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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Strolling around his suburban Montreal neighborhood every evening lost in a haze of words, he did. In the past, Wapnick had been able to practice two or three pages of two hundred words apiece in one study session. Now, he was doing twenty-two hundred words in an hour. “It was so automatic. It was fabulous.” He managed to memorize about four thousand British-only words. But then the new academic year started, his study time slipped, and now he isn’t confident. “This particular tournament, I don’t think it’s going to pay off,” he says.

  Boys, by contrast, is optimistic. He quit his job as a shipper at a medical equipment company in order to prepare for the Worlds; he’s returning to school to study computer programming. Marathoner-thin, with a close-cropped haircut, sunken cheeks, and nicotine-stained teeth, Boys looks like an extra from a World War II movie. He crosses his legs and bounces the dangling foot incessantly. For Boys, Scrabble is like Ritalin: It calms him down and gets him to focus, if only temporarily.

  Unlike a Wapnick or an Edley—players who exude a scholarly sobriety about the game—Boys is a “whatever” kind of Scrabbler. He plays the tiles instinctively, doesn’t overintellectualize board positions after a game is done. His early study involved reading the OSPD—no word lists, no flash cards, no system. He doesn’t subscribe to Wapnick’s technique. “I hate memorizing,” he says. “I’d rather find the word in a half a second on my rack than go through a list and spend a minute.”

  When he won the Worlds, Boys studied thirty hours a week, and he’s well prepared again. Boys won’t say it, but he wants to become the first person to twice win this tournament, which has grown in prestige as top American and Canadian players become more serious about studying the British words and as the rest of the world closes the talent gap.

  “It’s the whole world,” Boys says. “Not just North America.” He flips to a list that contains seven-letter words plus a Y. “PORTALS,” he says.

  Wapnick recites the alphagram, ALOPRSTY. Stumped again.

  “PASTORLY#,” Boys says. “BURNERS.”

  “It’s not SUNBERRY#, is it?” Wapnick asks.

  It is.

  Since the Worlds are played using a combination of the North American and British word sources, players who regularly use only one of them have to learn words in the other. And that’s mostly the North Americans. The United States, Canada, and Israel are the only countries in the world that use the OWL as their word source. England is the only country that uses only the OSW. The rest of the world plays the game using both sources, which is known as SOWPODS (an anagram of the letters contained in OSW and OSPD, the North American source until the OWL was published).

  The elite players in England, however, don’t even bother playing OSW-only Scrabble anymore. They play SOWPODS exclusively. That’s something the best North Americans can’t afford to do; there are just too many good OWL players, too many OWL tournaments, too few opportunities to play the world game, and too much geographical distance between the best SOWPODS players at home to limit study to the combined book. This shift has left the North Americans at a disadvantage.

  The British book is fatter than the North American one, so the U.S. and Canadian players have to learn more “new” words than their British counterparts. For instance, there are twenty-five British twos that a North American player has to learn for SOWPODS but only twelve American twos that don’t fly in Britain. The twos, though, are easy to learn. Harder are the 257 British-only three-letter words; 1,252 British-only fours; and close to 18,000 British-only sevens and eights. All told, there are 40,240 two- through nine-letter words unique to the British word source, nearly twice as many as there are American words for players across the Atlantic to assimilate.

  But in Scrabble, the world is converging. The biggest and most lucrative tournaments outside of the North American Nationals and the Worlds are held in places like Singapore and Bangkok, where corporations and governments are advancing prize money and support. And the world is deciding that a universal word source is the way to go; Australia has crossed over to SOWPODS play from the old OSPD, and England gradually is switching over from OSW.

  Only North America has been reluctant. For more than a year, a debate has raged over whether to adopt the international rules. Hyperbole and name-calling have been rampant on both sides of the fence. The pro-SOWPODS players, the antis say, are a handful of elitist snob experts who play in the world championships and are trying to ram forty thousand ridiculous words down the throats of the masses. The anti-SOWPODS players, the pros say, are a bunch of lazy Luddites who don’t understand that North America will be left behind if it doesn’t convert. Tens of thousands of impassioned, often venomous words have been spilled on the e-mail forum CGP. At Reno, players donned NO SOWPODS buttons. To which Jim Geary replied, “Why not just wear a sign saying, ‘I’m an idiot and I don’t understand all of the issues’?”

