Spreading the Word.(2008 Big Apple Scrabble Tournament )

The 2008 Big Apple Scrabble Tournament took place on a weekend in early October. Meg Wolitzer, the novelist, had signed up for the three-day event with her son, Charlie Panek, a thirteen-year-old eighth grader who was competing in Division 4, the lowest tier, but was holding his own against adult rivals. His mother, in Division 3, invited me to watch them play their final games, and we arrived at the venue, a loft on lower Fifth Avenue, a little before nine o'clock on Sunday morning. A light rain was falling, and the Avenue had been closed to traffic for the Pulaski Day parade. A high-school marching band from New Jersey, wearing Polish folk costumes, was disembarking from a tour bus with a clatter of drums and cymbals. "Uh-oh," Wolitzer said anxiously. "Oompah music--just what we needed."

Players were drifting in from a hearty breakfast at the Comfort Diner, on West Twenty-third Street, armed with leftover carbohydrates. The diner's owner, Ira Freehof, runs the tournament. His assistant director, Joel Sherman, a wiry bachelor from the Bronx known as G.I. Joel, is a legendary player and a former world champion who figures prominently in "Word Freak," a pungently written best-seller by Stefan Fatsis about the competitive Scrabble subculture. (Sherman's nickname refers to the soundtrack of gastrointestinal disturbances that often punctuate his games.) When Wolitzer introduced us, Sherman covered his ears with both hands and huddled near a wall. "I have sinusitis," he said. "You're distracting me. Go away." Later in the afternoon, we had a cordial chat about his role as the "official adjudicator," but he was hard to draw out. "Socializing is a challenge for a lot of us in the Scrabble community," John Chew, the tournament's Webmaster, noted tactfully. At that moment, we heard a scream, followed by a thud, and a young woman fell to the floor, apparently having a convulsion. A few people rushed over to help, but she turned out to be convulsed, for obscure reasons, with hilarity.

The room was a bright rectangle crowded with tables arranged hierarchically. Wolitzer and her son found their places in "steerage," as she put it. Once the games began, a hush fell, and players hunched over their boards. The tension and the brainpower were palpable. Tiles rustled in cloth bags, and I watched as a top-seeded player laid "pealike," using all seven letters--a "bingo"--which his opponent countered with another bingo, "cr[e]olise." Chew and his colleague Sherrie Saint John--anchors of a live Webcast--took the time to point out a few celebrities. Saint John whispered, "The guy with the red hair, taking notes and shaking his head at careless moves, is Adam Logan, a world champion. Like Joel, Adam doesn't talk much, but he went to Princeton at sixteen. Over there is Sal Piro, the president of the 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' fan club, playing with Frank Tangredi, who wrote an Off Broadway play. The handsome Latino guy to his right is Winter." Winter, a software engineer, just goes by one name. He is the subject of a documentary about his quest to visit every Starbucks on the planet. He told me, "I plot my itineraries to dovetail with Scrabble tournaments. So far, I've been to about eighty-nine hundred branches."

Wonkish misfits with awesome powers of recall, most of them male, seemed to dominate Division 1, and, during a break, I met John O'Laughlin, the baby-faced genius who designed Quackle--a Scrabble computer program that, Saint John said, "thinks almost like a human, which can't be said of everyone here." But Robin Pollock Daniel did not fit the mold. She is a chic blond Gestalt therapist from Toronto, and the highest-ranked female player in North America. While I was watching, she "bingoed out" (emptying her rack to win with a seven-letter coup de grace, "bli[n]dgut"), and whooped for joy. A little crowd gathered to congratulate her. A few feet away, however, the great Joe Edley didn't look up or even twitch. He is a three-time national champion, and one of the few players to have memorized the entire dictionary of official Scrabble terms (which, if you were wondering, accepts "blind gut" as one word). Some thirty years ago, he became enamored of "The Seth Material," a New Age text in eleven volumes that was supposedly dictated by Seth, an enlightened being, to Jane Roberts, a medium and psychic, who received the teachings while in a trance. Edley was inspired by Seth to realize his full human potential, and he chose to express it through Scrabble. Meditation and breathing exercises are part of his mental-fitness program. I hovered behind his chair (he has the posture of a yogi and the sang-froid of a Vulcan) while he replenished his rack. "Aneurin," "dentil," "wab," and "pavid" were already on the board, and he instantly played an arcane bingo: "residua." Most top players have day jobs--many in computer science and mathematics--but Edley is a full-time pro, who earns a living by consulting on and writing about the game and teaching workshops for beginners. "There is no point to playing Scrabble unless I make it a spiritual practice," he told me. "The secret is emotional control."

