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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  The Filipinos—emerging talents in the Scrabble world—meet the Pakistanis. The Thai mingle with the Singaporeans. I meet Adebayo Johnson Fasuba, a thirty-eight-year-old structural engineer from the Seychelles, and his teammate, Dhanapala Silva, a sixty-year-old schoolteacher. Keichiro “K.C.” Hirai, a young Japanese translator playing in his first Worlds, is dressed in a bright jacket known as a “happi coat”; he tells me about the six hours of words-on-tape that he has recorded, about how he is developing a version of Scrabble in hiragana, about his study of compound words—“SNOWLAND, SNOWSUIT, like that,” he says. “My next dream is to increase the popularity of Scrabble in Japan,” K.C. says.

  In this room there are Trinidadians and Maltese, Saudis and Scots, a Frenchman and an Indian, and more Sri Lankans, three, than I’ve ever met. There is an editor from Poland and a metallurgist from Malaysia and a plumber from New Zealand and a husband-and-wife team from Oman. There’s a Pakistani doctor and a Bahrainian chef and a Kenyan veterinary surgeon. There is a management consultant from Nigeria who sold his battered Honda for $1,000 to drum up cash to travel to the 1997 Worlds, and his countryman, an army colonel who was chief of logistics for peacekeeping forces in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

  That these people have come together to celebrate the English language even though many of them speak it as a second or third language, and sometimes just barely, makes the scene both touching and bizarre. Most of the nations represented here have at least colonial ties to Great Britain, and others traded with England. But some have no logical link to English or Scrabble. Thailand, which boasts some of the game’s rising stars, avoided European colonization. Today English is taught in Thai schools but rarely used outside the classroom. Regardless, the common language here isn’t English but words, and there’s a difference. “You don’t have to know how to speak,” Laurentiu Sandu of Romania tells me.

  No players at the event better reflect Scrabble’s cross-cultural tug than Sandu, who goes by Dan, and his teammate, Catalin Caba. Dan and Cata traveled thirty-five hours to get here, from Bucharest via London and Singapore. They each earn about $200 a month—better than the average Romanian income of about $80—and hit up family members, friends, and employers to raise more than $2,000 to pay for the trip. Dan, a thirty-year-old commercial inspector in city hall in Bucharest, scrounged $500 from a cereal company where an aunt works. Cata, a twenty-six-year-old computer engineer for the national electric company, paid the airfare out of his own pocket and hopes to be reimbursed by the utility.

  In the waning days of his repressive dictatorship, Nicolae Ceausescu, the “Giant of the Carpathians,” banned Scrabble as a subversive evil. “In the past was the Communist era,” Dan explains. “Now it’s open to go to other places, and with Scrabble there’s an opportunity.”

  Dan has a round head, close-cropped brown hair, a gaunt face with prominent cheekbones, and a mouth of gapped, brown teeth; still, there’s a faint glimmer of Paul Newman, circa Cool Hand Luke, in Dan’s bright eyes and wry smile. Beefier, with long black hair and slumping posture, Cata could pass for the bass player in a 1970s high school garage band. When I meet them, they, too, are wearing national costumes, Dan a black vest called a bunda, adorned with red and green geometrical patterns, and Cata an ie, a white, open-necked shirt with black and blue decorative stitching around the collar, shoulders, and sleeves. A Canon automatic camera hangs from Cata’s neck.

  Dan is the Scrabble veteran of the duo. He began learning English at age ten, but “Russian was of more importance.” Opportunities to practice English were, and remain, rare. “I know many words, but to speak...,” he says, struggling to convey a thought. Regardless, seven years ago he introduced competitive Scrabble in English to the country, and now is the national champion in both languages. (Romanian Scrabble sounds like a challenge: thirty letters, six hundred thousand words, thirty verb inflections.) Dan also plays duplicate Scrabble—which he pronounces DUPP-li-kate—in which both players use the same rack of letters. He plays it in French.

  At the 1997 Worlds, Dan gave John Williams a pennant that says FEDERATIA ROMANA DE SCRABBLE and a bottle of Transylvanian wine whose label features a drawing of Dracula. Dan finished seventy-eighth out of eighty players, ahead of contestants from Guyana and the Seychelles, with a record of 5–16. “Not so good. It’s not okay,” he says.

  Not okay? I think. You can barely speak English.