  There are a few. The biggest is that most players don’t want to learn more words. SOWPODS contains 35 percent more two- to eight-letter words than the OWL. “This is a monumental change,” says New York expert Paul Avrin, who hasn’t studied in years. “It cannot be compared to the relatively small amount of words added in the previous dictionary revisions.” Another point is that the British words would change strategy. SOWPODS is more creative and offense-minded, because more words equals more possibilities and more opportunities to score; individual scores above 500 points are routine. The extra two-letter words alone allow for more parallel plays, that is, placing one or more tiles on top of others, which improves the chances of playing bingos. And the British twos include ZO and QI, the latter especially important for dealing with the clunkiest tile, which often ruins the flow of games. In SOWPODS, it becomes more difficult to shut down the board, a common, stultifying tactic in OWL play. The pro forces see this as a positive change; the antis say defense should remain part of the game.

  But the loudest wailing has been reserved for the words themselves. The British list is based on The Chambers Dictionary, which all agree is a lousy source for a word game. Chambers is crammed with Shakespearian and Spenserian archaisms, not to mention thousands of Scottish words, like THEGITHER#, which means “together.” There are Latin words not labeled with a part of speech, and there is at least one word, PRENZIE#, from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, that, the definition admits, might have been a misprint. “If there were only a few of these, it would be fine,” U.S. team member Ron Tiekert tells me. “But there are tons.” And some of the British-only twos are ridiculous: PH, the measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution, is in there because the P is lowercase, and therefore meets the definition of a word (and the plural is PHS), while CH is defined as obsolete English dialect for “I” when fused with a verb, as in “cham” for “I am” and “chave” for “I have.”

  On CGP, every time an anti-SOWPODS-er trots out a list of supposedly weird British words, a pro-SOWPODS-er defines them to prove they aren’t so weird. If an “anti” suggests that the recent additions to the North American book are reasonable, like ANTIDRUG$ and REBOOT$, but the British words are insane, a “pro” points out that we also added words like TUGHRIK (a monetary unit of Mongolia) and KUVASZ$ (a large dog with a white coat).

  Some see the fight over specific words as beside the point. “English is a weird language,” Bob Felt says. “Words come and go.” Bob Lipton, one of the most vocal SOWPODS backers, notes what should be obvious. “If you take any subset of words that includes words listed in one dictionary but not another, you will see a list of words that is generally unfamiliar to most people.” Scrabble, say Lipton, Felt, and others, is just more fun when more words are available.

  Others see the SOWPODS movement as another step on a slippery slope. Having a word source sans definitions was bad enough. “Quaint as it seems,” Larry Sherman posted, “many of us signed up for this cruise because we enjoy language. Five or six years ago, I could actually define most of the words I placed on a board. But as SOWPODS advocates blithely remi
nd us, today’s letter combinations are just ‘game pieces.’ The same gentlemen who daydream about lucrative corporate sponsorships”—Larry is referring to his brother, G.I. Joel—“are not concerned that much of a SOWPODS board would look like Greek to their prospective audience.”

  The logical solution is to clean up both word sources; the OWL is still sullied by words that no longer appear in any U.S. dictionaries. A cleanup, however, would require corporate oversight, and no one believes that Merriam-Webster or Chambers or the companies that own Scrabble care enough about the game’s minutiae to get involved.

  At the time of the Worlds, the debate appears to be approaching a resolution. The NSA has promised to schedule a referendum on whether to adopt SOWPODS—but not on whether to clean up the dictionaries. Meantime, it has asked the Scrabble clubs to vote on whether to test-drive SOWPODS for a month. At one Thursday-night gathering, G.I. Joel stands up on his chair to stump for SOWPODS. He says he hates Chambers —“as a reference volume, it’s an abomination”—but he likes what it does for the game. One reason to try it is “to be recognized as the most courageous club in America.” I am one of thirteen club members to vote yea; I love the idea of more wide-open games, and I’m still learning words, so what’s a few thousand more? But SOWPODS loses by three votes. Joel keeps handing out 50-cent prizes anyway for the best SOWPODS words that don’t get challenged off the board, and off to Australia we go.

