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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  The park is Scrabble in its purest form, stripped of pretense and affect, like all games played on the street. The tiles are usually dirty. The bags often reek of too many hands reaching in too many times. The regulars use analog chess clocks, not the $100-plus digital variety found in formal play. They don’t have special score sheets listing all of the tiles so they can keep track during play; notepads or scrap paper will do. Some write down the twenty-six letters and track the tiles played with slash marks. Most don’t bother.

  Disdain runs high, and no one, as I’ve learned, is loath to criticize a boneheaded play by another regular. The park isn’t for the thinskinned or insecure. One day, before the parkies know me well, I’m playing Christine Economos, who is a sort of park den mother; she lives around the corner and often lends the parkies a board and tiles if they’re short. Matthew Laufer is kibitzing my game, and tells me I’ve just missed a bingo. Richie Lund, a Vietnam vet, is seated next to me at the green picnic table.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Richie bellows at Laufer. He rises to face him. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  It’s like a David Mamet play. Testosterone rules. The parkies can be divided into two classes. The first is the money players like Richie and Alan and Matthew and Aldo and other experts who wander by. The stakes are usually small—two or three bucks a game, plus two or three cents per point—but they can escalate to ten or twenty a game. The second class is everyone else. The best of the rest, and my favorite, is Joe Simpson, a tall, bearded, septuagenarian World War II veteran who always wears fatigues and a green beret that covers a bald, light chocolate pate. Joe, who spent three decades in air force administration, started playing Scrabble two days after his sixty-fifth birthday. That was six years ago. Joe is gruff, forever snapping at some poor parkie—usually Arnie or John, a skinny, retiring Woody Allenish figure. John always brings equipment but rarely plays, like an elementary school kid who knows he can’t compete but hangs around the jocks anyway. But it’s an act; Joe is a softie who enjoys playing the tough.

  When I stroll into the park on a late-spring afternoon, Joe greets me like an old friend. “Where you been?” he asks.

  “It’s spring now,” I say. “I’m back.”

  “You mean you’re not a winter player?”

  Meantime, his opponent is complaining. “I’m in trouble here,” he says.

  “Concentrate,” Joe barks. “You’re running your mouth a mile a minute.”

  I play three games against one of the low-skilled regulars, Herb, and win all three easily. Drawing all six blanks helps, but I also find words like SERIATED, BURGLED, and POTshARD. I’m back the next day, and Richie invites me to play doubles with him against Alan and Aldo. It’s a sign of acceptance into the park culture, akin to my drubbing Berg at the club and earning pats on the back. This will be my third season in the park, but my first as a real player, one who studies and has ambition. The stakes are low—$1 a man and 2 cents per point. Richie does most of the work, and I ask and learn.

  He’s patient; when a move is indicated, he waits for me to make a suggestion before explaining the options and completing the play. He finds GARAGING to a G. He sees the only bingo in DIINORS (SORDINI). He explains why he prefers a leave of DERSS over a leave of ESSV. When I suggest VIM through an I, simultaneously forming MAX, Richie says, “Nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing.” Richie and I lose six of eight games, and $13 apiece.

  “Sometimes you see a lot,” Aldo says, profoundly. “Sometimes you see squat.”

  “It’s very embarrassing,” Richie says.

  The next day, we play more doubles, and Richie and I recoup $9 each; I’m thrilled when I find a couple of plays—FATWA, AIRLINER through an L—that Richie overlooks.

  Richie is wearing his uniform: a black cutoff T-shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers. Three gold chains, one bearing an eagle, dangle from his neck. Richie is clean-shaven, with short hair that recedes from a forehead that hangs over his eyes. He’s missing a few teeth. By day, he’s a chemist for Con Edison, the power company.

  Between games, Richie shows off some of his new tattoos. Bruce Lee, which he’d had done before the Nationals last year after his quintuple bypass surgery, was just the first. “That’s the one that got me hooked,” he says. On his right forearm is a painting by the Japanese artist Hajime Suriyama called Cat and Telephone —a cat with a telephone on its stomach lying on a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. On one side of his left forearm is Gladiatrix, another Suriyama painting, of a futuristic female warrior. On the flip side is an adaptation of the exploding-head poster from the movie Brazil; in place of Jonathan Pryce’s head is Richie’s, with Scrabble tiles flying out of his crown. On his upper left arm is a painting by Donald Roller Wilson, Cookie, which depicts a baby orangutan; Richie says he is attracted to “the whimsical quality of it.” He turns around and lifts his shirt. Stretching across his back, unfinished, is the pièce de resistance: Rousseau’s The Dream, “which,” Richie notes, “is in permanent residence at the Museum of Modern Art on the second floor. It’s my favorite painting.”

