SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Dec.18, 1995
Seemingly civilized and cerebral, championship Scrabble
is actually a CUTTHROAT world where GUTS, GUILE, and
GAMESMANSHIP are PUSHED TO THE LIMIT
By S. L. Price
A man and a woman spend enough time together, this day is going to come. The way Jim Geary figured it, they'd had enough meals, seen enough movies, chitchatted enough already, so why wait any longer? Isn't he the game's newest star? Didn't he bust into the elite faster than just about anyone, ever? Doesn't he have that necessary drive, the tools, those empty killer eyes? Yes, he's as cocky as an unbroken colt; lose to Geary and you might well hear him chuckle as he celebrates the power of "the Jimster." Someday, he likes to announce, everyone will point and say, "There goes the best who ever lived." Shouldn't she know too? So here it is, the moment of truth. Just the two of them, at her place. Jim Geary turns to his girl and blurts it out: [italicized] I'm a world-class Scrabble player. There's a shadow, one flicker, of incomprehension -- and then she smiles and takes his hand. She understands! "I have a hobby, too," she says. She pulls him into the bedroom, reaches down. "I do _this_ for fun," she says and he can't believe what he sees; it's a kind of horror. In her hands she hold a lacy, white, formfitting... doily. One man stands at the blackjack table in the baccarat pit at Bally's in Las Vegas. He has been here all night, but this being the gut of a Vegas casino, there is, of course, no telling that it is now Wednesday or morning or August or someplace in the swelling bustle of the latest American boomtown. Out where the slot machines pop and whistle, the suckers are just now filling the place with a growing wave of touristy blather, but Chris Cree hears nothing. He is exhausted. He is cursing with glee. Three separate hands lay on the green before him, at $5,000 per. Behind that stands a mountain of chips. "Just 40 minutes ago, I had him down $15,000," mumbles Eric the dealer. Two large men without necks, casino boys, loom behind Eric. They don't look happy. "Then he went on a break... and I don't know what happened. Now he's up $150,000." Cree keeps winning. He's on that lifetime roll, insulting Eric the dealer, doing no wrong... but now someone starts tugging, gently, at his sleeve. A friend is telling him: The Scrabble tournament is about to begin. You're late. You've got to come upstairs now. Cree's eyes don't register. Eric the dealer looks up from the cards. "Is that a sport?" he says. Scrabble? Not hardly, not in the strictest sense: When you consider that its most demanding physical task is the lifting of a lightweight pouch to eyebrow level, that the verb best describing the vital act of pulling small lettered tiles from said pouch is _rummaging_ -- no, this crossword board game isn't a sport. Then again, in a universe that recognizes synchronized swimming, bodybuilding, rhythmic gymnastics, dog racing, Ping-Pong, biathlon and Don King boxing bouts as legitimate sporting enterprises, maybe we shouldn't be so choosy. Some 30 million people in the U.S. and Canada dabble in Scrabble; and while for many the game lies fallow under Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit until holidays force families to do something wholesome together, the Scrabble player who toils at the game's highest level is an entirely different animal -- brilliant, obsessive, cutthroat competitive. And never more than now. Since its invention by architect Alfred Butts in 1931, Scrabble has played poor cousin to chess and bridge, held dear mostly by crossword freaks and nickel-a-point hustlers in grimy game rooms like New York City's Flea House. No one made a living at it; Scrabble's world-championship event, now worth $11,000 to the winner, wasn't even held until 1991. But since the Milton Bradley Company took over the game in 1989 -- and began pumping cash into tournaments -- Scrabble's hard core has solidified into 10,000 registered players across North America, the better ones gathering in 110 regional tournaments, the best gunning for the $15,000 first prize at the biennial national championship. And you'll find none of the old-line Scrabble corps complaining. "I love money," says 60-year-old Lester Schonbrun, one of the original Flea House hustlers and an unrepentant disciple of Karl Marx. "Most Communists do. You can't escape the smoke that's all around you, even as a Communist." Here in Vegas the air is thick with smoke and money and the shock of the new: An unprecedented $50,000 first prize goes to the winner of the first-ever four-day, 54-player, 24-match $100,000 Scrabble Superstars Showdown. There has never been anything like it. The Showdown, which begins as a round-robin competition whose results determine the later-round matchups, is simply the richest and most stellar tournament in history. With even its $20,000 _second_ prize dwarfing the top prize for a U.S. or world championship, it has lured two world champions, seven U.S. champs and four other legendary talents -- Brian Cappelletto, Charles Goldstein, Richie Lund and Peter Morris -- out of retirement. There is a reason. That kind of money can change everything. That kind of money allows one to quit a job, change a life, become the first-ever Scrabble _professional_... _"I cain't be-leeve it!"