Eric explains with a straight face that we’re late in getting to a Scrabble tournament.
“These two guys are two of the top players in the world,” he adds, pointing at Matt and Marlon.
“A Scrabble tournament?” the cop says.
Eric shows him a score sheet.
Compelling, but not enough. He writes a ticket anyway.
As we drive away, I ask Eric whether he got the score sheet back. (He did.)
“Son, what’s this FINI*?” Matt says, impersonating the cop. Eric’s opponent had challenged FINI* off the board the day before. “What were you thinking here? Haven’t you ever heard of defense?”
“Didn’t you see AGUEWEED on this rack?” Eric adds. “I’m going to have to write you up for that play.”
Marlon blurts out, “TETRASPORIC is TRICERATOPS.”
“What’s nice is ATOP,” Matt says. He means that if the word ATOP were on the board, you could wrap letters around it to make TRICERATOPS.
“Oh, shit,” Marlon says. “And I nearly played ATOP thinking it would close the board.”
We all laugh. The odds against someone playing TRICER in front of ATOP and an S behind it are astronomical.
“Talk about risks. And Eric nearly passed someone on a curve doing sixty,” Matt says.
We make it on time. I win four out of five, but the loss is a finalgame showdown for first place. I lose by just two points, 347–345, blowing the endgame. In the wake of Waltham, I’m content with the second-place 11–4, +806 finish, even if it was in a weak field. (Matt takes the first division with a 10–5 mark; Marlon wins just seven. Eric does the same in division two.)
I collect my first winnings from a Scrabble tournament—$150—and I smile for the disposable camera that Edley’s wife, Laura Klein, uses to photograph the winners. Maybe it’s the setting, maybe the absurdity of running out of gas and the speeding ticket and Marlon’s space suit, but I accept my mistakes, as Edley has advised, and I move on.
Back in Brooklyn that night, the phone rings at 10:30. It’s Marlon. He’s just gotten home to Baltimore.
“I’m calling all of y’all,” he says. “TETRASPORIC is goooood.” Marlon looked it up in his Merriam-Webster’s. “I just called Matt and told him I don’t know how he win any tournaments. Motherfucker doubting me. Daaaaaamn.”
The median rating of the people who have played in a Scrabble tournament in the past year is about 1150. After the one-day Long Island event a week after Rosendale, my rating increases from 1118 to 1165. This jump leads to two conclusions: There must be a lot of people who play in one tournament and never come back, and there must be a lot of people who just enjoy playing in tournaments for fun, because there is no way that I’m as good as half of the people playing competitive Scrabble.
The definition of a good player is relative. Armed with the two-and (most of the) three-letter words, I can now beat casual players handily. I even sweep my brother, the onetime word-list maker, when we play a few games. But if I’m suddenly rated as highly as half of the active competitive Scrabblers, what does it take to become an expert, not to mention an Expert? And who is one, anyway? To a 2000 player like Edley or G.I. Joel, a 1600 player—technically an expert—is a patzer, a fly on an elephant’s back. To me, a 1600 player is a demigod, while Edley and G.I. and the other 2000s are full-fledged Scrabble gods. I said I wanted to be like them. But how?
The words are a start. By now, I even have a pretty good idea of which ones to learn and in what order, and I have accepted that it will take harder work than I’ve put in so far. But I also realize that it’s the psychological, not logological, blunders that torment me. And as I’m pondering this fact, Joe Edley weighs in on CGP with his recipe for becoming a champion:
The ability to DESIRE to be the best. Or, DESIRE to WIN whatever championship is important to you.
Unshakable honesty within oneself to answer the questions about your own strengths and weaknesses.
Controlling your breath.
Finding a way to control your emotional states.
The X factor. I don’t know what it is. It’s just the seemingly extraordinary state that any given champion has during the winning tournament.
It’s time to learn from the master.
5. Edley
THE BEST PLAYERS,” Joe Edley tells me, “are focused on the goal of winning. Because all else becomes less important. Every other behavior is extraneous. Every behavior you display while you play should be the focus of winning. Otherwise, why are you there?
