A few years later, Jim Geary, who had just begun playing, met Brian at a tournament in Phoenix. The two were discussing particular plays when Geary asked incredulously, “You know all the UN words? You know all the OUT words?”
“I know all the words,” Brian replied.
They went to Brian’s car, from which he removed a Ziploc bag of sample flash cards. Geary remembers seeing BLUEFISH and FUNGIBLE—common words. Brian had indeed recorded every bingo in alphabetical order, not just those unfamiliar to him.
“I thought I could become the best there was at this game, that was part of it,” he says. “And then everything would follow. I just had these crazy ideas of what the game could become.” Sponsors. Television. Big money. Brian imagined being a celebrity. Or at least imagined that telling people he was one of the best Scrabble players in the world would elicit more than a shrug and a mention of how much their grandmothers loved to play.
It wasn’t until the early 1990s, long after he had passed 2000 and peaked at 2122, one of the highest ratings of all time, that Brian felt he had the game nailed. He knew the dictionary, but he also understood the importance of strategic thinking—of word placement, tile turnover, rack management, and defense, how to vary the style of play at different junctures in a game, how to make good decisions. He rarely made mistakes. He won tournament after tournament, but never the big ones. Brian bombed out at the 1989 Nationals in New York, where he arrived as the top seed, and finished second at the 1991 Worlds in London and third at the 1992 Nationals in Atlanta.
Then he had had it. He couldn’t take the unfairness anymore. You play and you play and you play. And for what? No glory. Not much money. And even worse, from a Scrabble player’s perspective, no equity. “What’s the fucking point?” Brian thought. “You go to a tournament. You’re better than anybody else in the room. You should win, right? But you don’t always. It’s just tough to reconcile.”
At the peak of his game, Brian quit. He was tired of struggling to maintain his lofty rating by beating up on inferior players. When you cross over to the other side, to the place where the game is interesting because you and a few others do know all the words, anything else seems pointless.
“Unfortunately,” Brian wrote in a retirement announcement published in the short-lived Scrabble newsletter Medleys,
the main premise of tournament play is exploiting 1800 and 1900 players’ weaknesses. 2050 players are lucky to face one another in one fifth of the rounds in any given tournament. The vast majority of the time they are playing opponents against whom they have very little to gain and a lot to lose. There is little satisfaction in beating someone whom one should beat regularly. Winning is expected. Period.
Given this environment, one must play phonies, use baiting tactics, and find other ways to steal games that are seemingly out of reach. I find this part of the game unenjoyable. Against 2050 players, such games are sure losses. Against 1800 and 1900 players, such games can be wins, and hollow ones at that. How much fun is it to exploit their weaknesses? “Only I know this word doesn’t take an S.” Or, “Watch me steal this game.”
I’m sorry, but that’s not what the game should be about, and as long as that element is a big part of the game, I don’t want to be a part of it. Life is too short to keep trying to win 85 percent of the time against 1800 and 1900 players. Few would ever admit to this, but take it from me, it’s definitely true. Is it really a sin to put in the work and then desire to play opponents who also put in the work?
Brian was suffering from a problem few have the chance to experience: He was too good, and consequently bored. He wasn’t in Scrabble, like some 1900-plus players, for the social scene. It wasn’t a hobby. It was a challenge, and he couldn’t stand not being challenged. He’d rather not play at all. So he finished school at Arizona State with a degree in finance, found a job as a night clerk with a trading firm in Chicago, and began moving up until he was trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
But like Michael Jordan shagging flies or Sugar Ray Leonard doing color commentary, Brian found that being merely adequate at something else—like golf, in which he shoots in the eighties—isn’t enough. The best usually can’t stay away. He decided to return—but only for the majors. He played the Waltham premier event in 1995. Then Hasbro announced that it was holding the Superstars Showdown in Las Vegas with a $50,000 first prize. “Now we’re talking,” Brian remembers thinking. “I just got this job that doesn’t pay much. What else am I going to do? Here’s a chance to get out of this little shoebox I’m living in.”
