Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313)

by Fatsis, Stefan

  “They may own the game,” Williams tells me of the company on which his job depends, “but they’ll never come close to your devotion to the game.”

  13. 1461

  AMERICA’S GOOD-TIME GAME.” That’s how Hasbro describes Scrabble in the only television commercial the company has made for the game in the last decade. It’s a hokey, thirty-second montage of nuclear families, mostly white and blond, laughing around a board. So it stands to reason that few things could be more American than playing such a treasured game on the Fourth of July.

  But wholesome is not the image delivered this Independence Day by my next tournament venue: Reno. I’m greeted at the airport by the why-waste-a-minute image of slot machines next to the baggage claim. The Megabucks prize scrolling across a red neon ticker in the main terminal is up to...“$7,000,000!!!” THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD, as the sign stretched across the tawdry main thoroughfare proclaims, consists of pawnshops and jewelry stores and quick-loan joints—and all of them at once at Palace Jewelry and Loan. I feel a weird blast of air conditioning as I walk past Harrah’s and the Nugget: The gambling pit opens onto the sidewalk. Art Deco clubs like the Nevada and Harold’s, which boasts “50s and 60s nostalgia,” lie dark and shuttered. checks cashed upsTAiRS, one sign reads. Reno is a place to borrow money and gamble it away, or marry your sweetheart at the Candlelight Wedding Chapel and honeymoon at the Thunderbird Motel.

  What would Alfred Butts think? My hero, counting letters on the obituary page of the Herald Tribune so that sixty years later Americans could play Scrabble and blackjack in one afternoon.

  But Reno is The Tournament. As befits a superlative-happy gambling mecca, this year Reno is The Longest Tournament. Ever. Thirty-nine games in the main event plus twelve in an optional “early bird.” That’s a total of fifty-one games over eight days, a They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? exercise in Scrabble machismo or masochism, I’m not sure which.

  Reno is the second-most-popular Scrabble tournament after the Nationals, and in odd-numbered years, like this one, it is considered the championship stand-in. About three hundred players, including two experts from Thailand who barely speak English, have descended on this tacky gambling mecca. Most of the best in the land are present: G.I. Joel, Brian Cappelletto, Joe Edley, Jim Geary, Lester Schonbrun. Everybody plays Reno.

  The tournament has been run for years by a contractor named Johnny Nevarez, a buff Californian in his early forties who, with his passion and tanned good looks, would be the perfect host for a Scrabble infomercial. Nevarez got interested in Scrabble while in college. He and his friends would get stoned and play. “Games would last four hours,” he says.

  Nevarez stages the tournament at the Sands Regency, one of the cheesier hotels in the city’s casino district. It’s a giant ashtray (G.I. Joel wears a surgical mask throughout the event), and soft rock pours like a sedative through the loudspeakers twenty-four hours a day. Working-class vacationers clad in Reno T-shirts and pastel nylon sweat suits dump nickels, quarters, and Susan B. Anthony dollars into the slots, some patterned after Hasbro’s own Monopoly game. There are no high rollers in this joint. The room I share with Marlon fetches $39 a night, for two.

  When I arrive, Marlon is lying on his bed, his naked, fireplug body wrapped in the sheets, watching Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. He is crashing after a three-bus, sixty-one-hour journey from Baltimore via Washington, Toledo, and Chicago. His dogeared OSPD lies on a table, along with three tattered notebooks and several packs of off-brand toaster pastries and Parliament cigarettes. The early bird starts in five hours. Marlon is broke, and he says he needs to win some money—playing Scrabble, not gambling. He wants to pay me for this hotel room, and he still owes me $100 from a year ago in Chicago. Plus, he needs to make sure he has enough cash for bus fare home.

  I’m happy to front Marlon money—he pays back when he can—but I can’t help wonder. Marlon is a bright, self-aware, highly social man who won’t take a job because almost all jobs, he theorizes, benefit white people. He gave up on the idea of working for Amtrak. Instead, he plans to win a lawsuit he has filed against the food company Giant.

