Joel is “a little more apprehensive” than in 1993, when he lost to Nyman in the finals, and over the pancakes relived that nightmare for me. Joel won Games 1 and 2. Mark won Game 3. Then Joel took a 179-point lead in Game 4. Mark played the X for 52 points, drew both blanks, bingoed twice, and won by 9. In Game 5, Mark played BEDAWIN# to a triple-word square, opening a volatile area of the board. Mark came back again, and Joel lost.
“The scary thing is I thought about that game every day for the next three years,” he said. “That’s why I’m apprehensive.”
Mark arrives a few minutes after Joel. He pulls out his own rack, a dark wooden one he received as a gift after winning the 1993 Worlds.
While the technicians complete their checks, Mark and Joel head out into the main hallway and chat with the other players. When they’re escorted into their playing room, everyone applauds.
“I’ve got seven,” Joel announces, meaning tiles.
Thirty-three seconds later, he lays down CHAPLET. “Eighty-six,” Joel says.
It will be that kind of game. Joel runs out to a big lead, and there’s little Mark can do. Joel plays FILTHIER, a double-double worth 109 points. Mark responds with SEADROME for 74, but opens a triple line. Joel pulls both blanks to go with AELRW and takes his time. First he lays down WALkERs, but picks it up before hitting his clock. “He’s just jerking Mark off,” Geary says in the spectators’ room, where nearly a hundred people are gathered and I periodically visit. Finally, Joel plays WARbLEs for a 334–134 advantage.
Thanks to the camera, everyone sees Joel’s tiles descend into view as he places them on his red rack. One by one they come: I E E S R V C. “Oooohhhh!” SERVICE or SCRIEVE, which Joel selects. Now he’s up 412–160. Mark’s cooked, but when he finds INSOMNIA through an M, the room erupts in admiring applause; no one had spotted it, and Geary deadpans, “He’s pretty good.”
Final score: 624–307. “That was fun,” Mark jokes. “If luck evens itself out, I should be all right.”
The pressure seems unbearable. Not only are Mark and Joel playing for the world championship and $15,000, they are doing it before a phalanx of cameras, with the best Scrabble players in the world besides them gathered nearby heckling every move. Mark and Joel have no sense of the comments and catcalls of their colleagues. It’s dead quiet in the little room where they are playing. I’m not sure whether the silence makes it easier or harder for them to concentrate.
Mark draws better tiles in Game 2 and wins, 444–330. The players join the crowd afterward. It’s amazing: the two competitors for the world championship not only mingling with the vanquished but having to endure, and respond to, their second-guessing while the event is still in progress.
Both players sigh a lot in Game 3; neither is getting great racks. Mark looks as if he’s daydreaming. A moth invades the playing room, bumps into one of the cameras. Joel draws seven consonants. Mark twists his thumb around in his mouth, systematically gnawing all sides. The hum of the air conditioner is the only sound. Joel hooks an S onto ZAMIA, and Mark challenges. The natives, meanwhile, get restless.
“He’s challenging a word he’s known for twenty years!” shouts Ron Tiekert. “It’s a frivolous challenge.” Ron is implying that Mark is deliberately challenging words he knows are good in order to buy some time to think. It’s one of the perils of the free challenge rule.
Joel leads 130–112. Mark, holding six vowels, gets rid of three with URAO#, leaving AEI. “I think that’s a bad play,” Tiekert says. It might be, except that Mark draws LOPR and plays EPILATOR# on his next turn to cut Joel’s lead to 202–197. They trade bingos (GINGLES# for Joel, KINETICS for Mark), and then the game turns in Joel’s favor. He draws a blank, then an E, then the Q, then an N, then a U. The crowd begins oohing and shouting. Joel plays QUIeT atop the INETI in KINETICS for 69 points—a high-scoring overlap made possible by SOWPODS, as Joel made the word QI#—and a 386–280 lead. Mark pulls a bingo-prone rack; if there were an N on the board he could play ANTIWEED, but there isn’t.
“I like WEB,” Tiekert says. “It’s the kind of play he made when he made his big comeback in ninety-three.” Ron shouts out the daring play, which would create bingo possibilities. “WEB is the play,” he says. “It opens the board.”
