Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (2001)
There comes a time in any obsession when you have
to learn more. It doesn't 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?
-Word Freak
There, in a paragraph, is what you're in for once you pick up this very interesting, often amusing, but ultimately troubling book. Stefan Fatsis, who many will be familiar with through his sports writing for the Wall Street Journal and/or his reports for NPR, offers both a comprehensive history of the game of Scrabble, and a fascinating portrait of the strange netherworld of Scrabble enthusiasts, with everyone from child prodigies to Zen Buddhists to psychiatric patients, traveling the country to get to tournaments where the top prize is a few thousand dollars. Though the book starts casually enough, with Fatsis playing pick up games in Washington Square Park, by the end he's completely obsessed, memorizing word lists, endlessly replaying blunders, and living and dying by his official Scrabble ranking, having set himself a goal of reaching 1700.
Now, I'm willing to bet you've got a Scrabble set in your house, maybe even more than one. And you probably get it down a couple times a year--most likely at Christmas time and at some point in the Summer, when you're at the shore--play feverishly for a night or a week, and then put it away and forget about it for another six months. Maybe you even remember a particularly spectacular game or turn (Personally, I recall when I was 12 and my grandfather, a Federal judge and a a truly brilliant man, dropped the word MEASLES for the first play of the game, essentially finishing the contest right then). But here are a whole group of people who define themselves by, and judge their own self-worth by, their rankings in the game. To be a world class player requires you to memorize literally thousands of "words" that you will never see in the real world. Championship players know every two letter word, all the words that begin with Q, all the seven letter words, etc.--and actually don't even know them all, just know the ones that are accepted in the Official Tournament and Club Word List. They aren't even playing the game any more, they are just demonstrating memorization skills. They sure as heck don't seem to be enjoying themselves, which one would think is a fairly fundamental prerequisite for a game.
In the beginning, Fatsis himself, while he does not hold them up for ridicule or anything like that, recognizes that much of the story here lies in the oddish personalities who are attracted to this competition. But then he too succumbs and gradually turns into the word freak of the title. The whole thing is more than a little disconcerting.
Whether you're a Scrabble fan yourself, or just looking for a good read, the book is definitely enjoyable. But I couldn't help but agree with the sentiment expressed by Alfred Butts's nephew Bob (Alfred Butts, in case you hadn't figured it out, invented the game) :
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.
Neither do I, Bob, neither do I.
(Reviewed:16-Jul-01)
Grade: (B+)