  A few months earlier, Marlon walked into a supermarket to buy a pack of cigarettes. The clerk asked him for identification. Marlon, who is thirty-four, felt as if he were being harassed. He raised his voice and asked to see the manager. He raised his voice again. Then Marlon says a security guard—a white security guard—grabbed him, threw him to the floor, and pinned his arms behind him. Marlon was arrested. No charges were filed, but he sued the company, alleging battery, false arrest, and false imprisonment. “I’m gonna get a whole lot,” Marlon says. “That’s malicious prosecution and shit. Brother man gonna get paid.”

  In addition to studying words and waiting for the trial, Marlon has begun writing what he describes as a tract about Pan-Africanism. I’m never sure if Marlon’s by-whatever-means-necessary routine is bombast or if he’s organizing a revolutionary cell in his bedroom. Marlon is a pussycat by nature, polite, funny, loving, and friendly with just about everyone in the Scrabble world, race notwithstanding. But he’s also genuinely angry. When I ask him what he’s going to do, he’ll often reply, “Gonna burn down America!”

  Marlon was born in Baltimore. His mother, Hattie, worked for years in the main post office downtown until she went on disability with diabetes and neuropathy in the early 1990s. Marlon knows his father, but he has never been part of Marlon’s or Hattie’s life. Hattie has lived in the same row house in the black working-class neighborhood of East Baltimore for more than forty years.

  At age two, Marlon could recite the One Hundredth Psalm from memory; his relatives propped open a Bible to make it look as if he were reading. At age five, he could read, and soon was poring over the World Book encyclopedias that an uncle sold door to door. He remembers reading about World War II and the Kennedy assassination. “I knew that was bullshit,” he says. “Ain’t no way [Oswald] popped him by himself.” So emerged Marlon the skeptic. An aunt inspired in him a sense of racial injustice; reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, instead of “and justice for all,” she would say “and justice for y’all.” An uncle told him that white people “didn’t want black people working with them because they didn’t want us to know how dumb they really were.”

  Marlon never followed, or led. He had few close friends outside of his family. He never joined a gang because “peer pressure is totally lost on me.” He went to the library but hated school—the bells telling him when to come and go, the obligation to study what he considered useless subjects, like the German class he quit in sixth grade.

  Marlon was bused to special schools because he tested well but fought with other kids, cut classes, and got bad grades. He turned down a scholarship to a private school and wound up at a technical high school learning electrical construction and maintenance. He played one game of high-school football, in ninth grade, rushing twelve times for 173 yards and three touchdowns, but he quit because he didn’t start the next game. “I didn’t feel I was getting respect.”

  Marlon went to Morgan State University, a predominantly black college in Baltimore, for two years, but quit because a white teacher stiffed him on a grade on an English paper. “You are a big fish in a little bowl. There are many bright minds in the big bowl,” Marlon says the teacher wrote atop the paper. “Meaning I wasn’t no more than a smart nigger at Morgan. It soured me totally. Here I am at a black university and I have to go through this shit.

  “I’d a been a great football player, a great boxer, a great anything I would have done,” he tells me. “If I’d a gone to school, I’d a been a great doctor, a great lawyer, anything.”

  “Whose fault is that?” I ask.

  “I don’t see it like a fault. That I’m not plugged into the matrix is not a fault. I’m glad I’m not plugged into the matrix.”

  The Hills played cards, family and friends gathering for long, competitive games of whist. One night, lightning struck a nearby church while
they were playing. It was a sign from God: no more cards. So they switched to board games. Scrabble became a favorite. The Hills always looked up words in their dictionary, and over time learned dozens of two-, three-, and four-letter words, and bingos, too. Marlon’s older cousin Cheryl eventually agreed to let ten-year-old Marlon play Scrabble with her. They became a family of living room experts, with strong memories and an intuitive sense of board strategy. “Twenty, twenty, twenty, bingo,” Marlon recalls his Uncle Harrison instructing him. The meaning: score about twenty points three turns in a row while setting up your rack to bingo.

  But throughout high school Marlon refused to enter a tournament. “What muhfukka 16 wanna be in the company of da flippin’ socially retarded nerds that constitute the upper levels of the Scrabble stratosphere?” Marlon e-mailed me shortly after we met. It wasn’t until he was twenty-seven, in 1992, that he did. On the Saturday of July 4 weekend, Uncle Harrison told Marlon they were going for a ride, but he wouldn’t say where until they arrived at a hotel downtown. Marlon was pissed, but after starting off 4–0 he agreed to return for the second day of the tournament. He wound up 10–0, and afterward experts gathered to meet the new black kid who could play. One of them told him about the Nationals later that year in Atlanta and mentioned the prize money. “When I found out you could win ten thousand, I said I’m into this goofy fucking game,” he says. His initial rating was 1765.

