“I felt I hadn’t done anything. I felt it was fated to happen for two years prior. I was just doing whatever the universe told me to do.”
As we talk, Joe suggests setting up a board and playing a consultation game. I make a move, and Joe critiques it, recommending better moves, ones that he might have made based on his superior word knowledge, but also ones within the confines of my limited Scrabble vocabulary. The plays are fairly pedestrian—three- and four-letter dumps to “clean up a rack” while preserving potential bingo tiles. Joe is steering me toward understanding which letter combinations are better than others, and how to maintain them without sacrificing points.
Then, with the G on the board, and the letters BDIONRS on my rack, I shuffle and shuffle and shuffle. I look for words ending in ING. I look for words ending in S. Then I see BIRD. I lay down BIRDSONG. “No, but close. Try it again.”
Whoops. SONGBIRD. (Actually, BIRDSONG had just been added to the OSPD. Edley had simply forgotten.)
What I just did, Edley says, is what I should remember.
“There’s always something more going on in your head or on the board,” he says. “It’s just that the act of finding a word in a jumble of letters, that act is fun. That’s the essential act of Scrabble. You don’t need probabilities, you don’t need to win, you don’t need to care about anything else other than finding plays. It doesn’t matter. It’s just finding the plays.”
Winning becomes a byproduct, I conclude on my own. Find the right play, and the winning follows. I think of Michael Milken, the junk bond Pied Piper, whom I covered as a reporter. Milken liked to say that money is a byproduct. Make the right deal, and the money will follow. Edley, I decide, is more Mike Milken than Darth Vader: tireless, single-minded, preachy, pensive, persuasive, unflappable, intellectually abstract, a bit of a charlatan.
“In chess,” Edley continues, “you have standard positions that appear over and over and over again. In Scrabble, the only position you see over and over again is the opening. The second position is always different. The thinking is different, too. In chess, you’re always looking for the theoretically best play. You can do that by looking ahead and seeing possibilities. In Scrabble, you never really know what the best play is. You can come close, but you’re never really sure. It’s hard to tell.”
Joe is describing one of the core facts about Scrabble: It is a game of imperfect information. Chess is a game of perfect information. Both players have access to all of the information about the game. All of the pieces are on the board. Both players can conduct the same evaluation. In Scrabble, not only are your opponents’ pieces—the tiles—hidden, but there is an unseen pool of pieces yet to be drawn—the bag. That randomness means there is an element of luck, and when luck plays a role, even the better player sometimes will lose.
“You play so many games,” Joe says, “that you have to be prepared to lose and overcome your own negative thinking. Negative thinking has a much bigger impact than in chess. Because you can win in Scrabble when you’re way down. That’s not true in chess. If you’re a championship player, if you get a pawn or two pawns down, the game’s virtually over.
“That’s one of the beauties of [Scrabble]. Your negative thinking, if you get down—or even if you’re up and your opponent has a bingo or a blank and you could be in trouble—has a much bigger impact. The very best players are the ones that are the most optimistic.”
I’m not very optimistic over the board, I tell Joe. I worry about dangers ahead. About missing bingos. About the poor tiles I have in front of me. About my opponent’s plays.
“You should never whine,” Edley reminds me. “Take responsibility for your wins and losses. For your letters, even.”
“Your letters?” I say. “Letters are pure chance.”
“How do we know? How do we know that?” Edley mimes reaching into the bag and whispers that he will pick the blank. “How do we know that’s not going to happen? We don’t. That’s the answer. How did Matt draw so well to win thirteen games in a row [at the 1997 Worlds]? I don’t think it was just luck. I think there was something else going on.”
“What else could be going on?” I say.
“I don’t know. I don’t know the inner workings of Matt. But I know there was something going on. Why did I have the feeling I was going to win in 1980 and have an incredible number of miracles to happen that allowed me to win?”
“Chance isn’t a good enough explanation?”
“No, it’s not. Not for me. I don’t know what it is. If I could bottle it, I could win every tournament.”
