“Good luck,” Joel says sarcastically when I tell him whom I’m playing. I toss in bed thinking about how I’ll have to play differently against this guy who belongs with the real experts.
Despite my good start, suddenly I don’t feel the same cocksureness as I did when I left Bird-in-Hand. The field is stronger, the ratings higher, the players more experienced, and the competition stiffer in the last half of the tourney. I try to be Edley-like. I tell myself in the mirror that I’m going to win, but I’m not convinced. It seems to take hours to fall asleep, and then I’m awake again, too early. It’s either too hot in the room or too cold. Matt’s presence unnerves me. Why didn’t I bring my sleeping pills?
I lose to Amit, who indeed proves to be a skilled player with strong word knowledge (and gets good tiles to boot). Then I split the day’s remaining six games and head into Monday in eighth place with a 10–7 record, all but mathematically eliminated from contention thanks to a play that will haunt me that night and for several more to come. In a high-scoring shootout in Game 16, my opponent, Ann Sanfedele, the New Yorker who has played since the seventies, opens a fat spot late in the game, playing QUIRE vertically, starting in the second row, forming UN, IT, and RE.
If I have an S, I can simultaneously form a word ending in S and SQUIRE on the triple-word row. And I do. My rack is ANKRUVS, and I have fifteen minutes on my clock because Ann and I have been slapping down bingos and counterplays as if rushing to catch a train. But I can hardly control my glee. Like a kid given a plate of chocolates, I gobble up the spot, quickly playing RANKS, the first thing I see, for 42 points and a fat 394–316 lead. That’s that, game over, I win, looking forward to Game 17. I hit my clock.
The chocolate creeps up my throat. Uh-oh. I’ve created a user-friendly bingo line under the R in RANKS. And both blanks are, in Scrabble lingo, unseen. I draw AEEGTUV. Yuck. Ann plays PICrATE (a chemical salt) for 76, placing the E under my R, and she draws the second blank, which I know because there are no tiles left in the bag. I use the next thirteen minutes trying to conjure a win, which I fail to do. If I had played KNARS or KNURS (bumps on a tree) or, better yet, VANS, I realize, I wouldn’t have given Ann much chance to bingo anywhere other than the existing spot on Row 15 (through the E), because the K takes only an A after it and no two-letter words start with V. So dejected am I that, after dinner (with Ann and others), I even play a couple of late-night games, violating my pledge to abstain.
I toss and toss and toss in bed some more. My Scrabble sleeplessness, I realize, isn’t about idiosyncratic roommates or hypoallergenic pillows. The game traps me in a purgatory of anxiety. I fret about KNARS and KNURS. Bump on a tree? Bump on my head. I mentally replay the endgame scenarios.
Then I think happily about finding MILLiArE (a unit of area) in a late-night game, but regret missing the more defensive and creative MILLcAkE (the residue from pressed linseed), which is how a 1900rated teenage Scrabble savant named Joey Mallick signs his e-mails (MILLCAKE being the shortest word using all of the letters in Joey’s last name). MILLiArE reminds me of DECIARE, a bingo I’ve just learned. Thoughts of one game lead to the next, and I smilingly recall the six-tile overlap I made by placing, on consecutive turns, BELATED next to RETINAE to form RE, EL, TA, IT, NE, and AD simultaneously.
But pride yields to inadequacy as my consciousness streams. I recall playing GURNIES* in Game 17, but getting away with it, but then lying about it, telling someone that REUSING didn’t fit on the board. I ponder what would have happened had I correctly opened my game against Amit with FOB, leaving AENR, instead of a phony, BARONE*, to which Amit hooked the T in his bingo FRIGATE to form BARONET. I think about racks I had and racks I didn’t. Tiles spill abstractedly from my head and float in the ether as in the tattoo on Richie Lund’s arm. I remember a recurring childhood nightmare: giant wooden triangles and squares and parallelograms pressing against my head so that I can’t think. Were those wooden blocks a foreshadowing of the Scrabble tiles that haunt me now?
