Word Nerd: Dispatches From the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground

by John D. Williams Jr

  The ESPN All*Stars event was an astonishing experience for all involved. The NSA staff and Advisory Board worked hard to come up with an eligibility format that was fair. In the end, we decided to invite all former world and national champions, with the rest of the field being eligible by tournament rating. Interestingly, former champions Peter Morris and Brian Cappelletto both emerged from self-imposed retirement for a crack at the $50,000 first prize. While NSA experts often and understandably bemoaned the lack of big prize money compared to chess or poker, this did represent serious progress. After all, not long before, first prize in the National SCRABBLE Championship had been just $5,000.

  As expected, the event lived up to its billing in regard to the intensity of the competitors and the level of play. Technically, it was a challenge for the ESPN crew and announcers. These were guys used to filming and talking about nonstop action, and this venue was the opposite. Instead, the play-by-play consisted of words that could have been played, biographical backgrounds of the competitors, and fundamental SCRABBLE tips. For once, I half-wished a few of our more volatile players would start a fistfight or fling a board against the wall. We wanted to deliver viewers bang for their entertainment buck.

  Because of time constraints—forty-eight minutes—we knew we were not going to be able to show a SCRABBLE match in its entirety, move by move. The average tournament game takes about forty-five minutes, but we needed time for “up close and personal” player profiles, interviews and commentary, statistics and analysis, etc. So we ended up doing what colleagues everywhere do in the situation. We resolved to shoot as much footage as we could of everything and then figure it all out in postproduction!

  The ESPN SCRABBLE All*Stars special featured my most humbling career experience, when I received a standing ovation when I delivered my opening remarks. I knew well that this was a diverse group, many of them ambivalent about me at best. I learned over the years to try not to take it personally. I came to realize that it was not me per se but what I represented. Essentially, I was the person between the business/corporate side of the game and the purist point of view.

  As I’ve mentioned, many players—usually top experts—saw both me and Hasbro as necessary evils who came attached to the game they loved. Worse, the NSA and Hasbro pretty much called the shots as to how the competitive SCRABBLE world was run. We had money, power, and the law on our side. In addition, the players’ world was occasionally chaotic, a free-form society with many smart, individualistic, offbeat people wary of authority over their game.

  Although I’d tried hard to prove myself as a player, I was still an outsider. One of the reasons was that I did not compete regularly in local tournaments or at local SCRABBLE clubs. Part of this was practical. I lived forty-five minutes from the nearest SCRABBLE club. Also, I liked to have weekends for myself. And, although I knew nothing about leadership, I felt it was a good idea not to get too mixed up in the personal lives of NSA members. It would make the job that much more difficult. This is not to say I didn’t develop close friends among NSA members. I did, but carefully.

  Perhaps the perception of me among players is best summed up in a couple of scenarios. One involves a friend of my family who happened to run across a well-known woman SCRABBLE player at a social event. He’s a brilliant young guy, who had defeated me in the very first game we ever played. I remember it well, not only for the personal humiliation but because he had thrown down the word ROADEO against me. I knew damn well it was a guess on his part and challenged.

  You know the rest. ROADEO turned out to be an acceptable word, meaning, basically, a rodeo for cars. Who knew! Anyway, he happened to mention the victory to the woman during the conversation, looking for some appreciation or validation. Instead, she immediately scoffed, “So what. John Williams is the marketing guy.” He might as well have told her he’d beaten a kindergarten student or a moron.

  There was another conversation that epitomized the cluelessness and scorn some top players had for both me and Hasbro. It was a phone call with Floridian Bob Lipton, one of the very top American players for many years.

  Lipton and I had enjoyed an ongoing dialogue for a long time, primarily about how I ran the organization and about the NSA policy on new allowable words. He was one of the early proponents of an expanded dictionary for North American play. It was referred to as the SOWPODS list, and it was essentially all the international, or “English,” words combined with the existing “American” words. SOWPODS was an anagram of the abbreviated titles of the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary and England’s Official SCRABBLE Words.

  Lipton was of the more-words-the-merrier faction of tournament players. Not surprisingly, most in this group were top experts and avid studiers of word lists. Words such as ZA and QI—later acceptable here—were just more ammo in their arsenal. But there was one problem. This was a minority vision among NSA members at large.

  It was my opinion at the time that most NSA players—and casual players at home—felt there were too many words already. Hell, there are four thousand four-letter words alone—many unknown by even midrated tournament SCRABBLE players. Now the SOWPODS group wanted to add another forty thousand more!

  Lipton and another proponent, the late veteran expert Stu Goldman, insisted that the NSA mandate that the “international” word list be made official. Not so fast, I countered. I explained that the NSA was going to grow from the bottom up, not from the top down. Thus we really needed to take into account the opinions and wishes of lower-ranked players.

  Lipton then asked me a question that left me stunned. It went something like, “Does Hasbro realize that SCRABBLE could disappear and go out of business if these new words are not adopted?”

  In my opinion this was a question so mired in myopia and naïveté, I had no immediate answer. But I did have an ultimate answer: democracy. We decided to have the first organization-wide referendum in the history of the NSA in 2000. I felt this was too volatile a topic for the NSA to mandate one set of words over another. Let the players speak.