  On the train to Atlanta, Marlon met Matt, who hustled him out of $17, and he met Richie Lund, who dubbed him the Muhammad Ali of Scrabble because he was running his mouth. Marlon went 12–15 in the expert division, boasted that he would win a Nationals within five tries, and was interviewed by Joe Edley for Scrabble News. “I knew I had skillz, but no pillz,” he wrote me, meaning he had talent but no word knowledge.

  Marlon quickly discovered that winning at Scrabble was a mild but important form of empowerment. He could beat the Europeans —the people responsible for the school system, the government, and four hundred years of racial injustice on the continent—at a game of the mind. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, Ph.D.s—whoever. Playing Scrabble, Marlon could stick it to the man. It was even sweeter when he beat someone whose condescension was plain.

  “It definitely does not validate my existence,” he wrote to me. “But it makes some shit easier to take.”

  The spiral-bound notebooks without which Marlon never travels are filled with his eclectic brand of Scrabble study and his sometimes inflammatory musings on race, religion, and life. On one page, Marlon has written every six- and seven-letter word he doesn’t know by heart. On another, he offers himself a test of seven-letter words that have a tough anagram. He underlines the first letter of the anagram. For instance, in LIGULAS the anagram is LUGSAIL; PALSHIP, SHIPLAP; ALMONDS, DOLMANS. In another book, Marlon has over time manually recorded all of the nine-letter words he does not know. Even top experts play nine-letter words sparingly; after all, to do so you must either play through a two-letter (or longer) word already on the board or through disconnected tiles. “It’s just words I want to know,” he says. “If the possibility of them turns up during a game, I know to be looking for them.”

  During his sixty-one-hour bus ride, for inspiration Marlon reconstructed a game he played against Brian Cappelletto at the 1996 Nationals in Dallas. Marlon calls it “the nine-thousand-dollar game”—the difference, more or less, between the $10,000 prize for finishing in second place, which Marlon would do if he won the game, and the $900 for fifth place, which is where he would wind up if he lost. Marlon committed to memory every play in sequence. He beat Capp —only Marlon calls him Capp—and shocked the Scrabble world, finishing 19–8 and second to Adam Logan, the Harvard math graduate student who ran away from the field with a 24–3 mark. It was, and remains, the high point of Marlon’s Scrabble career.

  The victory led to a profile in the Baltimore Sun, which led to the job testing game software for a Baltimore company whose main client was Hasbro’s interactive division. Marlon tested computer versions of Monopoly, Battleship, Mastermind, Risk, and Scrabble. On his own time, he played ten thousand games against the Scrabble CD-ROM, proving, he says, that it cheats (drawing better tiles for itself than for its opponent). Marlon loved the work, and he was good at it. But he quit a few months after I met him, citing a racial incident. He worked briefly as a security guard at Morgan State, but quit that, too. Now his job is Scrabble, Marlon says, and changing society.

  At Reno, Marlon swears he won’t let a string of recent bad luck influence his play. To help achieve that goal, he composed during the bus ride his “Rules of Engagement.” For the early-bird event, Marlon has four rules.

  1. WIN THE GAME.

  2. STAY FOCUSED.

  3. KNOW THE LEDGE. “That’s knowledge,” Marlon says, explaining to me, the hip-hop-challenged white boy, that the phrase comes from a song by the rapper Rakim.

  4. ICE FOR BLOOD. “In a short tournament, calm the fuck down,” Marlon says.

  Marlon has different rules for the long tournament. He says that in a short tournament you just try to win the few games and not take any chances. In a long event, you need to rack up a big point spread, because that often is what decides the overall winner.

  1. PLAY MY GAME. “If you’re a boxer, you don’t fight somebody else’s fight, like Sugar Ray did fighting Duran,” Marlon explains. “My game is an open game. In a long tournament, play my game.” For instance, Marlon insists that in a long tournament, if handed FACTION on his opening rack, he would not make the conventional placement of the F on the double-letter score but would slot it two spaces to the right, sacrificing 8 points for the remote chance of playing LIQUEFACTION from the triple-word score.

