Joe Leonard did not contribute to the new books. The Word List Master General was quietly permitted to receive the Scrabble News again, and he stayed in touch—via handwritten postcards and typed, single-spaced letters, of course—with a few Scrabblers, including Mike Baron. Mike believes that Joe was still compiling his lists of additions and corrections before and after publication of the new OSPD and OWL. But Joe didn’t share any work with him or with the dictionary volunteers.
Mike received what would be his last postcard from Joe in early 2008. In it, Joe wondered why, in a new edition of the Wordbook, the letter Z was missing from the anamonic for the stem SOIGNE, “A JEW BELCHED PROUDLY.” (The reason: GINZOES is the plural of an offensive term for an Italian. Mike’s book was now sanctioned by Hasbro, so it included none of the expurgated words.) Joe then reported that he was suffering from congestive heart failure, cardiomyopathy, and abdominal edema. “I’m in very sad shape,” he wrote, in all caps. About two years later, while Joe was being treated for a swollen artery, doctors discovered that he had cancer. He died in December 2010 at age seventy-six.
Three and a half weeks passed before a Scrabble player posted news of Joe’s death on CGP. I tracked down Joe’s upstairs neighbor, caregiver, and benefactor, Robert Dennen. He told me that Joe’s bouts of obsession and anger had lessened in his final years, and he reminisced about his friend’s gentle nature. I finally asked about Joe’s voluminous research, his papers and lists and correspondence. Dennen said he kept all of Joe’s reference books, but the papers were just too much. The building owners wanted the apartment cleaned out immediately.
I shut my eyes and covered my mouth. All that work. All those lists. All that compulsive lexicographic genius. I think Dennen sensed my sadness and the scale of the loss. “I sort of curse myself and I curse them,” he said. “But I couldn’t keep all that. Impossible. I feel like crying. I do. I feel so guilty about what I had to do.”
A few days earlier, Dennen told me, he held a memorial in Joe’s apartment. He erected an altar between the two windows. On one side, he placed photos of Joe as a young man; on the other, he placed lighted candles on Joe’s favorite green chair, where he had sat and gazed through the shades at the world below.
The strongest opponent to the word list continues to be Dan Pratt, the retired Defense Department mathematician and linguistics PhD whose research I mentioned in chapter 10. His main beef is still that the OWL contains thousands of words that can’t be found in any twenty-first-century American college dictionary, including some that appeared in one edition of one dictionary, occasionally in error, as long ago as 1963.
Pratt believes the solution is to start over. He has spent several years compiling and hopes someday to find a publisher for a competing word source that would exclude several thousand out-of-date, obsolete, erroneous, and what by modern standards he considers lexicographically indefensible words found in the OWL. For instance, on the grounds that James Brunot’s early rules prohibited foreign words, Pratt would delete DE (as in Charles de Gaulle). On the grounds that those rules mentioned “usage,” ET (a dialect form of the past tense of “eat”) would be out, as would offensive words. Pratt would admit some twos from the international lexicon, and one unfound in either source: the interjection EW. To reflect the global reality of English in the Internet age, Pratt’s book would consist of words found in several American, Canadian, and international dictionaries, plus some nondictionary sources. To help players understand his lexicographic rationale, he intended to circulate an annotated list of the twos that would appear in his book.
Pratt said his new list wouldn’t confuse or enrage players and might attract casual players turned off by strange-seeming words. But while his effort could be viewed as intellectually defensible—cleaning out old mistakes, making the game reflect the current state of the language, improving the dictionary part of Scrabble’s dictionary—it also looked like the subjective crusade of one disaffected customer. I wasn’t alone in disagreeing with Pratt’s contention that the word set is what discourages many living-room players from going competitive, or with his strict-constructionist interpretation of Scrabble’s rules, or that the game should reflect a narrow interpretation of the language.
“If you’re still arguing with ‘The Book’ thirty years and five editions later, you’re wasting time you could be spending learning it, and playing the game,” G.I. Joel wrote on CGP. “We all know it has its warts, and it’s still better than most other things that have been or might be tried.”