  So we sent out ballots to all members in good standing and asked one question. Did members want the expanded dictionary, or were they happy with things just as they were? When the results were tallied, approximately 67 percent of the NSA membership wanted to stick with things as they were—no international words.

  It’s important to realize that I had no real opinion in this matter. For me personally, it would just be adding another batch of words I’d never know to the sixty or seventy thousand I already didn’t know. But I felt that any change this substantial had to happen organically, and that’s what I told Lipton and other SOWPODS adherents. To me, it was no different from the three-point shot becoming acceptable in basketball or the instant-replay review being used for official calls in pro football. It would, I explained, happen over time when, and if, it was meant to happen.

  And that is exactly what occurred. In time, interest in the “international game” started to gain momentum, despite the fact that Hasbro had stopped sponsoring the World SCRABBLE Championship in 2001 and Mattel had systematically reduced its funding as well. However, as happened so often in the past, the SCRABBLE subculture rose to the occasion to provide missing elements for the hardcore player.

  Previous examples of this include customized boards with superior turntables and personalized graphics or monograms. There were also customized tile bags, customized chess clocks, elongated racks, unlicensed books and study materials, limited-edition T-shirts, and more.

  Anyway, interest in international play—and its accompanying dictionary—slowly began to build as the twenty-first century dawned. This was despite both manufacturers losing interest in funding the World SCRABBLE Championship. There were myriad reasons for this. First, as with everything else in our lives, the Internet made a huge difference. Though mostly on illegal sites, you could now find a SCRABBLE opponent any time of day, anywhere in the world, of matching skill and preference in word authority. It was no longer necessary to tour
Europe or be among the handful of competitors in a World SCRABBLE Championship to play the international game.

  The landscape in learning new words had changed greatly, too, also due to technology. Gone were the days when players used to covet secret word lists, painstakingly researched and compiled the old-fashioned way—word by word. Now you could almost customize your study habits with a push of a keyboard button. For example, let’s say I recognize that I have a weakness in five-letter words ending in CH. Don’t laugh; it gets this precise and then some. I can find that list somewhere on the Internet, or create it myself, in a format that has been proven easy to memorize. Hence, the prospect of learning thousands of new words is not as daunting as it once was.

  Ultimately, all this led to growth in the international game. By 2012, it had reached the point where many local tournaments and the National SCRABBLE Championship itself had a separate “Collins Division”—Collins SCRABBLE Dictionary being the name of the dictionary published in England by HarperCollins that includes both the American and English acceptable words.

  All this is a way of saying the standing ovation from these experts at the SCRABBLE All*Stars event was meaningful. Even one of my biggest critics, perpetually disgruntled expert Marlon Hill, joined in. He had once said something like “John Williams represents everything that is wrong with SCRABBLE.” He also remarked that the game should be on a big-time circuit with players paid to wear Nike footwear and the like. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon.

  Another touching highlight of the event featured two of my favorite experts—Chris Cree from Texas and David Gibson from South Carolina. Chris is a larger-than-life, well-dressed, successful businessman, a Texan in every way. He has been one of the nation’s top players for over thirty years and to some extent is my successor, as he—along with John Chew—is copresident of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association, the new governing body of the game in the wake of the 2013 closing of the NSA. More on that later.

  Despite Chris Cree’s proven skill, he has never been able to win “the big one,” that is, a World, National, or All*Stars SCRABBLE Championship. But it appeared he finally might do it at the 2003 SCRABBLE All*Stars. As we approached the finals, Chris and David were paired in a do-or-die game. The winner would go on to the finals of the richest SCRABBLE tournament in history against arguably the strongest field in history. The loser, through the nuances of the pairing system, would automatically drop as low as sixth place.

  It should be noted that David Gibson is one of the most unassuming and beloved players in the game. He also belongs in any discussion about the best players in history, having won the 1994 Nationals and the 1995 Superstars in Las Vegas. At the latter tournament, David took his $50,000 first prize, kept less than half for himself, and distributed all the rest among the other competitors! It was a display of sportsmanship and graciousness never seen in the SCRABBLE world before.

  So these two longtime friends sat down for the crucial game at ESPN SCRABBLE All*Stars. The room was thick with anticipation, the stakes astronomical. What happened next is best told by Chris Cree himself.

  “So I’m ready to start, but first I look over at David,” Chris recalled years later, “and he’s crying.” Chris knew exactly why. These guys had so much respect and love for each other that they were seriously conflicted about winning.

  Chris continued, “So then I start to cry too. We look at each other in silence, then stand up and hug.”

  I’d noticed what was happening from across the room. By the time I reached the table, they’d progressed from crying to damn near weeping. Each knew one of them was poised for a painful loss at the hands of a close friend.

  The three of us made small talk for a minute or two, and then they both jumped up again for another hug and a few more tears. Finally, Chris and David composed themselves and the game began. I too was on the verge of tears from the experience. It spoke so deeply not only about both men but about the complex relationship—in all sports and competition—between friendship and rivalry.