  Richie has spent about $7,000 and more than sixty hours being tattooed, and he’s not done. “I want to get some high art,” he says. “Maybe a Magritte on my leg. I’m doing a Mount Rushmore with my four favorite composers. It’s going to be Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.” Richie slaps his knee and laughs. It’s a deep, sinister, Goodfellas guffaw that insists you join in or risk bodily harm. He invites me to come watch him get tattooed. Suddenly he says, “It smells strongly of urine over here, doesn’t it?”

  I meet Richie on a Friday night at the East Village tattoo parlor of Anil Gupta. Since that day in the park, Richie has had the composers etched into his lower right arm: Mozart in lavender, Bach in orange, Beethoven in green, and Handel in blue. Richie removes his shoes and his right sock and sits in a dental chair. He swallows a couple of Tylenols with codeine and lifts his right pants leg, revealing the work in progress: the funeral mask of King Tutankhamen.

  Anil dons surgical gloves, trains a lamp on Richie’s leg, and rubs King Tut with lotion. He flicks on the tattoo gun, which emits a high-pitched buzz. It punctures the skin at a rate of about fifty pricks per second using anywhere from three to fifteen needles. Anil is using seven needles to paint the red ink along the edge of Tut’s gold mask. Richie bites on a plastic bottle cap to dull the pain.

  Richie Lund is the Fonzie of Scrabble: He’s so cool that you wonder why he’s hanging with the nerds, but his mere presence legitimizes everyone around him. It’s not just the black clothing or the gold chains. Not the welcoming charm or lack of condescension. Not the brilliant plays or sudden eruptions. (In Waltham, once, another player gave him the finger and Richie screamed, “Give me the finger? I’ll break that finger off and shove it right down your fucking throat!”) Not the dark, penetrating eyes or the unblinking gaze over the board. None of that. What makes Richie Lund special is knowing that the pain of a tattoo is literally just a pinprick compared to what he has gone through to get this far.

  As Anil switches to yellow ink for Tut’s mask, Richie tells me his life story. He was born in 1948 in Brooklyn, which accounts for his accent. The family moved upstate and then, when Richie was sixteen, to Parker, Arizona, where his father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A year later, at seventeen, Richie graduated from high school and joined the marine corps. And a year after that, in 1966, he was sent to Vietnam. “I wanted to go out there and get some adventure in my life,” Richie says. “I was sent right into the shit, man.” He flew directly to Da Nang. “Two days later I was up the DMZ dodging mortar shells. Nothing in between.”

  Richie was a radio operator with the Fourth Marine Regiment of the Third Marine Division, assigned to night watch patrols, carrying a PRC-25 portable radio weighing twenty pounds, plus batteries, on his back. Richie did a thirteen-month tour. Dong Ha. Cuaviet. Cam Lo. Con Thien. Right on the DMZ, the focus of heavy action. Camp Carroll. Phu Bai. Camp Evans. Richie saw it all. A buddy blown up by
a land mine. Bodies dangling from trees. A camp full of dead Green Berets.

  Richie came home a broken man. “Bellicose, warlike, always getting into fights, starting to do drugs, downers, drinking,” he says. “My mom didn’t recognize me. I had this vacuous look in my eyes. I was gaunt. I looked like death warmed over.”

  Then he volunteered to go back for thirteen months more. This time he was assigned to the Fifth Marine Expeditionary Brigade of the Third Marine Division. On the second day of his second tour, in the spring of 1967, Richie wound up at Khe Sanh, in the middle of the Tet Offensive. “It just got worse my second time over,” he says. “I knew if I got through Khe Sanh, I could get through anything. That was as bad as it got over there.”

  Richie bites on the cap and grimaces.

  Like many veterans, Richie couldn’t readjust. “I was as much of a mess on the inside as I was outside. I wasn’t about to accept help from anybody. My attitude was fuck everybody. I wasn’t even angry —just out of it. I didn’t want to fucking think about anything. I was one of the lost boys.”

