcheesi were acceptable “for it appears they believed that [dice] would never encourage one to gamble.”) Harriet Righter, a daughter of John Righter who succeeded him as president, passed on acquiring Monopoly from its inventor, Charles B. Darrow, because the game used play money.
Selchow dropped out of the wholesale business but started manufacturing Parcheesi in 1927. The firm wanted to keep things small. It wasn’t an innovator. It didn’t take risks on new products or develop any hit games. It didn’t pressure buyers and retailers to stock its line, and didn’t advertise directly to the public the way Milton Bradley did with Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land, and Parker Brothers did with Monopoly, Go to the Head of the Class, and Sorry! Selchow had Parcheesi, and that was fine.
That Scrabble wound up in the hands of a cautious, conservative, unglamorous company made perfect sense. The game, after all, was invented by cautious, conservative, and unglamorous Alfred Butts. Just as Alfred had one success in life, Selchow built a business on one product, Parcheesi. Just as Alfred had no idea about how to bring his invention to market, Selchow didn’t approve of the hard sell. Alfred stumbled across an investor who helped him get his game made and marketed; Selchow stumbled across its games. No owner made Scrabble the legend it is now. The public did.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 20