  Dan wants to win ten games this time. “Double,” he says, only he pronounces it DOO-ble.

  Cata began playing Scrabble in English just three years ago and didn’t start studying lists until this year. “We know many words but we don’t know to put letters in front or back,” he adds. “Hooks,” says Dan. Whooks. “Hooks are big problem.”

  Peter Morris of the United States captured the first World Scrabble Championship in 1991. Mark Nyman of England won in 1993. David Boys of Canada did it in 1995. And my roommate, G.I. Joel, won in 1997.

  In Melbourne, Scrabble’s resident bookie, Jim Geary, has made Nyman the favorite at 6 to 1. Two Americans (Brian Cappelletto and Joe Edley), two Canadians (Boys and Wapnick), and a New Zealander (the little-known Nigel Richards) are 7 to 1. Who knows? A Thai, Filipino, Sri Lankan, or Nigerian might emerge as a contender. It’s bound to happen someday: Two people speaking broken English battling for supremacy of a game using English words. Everyone studies the same lists, learns the same strategy, plays against the same computer programs.

  But the focus is on the Americans. When the U.S. team poses for a group photo at the reception, a flock of players from other countries gathers to snap pictures. Cappelletto, Edley, Sherman—these men are Scrabble gods. “I just had to have a look at him!” a middle-aged Aussie woman says to me at a warmup tournament (in which I play, going 3–3). “Joel Sherman! The world champion! I tried not to let him see me looking.”

  When I ask about his performance at the three previous Worlds in which he has participated, Kunihiko Kuroda of Japan offers his proudest achievement. “Four years ago,” he says, “I beat two Americans.”

  Of course, the Americans are less interested in fostering Scrabble World Harmony than they are in being themselves. Bob Felt is at his disheveled worst, shirttails untucked, pants unbelted, face unshaven, hair uncombed, wandering about the hotel lobby re-creating for anyone who will listen, and even those who won’t, some random Scrabble position. G.I. Joel bounds around like a kid on a sugar high. Joe Edley talks about his energy level from behind a baby blue surgical mask he has donned to ward off cigarette smoke. (“There goes the Darth Vader of Scrabble,” Jim Geary says. “Oh! Now he looks like the Darth Vader of Scrabble.”) At a restaurant, Brian Cappelletto reads aloud the description of an item on the menu while a waitress shifts uncomfortably. “Brian,” his girlfriend finally admonishes. “Don’t perform it. Just order it.”

  The Americans’ quirky behavior—and the presumption that they are the best—is a bit much for the English team. After all, Nyman is considered the best SOWPODS player in the world. The British dominated in 1993, taking three of the top five spots and four of the top fifteen in 1997 (of course, the Americans took first through fourth places). And yet when the nine members of the English team assemble for a group photo, no one from other countries takes snapshots of them. It raises a question that rankles the Brits: Are the Americans really better? Or just weirder?

  “Most of the Americans are a bit larger than life. It’s a function of national characteristics,” asserts Philip Nelkon, Mattel’s Scrabble man, himself a four-time British national champion. “I think the U.K. players are just as intense as the U.S. players, but they just don’t show it. I’d say we have more regular guys than you do.” He says that “Sherman-Edley types”—eccentrics unafraid, even eager, to flaunt their eccentricities—would be unusual in the U.K. Or, as the English player David Webb, a forensic accountant, sums up the Americans: “I can’t imagine being any of them.”

  “All the Yanks seem to live at the center of their own universe with only
a dim recognition of, and no interest in, life outside it,” Webb tells me. “Conversational gambits are treated as genuine inquiries into their universe, but there is no recognition of any need for reciprocity. There is a camaraderie about the Brits abroad which simply doesn’t exist with the Yanks. We enjoy our company and care about the team and how everyone is doing. I have never seen a Yank showing any interest in a fellow countryman’s performance, or indeed that of anybody else.

  “Having said all that, the Yanks are rather good at Scrabble and are the only nation we actively set out to beat every two years.”

  From the earliest days of the Flea House, the Americans played for money and blood. But the English were genteel. For years, they played a collaborative game the object of which was not to win but to score as many points as possible. Players would exchange frequently or burn two or three tiles until they could bingo. There were unwritten rules: Vowels were to be left adjacent to premium squares, allowing for high-scoring, two-direction plays for the X, J, and Z (ZO was always acceptable in British Scrabble). The triple-word-score square was not to be used except for triple-triples, or “nine-timers” in British parlance. Players would try to slot an E in the second position on the triple line to facilitate nine-timers. The benchmark for scoring was ten points per tile, and the combined score in games was about 1000.

