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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  After six rounds, just one player is without a loss: Nigel Richards of New Zealand, an unflappable, thirty-two-year-old water company technician who is regarded as knowing more words than any other player. Nigel had been playing for just four years, but already he is a legend: Nigel played CHLORODyNE# through three disconnected letters, SAPROZOIC through ZO#, and the obscure American word GOOSEFISH$. Nigel has read the entire 1,953-page Chambers Dictionary and says he is able to recall words simply by conjuring mental snapshots of its pages.

  At the end of the first day, Nigel is in first place with a 7–1 record, ahead of three other players who have the same number of wins but smaller spreads, G.I. Joel among them. Ten players have six wins. Cappelletto makes a comeback, clobbering his last five opponents of the day. Wapnick also has five wins, as does Edley, who is disgusted nonetheless and all but blows me off in the hotel lobby.

  Before the second day’s play starts, I peruse e-mails from around the world posted on a bulletin board in the hallway. There are messages for Edley, from his best man and fellow Scrabble expert Jerry Lerman, and for Logan, Boys, and Wapnick, the Canadians. There is one entirely in Polish for that country’s lone representative. (“Wczorajsze wyniki przekazal em Twojej Zonie," it begins, demonstrating why the Z and J are not power tiles in Polish Scrabble.) There are e-mails for the Pakistani team and for the Filipinos. Chris Cree, the lovable, complaining Texan, who has been following the tournament on-line, has sent one for Cappelletto: “Sure, give everyone a head start. You are the best that there is. It will work out.”

  G.I. Joel had insisted he wasn’t prepared for Melbourne. In the weeks before the trip, he had a cold, an “air bubble” in his back, and back pain. I e-mailed him to ask how he felt. “Still crappy. I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy the trip, and playing in the tourney is going to be a waste of time, because I haven’t been able to study. I’ve just been watching a lot of baseball games and resting even more than usual. I’ve got a week left to improve, but I’m not feeling very positive at the moment. Aarrghh!” A week later, the air bubble was still there and his back still hurt. “I literally wrenched it trying to cough up some mucus,” he told me on the phone. “Ever since then I’ve been jamming down antihistamines to make sure I don’t aggravate the back coughing up mucus.” But the antihistamines had left him feeling foggy and his stomach queasy. And the aspirin to dull the back pain had made his stomach more acidic.

  He seems fine now. In Game 11, against Nigel, Joel plays GHARRIES to go up 423–347, then draws ACIOST? and instantly plays AgNOSTIC through an open N for a 501–375 lead. He breaks out a hotel spoon and a small pie tin containing a tart, leans back in his chair, and starts eating. Eyes twitching over the board, mandible pumping on the tart, Joel wraps up the game to go to 10–1 and first place.

  Cata, meanwhile, has staked out Table 49 as his permanent home. His record of futility grows—0–4 with a spread of—641; 0–6,—1165; 2–9,—1476—and with it my empathy. Every time I wander by his table, Cata is a picture of pain, his back hunched over like a question mark, chin resting in folded hands, mouth agape, staring at the Scrabble set as if it were a Ouija board, only no answers are forthcoming.

  But every time I pass by, Cata also seems to have a blank on his rack. He misses ARMORIeS, then PREENInG. A game later he’ll be blessed with ELORST?, but won’t find any of the three dozen or so possible seven-letter words. Then it’ll be EELNR??—a perfect balance of vowels, consonants, and blanks—yielding a plethora of bingos but no hope to Cata.

  This time it’s AENORT?, with more than a dozen possible bingos, at least three of which Cata probably knows (the common anagram group SENATOR, ATONERS, TREASON). As he shuffles the letters, it’s clear Cata doesn’t know the obvious hook—using his O to turn WEIRD into WEIRDO. In the meantime, his opponent creates an even easier spot, playing the word MOO, to which Cata could add an N, S, or T (or a D, L, or R, not to mention an I, K, or P to form British-only words). He’s got three minutes left on his clock with at least half the tiles still in the bag. Cata plays off an O and draws a C.