“Well,” he says, answering his own rhetorical question, “a lot of other people are there for other reasons. And that’s why they don’t win.”
If Scrabble had “majors,” as in tennis and golf, the Big Four in North America would be the Nationals, the Eastern Championships in Danbury, the Boston Area Scrabble Tournament in Waltham, and the Western Championships in Reno, Nevada. The Nationals, Danbury, Waltham, Reno. It’s not about the money. The Nationals pays $25,000 to the champion, but first prize in Waltham is only a few hundred. The glory and prestige of winning a major is what really matters.
When Joe Edley captured the expert division in Danbury (while I was choking on the other side of the room), he became the only player to win the sport’s equivalent of a career grand slam. The Nationals? Twice, the only player to have done that. Waltham? Twice. Reno? Five times, including four in a row in the early 1990s. And now Danbury. Edley had won other biggies, too. The big winter event at the Holiday Inn in Atlantic City? Five times. The popular spring tourney in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, near Dollywood? Twice. The old Grand Canyon tournament, which attracted the best from both coasts? Twice again. On an unofficial list of career Scrabble earnings, Edley stood second with more than $60,000, and that didn’t include earnings in tourneys where first prize was less than $1,000. (David Gibson, who won $50,000 in one event, the 1995 Superstars, was first.)
Yet, less than two months after his Danbury win, I wander to the rear of the ballroom at the DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel in Waltham, where thirteen of the game’s best are slugging it out in the premier division. Edley is 0–10. In twenty years of tournament Scrabble, Edley had never lost more than five games in a row in a tournament. Even more remarkably, Edley says he is playing well, that all his games have been close ones. “I’m having fun,” he says.
So are Edley’s opponents.
“I’m trying not to give you a hard time because of what’s going on here,” one expert says.
G.I. Joel chuckles a bit too loudly. If schadenfreude were a liquid, it would be oozing from his shrunken being. Joel looks like Mr. Burns, the evil nuclear power plant owner on The Simpsons.
“This is fine,” Edley says. “Really.”
Really? Really? Fine to lose every game you play? Fine to know that other players secretly hope you’ll lose the rest of your games, so that you, one of the most successful players in the history of the game, Scrabble’s Jack Nicklaus, can suffer one of the most humiliating performances ever by a top player, one that will live in infamy in the Scrabble world? This is fine?
To Joe Edley, it is. Just as it is fine that one expert writes FIRE EDLEY on the $18 check renewing his membership in the National Scrabble Association every year. Fine for the warm, sweet, gentlemanly Lester Schonbrun to say of Edley: “He has zero noblesse oblige.” And fine for Edley to be dubbed (as a result of a misquotation, it turns out) “the Darth Vader of Scrabble.” Edley has been called arrogant, aloof, insensitive, rude, conniving, and worse, most of it behind his back. He doesn’t care, because he doesn’t worry much about what other people think. In the New Age story of Joe Edley, it’s mind over everything.
An only child, Edley was born in 1947 and grew up in Detroit. His father was a dental technician until he was accepted as a violinist in the Detroit Symphony at the age of forty-six. His mother worked as a bookkeeper. Edley was on the chess team in high school, and for fun he played a word game called Jotto, in which one person has to deduce a five-letter word though
t of by another person. He studied math and philosophy at Wayne State University, and twice won the university chess championship. His father gave him a gold ring with a chess knight in the center and Joe’s initials on either side, which he still wears on his right middle finger, though it looks as if it’s choking his circulation now. Edley liked the strategic component of games. But he hated the performance aspect of competition.
“In chess, I got to the expert level, but I couldn’t understand why I would win and lose,” he says. We’re sitting in the sparsely decorated Long Island town house where he lives with his wife and their four-year-old daughter, Amber. “Sometimes I performed my best and sometimes I didn’t. It was a mystery to me.”
After graduation, in 1969, Edley moved to San Francisco. He wasn’t chasing the Summer of Love; Edley didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. But everybody he knew did. “It was very exciting from my sheltered middle-class existence to come across all these people. And to be one of them but at the same time so totally alien. I would become like a chameleon. I’d be like them. They’d get high, I’d act high. It wasn’t a puton. It was just fun to do that.”