  As long as both parties cooperated—and they didn’t always—Scrabble became less a competitive sport than a team project. Nelkon once scored an 804 in the British nationals. The British tournament record is 849. Phil Appleby, in a friendly game, racked up 1049 points, which was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the highest-scoring game ever. Appleby played OXIDIZERS for 374 points, on a triple-triple line that stayed open for several turns, and LACQUERS for 221. “I missed another nine-timer later on,” he recalls. “I should have scored twelve hundred.”

  Now, Appleby says, the old British approach is “so contrived it’s almost embarrassing.” By the mid-1980s, aware of the popularity of the Scrabble scene across the Atlantic and growing bored with their “please, after you” game, the British experts gradually switched to the American system of play. In 1989, Appleby and Nyman traveled to Reno for the North American championships. The Brits were floored by how well the tournament ran and how many players—221—entered. “It was the most mind-opening experience,” Appleby says. “It was on a scale we’d never seen before.”

  It was so ... American. Bigger, rougher, brasher. More players, more money, more competitive. And it instantly underscored the cultural difference between the Brits and the Yanks. In the United States, Scrabble was all that mattered. In England, it wouldn’t be right to appear so unabashedly obsessed. Whereas G.I. Joel will tell anyone with ears that winning the 1997 Worlds validated his existence, the notion that Scrabble is more than just a game strikes the British players as overblown and self-aggrandizing, which is how they view many of the Americans. “Scrabble doesn’t validate anything,” David Webb snips.

  I ask John Williams about the differences between the two teams. After nearly twenty years observing the experts, Williams is the Jane Goodall of Scrabble. The North Americans, he believes, have something that none of the Brits do. Williams sees it in the calculating focus of Joe Edley, the nervous intensity of David Boys, the fast and aggressive play of Adam Logan, the self-loathing drive of Joel Sherman, the I’ll-hit-you-so-hard-I’ll-kill-your-whole-family gaze of Matt Graham (who isn’t in Melbourne because he didn’t qualify, and wouldn’t have come anyway because he doesn’t fly). He sees it in the unstinting, unforgiving desire to win. It’s not just not caring what other people think. It’s not just a lack of self-awareness and selfrespect. And it’s not a show. It’s a desperate, at-all-costs, life-isn’t-worth-living-without-it, insecure, overachieving need to win.

  “That’s who we are as a culture,” Williams says. “We were spawned by underdogs.” He adds, “It kills the Brits that we’re so good.”

  Mark Nyman comes closest to combining the British and American ways of Scrabble. He looks like the well-adjusted yuppie he professes to be, wearing black, rectangular Dolce & Gabbana eyeglasses and a black Donna Karan sweater. But over the board he gnaws his fingernails and tugs his thinning hair as if pulling taffy. Nyman is the only British player the North Americans actually fear. With reason. Much like Cappelletto, his American child prodigy counterpart, Nyman has a prodigious, possibly eidetic memory, uncanny anagramming abilities, and better strategic vision than his peers. Hell, he once finished second in the North American championships, where he had to avoid using the British words that filled his brain. It was like shooting pool with a pencil.

  Fearful of being portrayed as an American-style Scrabble weirdo, Nyman takes pains to minimize his commitment. Despite his demurrals, though, Nyman has crafted a life around anagrams. It began when he appeared as a teen on a popular television game show called Countdown. Two contestants are shown nine letters and have thirty seconds to find the longest word. (The show was piloted in the States a decade ago but was rejected as “too cerebral,” Nyman says. “Or so I’m told.”) Mark won eight shows. Later, he was offered a full-time job as a contestant researcher. Today, he coproduces the show.

  Like some top American players, Nyman quit Scrabble for a time. He had nothing left to prove and he was tired of the pressure. And yet he still loved the travel and the words and the competition. So he did more prep work for the 1997 Worlds than for any other tournament. He fell short, and now he wanted to show the cocksure Americans, who felt they were better than ever because they had begun devoting themselves to SOWPODS, that he could still play the game.

  “I want to be the best,” he says. “I want to be the world champion again.”