Inside NASPA, Pratt’s efforts had no support. In fact, rather than cleansing the game’s lexicographic history, the head of its dictionary committee, Jim Pate, a retired research librarian in Birmingham, Alabama, advocated embracing it in full. For the next OSPD/OWL update, scheduled for spring 2014, NASPA’s Dictionary Committee was adding words from the twelfth edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, plus two new source books: the Oxford College Dictionary and, to recognize our friends to the north, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. (No new editions were published of the three other dictionaries used for the 2006 update.) Among the couple thousand expected new words: at least two new twos, GI, a judo outfit, and TE, an alternate spelling of the musical note TI; CUZ and SEZ; the interjection GRR; the slang GRRRL, for “girl”; IXNAY (as in pig Latin) and MONTY (as in “the full”); and much more that was sure to arouse debate.
But Pate also had a more ambitious goal. He wanted to make the OWL historically comprehensive: that is, find and include every word that has been theoretically playable in Scrabble at any time since 1978, when the first OSPD was published. “If it was acceptable at one point and it was not an out-and-out mistake, my feeling is it ought to be in the next edition of OWL,” Pate told me. To accomplish that, Pate and his committee began rechecking all of the source dictionaries used to compile the first four OSPDs and two OWLs. Words that were accidentally or erroneously omitted were added to a list of proposed additions. Every nine- to fifteen-letter word that wasn’t culled for the first two OSPDs, which included only base words of up to eight letters long, also was added to the list. One example: the nine-letter SLIPSTICK, a casual term for a slide rule. It appeared in a pre-OWL edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate. When it was later removed, the word, for Scrabble purposes, died.
I like the idea of sweeping, historic inclusiveness. Good once, if not in error, good forever. The language evolves but the words endure.
Some players still want to take the word list even further. In late 2010, a few top experts began calling anew for North America to adopt the international dictionary. It would be a bigger jump, numerically speaking, than a decade earlier. That’s because international Scrabble in 2007 switched its word source to the Collins English Dictionary, which, when combined with the OWL (and including a 2012 update), yielded a total of 270,163 two- through fifteen-letter words.
Collins’ permissiveness—plenty of intriguing international English but also bastardizations like KEWL, for “cool,” and a lowercase JEDI—managed to turn off one very prominent former SOWPODS supporter: G.I. Joel. “Scrabble is supposed to be something that appeals to erudite people, and erudite people should find the inclusion of stuff like that objectionable,” Joel told me. “English as used in text messaging is not English, and neither is Maori or Afrikaans or any other language that Collins overrepresents. It has no business being used in North America, and would be a much greater deterrent to the growth of our competitive community than some people claim OWL is.”
Joel doesn’t do international events anymore. Mostly, he said, because studying Collins is too great an investment given how little he can play it in North America (and how expensive it is to travel abroad). “Making that effort would destroy my ability to compete using the domestic word source,” he said. Another disincentive is that Hasbro stopped hosting the World Scrabble Championship after the 2001 tournament in Las Vegas (won by Brian Cappelletto). The company also stopped paying for a U.S. team to travel to Mattel’s event.
But NASPA is openly supporting domestic Collins tournaments; immediately following the 2010 Nationals, it staged the first World Players Championship, intended as an off-year world championship in North America. Only twenty-eight players entered, and first prize was just $3,000, but it sent a message. By 2012, more expert-level players were switching to Collins, and NASPA gave them a division of their own at the Nationals. Thirty-seven players—from Joel Wapnick to Sam Rosin to Winter—competed. Veteran player Sam Kantimathi, whose first name adorns a line of timers, tiles, and other Scrabble paraphernalia, finished first and won $1,000 ($9,000 less than in the top OWL division).