Edley spent some of his $5,000 winnings from the 1980 Nationals on seminars in neurolinguistic programming, another human-potential movement developed in California in the 1970s, this one designed to help individuals change their behavior by changing their language, movements, and thoughts. (Edley chose it over psychic healing.) For two years, he studied NLP, ran seminars, and “trained” clients he found by placing ads in counterculture newspapers. But Edley became dissatisfied. “I wasn’t altruistic enough to deal with people who didn’t really want to change. I realized I wanted to help people in the game world, through games. Promoting my own ideas about manifesting your own reality through Scrabble—that became my next goal.”
How, exactly, wasn’t yet clear. In 1983, just as he was deciding to get out of the field, the Nationals were held in Chicago. Edley was just coming off of a two-month fruit-only diet that sent his weight plummeting to 120 pounds (Edley is five feet ten) from an already scrawny 142. His speech was slow or stuttering, and he had difficulty coordinating his movements. At the same time, Edley was adopting the breathing technique qi gong, taught to him by a wrinkly, octogenarian Chinese master in San Francisco. And he was exhausted from teaching one of his last NLP seminars. He told himself that second or third place would be fine—not exactly the positive manifestation of success as in 1980.
With an 8–2 record and in a virtual first-place tie with Joel Wapnick, a music professor from Montreal, Edley was practicing his new breathing when the left side of his body went numb. “I’m not in control anymore because I’m fearful. I threw three games away because I was scared.” Still, Edley managed to win enough to force a deciding finale against Wapnick. But he lost, and finished third overall, just as he had prophesied. “Because of my physical problem, I couldn’t manifest what I needed to manifest,” he says.
Edley next manifested himself on a six-month cross-country Scrabble and backgammon odyssey, staying with friends, playing in eleven Scrabble tournaments (four firsts, four seconds), and netting $500. When he returned to San Francisco, he had one last piece of personal growth to attend to: living outdoors. Edley stashed his belongings at the apartment of an old girlfriend, donned an army jacket, slept under a bush outside the arboretum in Golden Gate Park, and showered at a park near Fisherman’s Wharf. At age thirty-seven. “I wanted to feel comfortable being a citizen of the world.”
After five months, Edley decided to live indoors again. And he hatched a plan: He would start a Scrabble newsletter. About two hundred players subscribed to Edley’s twelve-page type- and handwritten Tile Rack, which contained game boards, anagrams, and other puzzles. At the same time, he worked as a bicycle messenger on the steep hills of San Francisco and drove an airport shuttle bus. And he was hired by the Scrabble association’s new public-relations man, John Williams, to proofread the SPN. He helped organize an alternate Nationals in Las Vegas in 1987, held when Coleco, which then owned the game, backed out of its sponsorship amid financial problems. In February 1988, a decade after deciding to memorize the OSPD and win the national championship, Edley finished manifesting his reality: Williams hired him as the Scrabble Association’s inhouse expert.
By the time I met Joe Edley, he had, by all accounts, mellowed. He won his second Nationals in 1992 and a year later married Laura, a social worker whom he had met before leaving San Francisco for Long Island, where the Scrabble Association was based. (“I manifested Laura in my life,�
� Edley says. “After having studied NLP and gone through the Scrabble thing, I realized I could do the same thing with a woman. So I visualized who I wanted in my life.” Good with people, intellectual, sexy, and “charmingly ditzy, Lucy Ricardo. I constantly visualized that. When I met Laura I recognized she had all those parts.”)
Still, the mere mention of Edley’s name sends some Scrabble players into apoplexy. Matt Graham launches into unprompted diatribes about Edley’s behavior as if they were part of a giant morality play. At almost every tournament I attend, some expert gripes, whether about Edley’s table manners or his dual role as player and NSA official or his alleged favoritism in controlling the content of Scrabble News. There was the time Edley supposedly dissed the perennial star Brian Cappelletto in the pages of the newsletter, calling him “a little rusty” after a year off. There was the perceived slight when Edley wrote that Jan Dixon “played the best Scrabble of her career to finish fourth” in the big Superstars tournament in Las Vegas. There was the accusation (denied) that Edley deleted all references to Cappelletto and Charles Goldstein, who had vilified Edley for years, from a story about that event in the Scrabble newsletter.