  To prepare for watching the Worlds—and for playing SOWPODS on the side—on the plane from Los Angeles to Auckland I memorize the twenty-five British-only two-letter words, which is a snap. Learning all 256 British threes, however, seems ridiculous. So I write down a few with entertainment value—DOH, EEK, FAB, GUB, HOO, ISH, PST, UEY, UFO.

  The words aren’t the only thing separating North America and the rest of the Scrabbling world. The World Scrabble Championship is a showcase for one of the oddest relationships in the toy industry, perhaps in any industry. While Hasbro controls the North American rights to Scrabble, in the rest of the world they belong to Hasbro’s rival, Mattel Inc. It’s as if Ford and General Motors were forced to manufacture a car together, or Coke and Pepsi had to share a soft drink. Scrabble is like a child caught in a custody fight between warring parents. In this case, visitation rights for the Worlds, by an unofficial agreement between the two companies, are on an every-other-year basis. “It’s quite possible that a high-level Hasbro executive and a Mattel executive never had a conversation about this,” John Williams says. “It’s like North and South Korea.”

  Hasbro and Mattel have battled for decades. Hasbro and G.I. Joe were long synonymous with the boys market, Mattel and Barbie with girls. In the 1960s, both companies tried and failed to build boardgame businesses from within. So they bought their way in. Hasbro had the upper hand. In 1984, it acquired Milton Bradley—which made Life, Yahtzee, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and dozens of other familiar games. Five years later, Hasbro landed Scrabble by outbidding Mattel for the assets of bankrupt Coleco. In 1991, Hasbro beat Mattel again, acquiring Parker Brothers and classics like Monopoly, Sorry!, Risk, and Trivial Pursuit. By 1994, Hasbro had gobbled up more than half of the $1.1 billion U.S. games market.

  But Mattel tried to catch up. It bought International Games, maker of the popular card game Uno, and then it pulled off a stunning coup: It outbid Hasbro for J. W. Spear and Sons, a mom-and-pop British firm that controlled the international rights to Scrabble. Spear had long been close to Scrabble’s old mom-and-pop North American owners, Selchow & Righter. Spear launched the game in Britain in 1954, policed the Scrabble trademark (though it was plagued by ripoffs worldwide), and hired linguists to translate the game into twenty-two languages, from Arabic and Afrikaans to Hebrew and Russian. “Only the Japanese and Chinese couldn’t do it,” Francis Spear, the grandson of the company founder, tells me.

  After Hasbro acquired Scrabble in 1989, it took a 27 percent stake in Spear. So when Francis Spear decided to sell in 1993, it seemed a fait accompli that Hasbro would be the buyer. But some Spear board members considered Hasbro’s initial offer of $47 million far too low. Hasbro raised it to $71 million. Still not enough. The board sought a “white knight,” and Mattel stepped in, eventually offering $90 million. Hasbro dropped out. “We believe the Mattel offer is very generous and above a level which we could justify in business terms,” the president of Hasbro International said.

  Hasbro had passed on an opportunity to lock up worldwide rights to one of the most popular board games in history. Plus, Mattel had beaten Hasbro in a showdown over a games company, which would have been embarrassing enough had that company not made a game Hasbro owned back home. Even worse, the appeal of Scrabble overseas had been growing annually, and there was a huge market waiting to be tapped.

  The NSA was hounded for free Scrabble sets by clubs in places like Nigeria, where Scrabble was a government-sanctioned sport. Pirated versions sold by the thousands from Italy (where it was called Scarabeo) to India (where there were dozens of knockoffs). Unsanctioned tournaments in Thailand were attracting more than one thousand adults and schoolchildren. Newspapers in the Philippines and Malaysia reported tournament results. “Hasbro didn’t understand that the game transcended cultures,” an industry observer says. “They didn’t do their homework.”