_ Cree's Texas screech cracks the calm of the baccarat pit. He is standing at the cashier's window, holding his check. "I won $177,500!" Cree owns and runs a business selling forklifts wholesale in Dallas. Now 41, he has been one of the nation's top Scrabble players for years. But upstairs at the Showdown he hasn't played well the last couple of days; he has no shot at the $50,000. None of his blackjack luck travels. Pried loose from his cards, he arrives late for the first Scrabble match of the day and loses. At lunch he races to the baccarat pit and wins another $62,000. Then he comes back to the Scrabble board and loses more. At week's end Cree leaves with more than $250,000 in his pocket, five times what the winning Scrabble player takes home. But when asked the obvious question -- would he rather win at Scrabble or win a quarter of a million dollars gambling? -- he doesn't hesitate. "Tournament," he says. "Glory. Glory. Glory. I want that glory." G. I. Joel suffers. You cannot miss this. He twitches, his eyes bulge, he burps, he reaches for the bottle of Mylanta beneath his chair. There is not a hint of cool about Joel Sherman, no stoic hero act here. He will detail, blank-faced, his various maladies -- allergies, asthma, hyperthyroidism -- but all that is mere warmup for the real fiend: his enemy, his stomach. It is such a constant topic that fellow players slapped him with the nickname Gastro-Intestinal. G. I. Joel. Five years ago Sherman, now 33, toiled as a bank teller, but stress turned his gut into a boiling pool; he hasn't worked since. He plays the piano and would love to sing on stage. It's impossible. "My sinuses tend to drain when I sing," Sherman says. "So I'll sing one song, and then I have to blow my nose." But Joel Sherman does one thing in this world better than all but about a dozen people. He can, like every one of the Scrabble masters arrayed at 27 tables in the casino ballroom this morning, glance at the name Las Vegas and instantly scramble its letters into "salvages," transmute "drainage" into "gardenia" and in the interest of put-upon writers everywhere, take "editors" and recast it as "steroid." He can tolerate spending four hours a day memorizing word lists, thumbing through _The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary_. He can land triple-triples -- an extraordinary play, hitting two triple-word squares and piling up enormous numbers of points in a single move -- so quickly it leaves his adversaries gasping, he can see extensions (turning a word like "city" into "electricity") more creatively than anyone alive. He can reach into the bag and pull out a seven-tile combination like E,I,I,N,R,S and a blank (which can be used as any letter), and instantly know he has hit the jackpot: There are 11 different bingos (plays burning all seven tiles and earning a 50-point bonus) that you can build out of that combo. "Ironies" is only the most obvious. A Scrabble tournament is the quietest sporting event this side of chess, with just the furious rattle of tiles, the scratch of pencils, the occasional "Challenge" rising softly into the air. It is a game demanding instant recall of some 100,000 obscure, common, gorgeous or ridiculous words -- 130,000 when, during the world championships, the British list is included -- which explains why the executive director of the National Scrabble Association, John D. Williams Jr. is only half joking when he says he fully expects someone's head to explode during a tournament someday. Though there are many fine female players -- Rita Norr, in fact, won the nationals in 1987 -- a consistent and crushing majority of the Top 20 are men. No one can say why. Scrabble makes winners of those who can compartmentalize their thinking while shutting out panic and worldly worry, which may be why it attracts its share of one-track geniuses who can barely hold a conversation. "Talking to him is like talking to a Martian," one intermediate player says of an expert. "But get him in front of a Scrabble board... then they _all_ come alive. Then they become giants." (Third page of text surrounds three photos. Left: David Boys faces Joel Sherman in WSC final match, top right: Joel Sherman reads word list in bathroom of hotel room, lower right: Mark Nyman. Because of the position of Boys' and Nyman's hands, the caption reads: "At the Worlds, David Boys and Nyman (bottom) prayed, while Sherman, er, prepped.) G. I. Joel is perhaps the most intense member of that subculture of Scrabble fiends who study, obsess and talk the game, play daily, argue strategy over the Internet -- and shrug as the rest of their lives wither. Top players include lawyers, stockbrokers, teachers; but that's only because they have no choice. If