  Sadly, the game itself was an anticlimax. David won decisively and went on to win the ESPN SCRABBLE All*Stars Championship, defeating 1985 NSC champion Ron Tiekert. Though admired and well liked by the SCRABBLE community, Ron was clearly not the favorite among the other competitors. For them, a David Gibson victory might mean divvying up the pot once again. And that’s exactly what happened.

  We spent a couple of months in postproduction cobbling all the footage into a forty-eight-minute telecast. It wasn’t easy. Originally, we’d pushed ESPN for a ninety-minute time slot, but the network rarely, if ever, had a ninety-minute show, and they weren’t going to do it for SCRABBLE. Our wish to show a complete high-level SCRABBLE game with commentary, as well as some “up close and personal” profiles of various players, was seriously compromised.

  Another concern was exposure and promotion for the eventual telecast. It was explained to us early in the project that ESPN does not do a lot of heavy promotion. This was especially true for niche programming, which we were. So while were we able to alert the entire SCRABBLE world about the All*Stars telecast, it was not exactly top-of-mind for either sports fans or television viewers.

  That was reflected in the ratings. They were tepid at best, with perhaps a half million people watching at peak viewership. Televised poker had up to five times more viewers. Even the National Spelling Bee had had more than twice our numbers, although they’d had over twenty years to build the franchise. So both the network and we were understandably disappointed, but we had a five-year deal and plenty of time to do it better. And there was a lot of triumph as well. No network in history had ever broadcast a match featuring a branded board game. Dampened expectations aside, we’d achieved our goal of having a SCRABBLE match on national television.

  Reviews of the show itself were scarce and mixed at best. The first airing was largely ignored by the press. Opinions among NSA members, however, were plentiful and predictably all over the place. Some wanted more strategy and less glitz. Others felt it played more like a highlight reel given the absence of a true complete game.

  Suggestions for improving the next telecast were equally diverse. One person insisted we should mike the players, even though most SCRABBLE experts rarely mumble more than a few words during a game. A friend said we should take a cue from professional wrestling—give the players theatrical entrances, stage names, and jerseys festooned with numerous sponsor logos.

  Perhaps the best suggestion—one we’d come up with ourselves—was to develop some colorful and meaningful graphics to help tell the story and underscore the wondrous subtleties of the game. For example, if a player’s rack featured the letters ISPDOTE, we could immediately flash on the screen all the anagrams of the word: DEPOSIT, DOPIEST, PODITES, POSITED, SOPITED, TOPSIDE. This would be a cool feature for a number of reasons.

  First, it would reward the casual SCRABBLE player with words that were familiar. For the more advanced, it would feature some esoteric words. And chances are both parties would learn a new word or two. Another graphic, using the available artificial intelligence, was to illustrate the best play options from a statistical viewpoint. Then we could take those specific words and move them to various spots on the board to illustrate strategy and options.

  In our postmortem with both ESPN and Hasbro, we agreed on one thing. Given the growing popularity and ratings of the National Spelling Bee and our positive experience at our first National School SCRABBLE Championship, it was definitely time to put the kids on television.

  12

  GOING HOLLYWOOD

  AMONG THE LESSONS I’VE LEARNED IN dealing with Hollywood is that you are as good as anyone needs you at any given time. After that, no guarantees. This was absolutely hammered home to me during an experience I had back in 2000. I received a call from an LA-based production executive regarding the use of SCRABBLE in a proposed Jennifer Lopez movie, The Wedding Planner.

  I should start off by saying that t
he movie was a big hit despite tepid reviews that saw it as another paint-by-numbers romantic comedy. The project, which also starred Matthew McConaughey, was a classic example of why major studios will always invest in a big star with a mediocre script as opposed to a great script with an unknown actor. It’s a business decision: go with a sure thing.

  I received this call a few weeks before shooting was about to begin. I’d already known about the project because a year earlier I’d read the screenplay for Hasbro to make sure that SCRABBLE was portrayed accurately and that there was no prurient content or violence involving a SCRABBLE board, tiles, or other icons of the game.

  Arguably playing against type, Jennifer Lopez had been cast as a SCRABBLE tournament player and devoted attendee at a SCRABBLE club in San Francisco. The script contained a few scenes involving the game. One was at the SCRABBLE club and another at an important championship, where JLo was poised to win both the competition and Matthew McConaughey’s heart.

  During the conversation with the production person, I had to explain that I found a few erroneous assumptions made by the screenwriters. First, no NSA tournament ever had four people playing the same game. It was always one-on-one. Second, other than Jennifer Lopez, every SCRABBLE player in the script seemed to be depicted as either a white-haired senior citizen or a crazed geek just this side of the Unabomber. Third, no tournament final ever took place on a stage with an audience of hundreds just twenty-five feet away, as written.

  The executive listened patiently to my comments. Authenticity, he assured me, was “the key to the movie’s soul.” Taking this cue, I then explained such NSA tournament staples as chess clocks, tracking sheets, customized tile bags and racks, and more. As the conversation wound down, he asked me if I would be available to serve as the SCRABBLE technical adviser on the film.