  He shuffles and shuffles and shuffles. Suddenly, he lays down CERATiN, hooking the N to MOO. I’m elated. Cata is anxious when his opponent challenges—under the “open challenge” rule at the Worlds, players do not lose a turn for challenging an acceptable word, only for playing a phony—and then relieved when it is good. Cata probably plays the “Scrabble word,” CERATIN, about which he is unsure, rather than the common word, CERTAIN, because they have equal meaning to him, which is no meaning at all.

  Afterward, I tell Cata and Dan about WEIRDO. “Someone who is strange, a strange person,” I say.

  “No, I didn’t know,” says Cata.

  “Weirdo?” says Dan, as if spitting out a piece of rotten fruit.

  For all the competitive intensity, for all the sniping and personal enmities stockpiled over years, the shared bond of Scrabble wins out. Players mock Bob Felt but indulge his need to yak about racks. G.I. Joel can be pesty, demanding, and embarrassing, like a little brother, but he is also sensitive and smart and proud of his talent. I sit around the table at a Chinese restaurant in a Melbourne suburb with Lester and Joan, my favorite socialists; with Ron and Susi Tiekert; with G.I. Joel’s brother, Larry, and their cranky father, Mike; with Lisa Odom, the top-rated American woman player and top-rated African-American, too, and her partner, Steve Pellinen, an expert player himself; and with Jim Geary, the pudgy, sarcastic, brilliant poker player, and I think: What am I doing here with these people? And why am I so comfortable?

  I have traveled halfway around the globe to watch a Scrabble tournament. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t writing about the game, of course, but I feel as if I’m where I belong. I enjoy the Scrabble chatter that dominates dinner, and the background conversation, too, getting to know some of my Scrabble comrades better as regular people. They are no longer just “characters” in a literary sense but friends, and the game itself has established an emotional permanence in me that goes beyond winning and losing. I’m not sure it’s rational—believing as many do that a board game possesses a sort of cosmic power, something commensurate with our capacity for wonder—but I feel it nonetheless.

  I feel it as I wait for the elevator on the fifth floor of the hotel, where G.I. Joel and I are bunking. I lean over the wall and glance down the atrium to the lobby below where a half-dozen friendly games are taking place. I hear the rustle of the tiles and the white-noise game chatter. From up here, the boards look like matchbooks and the players are nearly indistinguishable. I love the scene so much I want to float down and hover over the boards and osmose the words and the tactics and the ambience. It is so hazy and yet so palpable that I almost want to cry.

  I feel it again late on the night before the final full day of play. G.I. Joel had a bad afternoon, falling to 11–5. Three players are at twelve wins, including Wapnick and Nyman. Eight players are bunched at eleven wins—Boys, Sherman, Cappelletto, Logan, two Brits, an Australian, and a Thai. Nigel Richards has ten wins. The consensus favors the Americans heading into day three, or at least the consensus of Yanks thinks it does.

  But at 11:00, the competition is secondary. A crowd of us has just returned from another meal and Scrabblers of varying nationalities fill the lobby, a few playing, most sitting in circles drinking and talking. Paul Epstein, a taxi driver-rock musician from Ann Arbor, Michigan, finishes a piano set of Rolling Stones and Beatles tunes—he plays “Back in the U.S.S.R” and I wonder if Lester notices—and then G.I. Joel takes over.

  Joel often says that what he really would like to have been in life, had he not been cursed with his body and looks and nasal passages, is a singer; after he won the Worlds, Joel had hoped to go on David Letterman, talk about Scrabble, and perform, but the appearance never materialized. Without fanfare, he sits down at the black baby grand and attacks the keys. He’s a banger, with a heavy foot to boot, and he’s serious, curled over the keyboard as if it were a Scrabble set. He belts out a deep vibrato th
at makes all of his colleagues stop and listen.

  I soak in Joel, tiny Joel, hammering away at the keys, exorcising his demons, now at the piano as before over a bunch of letters, exposing himself without fear or shame, with joy.

  G.I. Joel is singing Billy Joel.

  You may be right, he croons, I may be crazy.

  The next morning, remarkable things happen. At Table 3, Nigel Richards plays THIONINE$, a violet dye, Adam Logan plays FLIGHT, and the relevant section of the board looks like this:

  Three turns later, Nigel lays down USE, forming UG#, SH, and ETHIONINE$, which is an amino acid.