he could, "I'd give up _my_ job, says England's Mark Nyman, the '93 world champion who at 29, would seem to have a dream career as a TV producer. "I'd just travel around the world looking at the dictionary." Sherman doesn't even bother with pretense. He lives off an inheritance, so he's free to serve as archetype for those Scrabble grinds whose bright-eyed absorption is all-consuming -- people like Bob Lipton, who memorized words 12 hours a day for months to prepare for November's world championship; or Robert Felt, who was so occupied with bemoaning his Scrabble luck that he never noticed when the car in which he was riding was rear-ended by a bus; or Alan Frank, who once kicked a woman he had played against in the stomach. In 1980 John Turner, who would finish sixth in the nationals, became so frustrated with his inability to place a Q that he ate it. "I can compare it to the cast of _Twin Peaks_: There's a large percentage of weirdos," Nyman says. "Of course, I'd like to think I'm one of the normal ones. It's no accident that whenever Alfred Butts is mentioned, Scrabble players emphasize that he was an _unemployed_ architect; who needs work with a game like this? Once at his home Sherman was in the next room while two others played. One picked up the bag filled with two dozen pieces and shook it. "There's a defective tile in there," Sherman called out. There was; he had _heard_ the paper label flapping. In August '94 the pressure of the U.S. nationals proved too much for Sherman; when he realized he couldn't win, he bolted from his table and ran out to sulk in the parking lot. But a world without Scrabble, he declares, would be "pretty much unbearable, I'd say." Now, a year later, Sherman teeters on top of the mountain. A good, casual Scrabble player can expect to score 250 to 350 points a game but would be as lost here as a country-club champ at the Masters; top-rated players regularly score close to 400 points against the stiffest competition. But by the second day of the Showdown, Sherman has risen to an even higher level, winning his first nine games, averaging 455 points and threatening a runaway. "It's my whole life," he says. "Basically I've been an underachiever in everything I've tried: Schoolwork. Work. Social life. Winning this would validate my existence." There is something strange, yes, but also something admirable about Sherman's naked drive that makes him vaguely heroic. He cannot relax, and as his second-place finish at the world championship in London would later show, the same neediness that makes Sherman great is also his worst enemy. Yet despite the awful tiles -- all vowels -- pulled from life's Scrabble bag, despite a body that, when he leans over a board, resembles nothing so much as a battered suitcase refusing to close, Sherman has this attitude: _You deal me faulty health? Fine. I'll use the one organ you left untouched, I'll uncover the one skill I have, and I'll be excellent._ Meanwhile he has found a like-minded community of obsessive friends. "It's not just a game," Lipton says. "Every one of these tournaments is a family reunion. We all love each other." Sherman, just walking by, overhears. He stops and smiles a surprisingly sweet grin. "That's not true," Sherman says. "There are at least three people in this room I can't stand." Did he do it? In Vegas, that was the only question whenever Louis Schecter padded into view. Did he cheat? Last June, Shecter, 43, the 37th-ranked player in the country, was in a match against Charlie Southwell in a tournament in Stamford, Conn. Suddenly, Southwell pointed out, a tile was missing. He called over the tournament director, who demanded that both players empty their pockets. "I didn't like that," says Schecter, a bookkeeper from Brooklyn. He refused. He was disqualified, and word spread like a line out of Damon Runyon: _Did you hear? Louie palmed an E..._ There was no proof, of course; who can say what happened? Though that was as close as Scrabble gets to a Black Sox scandal, the Schecter incident was hardly unique. During the four-day Superstars competition, a Q dissolved into thin air during the Darrell Day- Johnny Nevarez match; it was later found. "That could've been cheating," says Joe Edley, a two-time U.S. champion. "But nobody wants to cheat; otherwise they lose a significant part of their life." Even those at the top aren't immune: Nyman's father was once reprimanded after one such mishap. "He's very absent-minded," says Nyman. "And he got caught with eight letters on his rack. If you'd met my dad, you can never imagine him doing it. It was just a slip." Maybe, but it is impossible to know. Scrabble is a game of personal honor; opponents police themselves and each other. As a result it is rife with feuds and imagined slights and muttered complaints. Players are as sensitive as flowers to any sign of "coffeehousing" -- the practice of trying to throw off an opponent by slurping a drink, writing loudly... or talking during a match. After losing to Sam Kantimathi in Las Vegas, Geary stomped out