Charlie Panek is a third-generation Scrabble fiend. His mother still plays with her mother, the novelist Hilma Wolitzer, who is seventy-eight. If novel-writing runs in families, so does Scrabble addiction, and I was hooked at a tender age by my own mother, an English teacher who always hated to sacrifice a lovely word like "glaive" or "deodar" for a more prosaic play with a higher score. She was initiated by my uncle Roy. In 1949, the second year that Scrabble was on the market, 2,413 sets were sold, and Roy bought one of them. He sailed a schooner on Chesapeake Bay, and a friend at the marina had previously introduced him to Scrabble's precursor, Criss-Cross Words, which helped the old salts to while away their becalmed hours. After Roy died, I found the set in his den, with all the tiles--ninety-eight letters and two blanks--still accounted for. (He had kept it with his boating trophies and Army relics, including a Luger that he'd captured at El Alamein.) It has since helped me to while away many of my own becalmed hours. One summer, on a torrid afternoon in Carl Schurz Park, the worn tiles, like a saint's femur, wrought a miracle: I trounced my opponent with the bingo of a lifetime: "bar[o]ques," worth three hundred and eleven points. (It spanned two triple-word squares, with the "q" on a double letter.)

Scrabble is enjoying a second hey-day. The first was in the early nineteen-fifties, when demand for sets outstripped production. (In 1954, an advertisement in this magazine showed a wedding party stampeding from a church; the bride explains to the baffled clergyman that the toy shop next door has a new shipment.) Between one and two million sets are sold yearly; one in every three American households is reported to own one; and thirty thousand new games are said to begin, somewhere in the world, every hour. Players of note are a heterogeneous confraternity that includes Barack Obama, the Queen of England, Madonna, Igor Stravinsky, Rosie O'Donnell, Duke Ellington, Nora Ephron, Meadow Soprano, Dustin Hoffman, Justin Timberlake, Chris Martin, Maya Angelou, Carol Burnett, Richard Nixon, and Ludacris, who plays "hip-hop" Scrabble, using words like "crunk," "hizzo," and "pajawa"--a version of the "dirty" Scrabble that was popular with Hollywood swingers fifty years ago. (I heard one of their ancient jokes at the tournament: " 'Cervix' is my favorite opening.")

Scrabble is both mindless and cerebral, which may account for its appeal to writers--it gives you a chance to push words around without having to make them mean something. As a symbolic battleground of family life, it has often come in handy as a plot device. Graham Greene, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, Rick Moody, and Patricia Highsmith are among those who have savored the game, injected it into their fiction, or done both. In Ira Levin's "Rosemary's Baby," the tiles spell out a Devil worshipper's name. Nabokov's Ada is an elegant player, probably in the image of her creator, who also designed crossword puzzles. In Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It," the heroine's suitors squabble over their board. And Scrabble, one imagines, would have appealed to Shakespeare and Moliere--it lends itself to the comic comeuppances that occur at class intersections, where gullible plebeians affect courtly language, and pretentious know-it-alls are cornered by their bluffs. (In a famous episode of "The Simpsons," Homer, Springfield's Bottom, draws "oxidize" but plays "do," while Bart tries to sucker him with "kwyjibo"--a species of ape, he explains, dumb and balding, that's native to North America.)