Can't Find The Words?

Baltimore's Scrabble tournament might offer several…

By Ethan Goffman

To its adherents, though, Scrabble is far more: an avocation, an inspiration, an endlessly shifting puzzle, a way of life. Baltimore's annual Scrabble tournament is a gathering of like-minded acolytes whose idol becomes more complex as one gets to know it better; a battle of vocabularies, anagramming, psychological ploys, and clever stratagems. Scrabble is currently undergoing a renaissance, thanks in large part to Stephen Fatsis' book Word Freak, which details the many eccentric characters who have mastered the game at its highest level.

Gotta Have Scrabble

But for every Scrabble champion, there are unsung legions that obsess about the game; return to it; sweat over it time after time. While this year's Baltimore tournament included a few celebrated players, such as Marlon Hill, who is currently ranked ninth in North America, the bulk of the players are in it solely for the game's thrill and beauty.

Tim Maneth, who has been running the Baltimore tournament since 1984, initiated the first recreational event in 1977 (there had previously been city tournaments in New York). Afterward, he said, people came up to him and "thanked [him] for changing the course of their lives."

There are those who chart their course by following Scrabble tournaments, and they include Cathy Poole and Millicent King of North Carolina, who have spent nearly ten years attending tournaments across the United States and have even followed the game to England.

Poole creates a special scorebook for each location she visits: Her Baltimore version proclaims "Have Scrabble Will Travel." She discounts the stereotype that Scrabble is mainly played by teachers and librarians. People of all ages, races, and occupations play tournaments, from stockbrokers to truck drivers. Don't be fooled, though, occupation is no sign of skill level.

Alluring Artistry

What draws so many fans to a simple board game? I queried a number of participants, hoping to synthesize a definition. Is playing Scrabble an art or a science? Most leaned toward science, pointing to the analytic ability and knowledge required. Poole, however, believes that Scrabble is both, that it requires mental processing, but that "the beauty of it as an art is the intertwining of so many disciplines."

Tim Maneth explains that a completed Scrabble game, which appears to most people as a jumble of words, to an expert player may be a thing of "artistry due to the way the words are overlapped and set up."

Double Word… Score!

If it's not quite an art or science, is Scrabble, then, a sport, in the same way that chess is officially labeled a sport? Jeff Cook, of West Virginia, rejects the sport moniker for chess, even, since it lacks any physical component. Cook distinguishes Scrabble from chess since luck makes every game different, and that allows a defeated player an intact ego, convinced that the loss came from drawing the wrong tiles.

For those competitive spirits, many players do consider Scrabble very much a sport. For Maneth, Scrabble "satisfies a competitive need that a lot of people have that are not blessed with physical attributes."

Joe Neff, another tournament participant, would like to see Scrabble on ESPN as a spectator sport. Most Americans are familiar with it. After all, Scrabble games appear in most American homes, so with the support of expert commentary and compelling graphics, he believes that the drama of expert-level play could reach a whole new audience.

So what is Scrabble? The final answer is: Who knows. It's a little bit of everything. It's what you make of it. And what it makes of you in requiring both rigor and inspiration, and in drawing you to meet new people you might have thought you had nothing in common with.

The tournament's surprise expert-level winner, Yawo Ananga, comes not from the United States but from Ghana and learned the game mainly on computer. In unexpected places, Scrabble is attracting new devotees who enjoy the delicate balance of knowledge, luck, and skill, who thrive on having their minds bent and stretched and taken new places by the lure of the game's modest, mysterious tiles. The Baltimore tournament is held annually in the fall. If you wish to participate in the 2003 tournament, please contact Tim Maneth at 410.529.4053.

Yawo Awanga, Scrabble Champion

The largest tournament in the world, and a good one for beginners, takes place on January 24-26, in Atlantic City, NJ.

Contact: Margaret Bauer Williams, 201.991.1499 (after noon), MargaretBMW@webtv.net.

For more information about tournaments, see www.scrabble-assoc.com/tourneys.

Scrabble Clubs in the Washington, DC, area:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A diasporic figure exiled from the great state of Indiana, Ethan Goffman works a motley collection of jobs in freelance writing, teaching, and Internet indexing.

Illustration by Cynthia Fowler