He studied for months, played Reno, finishing fourth, then started out 8–6 in Vegas, and wondered, “Why did I come back and start playing this fucking game again? This is so stupid. I’m eight and six and don’t have a prayer. Somehow I won nine out of my last ten games and finished second and won twenty thousand bucks. It was so bizarre.”
But rewarding again. Brian was maturing, so he got over the fact that the rest of the world would never appreciate his talents, and he accepted that competitive Scrabble would never be a blockbuster sport, and even that he sometimes had to face inferior players. He still didn’t win a Nationals or a Worlds, but he knew it was inevitable.
Through day four (BE TRUE TO YOUR WORD), I have played a woman confined to a wheelchair, a heavy-breathing fat guy wearing a T-shirt that says PAY ME, an older woman who complained after every draw in a sixty-grit sandpaper voice that could raise the dead, a woman who complained even more and smelled like an ashtray and tried to quit before my 200-point win was done, and a prim, middle-aged woman who played CUNT for 37 points. (It’s a fact of Scrabble that the novice and intermediate ranks are heavy, literally and figuratively, with middle-aged women; twenty-five of my thirty-one opponents will be of the opposite sex, maybe one under age thirty.) My record is 14–14. But my spread—the difference between the points I score and those my opponents score—is +510. That indicates two things. I’ve won a few blowouts and lost a lot of close games. Indeed, eleven of my fourteen losses have been decided by fewer than 70 points. Less than the typical bingo.
None of my opponents dazzles me. The oddest play I see is RADDLING, meaning “to weave together”; I challenge it. But I know too that lack of confidence in the words is devastating; I miss several “common” Scrabble words other than ETESIAN, like XYSTI, important because it starts with X and there aren’t many of those, and JINN, a supernatural being in Muslim mythology, which I should know because it evolves from JIN. (As do DJIN, DJINS, DJINNI, DJINNY, JINNI, and JINNEE, I later learn.)
It’s clear I haven’t absorbed Edley’s lessons, and I realize that knowing more words compensates for a lot of other games-playing deficiencies, particularly at this level. I’m not Brian, with a gifted memory and a powerful Scrabble work ethic and whatever missing piece makes a fifteen-year-old kid memorize words a couple of hours a day while listening to classic rock radio. I’m not naturally attracted to the unfathomable possibilities of word formation or preternaturally skilled at finding words in strings of letters. I’m not especially intrigued by the history of language or the mathematical ramifications of the game. I’m discovering, though, that I do like the rational mindset required to assimilate the huge amounts of random information presented. And that I love to play. I love the adrenaline rush of competition, even if some little old lady is sitting across the table. I like the Christmas-morning sensation of not knowing what comes next: that the next rack might be the one in which some harmonic convergence produces ZYzzYVA, or, as in one of Matt Graham’s dream plays, AVGOLEMONO manifests itself through an opening play of GOLEM.
In Scrabble, the thrill of victory is restrained. It’s an intellectual game, after all. Brian doesn’t spike a tile on the board or taunt his latest victim. Even after a championship game in a big tournament, the two contestants will linger over the board in analysis, as if the exercise is more important than the outcome. But don’t be mistaken: Everyone hates losing. Brian overcomes that by doing everything to ensure h
e wins. He knows he has worked hard enough to develop the tools that will allow him to do so; plus, he doesn’t worry about it. It just happens, because the plays are intuitive, almost automatic. Brian had told me with a shrug about a game he won by calculating the odds of drawing an N out of the bag in the endgame. He had AAGIINS on his rack, and saw that if he could play off one of the I’s and draw an N he could win. “I was fishing for the last N for ANGINAS,” he says. “It was a twelve to one shot.”
The one-on-one challenge doesn’t seem to be some endorphin release for Brian. For me, it’s all about nervous energy, the caveman thrill of killing the beast and eating it for dinner. But if I want to experience that feeling more frequently—if I want to win, to have a high rating, to be an expert—something has to change. I have to listen to Edley—that winning is secondary to making every play. But I also have to emulate Brian. With his “who wouldn’t have seen that play?” bemusement, Brian supplies a distinct lesson: To win, you need the ability to win. You have to develop your mind to the point at which seeing the plays, considering the best options over the board, becomes possible.
