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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Edley 21–9 +1434

  Wiegand 21–9 +1430

  Cappelletto 21–9 +1279

  Hersom 21–9 +227

  Hersom can’t win because his spread is too small. For Cappelletto to repeat as champion, he will need to blow out Hersom while Edley and Wiegand play a close match. Whatever happens, the 2000 champion will be decided not by who wins the most games but who has the best point differential. There is no playoff in the Nationals, as at the Worlds.

  Cordoned off to give the finalists space, the top two tables are surrounded now: by cameras, by annotators recording every move, by players whose games end quickly. Edley’s third straight game against Wiegand finishes first, and a roar of applause and cheers erupts. Over at Table 19 in Division 2, where I sit, having lost both of my morning games, it’s impossible to tell who’s won. Then the word filters over: Edley. He finds CAPESKIN (a soft leather) to the N and hangs on for a 20-point victory.

  Cappelletto and Hersom are still playing. The 1998 champion doesn’t know it—in fact, he doesn’t even know who won the other match—but now he needs to beat Hersom by 176 points. Brian is up by a bingo late in the game, and trying to find a spot for another one. Then he smiles knowingly: The Q has appeared on his rack and he realizes he will have to eat it. Edley cranes his neck to see the board, and someone whispers in his ear that Brian is winning, but not by enough. The game ends; Brian wins by 63 points. Edley wears his wry smile, the one that looks like a smirk. His wife hugs him and he quietly accepts congratulations from the onlookers. Zen to the end.

  “Hard to believe,” Edley says matter-of-factly. “Amazing.”

  And it is. Three players with a chance to win the $25,000 prize. The outcome decided by a total of 112 spread points. Over the tournament’s thirty-one games, that’s 3.6 points per game—a lucky draw here, a missed play there. I gave away more spread points in a single game.

  Brian and Randy are still analyzing their game—neither seems to consider the idea of first congratulating Edley and then returning to complete the review—when a clutch of video and still photographers gathers around the champion at Table 1. John Williams, Edley’s boss, pulls over a couple of standing tournament banners, grabs the giant check signed by Alfred M. Butts, and hands Edley a silver Tiffany bowl, in an impromptu awards ceremony for the video news release that will be sent out in time for the evening news. “It’s draining after so many days,” Edley says. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  That’s what makes his achievement so remarkable. Edley was the only two-time national champion, and now he’s the only three-time winner. In a game dependent on memory, Edley has won the title in his thirties, forties, and fifties—in 1980, 1992, and now 2000, three different decades. His peers, so accustomed to griping about Edley, now are just stunned by him. “I can’t believe the motherfucker won it again,” says Marlon, who finished thirty-third with a 17–14 mark.

  Eventually, most of the other experts offer congratulations, some of them no doubt grudging. Marlon does. Brian does. Hersom and Geary and Ron Tiekert do. Matt Graham, who finished twenty-fifth at 18–13, doesn’t, but he does demonstrate the self-centered Scrabble behavior he so often mocks: As John Williams is getting ready to hand out the awards, Matt corners him with a rambling request concerning the tournament’s so-called brilliancy prize for best strategic move.

  To honor the winner, Eric Chaikin helps whip up a “Scrabblegram”—a message using all one hundred tiles. (This one also happens to be a limerick.) FOR FUN A CHAMPION EDLEY / KEPT VICTORIES GOING QUITE READILy / VERBOSE JOE IS / AN ANAGRAm WIZ / EXULTANT ABOUT HIS WORD MEDLEY. During the ceremony, Edley sits near the rear of the convention hall, at the same table as Cappelletto. G.I. Joel is a table away, upset over finishing fourteenth but happy his brother took fourth in my division. When another Division 2 player collects a prize, Rich Lupo, the Providence bar owner, leans over and whispers to me, “I saw that guy in the bathroom between rounds eating sardines.”

  After Brian accepts the $10,000 for second place, Edley walks past him to the front of the room, but they don’t pause to shake hands or embrace, one champion to the next. “Many of you might know I’ve not done as well in tournaments the last couple of years,” Edley tells the couple hundred players who have stuck around. He credits diet, exercise, and his acupuncturist. “If I can use being a three-time champion for any good,” he says, “I’ll use it for promoting Scrabble to the outside world.”