  On the next turn, Adam makes another extension by playing BAM to the triple-word score, forming BUG, ASH, and METHIONINE, another amino acid.

  Adam’s final play used three letters and scored 78 points. “I don’t quite know how I knew the words; maybe memory from organic chemistry or from some popular book on the subject (Godel, Escher, Bach?),” Adam tells me in an e-mail after the tournament. “And I think I’d heard those hooks mentioned before in a Scrabble context. I saw the possibilities as soon as he played THIONINE, and, believe me, when he played USE, I was very glad to see that I’d just picked the M!”

  In the same round, Joel Wapnick turns the word GLOM into the nonbingo, triple-triple EGLOMISE$ for 99 points. And when Brian Cappelletto beats Mark Nyman—despite Mark’s play of CAT-hOODS#, which Chambers defines as the state of being a cat or having the nature of a cat—he moves into first place on the leader board. Brian has gone from ninety-seventh place to first place, from Table 49 to Table 1. After nineteen rounds, Jim Geary’s two favorites —Brian and Mark—are running first and second.

  I stop by Brian’s old stamping ground, Table 49, and, sure enough, Cata has another blank on his rack: CINOSU? This time, however, he finds a word! AUCtIONS! Who’s the Giant of the Carpathians now?

  Dan, it turns out, also is making some impressive plays. “The best game of mine,” he excitedly tells me, and then recounts his top plays.

  “ACTINIDE,” he says. AK-tin-i-dee.

  “STRIVERS,” he says next, getting the pronunciation correct.

  “And hoe-ax.”

  Hoe-ax? Hoe-ax? I wonder whether HOEAX is good in the British book. I check his score sheet.

  “Oh,” I say, grinning, “hoax”

  “I have eight,” Dan says. Eight wins is truly remarkable, I tell him, as many as a Canadian and an Australian.

  “But it is no good,” he says. “Ten is good. I want ten. That would be double.” Dooble. “Double the last time.”

  After Game 20, the first six spots are held by players from six different countries—England, Canada, the United States, Australia, Nigeria, and New Zealand. When the Brit (Nyman) beats the Australian (John Holgate) in Game 21, he does so by playing MPRET# at the very end, a word he has never before used in a game (it’s a former name for the ruler of Albania). Nyman’s endgame is so impressive that the spectators around Table 1 actually applaud. After twenty-two rounds, Nyman and Wapnick are 17–5. Only Cappelletto and Boys, both 15–7, have a chance to catch them. G.I. Joel is out of it at 13–9.

  Nyman loses to Ron Tiekert. Wapnick loses to Boys. If Brian wins, he will have risen from the ashes of Table 49 and given himself a chance to silence his SOWPODS critics and advance to the finals. He’s playing a Brit, Andrew Fisher, and has a lead of about 20 points in the endgame and the tiles to win. Then Fisher plays EPEE, hooking an E to the word RONT#, forming RONTE#, for 35 points. Brian thinks it’s a desperation play, and challenges. It’s ruled good. Brian is stunned. He loses by 5 points.

  “I just didn’t know a British five,” Brian says when I ask him what happened. “RONT and RONTE. I just didn’t know the pair. I just didn’t know the hook. I didn’t know the hook.” Brian is flush, on the verge of tears. “Five points,” he says. He grabs his girlfriend’s hand and slinks down the hallway, head bowed.

  “The magic number,” David Boys says, “is ninety-two.”

  That’s by how much Boys has to beat Nyman in the last game to make the finals. Wapnick, who is in first place by virtue of a larger spread than Nyman, would have to lose by more than 200 points not to make it.

  Six hours earlier, Boys had written off his chances. He lost his first two games of the day and was mired in twentieth place. Plus, he had a persistent migraine headache. Boys played through the pain, winning five in a row. Now he’s in the hallway, dancing on the balls of his feet, a nervous whirl that brings him inspiration. He recalls a scene from a 1970s slapstick comedy. “You ever see Gumball Rally?” he asks me. “The Italian guy rips off his rearview mirror, and says, ‘What is behind does not matter!’ Whenever I get in this situation, I think of that.” Into the playing room he bounds.