  So now the Scrabble world was divided. But while Hasbro was deepening its commitment to the competitive side of the game, hosting ever bigger Nationals, Mattel cut funding to the British players organization and in 1998 decided not to sponsor the British national championships, instead spending money on a school program and a publicity stunt in which the army played the marines on a giant board in Wembley Stadium. Mattel executives “see that there is a part of the PR that should be related to the players, but they don’t see that the PR is always positive,” says Philip Nelkon, a top British player who handles Scrabble marketing and media for Mattel.

  Overseen by Mattel U.K., six thousand miles from the company’s California headquarters, Scrabble barely registered on executives’ radar screens. Even more problematic, Mattel simply wasn’t a games company, despite its efforts to become one. “It’s about Barbie,” a Scrabble insider says. Scrabble’s boosters at Mattel U.K. “are trying to convince Barbie and Hot Wheels people what this stuff is about.”

  As 1999 approached, doubts surfaced about whether Mattel even would stage the Worlds. Barbie sales had tumbled, profits weakened, and a major management shakeup was announced in early 1999. Understandably, a Scrabble tournament was a low priority. John Williams suggested contingency plans to Hasbro in case Mattel backed out. A few months before the event, though, Mattel approved a budget. The scale would be smaller than Hasbro’s blowout event two years earlier, with total prize money of $35,000, including a $15,000 first prize, compared to the $50,000 ($25,000 for first) that Hasbro paid. The Carlton Crest Hotel in Melbourne, where the tournament is being held, is a Motel 6 compared to the elegant Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Hasbro gave each member of the U.S. and Canadian teams $3,000 to help cover expenses; the British players got about one-quarter as much from Mattel U.K.

  I’m rooming with G.I. Joel in Melbourne. Since arriving a couple of days earlier, Joel has been suffering from his usual range of maladies, plus back pain that has led him to sleep against an ironing board propped against his headboard. Except for playing in two warmup tournaments and taking a trip to the zoo with a Filipino player on whom he has a crush, Joel has scarcely left the hotel. He’s played lots of Scrabble in the lobby, which has been commandeered by tournament players.

  The four-day, twenty-four-game event begins in the morning, and tonight Mattel hosts the traditional player reception. As the defending champion, Joel will be center stage, and he intends to make a grand entrance.

  Joel looks presentable, if a little lost, inside a navy blue suit complemented nicely by a maroon tie adorned with Scrabble tiles. We’re ready to go, but then he gets animated, and I get worried. He pulls out a pair of Scrabble boxer shorts (which match
the tie) and pulls them over his pants. I notice a stack of T-shirts on his bed. Joel unfurls one of them—from the 1996 Nationals in Dallas—and wraps it around his right leg.

  “Joel, you can’t,” I say.

  “Sure I can. Why not?” He’s giggling.

  Then he asks me to help him tie a T-shirt from the 1998 Nationals in Chicago around his left leg. Reluctantly, I oblige.

  “That seems to work,” Joel says.

  I think: For whom?

  Finally, Joel unfolds a third white T-shirt, this one from the 1997

  Worlds in Washington, the event that he won, the event that validated his existence as a human being. I can’t imagine what Joel has planned for this garment, given that he already is wearing a shirt, tie, and jacket, and his thighs are swathed in Scrabble T-shirts that dangle below his knees like chaps. But Joel is undeterred. He squeezes the T-shirt over his suit jacket, gazes at himself in the mirror, and laughs.

  Joel prompts a few chuckles and a lot of head shaking when he enters the reception. The narrow, nondescript conference room hardly befits a world championship in any sport. The hors d’oeuvres are skimpy and the décor doesn’t exactly shout class. Five flags featuring the Mattel corporate logo—a spiky red circle bearing the company’s name in capital letters—hang limply from the walls. Two smaller banners read world scrabble championship 1999.

  I remind myself, though, that it’s not about how much money the sponsoring company spends. It’s about the international love affair with the English language and this game. The Nigerian squad sports fila, or traditional caps. The Kenyan team arrives dressed in long, colorful outfits known as kitange, which they also peddle in the hallway, pulling matching shirts and hats from a duffel bag. The nine English team members wear yellow golf shirts adorned with a rose, the national flower; a springbok leaps on the kelly green shirts worn by the three South Africans.