“WEB hardly opens the board,” G.I. Joel says into the microphone. He’s been doing scant play-by-play, just periodic suggestions and goofy inside jokes that only the North Americans can understand. He sometimes condescendingly rebuts the suggestions of others, as he has just done with Tiekert.
“WEB is one hundred fucking percent the best play,” the normally good-natured Tiekert snaps. “I’m tired of his egotistical commentary.”
“Well, he is the world champion,” Geary says.
For another couple of hours anyway, I think. G.I. Joel gets no respect.
Mark loses the game. He passes up the free lunch with the Scrabbling masses and heads off with his girlfriend. Droplets of perspiration bead on his upper lip. Joel retreats to his room with a 2–1 lead. An hour later, he emerges, shutting the door behind him—and forgetting his score pad and room key inside.
Joel and Mark say hi to each other, sit down, and play resumes. Mark, going first, pulls junk out of the bag—EEINNOU—and sighs. Clearly, he’s rankled by his bad luck. Of the six possible blanks in the first three games, Mark got just one. Make it one for seven: Joel lays down ISOgRIV$, attaching the S to Mark’s opening play of ENNUI. Mark is frustrated, biting his nails madly.
Mark catches a big break when Joel lays down FUROUR on his second turn. Mark instantly stops the clock and shakes his head. “It’s no good,” he says. Joel is holding the bridge of his nose with his right hand. The judge confirms. “Phew,” Joel sighs, shocked and embarrassed at playing a phony in what could be the deciding game of the world championship. To lose again to Mark after being ahead, well, that might be too much to bear. Mark draws CCDEEIM and exhales, his lips flapping at his continued misfortune. He makes a small play, MICE for 21, and Joel burns some unpromising tiles for a 94–60 lead.
Finally, Mark gets a blank, and plays lAICIZED for 90 points. Two plays later, though, Joel bingos back with STIFLERS. A few turns later, Mark bingos again with EMBOGUE#, but Joel on the very next play replies with TABORETS. It’s 340–333 in Mark’s favor, and there are just ten tiles left in the bag. The J, Q, and X have yet to be played.
But when Joel lifts DEGOTXY from the silky green sack, there’s a surge of excitement among the chattering experts.
“This looks over!” Tiekert says. “This looks over! This looks over!”
“He’s got DEOXY!” someone shouts.
“DETOX! DETOX!” Edley says.
“It’s over!” Tiekert repeats. “The match is over!”
Mark plays JO for 42 points and a 49-point lead. But Joel sets up DEOXY$ on his rack, and I race back into the playing room. When I arrive, Joel is reshuffling. His hands are trembling. He drops DEOXY on the board, forming TO, AX, and BY. “Okay,” Joel announces, exhaling. “Fifty.”
“Three eighty-two, three eighty-three?” Mark says.
“Yeah.”
“You went ahead?” Mark checks.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
Mark runs his left hand through his hair. He holds his pen in his right hand, which is shaking. His right leg is jumping uncontrollably. Mark touches the Q. He reviews Joel’s tiles: GRT. There are two places for Joel to get rid of them by playing GIRT. Like a premonition of one’s own death, Mark sees it and can’t stop it. He’s going to lose by 1 point. He plays QI# for 28 points. Final score: 403–402.
Joel looks at me and pumps his fists.
“Congratulations,” Mark says.
“Thanks,” Joel says. “This isn’t a dream, right?”
David Boys is the first player to reach the room, and the two Canadians embrace. I think about running into them at the Auckland airport ten days earlier, quizzing each other between flights, Boys supremely confident, Joel filled with sel
f-doubt.
Mark is red-faced and shell-shocked. The tournament organizers ask him to stick around for satellite interviews back to England. “I’ll just go off and have a fag and I’ll be back,” he says.
When Joel reaches the main playing room for the awards ceremony, he’s mobbed. “This is great!” he says, pumping his fists again and walking on tiptoes, like a kid on Christmas morning. Everyone applauds when he finishes an interview for a video news release, in which he eloquently answers the “Why?” question: “Scrabble is a passion. It’s something that all of us who play it are enthralled by. It’s got so much beauty in it, and creativity and excitement, that it’s irresistible once you get into it.”