  To assess the role of luck in this game, I need only compare my 16–15 record and Edley’s 22–9. You make your own luck, the cliché goes, and the best way to do that is to be innately talented, and to prepare.

  Lacking innate talent leaves one possibility. It took me two years, capped by thirty-one games, to understand fully that intelligence and good fortune carry one only so far, and when I peruse the leader board and see Edley’s name atop it—Edley, who will once again be rated over 2000, who will resume studying words the weekend after the tournament, who will return to NSA headquarters the following Monday and rate the tournament and create new board diagrams and continue to live a life of Scrabble—I'm not surprised at all.

  Does this make Edley the best Scrabble player of all time? Does it mean that luck played no role in his third crown? Mike Baron, the Edley detractor and Cappelletto booster, later points out that, as the top seed, Brian played the toughest field statistically in the first eleven games of the tourney, which were a round robin; Edley had an easier go. Jim Geary, who finished eighteenth, praises Edley's achievement; Jim is one top player who truly doesn’t resent Joe’s success. But he also cites a Scrabble truism: In the strongest overall field in the world, the winner needs to be damn good and damn lucky. In one four-round stretch, Geary notes, Edley posted the tournament’s high-scoring game three times.

  “Does this make him some kind of supergenius?” Geary writes to me afterward. “No, Scrabble doesn't work that way. You have to play well, of course ... but by and large those 550-point games are born of having things go really, really well for one game. Additionally, in those games, things are going pretty shitty for your opponent. The other thing to note is that those games are remarkably easy on the system. And [for Edley] they were between Rounds 21 and 24. What fortune!

  “In the long run,” Geary says of luck,

  it's going to balance out, but thirty-one games isn't the long run. With ten other fantastic players in the field, you can’t win the tourney with balanced luck. And you really can’t with bad luck.

  I’m DEFINITELY NOT saying that Edley isn’t a star, but I do say that people overstate the significance of small strings of statistical events based on their grouping. Granted this is the case in many, many competitive endeavors, but that doesn't mean that Joe Edley is the best player or that he was even the best player that week.

  I understand that that’s just the way the game goes. If lightning should strike and I win the World Scrabble Championship, I won't kid myself too much about what it means.

  But I'll be happy.

  I apply Geary’s logic to my own game. Did I have bad luck or was I just bad? Or some combination of both? Or is it not really relevant once you leave the upper echelons of the game, because only with near-complete word knowledge is the game truly meaningful? Leaving aside the last, because, unlike Geary, I believe you can scale down the game to accommodate the incomplete vocabularies possessed by all but the top ten or twenty players, I had my share of fortune in Providence, including a 588-point game (the ninth-highest in the entire tournament) and a 553-point game. I saw more than half of the blanks (35 in the 31 games), and just under half of the S’s (57 instead of 62). The average rating of my opponents was above mine. So I probably finished about where, logically and statistically, I should have.

  Understanding that, and accepting the limitations imposed by lack of word knowledge, does not make it palatable. In other words, it’s not just about the words. Take away the first and last days, I tell myself and anyone who will listen, and I would have been
in the hunt. I went 1–9 on those two days and 15–6 in between. My pal Eric Chaikin was 0–10 and 15–6 in the same stretch. Eric the committed logophile and me the full-time Scrabble player. And we lost nineteen out of twenty games! You could line up the twenty highest-rated players in North America, never mind some of the Division 2 meatballs to whom we lost, and we wouldn’t go 1–19. We could blame probability, those awful tiles, Matt’s oxygen tank, the woman at the next table humming the Jeopardy! theme song. But we don’t.