Right now, it’s all I can do to play within the twenty-five-minute time allotment. Probabilities, though their importance has been explained to me, remain a mystery. Tracking tiles accurately and with purpose is beyond me. And I only rarely record my racks for later review. As with the words, I feel overwhelmed by the process of playing. The more I watch the pros, the more complicated the game feels.
The day after we talk, Brian wins all seven games to run his record to 24–4. He is four games ahead of his nearest challenger with just three games left to play. Brian has clinched his first national championship.
“So here’s the winning board,” Jim Geary says. “Kind of pedestrian. But he’ll take it.” On the board are DYNEL, DELFT, ELUATES, JUBA, KELPY, and ANORETIC. All new to me.
“It is kind of pedestrian,” Brian admits.
Marlon comes over. “‘Chicago’s Own,’ that should be the headline,” he says by way of congratulations.
“OWN is the anagram of WON,” says Mike Baron, Brian’s biggest booster. “‘Chicago’s Own Won.’”
“Now,” the champion says.
They all high-five and laugh. Almost no one begrudges Brian his victory. His prodigious talent, his years of hard work, his unflagging sportsmanship—all of it is universally respected. And his inoffensive personality makes respecting him easy. Brian may not be exactly likable, but he certainly isn’t unlikable. In fact, he may be the exception to a rule articulated by John Williams, half in defense, I think, of his constituents. “Scratch the surface of any champion in any individual sport,” John said, “and you’re often going to find an obsessed misfit who’s deficient in many parts of his life because he devotes eight hours a day to it.” Brian isn’t the only nice guy with a steady job and a reasonable grasp on reality among the elite players, but he is by far the best of the nice.
“I dreamed he’d win the tournament,” Richie Lund says. “That’s awesome.”
“Way to go, kid,” G.I. Joel offers. “It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate person.”
Brian wins two of the three meaningless games the next morning (day five: YOUR WORDS AGAINST MINE) to finish with a record of 26–5. For the tournament, he averages 433 points per game against 358 for his opponents, with a high game of 590. (By comparison, I average 360 points per game, a full bingo less, against 354 for my opponents, with a high game of 490.) Brian’s rating will climb to a mind-blowing 2109, by far the best in the game, and more impressive because of substantial ratings deflation in recent years. When John Williams introduces the new champion, he says, “It certainly has been a long time coming.”
In the back of the ballroom, sitting on the floor with his duffel bags and two bottles of Afrin, Matt Graham pretends to be interviewed. “Thank you for allowing me to come here and have the shittiest week ever in Scrabble,” he says.
Matt, Marlon, and I all finish with records of 15–16. Marlon blames a woman on the Scrabble scene with whom he had become infatuated. “When you’re Samson and you get your hair cut off you get distracted,” he says. “The only thing that can distract me is pussy.” But Samson also blames himself. “I screwed up at nine and four. I thought my opponent had six tiles on his rack but had seven and bingoed out with REInVITE through a V. You miss a bus, it change your life. REINVITE. Fuck. Reinvite me to Chicago.” Marlon had counted on winning a few thousand dollars. “I got to get a job next week,” he says. “Next week.”
With a nervous smile on his face, a red-faced Brian bounces to the podium to a standing ovation from his peers and collects the photoop-ready giant check signed by Alfred Butts. “I just don’t know what to say. I can’t describe what it means,” Brian tells the crowd of players in his awkward, aw-shucks way. “It’s really something. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Another electrifying personality,” Matt Graham cracks, “wins the National Scrabble Championship.”
Maybe not electrifying, but for a moment profound. I watch Brian talk to a television interviewer. “There’s always more to learn about this game,” he says. “Always more to know. If only we had a little more time to solve the nuances.”