  17. The Worlds

  THE FIRST GAME of any Scrabble tournament—in Melbourne at the Worlds or in some motel by the Long Island Expressway—is always the tensest. There is the promise of the new, the boundless hope for perfect tiles, the misguided belief that possibility can temporarily outmuscle probability in a game governed by those twin, warring concepts. As the defending champion, G.I. Joel is seated at Table 1 for the first game. He dips a tissue into a water glass and cleans off his personal Mattel-made playing board (the premium squares are the same color as on the Hasbro boards, but the remaining ones are kelly green rather than tan). Using two seconds, Joel’s opponent makes the first play of the tournament: QAT.

  As I stroll around the playing room to capture the initial moments, a familiar competitive tension courses through my body. I’m on high alert: eyes widening, breaths deepening, neurons straining to see what they see. Bob Felt plays WHORING. Jim Geary drops down YAWING. Phil Appelby plays DZO#. Brian Cappelletto opens with QUINA#, placing the last three letters atop the FOH played by his opponent. Steve Polatnick of the United States plays three bingos in a row—GOALIES, ALIZARIN, and NOSTRILS—but his opponent, Pui Cheng Wui of Malaysia, makes LEAFERY#.

  Joel Wapnick sets up DEA?ING on his rack. Wapnick has been a virtual hermit since we arrived, venturing out of his room and his word book only for twice-a-day, three-mile walks around Albert Lake across the street and an evening meal with other players. He glances up to find me standing a few feet away and shoos me off.

  My Romanians, as I paternalistically think of them, become my Everymen. Especially Cata. His command of English as a spoken language is virtually zero; but he makes and studies lists (his favorite: the four hundred words acceptable in both Romanian and English), so a “Scrabble word” will spring unprompted from his brain. Cata has drawn Lester Schonbrun in the first round. This pairing is a big thrill for the U.S. team’s only Communist. (He can’t wait to tell his friend Steve Brandwein.) After three turns, Lester is ahead 147–40, when Cata tries to turn LINTERS into FLINTERS*. “It sounds good to me,” Cata says as the word is looked up. “It’s no good,” Lester says gently. “Zero,” Cata says dejectedly, picking up his tiles.

  I wander around the room, and then return to Cata. He is losing 457–237, but he�
��s made a bingo, StRIPES, and he holds the second blank! He hunches far over the table—his back arched like a prehistoric man in a National Geographic drawing, his face inches from the board, a pile of dandruff marking the black tablecloth like a fresh snowfall. He pulls RUY to go along with his ELT? and shakes his head. Come on, Cata, I think, don’t shake your head. You can find a bingo! I want to channel my thoughts into his brain. UTtERLY! cUTLERY! cRUELTY!

  Cata doesn’t find any of them. Lester wins, 532–287.

  “He’s amazing. Just imagine if I was playing in Romanian,” Lester says to me. He has Cata autograph his program.

  Unlike Cata, Dan is oblivious to his linguistic shortcomings. After losing by nearly 200 points to an Englishman, a wounded smile reveals Dan’s boulevard of broken teeth. “Fine. It’s okay. It’s okay,” he says, falsely. “He had better letters.”

  Not without reason did Jim Geary make Brian Cappelletto a favorite to win the Worlds. For the previous two years Brian has been far and away the best Scrabble player in North America. Of all the players I talk to in Melbourne, only David Boys seems unintimidated by Brian’s accomplishments. “Brian” he says in a breathy, mock-reverential voice. “The fear of him. The myth of Brian. The fact that people sit down, and think, ‘Wow, he’s so much better than everybody else.’ He still hasn’t proven himself at SOWPODS.”

  Indeed, that’s his one shortcoming. Brian finished tenth at the 1997 Worlds, and unlike Joe Edley or G.I. Joel he hasn’t polished his SOWPODS skills by playing in lucrative tournaments in Singapore or Bangkok. So when Brian loses to a British player in Game 1, an Australian player in Game 2, and a player from the United Arab Emirates in Game 3, I wonder whether Boys is right. Maybe Brian isn’t prepared. Regardless, in Game 4, ninety-seventh-place Brian Cappelletto is sitting in the very last chair, at the very last table, Table 49, of the tournament room. He is paired with the player in ninety-eighth place, the only one in the room with zero wins and a worse spread than he: Brian is playing one of my Romanians. He wins 502269, but it’s little consolation. Brian is embarrassed.