  We blame ourselves. In games, as in life, you get what you deserve. I played like a blue-hair in at least four games. I can’t explain why. And while both Eric and I made spirited comebacks, they ended with a thud. We sat next to each other at Tables 18 and 19 for a final, ignominious defeat, interrupted by the applause cascading from Division 1. Eric had the word SAXTUBA on his rack, which he shuffled around to form its anagram, SUBTAXA, but neither word fit on the board. My opponent, Alan Stern of Los Angeles, almost apologetically played STRiNGS three turns from the end of an undistinguished game to win. It had to end anticlimactically, I thought at that moment. It’s what I deserved.

  The players say their goodbyes, and the convention center empties. I stagger around the cavernous space like a boxer who went fifteen rounds but can’t remember any of them, saddened by my perceived failure, by another ho-hum result in an event on which I had placed so much import. Two years, I think, and for what? For 16–15? For mediocrity? This was my valedictory? Then I spot Edley, and I congratulate him again, and I tell him that he has been more influential than anyone in teaching me the game, and teaching me how to think, and how to win, even if I didn’t here, and I thank him.

  “You did the work,” Joe tells me.

  And maybe I did. No, I did. I came into this sport with a limited set of the requisite skills for becoming a real player—some math aptitude, some language facility, some competitive drive, a latent but untapped predisposition toward obsession. But I didn’t possess the full range—the innate memory gift, the deep spatial perception, the monkish discipline. I just wasn’t wired like the masters.

  If I knew this before I started, why didn’t I stop? What was I trying to prove? It was never entirely clear what attracted me to the game. A search for a quirky story—something to write about—was part of it. But I’d written hundreds of stories in my career, and I’d never wanted to do what my subjects did: sell junk bonds or prosecute white-collar criminals or negotiate athlete contracts or run minor-league baseball teams. Scrabble turned out to have a deeper connection. It recalled childhood snubs and competitive fears, the words of an editor who on a job interview lumped me favorably with the “insecure overachievers” the paper liked to hire (I got the job). Scrabble gave me a place to address my “issues” off of a therapist’s couch. Recognition, expertise, validation—not to mention strategy, tactics, words, and winning—all turned out to matter more than I had imagined. And all turned out to be attainable. I might not ever find AUBERGiNES or WATERZOOI, but I could appreciate their intrinsic beauty, and create some of my own.

  In the biggest tournament of my career, I finished 51st out of 105 players. But Edley’s words—“You did the work”—make me feel as if I have achieved something important. I don’t know why, but during my final three losses, I couldn’t purge the Rocky theme from my head.

  Flashback to the first morning of the tournament. I bump into Chris Cree in the hotel elevator. “I was thinking about you last night,” he twangs. “I wanted to say this in front of more people.” He stops talking and laughs, because he’s not saying it in front of anyone but me, his wife, and a stranger. “But I wanted to tell you that I'm really impressed with what you've done in such a short time. You should be proud. It's like going down to a golf club never having played and becoming a five handicap. Really impressive.”

  We walk to the front of the convention center. I leave Chris and his wife there to smoke and I ride the escalator to the third floor, where we’ll play. As I greet the other Scrabblers I wear a fat grin, like a celebrity at his own roast.

  So what if I went on to lose six of seven games that day? Into this world of brilliant minds and misfits I waded a la Plimpton, ill-prepared to play at the highest levels. But I wasn't laughed at or humiliated by anyone but me. And I found that I shared more with the word freaks than I thought.

  I probably won’t ever see a 1900 or 2000 rating, and I won’t be able to play the game, as Jim Geary told me, “the way it’s meant to be played.” But then I never imagined I’d get as far as I did. When G.I. Joel won the Worlds, he said it validated his existence, and I laughed. But now the number attached to my name, the one I wore for so long like a dunce cap, has finally come to validate mine. I think back to my initial 761 rating, which ranked me about two thousandth of twenty-three hundred in North America, and my sheet with the crossed-out two-letter words, and playing EXO* and YER*, and my snaillike advance, and the heart-pounding agony every time I tore open an envelope from the NSA bearing a new rating, and the usual subsequent humiliation at being linked to the number at the end of the row bearing my name.