  Meanwhile, at Table 49, in the last two seats in the house, Dan and Cata are paired in the final round.

  “The two Romanians,” Dan says.

  “No problem,” says Cata.

  Nyman takes an early lead. Boys comes back. Nyman goes ahead again. On his score sheet, Mark doesn’t bother with the actual tally; he records the game as if he had started with a 91-point lead, because all he needs to do is not lose by more than that amount. He bites the fingers of his left hand, which he holds with his right. Boys cradles his migrainous head and wipes his face. He lays down two tiles, then picks them up, then checks his tracking. He has a blank, but awkward tiles to go with it, and not enough points. When the bag empties, Mark knows Dave can’t bingo. While he will lose the game, and the two will finish with identical 17–7 records, Mark will have a larger spread and meet Wapnick in the finals.

  Mark glances over at his girlfriend, who is standing behind the rope, and he nods repeatedly. He sees me standing to his left, and winks.

  The game ends. Mark taps his pen three times on the table and stands up. The game occupies the last page in his score pad, a spiral notebook with soccer balls on the cover. His clock reads 00:01.

  “So it’s 1993 all over again,” Boys says, referring to the Nyman-Wapnick final that year.

  Wapnick comes over after vanquishing Ron Tiekert.

  “Good luck to both of you tomorrow,” Boys says, gracious in defeat.

  Wapnick turns to me, insecure already. “Mark’s incredible, and I have a terrible record against him,” he says, calculating right there that he is 3–9 against Mark, including 1–2 this week and 2–3 in the 1993 finals, where he lost three games in succession. “And I still am not prepared.”

  I dash over to Table 49. “So who’s the Romanian champion?” I ask.

  Cata shrugs and tilts his head toward a beaming, teeth-flashing Dan.

  “He needs the victory,” Dan says, “and I need the beer.”

  I’m not sure what this means, but it sounds like it would work in a Michelob commercial.

  Dan finishes in ninety-first place with nine wins, fifteen losses, and a spread of—2008 points. Not quite dooble, but amazing nonetheless. Cata is dead last, with three wins, twenty-one losses, and a gargantuan spread of—2991.

  “Today, bad luck, but I don’t accuse,” says Dan.

  “No problem,” says Cata.

  I love these guys.

  That the two finalists are a Canadian and a Brit seems just. Canadians finished first, third, and fourth in the standings; Brits were second, fifth, and sixth. Ron Tiekert wound up as the top American, in seventh place. Brian Cappelletto, after a stunning 14–2 run, lost four of his last five games to finish in eleventh place. G.I. Joel also ended with fifteen wins, and in fifteenth place. Joe Edley finished 13–11, and Jim Geary was 12–12. “All that effort. Nobody knows,” Geary says. “I put my whole life into this tournament. It’s so sad.”

  For the finalists the next morning, there is no playing-room buzz, no shuffling of tiles from other tables, no distractions like challenges or spectators hovering nearby. As in Washington in 1997, the best-of-five-games match is held in a small room equipped with video cameras to show the games on closed circuit to the other players. Computers
will simulcast them over the World Wide Web. By virtue of my reporter/insider status, I’m one of a handful of people (a word judge, annotators recording every play, the technicians, a Webmaster, and corporate execs) who can be in the room during the match. In the main playing hall, now cut in half of its tournament size, three screens—one for the board, one for Nyman’s rack, one for Wapnick’s—face twenty rows of chairs. G.I. Joel is happy to be tapped as one of the two color commentators (along with an Australian player). He wears his Scrabble tie for the occasion, but not the boxers.

  Wapnick arrives first and unpacks his clock, his Canadian flag, and his lucky fire-engine red plastic rack that came from a 1950s Scrabble set purchased by his mother. A techie tapes the rack to the table so it stays in camera range. Wapnick looks shaky. He had a quiet dinner at the hotel, studied British four-letter words, and was in bed at 10:30. Nerves woke him at 4:00 a.m., and he managed to sleep for only another hour. I ran into him at breakfast, where he was seated alone, eating pancakes. “I am looking forward to this being over, regardless of what happens,” Joel told me. “I want to relax.”