of the room, growling, "The one guy I didn't want to lose to." Why? "He's an ass. I just don't like him. If I could find a way to kick his ass, I would. He tends to rattle his tiles whenever you play but manages to be so quiet when he's playing. Aggghhh. _Sam._ Sam I am." Actually, though, there is less open confrontation than there is sniping. Edley, the only player to win the nationals twice and thus the closest thing Scrabble has to a Babe Ruth, is constantly under fire for his perceived arrogance, his unique status as both player _and_ associate director of the Scrabble association, and his alleged coffeehousing. Sherman calls Edley Darth Vader. And after losing a match at Superstars to Edley, Charles Goldstein buttonholed Williams for 10 minutes to complain about Edley's demeanor. "He's a better player than I am," Goldstein says, "but that's beside the point." Edley shrugs off Goldstein's complaints, but he has seen firsthand what can happen if enough Scrabble players decide you're not right. Schecter, he says, was "ostracized in Las Vegas." And it's true: In his first tournament since Stamford, Schecter drifted about quietly, and usually alone. When an S disappeared from his game with Robert Felt, it was taken as further evidence of his guilt -- never mind that the tile was later found to have been misplaced in another bag. He finished 53rd out of 54. In the end, only one player stood up for Schecter, the same player who went to Schecter's room in Stamford that night and found him on the verge of tears. "He was being shunned like a dog," Richie Lund says. "But I'm convinced he didn't cheat. I think he took a bad rap." Louis Schecter is a lucky man. Few voices in Scrabble carry more authority than Lund's; the game is too important to him. Everyone knows: Richie Lund, born in Brooklyn, raised in Phoenix and shattered in Vietnam, owes Scrabble everything but his life. Rack balancing? Clutch bingos? Deep word knowledge? Tile management? Sure, Richie Lund has all that at his command, which would be more than enough to secure his spot among the game's elite. But with Lund there is an essential drama to his game that is unique: In 1985, after months of study and play in the Scrabble game anchored in New York City's Washington Square Park, he emerged from nowhere at the North American Scrabble Championship in Boston and stunned one of the game's masters, Stephen Fisher. On the pivotal play of his final game, Lund reached into the realm of obscurity and played "twinborn"; Fisher challenged the word, unsuccessfully. "One of the greats," Lund says, laughing at the memory. "And he wasn't sure of it!" Lund finished third -- like some club pro disposing of Jimmy Connors on Super Saturday -- and became an immediate Top 10 force. But not just because of talent. Lund has won plenty of tournaments but never a major title. "He has a bizarre genius," says Williams "so he's respected beyond his accomplishments." Maybe that's because, in the nebbishy world of Scrabble, the 48-year-old Lund is a walking anomaly. With long ponytail and a uniform of black jeans, black T-shirt and three heavy gold chains, he cuts a figure somewhere between Hell's Angel and rock star. He lives by the park code -- he's the one top player who neither tracks his tiles on paper nor ever asks for a recount during tournaments -- and his Marine Corps training and random giggle all make for a fiery, intimidating presence: the Dark Lord of Scrabble. "It's like playing Meat Loaf," Nyman says. "He's this Vietnam vet... and ah, well, it's just the way he _stares_ at you." Then there are the explosions: At a tournament in Waltham, Mass., in 1992, Lund shattered the mumbling, abbeylike quiet with a screaming response after another player, Merrill Kaitz, gave him the finger. "I've never seen anything like this," says Matt Graham, a stand-up comic who until recently had been one of the game's rising stars. "Richie says, 'Give me the finger?! I'll break that finger off and shove it right down your _______ throat!' He'd quiet down and start thinking about it, and then he'd have to let Merrill know _again_." Lund, a chemist for Con Ed power company, has a reputation for charm and generosity, but always on his terms; he maintains a clean distance. Lund does not play or communicate on the burgeoning Scrabble network on the Internet, and he has a tendency to drop out of competition abruptly and lose contact with even his closest friends -- as he did for six months this year. Part of his recent funk had to do with discovering, in December '94, that his clogged arteries required a triple-bypass operation. At the last minute Lund didn't go through with it, but the knowledge that he was living with a time bomb in his chest so affected him that his game declined. Just before Lund sank out of sight in January, Graham pummeled him in an unheard-of four straight games in New York. "He was sick, coughing... but I'm not going to let up on him," Graham says, "I mean, this is _Richie Lund_." Months later, just as abruptly, Lund resurfaced in