  Richie shunned his family and old friends. He wandered. Arizona. Colorado. California. Oregon. Washington. He visited other vets. He rode a Harley-Davidson Sportster until he wrecked it in California. He took a job repossessing cars in Phoenix. Still drinking, still getting wasted, still spiraling downward. He was accused of punching a cop (Richie denied it) and spent a couple of weeks in jail in Tucson. It was a hidden blessing. The father of a fellow marine was an influential lawyer in Tucson who helped place Richie in a yearlong detox and rehab program.

  Richie moved back to Brooklyn, sober, to live with his grandmother. He decided to go to college under the G.I. Bill. He finished second in his class at a community college and then earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Brooklyn College. Under a Vietnam veterans outreach program, Con Ed hired him in 1979 as a chemist. For years, Richie has conducted environmental analyses to check for asbestos, PCBs, and the like. He’s just been transferred to an administrative job in the department.

  It’s hard for him to talk about Vietnam and its aftermath. He leavens the conversation by asking rhetorically, “Can you believe that?” and guffawing. He shifts the subject to tattoos and the quality of Anil’s work, showing me around the studio and pointing out impressive designs.

  Richie adjusted to working; he liked it. At Brooklyn College, he saw a flyer for a Scrabble club in the borough. He had played with an aunt and uncle in Brighton Beach since returning to New York, and when he was growing up his parents had played chess, Scrabble, and other word games. He went to the club and met Steve Pfeiffer, another Vietnam vet. Pfeiffer shared word lists and they talked Scrabble, but rarely Vietnam. Richie decided he wanted to master the game. Why not? Scrabble was the ultimate distraction from everything that had come before. How could you think about the horrors of war when you had to memorize one hundred thousand words? Scrabble helped Richie forget. He devoted a year just to learning the words. (No lesser an authority than Brian Cappelletto once credited Richie with having the greatest Scrabble word knowledge of all time.)

  “I just wanted to be a top player. I wanted to be top at something. I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to be top in my profession. Given what I had previously been through, it was an accomplishment just to get a job.”

  Richie played in a few tournaments in New York, earning an 1800 rating, but outside of a handful of local players, no one knew who he was when he traveled to Boston for the 1985 Nationals. Ron Tiekert won, Joe Edley finished second, and Richie came in third. On the pivotal move in the final game, against one of the top players at the time, a Canadian lawyer named Stephen Fisher, Richie cemented his place in Scrabble lore by plunking down TWINBORN. Fisher challenged. It came back good.

  “Me! A virtual unknown!” Richie says. “And he didn’t know the word!”

  Other experts began calling him Mr. Twinborn. Richie had found a new, less harrowing world to replace the inhumane one he had encountered in his youth. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that Scrabble saved Richie Lund.

  He started playing regularly in tournaments. He won a bunch of East Coast events. He finished in the top five in three Nationals. He finished fifteenth in the Worlds in New York in 1993. But he always remained enigmatic. He’d drop out of the scene, disappear from the park for months at a time, and then suddenly reappear, ready to play. When he did, other players wondered, “Is Richie okay?” He was Scrabble’s cipher, which, of course, only burnished his legend.

  For a while, he burned out; studying was no longer fun. But, like a few other retired stars, Richie reemerged when the lucrative Superstars Showdown in Vegas in 1995 was announced. He returned to the park and entered a weekend tournament on Long Island attended by all of the top players in the east. He hadn’t played in a tournament in a year. “I annihilated the field!” he says, belting one of his happily threatening laughs. “Won ten in a row in the middle of the tournament. Only lost three.”

  He entered the Superstars with the second-highest rating in North America, 2080, behind only the defending Nationals champion, David Gibson, who also came out of retirement to play. Richie didn’t do well, finishing thirty-fourth. But he invited his family. Richie wouldn’t board an airplane, so he hadn’t seen his parents for eight years, his sisters for thirteen and twenty-four. Scrabble had made him whole again in ways that Richie can’t describe and doesn’t necessarily even want to think about.

  Anil puts the finishing touches on King Tut’s funeral mask. He squirts green soap on Richie’s leg to clean off the stray ink. He’s done.

  “Oh, man,” Richie says. “I’m so glad.”