When Wapnik announced his switchover on CGP, he said that while Collins isn’t perfect, the OWL is actually the problem list because it excludes “thousands of perfectly good words.” But the debatable goodness of either list is almost beside the point. With all those extra words, Collins is undeniably a more challenging, creative, and high-scoring game. Cappelletto started a robust online debate with a manifesto on why he too had decided to focus on the international book. Without getting too Scrabble-geek here, Brian argued that Collins is strategically richer and more complex. A hundred-point lead isn’t safe the way it is with OWL because it’s harder to shut down the board and because the fatter word list offers more comeback chances.
But Brian’s main point was that adopting Collins would end North America’s Scrabble isolation, or what he called its “provincialism.” This remains a rallying cry mainly for the superexperts, and they have a point. It would be cool if all the amazing foreign players were welcome in the United States, if Scrabble were no longer globally bifurcated. It also would be cool if North Americans were once again among the best in the world, which is no longer the case. But the rank and file remains largely unaware of, or unconcerned with, issues of unity and strategy. As before, they aren’t likely to switch to the world book. And, most important, Hasbro is contractually aligned with Merriam-Webster, which publishes a Scrabble dictionary the content of which it controls; it wouldn’t be turning over that franchise to or cutting a deal with a rival publisher, especially one that may or may not be appropriating its content (the OWL) for use in its own word source. “Sanctioned coexistence”—that is, rated Collins tourneys alongside OWL ones—is the practical reality, probably for a long time. I see that as a potential threat to competitive Scrabble, another split in our small world. Chris Cree disagrees. “They wanna play, we will rate and bill them,” he said. “To me, far better than saying ‘no dice’ and having them go on their own.”
In terms of the frequency of big events, the amount of prize money, and the concentration of great players, the epicenter of Scrabble has shifted overseas and specifically to south Asia. The last five world championships have been held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2003 (won for the first time by one of the remarkable Thai players, Panupol Sujjayakorn); London in 2005 (Adam Logan of Canada); Mumbai, India, in 2007 (Nigel Richards of New Zealand); Johor Bahru, Malaysia, in 2009 (another Thai, Pakorn Nemitrmansuk); and Warsaw, Poland, in 2011 (Nigel Richards again). Logan is the only North American to finish in the top two in any of those five events. Most of the highest-rated Americans and Canadians haven’t attended. “The rest of the world has caught up to us,” Cappelletto wrote.
He and Wapnick announced their fealty to Collins shortly after returning from the 2010 Causeway Scrabble Challenge in Johor Bahru, also known as the Iskandar Malaysia World Festival of Scrabble, where they played seventy-two games over eight days. The two-tournament event demonstrated the gulf between Scrabble abroad and at home. It was sponsored by Mattel, the local government, and the regional development authority. The prize package totaled $85,500. A princess presented the awards.
Part one was a five-day, forty-five-game multidivisional tournament with a top prize of $30,000. Panupol, the Thai, won. Finishing second was Mikki Nicholson, a thirty-two-year-old transgender woman who was taking the Scrabble scene by storm, as much for winning the British championship just a few years after beginning to play online as for doing so while wearing a bright pink wig and matching skin-tight dress. Part two was a $10,000, winner-take-all, three-day, twenty-seven-game tournament of champions. It featured nine of the ten world champs, including the very first, Peter Morris, who after retiring from Scrabble has become a widely respected baseball historian and author. The only one missing was G.I. Joel, who declined an all-expenses-paid invitation to play.
Joel did make one exception to his no-Collins pledge: the 2011 Worlds in Poland. He told me he did so because a $50,000-first-prize tournament in Malaysia was scheduled shortly afterward. “I felt that was a high enough price to justify exposing myself to the pile of crap word list.” Joel committed to the U.S. team for the Worlds and bought a nonrefundable plane ticket to Warsaw. A few weeks later the Malaysia event was canceled. Joel went to Poland anyway. He didn’t study, didn’t pressure himself, and still managed to go 19–15. He also saw a bit of his father’s father’s homeland and “had a lot of good food.”
“I later learned,” Joel reported, “that Johor Bahru, once you step outside the tourney hotel, is a disgusting shit-hole, dangerous and smoky, and had I gone, I would have been ridiculously uncomfortable, if not altogether too ill to play. So I dodged one superexpensive bullet, thank goodness for small favors.”