All of those allegations—and more—are contained in “The Trial,” a twelve-chapter, ten-thousand-word screed posted to CGP in 1996 by Edley’s onetime friend Mike Baron. Written as a mock trial, with “J” the defendant and “M” the plaintiff, it’s a chronicle of slights, aspersions, grievances, and misunderstandings. Baron rehashes his falling-out with Edley, which stemmed from his having accused Edley of acting out of “self-interest” regarding the structure of the Worlds. He recalls how Edley took a year and a half to review The Wordbook in Scrabble News. He reprises snide remarks that Edley is alleged to have made to players and reprints a flaming e-mail by Edley questioning Baron’s business ethics. He revives complaints that the Scrabble Association—which offered him Edley’s job first—neither acknowledged nor compensated him for appropriating many of his word lists.
Baron had long felt his contributions to Scrabble had been slighted, and clearly his play in twelve acts had as much to do with him as with Joe. But still:
Lawyer for the People: It’s July 30, 1988, 3 P.M. Where are you J?
J: I don’t know, New York?
LP: No, basking poolside at the Sands Regent [Baron changed the names of some companies, places, and people] in Reno at the 1988 Nationals, just six months after assuming the throne...
Lawyer for J: Objection!
Judge: Sustained.
LP:...after assuming your current position. The 1988 Nationals. Memory returning?
J: Yeah.
LP: And what are you doing poolside?
J: Sunbathing?
LP: Yeah. But just before that, you saw there was a shipment of many boxes of books, all addressed to M c/o the Sands Regent sales office. M was very much looking forward to not only unveiling his seven-years-in-the-making project, but eyeing the very first copy from the manufacturers, a finished product he had yet to see. But there you were, poolside, having ripped open the first box yourself, having taken the first copy, and begun reading The Wordbook. Did you *really* have the chutzpah to do such a thing?
J: Yes, but...
LP: Eh, eh, eh. Did you or did you not do this?
J: I did.
LP: First to read the book and last to review it, when, a year and a half later, it finally makes the News. Can you anagram AEIPSSV AEEGGIRSSV? I have no further questions at this time....
LP: Can you imagine: The final game of the WSC, you’re paired against, oh, say, hmm, Brian Cappelletto. Let’s see, oh, here it is. You said “Brian knows I love him” (8/4/96, CGP). Okay, so you’re down 423–322, you’ve gotten seven power tiles, and you stick Brian with the Q, while bingoing out with rETAiNS, with both blanks, scoring 82 points, catch 20 for his Q, and win 424–423. You’re the “World Champion!” Headlines read (goes to a blackboard, takes chalk in hand, and loudly pounds out with big block letters) “J WINS!” But, you know, there’s one little peculiarity. It really reads (he inserts four large loud periods) “J W.I.N.S.!” And everyone saying this comes to know it stands for “J Who Is Never Sorry!”
LJ: Objection! Objection!
Judge: Sustained. Mr. LP, let this serve as a warning. No further outbursts and remain on point.
LP: I am sorry your honor.... I do have two small questions left for the witness.
Ju: Proceed.
LP: Earlier, J, did you get the anagram for AEIPSSV AEEGGIRSSV?
J: Passive aggressive.
LP: And what is the anagram of IM ORRSY?
J: I’M YORRS.
LP: Try again.
J: I’M RROSY.
LP: I have no further questions, your honor.
Edley barely blanched. He didn’t hire a lawyer. He didn’t bitch to John Williams. He defended himself in a few relatively short, occasionally sarcastic, responses. “I couldn’t have made a better case against Mike if I tried,” he wrote on CGP. “He could probably get Mother Teresa hung for murder with his technique: ‘You mean all those people died while in your care? Very suspicious!’ Quote out of context, then slant to perfection. That’s the recipe.” And then he let it go. He just decided he and Baron couldn’t be friends. Four years later, Baron was still making awkward attempts at reconciliation, which Edley ignored.