He got married one April Fool’s Day and divorced the next Thanksgiving. He didn’t have sex for two years. He hitchhiked home with $10 in his pocket. He drove a cab. He lived in a residence club called the Monroe, where everyone worked fourteen hours a week in exchange for room and board. But mostly he meditated, played pool and Risk and table tennis and Monopoly, some backgammon for money, and stood in the bookstore on Polk between California and Pine reading about human potential.
There Edley began to figure out whom he would be. He read I Am That: The Science of Hamsa from Tha Vijnana Bhairava, a guide to achieving inner peace by Swami Muktananda. He read Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg and Jack Chalker. But he was influenced most by Jane Roberts, a New Age philosopher who claimed that a “non-physical teacher” named Seth spoke through her while she was in a trance. Roberts’s message was that human beings could manifest their own reality. As Seth said through Jane, “in a manner of speaking you are given the gifts of the gods. Your beliefs become reality. What you believe is, and becomes real in your experience. There is no area in your life to which this does not apply.” So Edley asked himself, “What beliefs do I have? What are my attitudes? What kind of reality do I want to create?”
In the end, he decided that he was good at games, playing them and creating them, so that’s what he would do with his life. He read about the first national championship in Scrabble, and about the publication of the first Scrabble dictionary. While he didn’t play the game growing up or with his friends at the Monroe, something called him to it nonetheless. Edley decided that he could become a top Scrabble player; therefore he would. “I felt there was a destiny there,” he says. To manifest his destiny, Edley decided he would learn the OSPD. All of it. He took a night watchman’s job. “I would stay up all night studying Scrabble,” he says. “I punched in every half-hour just to make sure I was awake.”
On his girlfriend’s business cards, Edley wrote alphagrams on one side with the answers on the other. Once a week, he and a friend who had moved with him to San Francisco, Jerry Lerman, would play six-or eight-game sessions. He reminded himself where he wanted to be: in a place where he could anagram all of the bingos in the OSPD instantly, first without a blank and then with one. “I felt that I could win the national championship, and said, That’s what I want to manifest. Let me prove to myself I can do that.”
Why that, I ask Edley, as opposed to—well, as opposed to just about anything else?
“That can’t be explained,” he says. “That cannot be explained. All I can say is that my life up until that point had been leading up to the fact that I was a games player, that I just needed the attitude, I needed the drive, and I needed the game. Everything I had been doing in my life was leading up to this moment.”
After seven tournaments, and accumulating frustration, I need a tutor. Edley, of course, has the playing résumé even his detractors concede that he is among the all-time greats. But that’s not why I seek out his counsel. Most 1800 players could teach me the finer points I need to climb the ratings ladder. It is Edley’s blanket calm and unswaying belief in an inner game of Scrabble that make him the ideal Scrabble swami.
When I call, though, I’m not after a deep skull session. I don’t feel as though I’ve played enough games or know enough words to benefit from a heavy lecture on topics like opening moves, board control, and rack management—the strategic aspects of the game explored on CGP, over the board, and in cultish newsletters and how-to books. I’ve osmosed some of the basics, but I think it takes thousands and thousands of draws from the bag to appreciate the difference between moving tiles, which is what novice and intermediate players do, and playing a complete game of Scrabble, which is what the high experts do. It’s finger painting versus Picasso, and I’m just a finger painter.
Edley senses this, and doesn’t push a strategy lecture. Instead, we sit down at his kitchen table and, between installments of the Joe Edley Story, we talk about the fundamentals, and the metaphysics, of the game.
I open with a confession. “I feel overwhelmed by the words,” I say. “All the lists and sublists and potential lists. There’s just too much, so I don’t do much at all.”
Joe calmly reminds me that, in this matter, there is no choice. “You know what to do. Learn the words.”
It’s not overwhelming, he says. You can train your brain to do it, to anagram and retain learned words. “It’s a process of asking yourself questions, forcing your brain to ask yourself questions constantly and answer yourself constantly in a search,” Joe says. “Rather than just searching aimlessly. Forcing your brain to talk to yourself is one thing you’ll see in every top player.”