  After a four-hour journey back to New York, I drop off Matt and his oxygen tank on the East Side and Eric at a friend's in SoHo. When I return to Brooklyn, Marlon is waiting on the stoop of my building; he had taken a different ride to the city, but now he needs a place to crash. I head to bed, leaving him lying on the living room carpet, calculating our new ratings. At 7:00 the next morning, he's in the same spot, wrapped in a polka-dot sheet, pen, paper, and calculator discarded beside him.

  “Well?” I ask him. “What is it?”

  “Seventeen thirty-five, if I got it right,” he says. “You there.”

  It’s a number that intimidated me not long ago; real experts were rated 1735. It’s a number of stature. A number that defines me as the 180th or so best Scrabble player in North America. A number that, at least for now, I can live with.

  1735. I’m there.

  Marlon holds out a fist for me to knock with mine. Which I do. I slowly nod and my mouth curls into a smile. I savor the feeling for a moment. And then we play a couple of games.

  Epilogue

  I DON’T SEE Matt Graham for several weeks after the Nationals. When I do, in Washington Square Park, the sight of him jars me. A red scar runs from one side of his neck to the other, just below his chin. Matt won’t tell me what happened, but he says he’s stopped drinking because of it.

  In the months that follow, Matt rededicates himself to Scrabble. “There’s too much I don’t know anymore,’’ he says. So he studies. Matt wins a tournament for the first time since 1998. In five events over seven months, he earns about $2,000 and his rating climbs from 1909 to 2024, the fourth highest in North America. That guarantees him a spot on the U.S. team at the next Worlds, scheduled for late 2001 in Las Vegas.

  Despite his winnings, Matt is broke. He isn’t optimistic about landing a possible full-time job at the Conan O’Brien show and hasn’t looked for other work. The abstinence from alcohol is brief. “Life’s anxieties stack up,’’ he says.

  Marlon Hill is still living in his childhood home, still studying words, still short on cash. “Nothing changes. Still the devil causing trouble with the righteous people,’’ he says when I call one night and find him playing Scrabble with his mother. Marlon makes some money painting houses with his uncle and doing taxes for people in his neighborhood, but it doesn’t last long. “I can’t go nowhere,’’ he says.

  “It all dried up.’’ But Marlon retains his equanimity. “I’m a do what I have to do,’’ he says. “Whatever I have to do to survive, I do.’’

  He does finish writing his book, which he titles PanAfrikanist Rhapsody, and starts another. When I ask if he’ll try for a wild-card slot on the U.S. team at the Worlds—his 1852 rating is too low to qualify outright—Marlon says he may apply for Ghanaian citizenship and play for the West African nation instead. “I was going to do that aside from Scrabble,’’ he says. Marlon already has settled
on a Ghanaian name, Ampha Adom, meaning ‘‘blessings from God.’’ When I ask why Ghana would give him citizenship, he says, “I’m a pan-Africanist. I got something to offer.’’

  Joe Edley socks away his $25,000 prize money from the Nationals. In December, he has another medical drama: a kidney stone and an enlarged prostate, discovered just before he and his wife are to direct a ten-day Scrabble cruise along the Mexican Riviera. He goes anyway, wearing a catheter.

  Edley, naturally, takes it all in stride. He practices new techniques to help his ailing body stay sharp; in one, he closes his eyes tightly and stares at the darkness, then opens them and focuses intensely. “Because of my peculiar biology, it seems to have a very strong effect,’’ he says.

  In February, for the third time in four years, Edley wins the Eastern Championships in Danbury, with an incredible 17–3 record. It pushes his rating to 2045, second only to Brian Cappelletto’s 2072.

  Lester Schonbrun’s rating dips into the 1800s. He says he probably won’t try to qualify for the Worlds; the prospect of relearning all of those British words is too daunting, the likelihood of success too small, and the threat to his OWL game too big. Lester is sixty-five, and feeling it. “I want to hang onto any prowess I have as long as I can,’’ he says. “I’m looking at the Worlds as something that’s potentially going to confuse me.’’ In his spare time, he’s compiling a leftist’s dictionary of cultural and political terms, from abortion to the French Revolution to the labor theory of value to Vietnam. “To me, it’s an anti-bullshit dictionary,’’ he says.