  Nearly every top player would judge this strategy as idiotic. “That’s why people think you’re crazy,” I say.

  “People have no fucking idea,” Marlon replies. “People have no idea what is fucking going to happen to them. I’m calculating more than just about anybody who can play.”

  2. STAY FOCUSED.

  3. WALK A TIGHTROPE (EARLY BUT NOT LATE). “String the board wide the fuck open,” Marlon explains. “Flirt with danger. Slot T’s in the triple-triple line. Slot E’s in the triple-triple.” Why take the risk? I ask. “I’m a stronger player,” he says. “I know the dictionary now. I’m probably ninety percent on the dictionary now.”

  4. BREEZE IT, BUZZ IT, E-Z DUZZ IT. Marlon is quoting from a West Side Story song. “I got to remind myself that all the time,” Marlon says.

  Indeed, losing his cool is Marlon’s biggest weakness. But it is also the personality Marlon chooses to cultivate: the brilliant but unpredictable ghetto boy, as apt to drop ELUTRIATE in a game as he is “motherfucker” in a conversation.

  It’s not just his skin color, it’s how he chooses to wear it. There are plenty of African-American Scrabble experts, including one ranked higher than Marlon, Lisa Odom of Minneapolis, who’s also the highest-ranked woman. But none of them makes a point of race, while Marlon struts his blackness, from the wooden Black Power fist and African-motif necklace he wears—“Green is for land. Red is for the blood of the people”—to what Matt Graham calls Marlon’s “high Ebonics” speech. Marlon knows standard English; he chooses to speak the way he does. During games, Marlon turns his chair around and straddles it, sucking on a toothpick or two. He’ll show up late and let his opponent start his clock. He’ll chatter to himself, usually growing frustrated over bad racks. “God-damn” he’ll cry, quieting a room of players.

  Of course, no one takes Marlon’s act entirely seriously. He’s never threatening. He laughs at himself when ribbed. He has forged caring friendships with many players; he greets me with a soul handshake and chest bump, while the sweet Rose Kreiswirth, a middle-aged expert from Long Island, gets a hug and kiss on the cheek. Marlon’s ready good humor, courtesy, and lovable charm don’t stop his outbursts. If they did, Marlon wouldn’t be Marlon. Even Marlon doesn’t always view himself as entirely out of the mainstream. Asked to pic
k seven Scrabble tiles that best describe him, he replied, “M-A-R-L-O-N, plus a blank. MARLON is NORMAL. And the blank is unlimited potential.”

  If he’s ever going to be feared and respected, like Cappelletto and Edley, Marlon needs to exploit that potential and play it cool. Otherwise, he’ll forever be a sideshow—the loud, irreverent, outrageous Black Player, good but not great. Not that Marlon worries about how he’s perceived. He knows he’s smarter than most people.

  “Never in my life have I felt inferior,” he tells me. “Never, not ever. Ain’t never looked at a white boy and thought that motherfucker is better than me. Under no circumstances. Stupidity when it confronts intellect does not retreat. Intellect when it meets stupidity ain’t got no choice but to retreat. ’Cause the first thing you say is, ‘Oops, you stupid.’”

  I come into Reno with my 1461 rating ranked about 650th in North America, a long way from about 2,000th, which is where I began my quest for Scrabble proficiency. But in the three weeks since my tournament victory on Long Island, I’ve lost momentum. I’m exhausted from moving into a new apartment, I haven’t studied much, and I’m my usual nervous self. While I finally have achieved a respectable rating, deep down I feel like a fraud.

  In the smoke-filled hallway, within earshot of the jangling arcade noises of the omnipresent slots, I’m listed on the player sheet under my old rating, which bothers me. I want to be known as a 1461 player, a solid intermediate. While a mistaken rating could work in my favor by lulling opponents into complacency, I’m more concerned about how I’m perceived. Still, I win three of four in the early bird on day one, which ends at 11:00 p.m., or 2:00 a.m. Brooklyn time. My back is killing me, Marlon snores, I sleep badly, and the next day I lose seven of eight games.