To Edley, “The Trial” was just one more example of how his behavior is misunderstood. But his response makes me wonder: Is he so self-aware that it truly didn’t bother him or so un-self-aware that he couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize the behavior that prompted such bile?
Either way, the reality that Edley has manifested is one that sometimes makes him appear—over a Scrabble board or in a tournament room or at dinner—oblivious to others. But then Edley can be oblivious. He sits in his tiny office at the NSA on the hottest days and doesn’t open a window. He brushes off interlopers after a lousy day’s Scrabble. He explains away poor performances in ways that make other players smirk. (“I don’t have my energy back. It’s not coming up. It’s blocked down here,” he tells me at one tournament, pointing to his stomach. At another, he says, “I think it was just a lapse in endorphins. It was a loss of focus. And I was breathing.”)
But don’t misunderstand, Edley will say, it’s not arrogance and it’s not personal. It’s just who I am, how I prepare, how I focus, why I win. Noblesse oblige is beside the point.
“It has nothing to do with the other person,” he says. “I’m engaging with myself. It’s a battle, trying to manifest my best. Off the Scrabble board, I want to help everybody give their best. I recognize that my competitive self is not my social self.”
Edley does have friends in Scrabble, people who understand that disconnect; he’s not universally hated. “It’s the life well examined that Joe is living,” says expert Jerry Lerman, who’s known Edley since they were teenagers in Detroit and was best man at his wedding to Laura. “But it’s internal, not external. He hasn’t necessarily become a master of dealing with others. But it doesn’t cast him in the villain’s role that others have put him in.”
I see beyond the disconnect. I admire his ability to detach when he plays and the passion he brings to teaching the game. That’s why I turn to Edley.
As I’m preparing to drive home to Brooklyn, Edley asks when I’m next playing in a tournament. I hem and haw. I tell him how I’ve played in four tournaments in seven weeks and feel as if all my performances were mediocre. The 8–7 on Long Island, then 5–7 at Waltham, 11–4 in the Catskills in the weak field, and 4–5 on Long Island. A 27–24 record. I don’t tell him this, but I’m beginning to feel burned out. The game is too stressful, the prospect of improving too daunting. There’s a seven-game tournament the following Saturday on Long Island, but I roll out a list of excuses not to play—it’s a holiday weekend, there will be a lot of traffic, the weather’s too nice.
Edley cuts me off. “If you were really dedicated,” he says, “you’d be playing.”
; At 8:15 A.M. the following Saturday, a glorious one at that, I’m in my battered red Volkswagen Jetta, groggy after staying out until 1:30 that morning—un-Edleylike behavior—but breathing deeply and ready to play.
“I’m going to run the table. Seven and oh,” I say aloud while driving. “Make the best play. Winning is a byproduct.” Make the best play. Winning is a byproduct. Make the best play. Winning is a byproduct. Make the best play...
That would be my mantra. Asking some higher force for help, Edley-style, wouldn’t seem genuine; I tend to place greater faith in mo—as in momentum—than om. I’m not yet ready to surrender responsibility for my play to a higher being.
It’s a big crowd this Saturday, sixty-four players in the windowless basement conference room at the Comfort Inn. The tournament director shouts her usual Pollyannaish “Bingos to all!”—a Scrabble equivalent of “Gentlemen, start your engines.” I think, Screw that, bingos to me —and we’re drawing tiles. I concentrate on breathing. I try to focus. The first two games, against the sixth and eighth seeds in our group of eight (I’m seventh) are cakewalks. The first is particularly gratifying, an autopilot game against the guy who wouldn’t stop complaining about his tiles in Danbury, marred only by my insistence on trying two phony bingos. The tile gods are kind in the following game; I jump out to a 142–32 lead when I start with MARINATE and RELINED, and cinch it by playing HOGTIES a few moves later.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 9