I remind Joel of our airport encounter, how he complained he wasn’t prepared, yet went on to win twenty-one of twenty-eight games and take the title. “I wasn’t prepared,” he says. “There were so many words I didn’t know. I still feel shaky. Especially those four-letter verbs. They drive me crazy. But maybe next time I’ll prepare better.”
G.I. Joel removes his identification badge, which reads 1997 World Champion, crosses out his last name and the year, and writes in “Wapnick” and “1999.” Nyman sets down a pint of Victoria draft beer he has procured from the hotel bar, and collects his check for $6,000 to a standing ovation. Philip Nelkon then asks G.I. Joel up to the stage, and it’s like the old Miss America crowning the new one.
“The last time I get to touch this,” G.I. Joel says, passing the trophy to the other Joel, who gets a thirty-second standing ovation, during which he sheepishly bows and holds the trophy aloft. After Nelkon asks G.I. Joel to leave the stage—he seems reluctant to go—the new world champion delivers a short speech. He thanks Mattel and Hasbro. He thanks David Boys. He thanks G.I. Joel. He thanks Mark Nyman. “I really don’t know how anybody could have done better today with the tiles that he had,” Joel says.
After the furor (wink, wink) subsides, I sit down with Joel Wapnick in a side room. G.I. Joel pokes his head in. “Mind if I listen in?” he asks. Well, I do, but don’t say anything. What is it, I ask Joel W. (knowing that Joel S. will answer, too), that makes you devote the years to this pursuit? Unlike my roommate, Wapnick has a wife and two children, a successful academic career, a well-rounded life. Why be an obsessive, too?
“I guess you could ask that of any athlete or anybody who is expert in any field of competition,” the new world champion says. “It’s very important. It just is.”
“It’s our personal form of self-expression,” the old one says.
“I think that’s a good way of putting it,” says the new one.
“We are artists and this is our way of expressing our art,” says the old one.
“There’s also something kind of nice,” Wapnick says, “in being world champion of something.”
18. 1416
AFTER WINNING his last game to salvage a .500 record, Jim Geary sat at the playing table in Melbourne and remembered: How he had created flash cards for every British-only bingo—seventy-five hundred seven-letter words, nine thousand eights, ten words to a card, with anagrams on the back and the British words written in red ink “because of the Redcoats.” How he had studied them while lying on the couch cradling his newborn daughter, Colleen. How he had stuffed the cards into two shoeboxes that he toted everywhere but Australia (five pounds, too heavy). How he had got a reprieve on his master's thesis in information systems engineering from a professor who told him the tournament was more important. How he had wanted to win so badly. All that effort, he thought, and for what? Forty-sixth place.
“We’re sitting there after the game,” Geary recalls in an e-mail report that he posts to CGP, “and I'm just drifting off in some kind of resignedness like a zebra that’s just been dragged down by a lion and doesn’t fight, doesn’t yell, doesn’t kick, just gets a glazy look in its eye and walks toward the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel all selfcontrol just floating out of my body, not caring what anyone in the world thinks of me at that moment.”
Tears build, and the moment begins to overwhelm him when ... when Bob Felt sits down and launches into one of his soliloquies. “Jarred back to the zeroth astral plane,” Geary writes, “I quickly gather my things and head down to the bar.”
Geary’s tournament diary—which runs to forty-five singlespaced pages on my printer—reveals how deeply my favorite pastime is connected to real emotions, and not just those resulting from winning or losing, but will and determination and passion and compassion and schadenfreude and humor, the whole human buffet, in fact, of hungers, disappointments, frailties, and insecurities. That may have to do with one’s dedication, or it may have to do with the nature of the game itself—the positional battle, the complex geometry, the mathematical calculation, the compulsion to play again. The prominent chess journalist Frank Brady once wrote that the strategy of the game and the shifting arrangement of the pieces made chess a form of artistic expression. “It’s a sad expression, though—somewhat like religious art,” he wrote. “It’s not very gay. If anything, it’s a struggle.” The inherent beauty of the game—the rhythmic dance that transpires on the board—is eclipsed by the very somberness of the pursuit.