Washington Square. "His family, his friends, people in the park -- nobody knew where he was," says Betty Aberlin, an actress whose recurring role in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on _Mister Roger's Neighborhood_ may have been the best preparation for her friendship with the self-named "parkies." "And when he turned up again, he acted like he hadn't been gone at all." That's nothing. In this, the first day of the Showdown, Lund's mother, Reggie Green, is sitting in a chair with her daughters Rondi and Diane, watching him as if he were some kind of revelation. Reggie and ex-husband Victor hadn't seen their son for eight years -- but, again, that is nothing. Diane hadn't seen him for 13 years. Rondi hadn't seen him for 24. One reason is that Lund hasn't boarded a plane since Vietnam, and it is a long train ride from Brooklyn to Phoenix. The other is more complex. "It was just tough for me to be around anybody," Lund says. "Just people... I'd have to go in the opposite direction. Having this motorcycle, being able to jump on it, just go, get away from things. Getting away... getting away... getting away... getting away..." In 1965, at the age of 17, Lund joined the Marines. By the next year he was a radio operator carrying a PRC-25 on his back for the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam. He spent 26 months in country, weathered the pounding of 152-mm shells at Khe Sanh, and took "a smell of rotting flesh and napalm and cordite" in his nose that he has never quite washed away. Too many buddies died there. Between tours, Lund went home to Phoenix once. "I think he felt guilty for being alive," Reggie says. "He came back and it was Thanksgiving Day and I was standing in the kitchen and all of a sudden I just stopped dead. My daughter was helping me, and I said, 'Richard's at the door, Rondi.'" Rondi told her mother that nobody had knocked, but she opened the door and "he was just standing there and sweat was running down his face and it wasn't even hot. Just running down his face. When he came back (from Vietnam) he was dead inside. Absolutely dead." One night Reggie was rubbing her son's head and it was late and he began talking about the things he'd seen, about the bodies of the Marines he went to find and how he found pieces dangling in trees; about the time he stayed on the radio for three days and four nights to keep a cut-off squad from losing contact; about how one of his closest friends was blasted to pieces by a land mine; about how he came to a Green Beret camp as dawn lifted and it was too quiet and dozens of American boys lay scattered in the dirt, stripped and bloody and dead. "'It's too horrible to tell anyone,'" Reggie says Richie told her. "And he never talked about it again." Lund was mustered out in 1969 and spent the next six years back home, wandering the country, doing drugs, odd jobs, nothing much. "I felt comfortable only with fellow soldiers, so I isolated myself," Lund says. In the mid '70s he began college in Brooklyn. He saw a flyer for a Scrabble club; he'd played as a kid. He became very good very quickly, but the best thing about Scrabble was that it didn't leave room for memories. "It helped a lot," Lund says. "It just gave me something else to focus on. I get into it, it pretty much occupies my thoughts, takes it off other things that can be damaging to me." He lived in New York. He didn't talk to his family much. (Sixth page of text contains one photo of smiling Chris Cree sitting at a blackjack table with large piles of Scrabble tiles taking the place of betting chips. Caption reads: "Cree's luck at the tables compensated for his futility at the Showdown.") But when Lund decided to head west for the Superstars, he did something daring. He invited them all to Vegas. Maybe it was the heart problems, or the fact that they'd never seen him play, or the fact that he's pushhing 50. He can't say. But _something_ had changed; Reggie could feel it. Still, she knows she is a distant second to Scrabble. "It is absolutely the most important thing in his life -- above people, above feelings, his job, his family," Reggie says. "It fills every gap in his life." And that is fine; she'll take that because, "I think Scrabble's the thing that saved his mentality, his mind," she says. And as Reggie sat and watched him play -- badly, with Lund finishing 34th -- she saw something she hadn't seen since he left for the Marines 30 years ago: Richie, before the anger and fear. "When he was in kindergarten, he drew pictures of turtles, and he'd have this deep concentration, and I was looking at him and he still had that," she says. "I saw something familiar and it was almost like... things were good. There he was, sitting there, and all the heartache and stress and not being together... all that faded. It wasn't important anymore." On the morning it all fell apart, G. I. Joel stood next to Nyman at the sinks in the men's room at Bally's. Both were washing their hands, Sherman turned to Nyman and said, by way of conversation, "Do you