7. Alfred
THERE COMES A TIME in any obsession when you have to learn more. It doesn’t much matter whether the object of an obsession is a person, a sports car, a football team, or a board game. You just do. You need to see the shrinking world into which you are being sucked as a fully formed whole. Before I throw myself deeper into the abyss that Scrabble appears to be, hijacking my nights, weekends, and idle thoughts—I’ve started dreaming about the game—I need to understand where it came from, and how it became an institution unlike any other in the two-hundred-year history of the American toy industry. To do that, I need to answer one question: Who was Alfred Butts?
In lore, Butts is the unemployed architect who invented Scrabble as a none-too-bright get-rich-quick scheme during the Depression. I don’t know how embellished the myth is, but I need more than facts. I want to know if Butts sensed he was inventing the most sophisticated board game of modern times, a worthy companion to chess and backgammon, which had centuries-old pedigrees. I want to know if he consulted dictionaries, if he marveled at the geometric forms of juxtaposed letters, if he loved words.
I want to know, in short, if he was one of us.
The two-story white colonial on Cold Spring Road in the rural hamlet of Stanfordville, New York, population three thousand, has changed little since Alfred Butts bought it in 1954 with royalties from his overnight game sensation. Yellowing floral wallpaper, creaky metal kitchen cabinets, dim-bulbed lamps—all seems untouched from when Butts bought the old house. Built in 1811 by his great-great-grandfather, but out of the family for decades, it would be a summer-and-weekend place; Butts and his wife, Nina, were ensconced in Jackson Heights, a middle-class neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. They had lived there for twenty years, and the steady, handsome income from Scrabble wasn’t going to change the lives of the quiet, modest couple. If there was to be an extravagance in Butts’s life, this would be it: the rolling grassland up Shelley Hill Road, the drafty windows, the alcove study for Alfred’s books.
After Alfred died almost forty years later, his nephew, Robert Butts, a reserved, sandy-haired, owl-eyed lawyer who helped an aging Alfred manage his affairs, bought the Stanfordville house. With it came his great uncle’s furniture and some of his possessions. Among them are what I dub the Scrabble Archives. Visiting the Archives, which I first do on a glorious early summer’s day, becomes a personal hadj: Mecca, the Louvre, and Cooperstown rolled into one. I imagine the place as a shrine with framed boards decorating the walls, old tiles in spotlit display cases like Egyptian antiquities, an original set of rules under glass like the Declaration of Independence.
Bob Butts, though, doesn’t display any memorabilia. Even a handful of documents framed by the National Scrabble Association for
a recent celebration—a 1933 rejection letter from Milton Bradley; a bill for $40 from the Dover Inlay Manufacturing Company (“Marqueterie of Distinction”) for cutting one hundred sets of wooden tiles; the scorecard from a 1956 game in which Nina scored 284 points by playing QUIXOTIC across two triple-word scores—remain wrapped in brown paper and sealed with masking tape. Bob doesn’t play Scrabble very often. The game, it turns out, isn’t much more than a family curiosity for him.
Bob extracts three boxes of artifacts. “This is the stuff,” he tells me. One contains the framed items; another holds original boards, tiles, and blueprints; the third contains Alfred’s personal papers. A presidential library it isn’t, but for me this discovery is more than historical research. It’s like being allowed to touch Edison’s first drawings of the lightbulb or Frank Lloyd Wright’s sketches for Fallingwater. So when I see the bankers’ boxes piled on a sideboard, it seems a little sad: Alfred Butts created an enduring piece of American popular culture, and here it is reduced to a few boxes in an aging house in the country.
But it also seems to fit. Bob describes his great-uncle as humble and self-effacing, a thin gentleman no more than five feet six who was proud of his invention but never boastful, a regular guy who happened upon something that wound up amusing the millions. Alfred himself displayed but one plaque commemorating his invention, and he talked about Scrabble only when asked. When the game attracted a cultish following and adherents began deconstructing the language to play it better, Alfred more than anything was bemused. “He never envisioned it,” Bob tells me. “He thought he was inventing a game people would play around a card table, like bridge or something like that. He didn’t quite get the point of memorizing word lists.”
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 11