“Is it memory?” I ask. “Because I don’t think I have a good memory.”
“It’s not memory. You’re not remembering anything. You’re going in the direction you need to go in and you didn’t know which direction it was. All of a sudden some light or some image or some feeling says, ‘Go there,’ and that’s where you go. It’s like a lock. I don’t know what letter combinations to try anymore. I’ve looked at every combination. And then I ask for help. And then all of a sudden the door opens and I know what to try. It comes to me. Sometimes I’ll sit there, and I’ll say, 'Help me,’ and all of a sudden I’ll see a bingo. And I won’t know where it came from.’
The human-potential movement, with its ashrams and est and cultof-personality gurus and other Me Decade silliness, spawned a man for whom the meaning of life was Scrabble. Jane had channeled Seth, who told Joe to play a board game.
For the two years leading up to the 1980 Nationals, Edley told himself that he would win the tournament. He had no idea why or how; in fact, he barely had faced other top players in tournament competition. In the western qualifier for the event, Edley finished sixth; only five players from the region made the field of thirty-two, but Edley was invited as a wild card. “Fate,’ he says. “Fate was guiding me.’
Needing to train against the legendary New York players, Edley headed east. He set up a session at one of the games parlors against Ron Tiekert. Tiekert won the first six games. “I realized there’s something going on. It’s not just luck,’ Edley says. “There’s another level I have to learn. It was apparent as we were playing all these games and I was losing every one that I was all nerves and making lots of mistakes, helping me to lose. Finally, I put it all together in the seventh game. And I won it by controlling my breathing. That was the key. Understanding how to control my breath was nearly the last thing I needed to do.’
Edley had studied yoga and tai chi chuan, in which breathing is a component of discipline and concentration. But he hadn’t linked it to Scrabble. The idea was to control your breath: take a full breath. Push energy into the center of your head. Move feelings from your stomach to your head. Push air farther or faster to generate more heat when you need it the most.
> “I wound up leaving ecstatic,’ Edley says. “When I went home I knew I had learned what I needed to learn.’
Edley was virtually unknown among the experts at the Miramar-Sheraton Hotel in Santa Monica, California, where the 1980 Nationals were staged. The favorites were players like Tiekert, the king of the New York scene, and Lester Schonbrun, the former king of the New York scene, who was now living in Berkeley; there was David Prinz of San Francisco, who had won the first Nationals, and Jim Neuberger, a New York lawyer whose father founded a prominent Wall Street firm. Edley couldn’t sleep from nervousness: two hours the first night of the tournament, two the second. He lay awake in bed doing his deep-breathing exercises and learning his “last lesson,” the last component of the psychological matrix that would make him one with the board.
“I was repeating in my consciousness a phrase that would stay with me the rest of my Scrabble career,” he says. “Please guide me,” Edley would beseech a higher force. “You can do it.”
Edley repeated it over and over, hundreds of time. The effect, he tells me, was to take his ego out of the process. Edley wasn’t doing anything; something else had taken over. Regardless of what the reality was—because we create our own reality, no?—regardless of what others would say, Edley believed he was doing nothing. That something was guiding him to think the thoughts he was thinking, to make the plays he was making, to push himself. He went 6–1 on the first day of the three-day, seventeen-game tournament, good enough for second place. He was 7–3 at lunchtime on day two, physically exhausted from lack of sleep. He took a long shower and did more breathing exercises and kept up his mental mantra. Please guide me. You can do it.
Edley would play his last seven games against the top seven Scrabblers in the country. He won his last four that day, 11–3 and still in second to Jim Neuberger. He won Games 15 and 16, the latter when Prinz mistracked the score in the endgame and blew a sure win. He was one-half game behind Neuberger, who tied Tiekert in Game 16 when a win would have all but assured him the championship. In the decisive Game 17, Edley drew better tiles than Neuberger and won. “Night Watchman Is North American Champ,” the Scrabble Players Newspaper declared. For Edley, age thirty-two, the championship had justified his life during his twenties, his psychological apprenticeship to Seth and Jane and Eastern disciplines, his deliberately crafted New Age mind-control system. But it was also a colossal letdown.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 8