I attempt a return to Earth, calculating what would have to happen for 10–7 me to catch the 12–5 leaders: Can three people not win two games? And four more not win three? Okay, if Ed and Amit lose their first two, and Roy and Jamie split, and Ann loses twice, and I don’t lose at all ... Why did I blow those two close ones on Saturday? Why did I botch my opening play against Amit? Why didn’t I play KNURS or VANS?
I spot the red digits on the bedside clock. It’s 7:10 A.M. I pull the covers over my head. I worry about oversleeping. Matt didn’t place a wake-up call. The maid knocks at 7:12. 7:12! I yell for her to go away. The racks won’t leave my head. At 8:20 I abandon all hope of rest. I want to touch the tiles and hit the clock. Adrenaline will out.
Rise. Wash. Stretch. Dress. Eat.
Play.
“Freedom, time, utility, chance—such concepts coagulate around the game player,” Alexander Cockburn wrote in his 1974 book Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death. “Why do some players become addicted to the game of their inclination? Why does the longdistance runner torment himself with endless miles consumed each day; the racing-car driver confront death on such unfavorable odds; the gambler return to lose more; the chess player exhaust so many hours at his game?...Humanism has watered the pastures of leisure and of games with much uplifting speculation. But in the world of games lie areas of darkness, of taboos, of cruel instincts and vile desires.”
Almost all of the greatest chess players were afflicted with various neuroses, breakdowns, and mental illnesses. Cockburn saw chess as a psychological condition, and applied Freudian theory to the game itself and the personalities consumed by it. More broadly, he asked, “How do people cope with idleness, boredom, pointlessness? What happens when they do have to work and plot their lives around this activity?”
While the Matts, Marlons, and G.I. Joels display many of the antisocial traits of expert games players, in Scrabble most top experts balance their devotion with outer lives. Some are downright normal, people I haven’t written about here for that very reason, like Jim Kramer, a bearded, soft-spoken professional proofreader from Minnesota, ranked third in North America, and Jere Mead, a Latin teacher at a suburban Boston high school, who is ranked fourth, and Bob Ellickson, a Yale Law School professor and 1900-level player whom I meet in Danbury.
The best female players fall into the relatively normal category, too. There just aren’t many of them. More women than men play competitively, yet the top experts are overwhelmingly male. Only one woman has won the Nationals—Rita Norr in 1987—and her eighth-place finish in 1998 was the only other time a woman finished in the top ten. Only one woman, Lisa Odom, represented the United States in Melbourne, and none did at the 1997 Worlds. There have never been more than six women in the top fifty, lately there have been just three, and there are no new women phenoms on the scene. At Danbury, I calculate, Division 1 is 30 percent female, Division 2 is 35 percent female, Division 3 is 60 percent female, and Division 4 is 90 percent female.
It’s no different in other games. Men outnumber women in competitive chess by about twenty to one. High-stakes poker is almost all testosterone. The television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire initially was slammed for the paucity of women able to get past telephone qualifying and onto the show. In relation to chess, Cockburn said, women “are happily without the psychological formations or drives that promote an expertise in the game in the first place. One could even add that women have never been allowed the cultural space to foster that lethargic yet zealous commitment to a useless pursuit that has fostered the bizarre careers of the great champions.” In Scrabble, the answer might be simple. “Probably because they have lives outside of this shit,” one male expert says.
Scrabble’s top women don’t disagree. At Danbury, I ask three top women players—Rita Norr, Jan Dixon, and Lynn Cushman—to talk about gender and Scrabble. On the last night of the four-day event, we head up to the hotel room Jan and Lynn are sharing. It’s not like talking to the top men. The three women have been
friends for twenty years. When we sit down, they don’t expound on racks, debate positions, or trade anagrams. They talk over one another, sharing stories and gossip, and laugh endlessly. Transcribing the tape of the session isn’t easy.
Rita began playing Scrabble when she was a young mother living in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Her furnace broke down one night and a friend came over with a Scrabble set. They formed a neighborhood Scrabble group, saw an ad for a tournament, and Rita went. Rita had read only a few basic lists in the Scrabble newsletter, but she turned out to be a natural. “I was always good at math and logic kinds of things and most of the people seemed to be computer or logic types,” Rita says.