  16. The World

  STROLLING GROGGILY through the airport in Auckland, New Zealand, eighteen hours after leaving New York, I see two men sitting across from each other, bowed over what appear to be word lists. I walk up, and say, “I can spot Scrabble players anywhere.”

  These aren’t just any Scrabble players. Finding Joel Wapnick and David Boys quizzing each other at a snack bar a few days before the World Scrabble Championship is like stumbling across Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras hitting balls at the public courts in Central Park before the U.S. Open. Wapnick, a fifty-three-year-old, mild-mannered music professor at McGill University, has sad eyes, a hangdog face, and a shuffling carriage. He was the North American champion in 1983, and runner-up at the Worlds in London ten years after that. Boys is a coffee-gulping, cigarette-smoking, thirty-five-year-old workplace underachiever with the energy of a Jack Russell terrier. He won the Worlds in 1995.

  We’re all traveling to Melbourne, Australia, for the 1999 Worlds. I’ll be observing, not playing, as ninety-eight players from twenty-nine countries square off across the board. The U.S. team of fourteen will be the largest. Boys and Wapnick represent Canada, which has six players.

  I buy a cup of chamomile tea and a blueberry muffin and join them. At this moment, they are drilling each other on eight-letter words that are acceptable in the British word source Official Scrabble Words, or OSW, but not the North American one, the OWL. Learning a lot of British-only bingos is a key to success at the Worlds. Boys has a list of seven-letter words to which an added letter forms a British-only bingo. He is quizzing Wapnick on the G’s. So when Boys says, “PATSIES,” Wapnick responds “GASPIEST#.”

  “OVERALL,” Boys says.

  “OVERGALL#,” Wapnick replies.

  “NOVELLA.” Wapnick is stumped. He has slept thirty minutes in the last thirty-two hours.

  “LONGEVAL#,” Boys says.

  Wapnick began playing Scrabble in 1975. It was a game well suited to his mind; mathematics and music are related in the brain. When he decided to learn the dictionary, Wapnick settled on rote memorization. As we wait for our connecting flight to Melbourne, Wapnick tells me how he did it. First, he broke down seven- and eight-letter bingos according to their component vowels; his first list starts with words containing three A’s; SALADANG (a wild ox) is the first word on it. Wapnick memorized the words i
n order of appearance, in blocks of twenty. Every twenty-first word is a “guide word” and every 201st word is a “super guide word.”

  “Take the list that starts with GALATEA,” he says. “GALATEA, ANNEALED, AGITATE, SALARIED, ASSAILER, SEASONAL, IG-NATIA, ADNATION, LAGUNAS, DELEGATE.” He utters the ten guide words in three seconds. “Those are words numbered one, twenty-one, forty-one, sixty-one, eighty-one, and so forth. So let’s say I have something like A-A-E-I-D-L-R-T. If I don’t see LARIATED immediately, what I’ll do is say to myself, ‘GALATEA, ANNEALED, AGITATE, SALARIED. It’s got to be after SALARIED.’” That’s because words containing the same vowels are listed according to the alphabetical order of their consonants. So DLRT (the consonants in LARIATED) would come after DLRS (the consonants in SALARIED) on the AAEI list. “Then I’ll go through the twenty words: SALARIED, LARIATED, ASSAILED. LARIATED is there. I can go through the twenty words real fast.”

  I ask him to do so, and he does.

  “SALARIED, LARIATED, ASSAILED, DILATATE, ATTAINED, DATARIES, DIASTASE, SATIATED, GERANIAL, ALGINATE, GAS-ALIER, TAILGATE, ANEARING, ANGARIES, ARGINASE, AERATING, ALLANITE, ARILLATE, NASALISE, ARTERIAL.”

  Seven seconds.

  Wapnick carries with him a wad of five stapled sheets of paper that, in microscopic type on one side of a page only, contain sixteen thousand OWL bingos. It represents an excerpt from his bible, a 425-page tome titled “My Word Book.” The system has served him well. In addition to his championship, he was runner-up at another Nationals and a Worlds—but lost the final three games in both to finish second. This year, after a bad tournament, he started studying from scratch. “I went back to my very first list, and I recited it over and over about fifty times in my head, so it was totally automatic. It occurred to me that if I did this with all of my old lists that I could get them back.”