Even Joel might be hard-pressed to argue with the following statement: Nigel Richards is the greatest Scrabble player of all time.
Now an analyst for a security company in Kuala Lumpur, Nigel has been by far the world’s dominant performer since this book was first published, winning a ridiculous 75 percent of his games and several hundred thousand dollars in prize money. He won that tournament of champions event, plus those two Worlds. He segregated the Collins-only words in his brain and won our Nationals in 2008, finished second in 2009, and then did the utterly astonishing: He won it again in 2010, 2011, and 2012, when he blew out former champion David Gibson in a decisive thirty-first and final game to finish first on spread and surpass Joe Edley for most Nationals titles.
Nigel’s mnemonic gift—visualizing words on a printed page—allows him to find seemingly any word in either book, and every possibility on the board, at any time. Nigel is kind, humble, and polite. But his innate ability, his reserved demeanor, and his ascetic ways—he wears a long, monkish beard; he dislikes, and often refuses to do, interviews; he professes no interest in rehashing moves or positions, or in the outcome of games—make him not only an unmarketable champion but one some players find hard to root for. Nigel just doesn’t seem to struggle the way everyone else does. His dominance has been so great that the game doesn’t look like a fair fight.
“He’s a guy who seems to have some sort of brain structure that, instead of being able to recite the first five thousand digits of pi from memory, he does this,” Matt Graham says, and not in a flattering way. “To me it would be more beautiful if he was the sickest studier of all time, that that’s all he did and that’s how he got his edge.”
Nigel doesn’t care about the opinions of others. “I just enjoy trying to work out the possibilities and see what I can do, see what I can come up with,” he once told me. “I can enjoy it if I win. I can enjoy it if I lose.”
I see G.I. Joel periodically when I visit New York, and Club 56, from Washington, D.C., where I moved in 2003. He calls me Book Boy or Little Bro, which makes me smile.
In Dallas in 2010, Joel and I met for dinner. He was working at the event, not playing, having dropped out because he and his brother had spent the previous months caring for their dad, Mike, who had been laid low by anemia. Joel just didn’t have time to prepare for the tournament. (Mike died a few weeks later, just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday. He happily and crankily played tournament Scrabble until the age of ninety-three, and he will forever steal a scene in Word Wars in which he is asked between games at the Nationals how he’s doing. “Kicking ass!” Mike replies.)
“I know my game has declined severely in the last coupl
e of years,” Joel said. “By my standards, I know I’m not capable of playing well enough to win this.” Of course, Joel’s standards remain rather high. In 2002, one year after [>], Joel won his first Nationals, in San Diego. That performance raised his rating to 2036, and while it tumbled as low as 1788 at one point in the following years, as of this writing it was back up to 1963—twenty-second-best in North America. “I kind of feel like I’ve had more [success] than I deserve,” Joel said. “But that’s just Jewish guilt.”
Joel is still running the New York club. Most of the regulars are still regulars. A few of the stalwarts have died, including the inimitable polymath Bob Felt, of a heart attack in 2002, and Rita Norr, still the only woman to win the Nationals, of brain cancer in 2010. But Joel remains Joel, the most logical, most utterly unself-conscious personality in the game, still shouting “MAAAATCH-UUUUUPS!” before each round, still letting his maladies hang out, as he did in an email canceling a club session. “Sorry for the late notice,” he wrote, “but I hurt my back sneezing this morning, and I’m going to need at least a day of rest.”
Man, I love Joel.
The day after dining with Joel in Dallas, I met Joe Edley at the same table for the same meal.
Edley had had a tumultuous few years. On the physical side, there was prostate surgery, kidney stones, and cataract surgery. On the personal side, his father died, his mother had cancer, and he separated from his wife, Laura, and moved into their finished basement. On the professional side, he lost his job at the NSA amid Hasbro budget cuts. He was on retainer, making about a quarter of what he once did, writing puzzles and other material for the Scrabble News. He no longer works at the offices in Greenport.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 45