Geary embodies that conflict. He loves the aesthetics of words—in Melbourne he dreams of finding the British word QINGHAOSU#—and plays beautifully. A few years ago, holding a rack of BEEIORW, he determined that playing off the B and an E would yield a 1 in 68 chance of drawing an A and a T that would give him a rack of AEIORTW and allow him to play, through the disconnected letters Z and O already on the board, the word WATERZOOI. It happened. He will happily detail his great plays and label them as such but then always leave room to berate himself. (His Web site, jimgeary.com, bears the slogan “Something to bore everyone.”) In one game at the Worlds, he challenges a five-letter Z word, saying, “It’s not in ours.” Then, “a lightbulb goes off, and I say, ‘Wait, it is in ours.’ And [my opponent] adds that it’s not even good in theirs.” Later, after taking a long time to play LASAGNE, which has two North American anagrams (GALENAS, ANLAGES) and two British ones (ALNAGES, LAGENAS), he writes, “Another Brit must wonder how he lost to an idiot who took five minutes to find the only playable common bingo.”
On the first turn of the second game in Melbourne, Jim lays down KATY*.
I start to think, “Hey, that’s not a word,” when I luckily remember the Cab Calloway song “She Caught the Katy” from the Blues Brothers soundtrack. As soon as I punch the clock, I feel sick. Probably confusing it with the British fours JUDY and MARY. It comes off, and he plays SECRETED for a double-double and I ’m down 160–0. Then things really start to go bad. I lose 515–368, and am now in 96th place out of 98 after two games. Worse, my confidence is shot, as I see losing a turn on a phony four as part of some big morality play where all my weaknesses are magnified at the wrong time.
At the midpoint, Jim is 7–5, but loses three in a row, the last to a Kenyan who, late in the game, “picks his fourth S to keep his second blank from getting lonely.” Now 7–8, “I’m emotionally exhausted and hoping to catch an opponent from Neptune or something, and find I'm paired with another strong American, the equally frustrated Lisa Odom. I pick well, she doesn't. So at the end of Day 2, I'm 8–8, and will not be World Champion this century.”
That night, at the hotel bar, I buy Geary a few Jack & Sevens, which ease the pain. He is desperate to finish above .500, which he failed to do in 1997. On the final day, Jim splits the first six games, and needs to take the final two to wind up with more wins than losses. In the penultimate game, against an Australian woman, Jim opens with an easy bingo, PEATIER.
Things turn south immediately thereafter as I can't buy an easy rack while she gets two blank bingos, GOATIeR# and StEALED#. Worse, I completely lose my mental control. Rather than focusing on my shortterm objective, I am plagued with sadness and self-pity and frustration and anger as I think about all the effort that I had put into the game over the last few years just to come up a no-op at thi
s tourney. I ’ve never had a mental breakdown of this order of magnitude in the middle of a tournament game before. Usually, I can correct fuzzy thinking with autosuggestion right away, but this is like a dam breaking. I lose 406–427. I say nice game, and stagger away crushed.
Jim wins his final game to pull even, Felt intrudes on his contemplative moment, and it's over. A week later, Jim writes:
I can’t sleep nights. I can’t stay awake days. I want to play another twenty-four games right now. I want to show the world that I know how to play this game. Two years is an awfully long time to wait to redeem yourself. I can usually hit my horizon playing medium-stakes poker tournaments in about a month. The WSC’s [World Scrabble Championship’s] horizon could easily be ten years. I have to make a decision. It’s tough to compete with an entire world playing one version of English Scrabble [SOWPODS] while I play a different one [ OWL].
But not playing any Scrabble at all isn’t much of a choice.
After Reno and San Francisco, before the Worlds, I've had enough. The fifty-one games, the round-the-clock Scrabble scene in the tawdry casino, the homeless former Scrabble player on the corner. I'm too committed to the game and losing perspective. On the one hand, I have agreed to write this book, which requires me to be a full-time Scrabble player (I ’ve taken a leave of absence from my job). On the other hand, if I allow the game to dominate my life, as I have, how am I any different from Matt or Marlon or G.I. Joel (other than the fact that I ’m still a weak player)? They're like Bobby Fischer, who told an interviewer in 1972 that he understood that chess wasn’t “work” and that he was “out of touch with real life.” Fischer said, “I ’ve thought of giving it up off and on, but I always considered: What else could I do?”
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 31
