Stefan Fatsis » San Jose Mercury News, July 15, 2001

San Jose Mercury News, July 15, 2001

By Charles Matthews

“I don’t consider Scrabble an obsession in a clinical sense: a disturbing preoccupation with an unreasonable idea,” Stefan Fatsis tells us. “I think of it as an obsession in the colloquial sense, a compelling motivation.”

You may think of glassy-eyed video gamers as obsessive. But Scrabble players? That board game you fish out of the hall closet for winter evenings when there’s nothing good on TV? From “Word Freak,” Fatsis’ marvelously absorbing excursion into the world of Scrabble, we learn that the game we play at home is only a pale, timid version of the game played in tournaments.

Competitive Scrabble has a 23-page rule book and its own official dictionary, which participants spend large chunks of their time memorizing. Actually, there are two official Scrabble dictionaries — one American, the other British — and the serious international player has to learn them both.

Fatsis seems like a normal guy when you read his sports reporting in the Wall Street Journal or hear his commentaries on National Public Radio. But his book is a walk on the wild side of words and a venture into the zone where language and mathematics intersect. For in tournament Scrabble, words cease to have meaning beyond the countless permutations of the tiles.

“There are 3,199,724 unique combinations of seven tiles that can be plucked from a virgin Scrabble bag of ninety-eight letters and two blanks,” Fatsis tells us. “Mathematicians have determined that the possibility of choosing an acceptable seven-letter word”—known to tournament players as a “bingo”—is “12.63 percent.” Tournament Scrabble players think like that.

Fatsis was not always one of them, but as he started researching and writing his book he became “caught in the web of words,” as one tournament Scrabbler put it, alluding to the title of a biography of James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Fatsis began as a casual player, started playing pickup games in a New York City park frequented by already-obsessed players, entered some tournaments, got hints from veterans, began memorizing word lists and doing anagrams in his head and wound up playing on the expert level.

But not without some concerns about his own sanity: “The Scrabble tournament scene, it turns out—and I’m shocked, shocked—isn’t the most highly functional subculture around,” he admits. And as a sportswriter, Fatsis knows the price that highly competitive people pay in their personal lives. As the head of the National Scrabble Association observes to Fatsis, “Scratch the surface of any champion in any individual sport, 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.”

Yet Fatsis’ portraits of his fellow Scrabble fanatics are both amused and affectionate. Among them are the pill-popping Matt Graham, a stand-up comic whom a competitor describes as “one chromosome up from the guy in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ ”; Joel Sherman, the “professional Scrabble player,” otherwise unemployed, whose gastrointestinal disorders led to his nickname, “G.I. Joel”; Marlon Hill, an angry black man from the Baltimore ghetto; and Joe Edley, “one of the most successful players in the history of the game, Scrabble’s Jack Nicklaus.”

Edley “looks like Mr. Burns, the evil nuclear power plant owner on ‘The Simpsons,’ ” but he was called to Scrabble by the teachings of the New Age guru Jane Roberts and her spiritual mentor named Seth. As Fatsis puts it:

“The human-potential moment, with its ashrams and est and cult-of-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.”

But Fatsis clearly doesn’t regard Scrabble as just “a board game,” and he tells us its history in loving detail. Unlike chess or backgammon, Scrabble has an owner — the toy company Hasbro, which latched onto it when Coleco Industries, its previous owner, went bankrupt. Coleco had acquired it from the now-defunct Selchow & Righter, who got it from the inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts, an unemployed architect who created the game during the Depression.

Butts originally called it Lexiko, but he was unable to get a game company interested in it, so he made and sold sets of it himself until he found a manufacturing partner, James Brunot, in 1947. Brunot changed the name to Scrabble—which means scratch, scrape or scribble when it’s lowercase, but also has, as Fatsis points out, “an aural link to scramble.” Brunot trademarked the name in 1948 and copyrighted the board design.

Little happened until 1953, when all of a sudden Scrabble became a cultural phenomenon that wouldn’t quit: “An astounding 3,798,555 units of Scrabble were sold in 1954, one of the greatest performances in toy industry history.” In 1971, Brunot and Butts sold all rights to the game to Selchow & Righter, which had had manufacturing rights to it since 1953. Over the years, Butts got a grand total of $1,066,500 out of the game—which even in uninflated dollars seems a pittance.

But the narrative thrust of “Word Freak” doesn’t lie in the history of the game or even the profiles of its players: The book is mostly about Stefan Fatsis’ determination to become a championship player—or perhaps something more transcendental. He gives us a play-by-play account of some of his games, and this makes better reading than you might expect—the man is a sportswriter, after all.

Mid-book, Fatsis realizes that “the game itself has established an emotional permanence in me that goes beyond winning and losing. I’m not sure it’s rational—believing…that a board game possesses a sort of cosmic power, something commensurate with our capacity for wonder—but I feel it nonetheless.”

So be careful the next time you break out the Scrabble set. You might be summoned to another plane of existence.

San Jose Mercury News, July 15, 2001

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