get a lot of mucus before the game begins?" By the third day Sherman's quick start had gotten swallowed up by the leveling forces of luck, panic and the skill of current U.S. champion David Gibson. Sherman eventually bombed out his last seven games to finish 13th, but when he met with the superstudious Gibson during the stretch run of the tournament, he still had a chance. Gibson's record was 17-2, but Sherman, at 14-5, could position himself for first-place money with a win here. "I don't even want to go over there," John Williams said. "Sherman has this look on his face, and frankly, it's frightening." Sherman led midway, 162-149, but Gibson clawed out a 60-point lead on a 77-point bingo with "toenails." A few turns later, after drawing the second blank tile, Gibson laid down "mucoids." Sherman stared at the board. Finally he held up his hand and said "Challenge." The tournament director came over with his dictionary. There was a long silence. "That's acceptable," he said. "Congratulations," Sherman murmured in the tone of a man announcing a death. "You've won $50,000." Gibson tried to wave this off, but it was true: By beating Sherman he was all but assured of the biggest prize in Scrabble history. "I have to be the unluckiest man alive," Sherman said later. "Everything that could go wrong for me, went wrong. And the funny part is, Gibson is one of the most modest guys around." How modest became apparent when Gibson, a math professor at Spartanburg (S.C.) Methodist College making less than $40,000 a year, earmarked part of his winnings for the elderly and doled out the rest, in individual checks accompanied by a nice note, to all competitors not finishing in the top 10. Gibson, obviously, is not your usual pro player. At 44 he is a soft- spoken, unabashedly provincial mystic who clearly sees Scrabble less as a game than as a calling. "It was meant to be," Gibson says. "I always did poorly in the SAT verbal, but about 10 years ago a supernatural love for words came upon me. When you get changed, you can't help it. It's spiritual." This is not a rare sentiment in Scrabble; it is, in fact, something of a necessity to surrender yourself to the whim of the game. Unlike chess, which is a distillation of learned strategy, success in Scrabble hinges on constantly shifting fate. You never know whether you'll get that precious blank or a fistful of garbage. The bag is god, the bag is chaos -- and Scrabble is, in that narrow sense, quite like life; you can only work with the pieces you're given. That's why so many top-level players burn out. "They get frustrated because they know so much, but they can't reach the pinnacle," says Cree. "They get screwed by Lady Luck, and it's just too much to take." But reaching the top doesn't guarantee peace either. Edley, like Gibson, thought it kismet when he won his first U.S. championship in 1980, but the suspicion that he was nothing but a tool for fate left him depressed -- "like a higher power was leading me, and I didn't have much to do with it," Edley says. He had always wanted to probe "the meaning of consciousness," but that title sent him off on other tangents: He flirted with New Age psychology, a fruit- only diet, a regimen of Chinese breathing exercises; after surviving these he decided in 1984 to live in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. "I wanted to deal with the last fear I had," says Edley. (He now lives, indoors, in Coram, N.Y.) Always, he kept coming back to this frustrating game. In 1992, after winning his second national title, Edley began to understand why that was. "When you play Scrabble over time, you look at yourself in the mirror," he says. "You're changing, and it develops your mind. It's everything." A down night at the Comic Strip in Manhattan. Matt Graham has had his good moments: He's a pro. He has worked comedy clubs for a decade, and three times he sailed through five minutes on _Late Night with Conan O'Brien_. But tonight he's slowly dying. Tonight he commits the sin from which he'll never recover: Unrolling a perfectly disgusting, hilarious riff on Southern strip bars, Graham begins talking about a particular Latinate term for female genitalia... and suddenly gets lost. (On the last page of the story are two photos. Left: David Gibson ponders his rack vs. unknown opponent in Superstars, viewed from above, you can't even see David's face, but his hair is recognizable; right: Joel Sherman's hand places tiles vs. John Holgate in WSC. The caption reads: "For the truly devoted, words have no meaning beyond their point values.") Instead of plowing on, he stops and, to himself, begins wondering out loud whether that is singular... or plural... or both? The crowd turns him off -- what _is_ he talking about? -- and Graham hurries to explain. "Tortured by words," he says into the microphone. "Caught in the web of words... that's me." That's him. Graham, you see, could well be the next Seinfeld or Phil Hartman, except that for too long he was possessed by the thought of being the "John McEnroe of