When she won the Nationals in Las Vegas, Rita had three kids at home and a husband in the movie business who traveled two weeks at a time. She was finishing a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Brooklyn College. “Scrabble sort of saved me,” says Rita, who has a soft, round face and speaks in the flat Midwestern tones of her Michigan childhood. She entered the Nationals rated 1911, just out of the top fifty. With three games left to play, Rita didn’t even realize she had a chance to win; Joe Edley had to tell her. She accepted the $5,000 first prize on behalf of all the women in the game.
Jan grew up playing Scrabble and other games in a competitive Delaware household with four brothers. “Ping-Pong, pool, cards, Scrabble, Mastermind, Stratego, canasta, pinochle, chess,” Jan says in her loud, 78-rpm, mid-Atlantic voice. Her family used a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary. “I realized how good I was when I was about twelve years old and we were in Kentucky and I was playing an aunt who was an English teacher and I was mopping the floor with her. I thought I must be pretty good at this if I can beat an English teacher.”
Jan’s first tournament was in 1981 in the Poconos. The top three finishers were women. “I had no idea women couldn’t compete at this,” Jan says. Within two years, she had a 2000 rating. “That was the only time I ever did what I would call real study.”
“She was focused,” says Rita, who barely studies now.
“I was very focused,” says Jan.
Jan was in her midtwenties with two children and midway through a divorce when she became a top player. Another top woman of the day had a similar experience. “We both got to our peaks when we were going through the bad marriage, trying to make our decision, trying to get our own self-esteem,” says Jan, who works as a tax accountant. “And that’s where we put our focus when we were getting out of the bad marriage.”
Lynn, a New Yorker, played a little Scrabble with her mother after college, but none of her friends was interested. A flutist who earned a master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music, Lynn was teaching at the 92nd Street YMHA when she met a pianist interested in Scrabble. Lynn soon discovered the clubs and tournaments. But then law school and seven years at a big Manhattan firm precluded regular play. When the firm folded, she got serious and studied formally until cracking the top fifty.
Over the board, each is serious and scholarly. Rita is the most calmly analytical. Lynn is aggressive and forceful; she hates losing. Jan, whose specialty is a killer endgame, is the most “male,” eager to analyze specific board positions, willing to brag about her abilities, most prone to Scrabble moments, like the time she played noisily during the eulogy for a Scrabbler at the Hartford tourney. I ask them why no woman has done what Edley did: dedicate his life to the game, memorize the OSPD cover to cover.
“Joe had to worry about Joe,” Jan says. “Rita and I had children. We had a life.” She goes on, “I just think we’re much more well rounded. It’s just one thing that we happen to both be good at and enjoy. But it’s just one aspect of our lives. Players like Joel Sherman don’t have a whole lot more. That is what they do.”
Lynn says it’s not only the fact that men seem more willing to focus on Scrabble exclusively. They may be more hardwired for games, just as they are hardwired to memorize batting averages and reenact Civil War battles and play video games.
“It’s what they prioritize,” Jan says.
“That might be it,” says Rita.
“The willingness to do it?” I ask. “The drive to do it?”
“No, no,” Lynn says. “If you look in music, you find great pianists who are women, great violinists who are women. It’s not drive. Why are women successful in music at a rate greater than they are successful in Scrabble?”
“But there is a part of it that’s drive,” Jan says. “I’m not much of a studier. When I play, I’m very into it. I look up lots of stuff. But when I’m home, Scrabble does not exist. A lot of people have said if I really studied and made the effort some of these players make, I’d be one of the very top players.”
“So why don’t you?” I ask.
“I’ve got two children. I’ve got a grandchild. I’ve got a house. I’ve got a job. I baby-sit two nights a week. I baby-sit every weekend that I’m home. Scrabble is not a priority unless I’m at a tournament.”
When I say that the great anagrammers seem to be men, and the most obsessive ones at that, Jan points out that some women are great anagrammers, too. But I note that I never see them sitting around playing Anagrams at one in the morning during a tournament.
“Men need to prove themselves,” Jan says.
Lynn reluctantly suggests that woman may not be programmed for competition, particularly against men. There’s the testosterone issue; women don’t storm out of playing rooms, punch walls, or curse aloud over bad luck or poor play (though I did see a woman once dump over a board during a tournament game—against her boyfriend). There also may be behavioral differences that make women afraid of succeeding in an aggressive manner, afraid of offending someone. Just that day, I mention, I squeaked out a win against Wendy Littman, the woman I beat in the final round at Bird-in-Hand, and she said to me afterward, “I’m glad you won because you looked like you were so upset.”
“You don’t want to cause that kind of upset. I’ve felt that,” Lynn says. “It amazed me to realize it was going on with me because I wasn’t brought up like that. I was brought up to think, Achieve, you’re smart, you’re talented, you can do whatever you want to do. To an extreme. But somehow I had that other thing going on, too. I keep coming back to the idea that the brains do work differently.”
Jan and Rita don’t share the maternal notion of not wanting to cause hurt in others, but all three agree that they don’t have the obsessive dedication to memorizing words that many men do. They’re just not interested. They don’t pore over old games in Medleys, spend hours interpreting Maven simulations, or calculate the equity of rack leaves. What they know, they know, and they stay competitive by way of skill and strategy, not sheer word knowledge.
At the Los Angeles club one night—Rita is divorced and living in southern California—she was playing Trey Wright, the classical pianist who finished second at the 1998 Nationals. “He had this rack, OUSFRAB,” Rita says. I note that she doesn’t automatically put the letters in alphabetical order, the way most top male players would. “And he said, ‘Well, if I had a J, I had FRABJOUS and if I had a T, I had SURFBOAT.’ A weird rack like that with the F and the B and the U—women don’t look at a rack like that, and say immediately, ‘We have these two bingos,’ know immediately that there are only two bingos and these are the only two letters I need to play.”
Most women, the women say, look to see if they can find a word. They don’t drill all of the answers into their heads. Jan recalls a game against Joel Wapnick years ago.
“He plays REOVIRUS,” Jan says. “Now, I know REOVIRUS is a word. But he says, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s from my E-I-O-U list. And he starts blah blah blah SOUVENIR blah blah blah REOVIRUS blah blah blah.”
“A system,” I say.
“Men are more methodical,” Rita says.
“I feel I don’t know half the dictionary,” Jan says.
“So how do you succeed?” I ask.
Jan mentions that she’s good at cleaning up bad racks, seeing options on the board
, and making intricate small plays—not in finding obscure words. They concur that, in the absence of regular study, they remember enough words from twenty years of playing to remain competitive at a high level. Also, I think they’re modest about their word knowledge.
“Well,” Rita notes, “we’re not [rated] 2000 either.”
The next morning, Rita wins one out of three games, but it is enough to finish the Eastern Championships with a 15–5 record, and first place.
I bang the playing table with my right hand and turn away in revulsion, barely suppressing a full-fledged Marlon. Through clenched teeth, I push out a “Dammit!” I want to hurl the board against the wall; if I had a golf club, I’d snap it over my knee.
I have just lost the first game of the final day to Trevor Sealy, a friendly player from Toronto who has a 1600 rating. The score is 391–385. I lose on time; exceeding my clock by less than one minute, I’m penalized 10 points.
After we complete the paperwork, I mutter “good game” and bolt from the playing room, nearly whacking an incoming player with the door I push too hard. I blurt out “sorry” but don’t break stride. I make for outside, and am thankful I can see through the glass doors without risk of maiming an innocent. Larry Sherman is standing there, hands in the pockets of his high-waisted jeans, getting some fresh air.
“Fuck!” I scream. Twice. Three times. I’m pacing, turning in circles, thrusting my head heavenward, shouting more imprecations into the dead winter air. Larry studies me curiously, as if I’m a trapped wildebeest and he’s Marlon Perkins in an episode of Wild Kingdom. I half expect him to start taking notes.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 35