Scrabble." And for a time, he was. With his schedule full of down time and delays, Graham had the hours needed to study word lists and to play. His knack for pulling off splashy plays in the tightest spots made Graham's name, and by the time of the Superstars last August he had reached expert status -- and No. 6 in the Scrabble association computer ranking -- after only five years in the game. But Vegas proved a disaster. Graham spent too much money he didn't have getting there and then finished in what he considers an unthinkable 38th place. His only consolation was handing Gibson one of his three losses, but that wasn't enough, and he is ready to give up the game altogether. "Gibson is what did it to me," Graham says months later. "I mean, his 21-3 record was unbelievable. And he's also this _gentleman_; he set the mark in both performance and class, and that's seldom done." Too, Graham may just be discovering that, oddly enough, Scrabble is the wrong game to play if you're enamored of words. For at this level, Scrabble's dirty little secret is that it is a word game in which words mean nothing. The dabbler comes to the board thinking definitions and word knowledge, and he gets swallowed up in showing that off; but the experts care for words only for their point value. The newest Scrabble dictionary expurgated some 100 offensive terms, but they're all usable -- no, welcomed -- in tournaments. Black players don't flinch when they see "nigger" or "darky"; women congratulate any smart play of sexual slang; and Joel Sherman, who is Jewish, didn't blink when Gibson opened their second game with "yid," because no one _cares_. "They're nothing but scoring tools," Sherman says. "One of my opponents used [a synonym for sexual intercourse] at the end of a game. He got 26 points. It was the right thing to do." Understanding English isn't even necessary; a group of top Thai players do quite well at major North American tournaments, and they barely speak the language. "It started out as knowledge of words, but now it's become something... different," says Jimmy Young, a 30-year player and one of the pillars of the Washington Square Park game. "Now I could play a guy who's a mongoloid idiot, but he can compete because he just memorizes lists." Gibson, naturally, is the apotheosis of '90s Scrabble, a math expert who spends as much as seven hours a day poring over interminable columns of words, caring less about what they mean than that they are "acceptable." Graham, for one, isn't sure he can last long in this world without going numb. "Too much is needed to play at the level I want to play. It's too consuming," he says. "I felt like I had no life. For now I've made the choice, and it's comedy." For a moment Graham goes quiet. After all, what else is there to say? Except that he can't shake loose of the web just yet; screwed by Lady Luck, haunted by Gibson, the comedian jerks up his head. "How can he be that good?" Graham says, voice rising. "He's not curing cancer. What did he _do_?" An October Sunday in Washington Square. A blue-sky clarity washes the air, blessing the kibitzers and clowns and dopers and geniuses who hover over games that go on and on. The all-day Scrabble game is split now: A lone board -- Mathew [sic (Laufer)] the poet and Forrest [sic (Tellis)], who speaks a dozen languages and falls asleep anytime -- running among the speed-chess boys, and two more here at the picnic benches where Aldo smokes his endless cigarette, and Richie Lund, dressed in the usual black and gold, calmly steamrollers all comers for a penny a point. "The game is it for them," Betty Aberlin says of the parkies. "Everything else, including rain, is just a distraction. I think of them as the Lost Boys." Like Graham, Lund was shattered by his poor showing in Vegas; his concentration shot, he considered giving up the game altogether. But he started playing in the park again, and the atmosphere revitalized him -- there is no purer form of Scrabble than the New York game. On Oct. 1 Lund took his first tournament in more than a year, beating a 26-expert field in Ocean City, N.J. The win elevated him back into the Top 10. "My confidence is up," he says. "I'm back. Yeah. I'm back." But now they're all more interested in talking about Aldo, a restaurant owner who has been playing for only six months. A couple of days ago Aldo played the game of his life, beating Jimmy Young. "And I always thought it was a sissy game," Aldo says. "A sissy game!" Richie giggles. "I like that." He reaches into the bag, shakes it, then bingos with "whiners." Silence now: All the men are staring at the board, reading the play. Out of nowhere a huge dog chases a wounded, fluttering pigeon behind them, under the table, at their feet. "No! No!" his master calls out, but it is too late; the dog has the bird in its teeth. None of the players moves, none notices the panic or noise or rush to destroy. No one looks up from the game. No one sees the dog trotting off with its prize, or the victim's eyes beginning to dim.
Last Modified 2/7/00