14/6/02

When the Spell Was Cast

Twenty years ago, I was asked to launch competitive Scrabble in Israel. The only words I could think of were "NOT ME!"

Backpacker Warawut Seahko was about to leave the country when he saw an ad in The Jerusalem Post in late 1981: "If you love to play Scrabble..."

I saw the same ad.

We both responded with an emphatic "YES!"

The Post and the Galei Kinneret Hotel in Tiberias were swamped with more than 400 responses to that ad. They were on to something big. Bigger than the hotel's manager, Haim Haviv, imagined. He thought he could lure maybe a dozen little old ladies to fill a few rooms. But that many little old ladies?!

Haim dashed off a letter to the (US) National Scrabble Association. "Help!" he said.

They suggested he locate a guy who just immigrated, who had recently played in the first Canadian championships. (Me.) He has experience, they told Haim.

Haim found me. Now wait a minute, I said, I only have tournament experience as a player; I had never really paid attention to how these things are organized or run. Close enough, he figured. He invited me to the hotel for a weekend for consultations; he said he really only needed to know how to choose a winner. Heck, I could tell him that in a minute. I agreed. He said he would be passing Herzliya Pituah, where I lived in an absorption center, on the way to Tiberias, so he'd pick me up and we could talk on the way.

Meanwhile, Warawut, a round-the-world traveler from Thailand, waited for more news on the tournament. He extended his visa.

Haim and I drove up the Coastal Road. He told me what he had envisioned for a Scrabble tournament: four people to a game, three or four rounds of play (if that wasn't too much for them), and a nice little prize for the winner.

Sometimes I talk too much, and this was one of those times. I told him about competitive Scrabble, with its specialized dictionary, timed play, tactics and strategies, fast-paced style of play, cutthroat championships, tension and excitement, "and if you're going to have more than two players at a game, count me out."

Haim was agog. He was familiar with the poky kitchen-table style of play. He and his wife played when they became stranded in Beirut in 1948, and had to stay indoors for a long time.

Now it was his turn to become animated, and he said some ridiculous things, all of which came true. "You will run the tournament, exactly as you described! And then -- I can see it now -- you'll organize clubs all over the country, a national association, and regular tournaments every year, no, twice a year, and championships, and you'll become known as Scrabble Sam!" I was terrified, wondering how I could back out of this thing and not threaten my comfortable obscurity. I did not want to organize anything or be anybody. I wanted to sit in the back and just play.

Well, that first tournament was 20 years ago on July 1, it changed my life, and launched competitive Scrabble in Israel, which flourishes to this day. We've staged about 30 tournaments, a national association with as many as 11 clubs, five national championships, Israeli representation at several world championships, and there are some people who know me only as "Scrabble Sam" (some people call me other things, but never mind). The Jerusalem Scrabble Club has for all its 19 years kept up its status as the largest Scrabble club in the world, with an average attendance of more than 50 a week.

In the last decade, other players took up the gauntlet after I burned out, most notably Evan Cohen of Tel Aviv, who organized a series of By-the-Sea tournaments. And in nine days, Ami Tzubery of Moshav Beit Zayit is taking up the director's whip for our first overseas tournament, at a resort in Kemer, Turkey (where I will sit in the back and just play. Well, maybe I'll help out a bit).

BACK TO that first one.

Warawut, then 34, came to Israel via Burma, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Iran. He hadn't planned to stay long -- until he read that ad.

He patiently awaited further word on the tournament. He extended his visa again.

I was now a Scrabble tournament organizer. I had no idea what to do. I spent dozens of hours formulating pairing methods and drawing charts that I never used, and dozens more hours creating a system that was spectacularly time-incompetent, but which I did use. In all that wasted time, it didn't occur to me to print up scorecards for the players themselves to fill in, incalculably more efficient than expecting the director to do it all himself. (Well, I had help. Haviv abandoned his managerial duties to literally sweat it out with me, practically round the clock, along with his wife and the wonderfully witty Helga Dudman, a renowned Tiberias writer who pitched in and later penned a memorable feature story on the tournament for the Post.)

Warawut rented a room in Tel Aviv.

Finally, the Post announced that there would indeed be a Scrabble tournament, and registration would now commence, but it was not the biggest news item of the day. There was also a war. And southern Lebanon was close enough that you could hear the booms of bombs in Tiberias. I would have been very happy without the war or the tournament. (I think the last time I had faced an audience was when I was five years old, and I went "ting, ting" on a triangle in a kindergarten concert. I've suffered stage fright ever since.)

Warawut got a job, in a Chinese restaurant.

Planning the event, I assumed that nothing less than perfection was expected, and that became my obsession. (I was a new immigrant, what did I know?) I dreaded criticism. So I devised that elaborate pairing schedule based on the idea that all 16 players of the "experts" division should play each other once, in a sort of mass round-robin. But a few hours before the tournament, it dawned on me that we could get in only 10 rounds of play, not 15, and I scrapped the whole plan. Panicked, I seized upon a stroke of inspiration: that a pairing system of standings-based, incremental, staggered quintiles would be so confusing, that no one would complain because no one would understand it. (Later I would learn that this was a modification of the Modified Swiss Pairing System, but at the time, I didn't know from nothing).

On the other hand, I couldn't have been stupider when it came to amassing the results of all those games, which was necessary to post the progressive standings, and rank and pair the players. I did it all myself, by hand, in a notebook, instead of having the players themselves fill out individual scorecards.

I tried to think beforehand of every "what if" so I could react spontaneously. I left nothing to "yihye b'seder" -- everything will work itself out. But I was an Israeli for barely a year; by now I know, "It's not enough to expect the unexpected -- count on it." In the middle of the tournament, a player was called to the phone -- in the middle of a game! He came back and told me: "I'll be able to finish this game, but then I have to leave. I've just had a phone call from the army." He went to join the war, leaving us with an uneven number of participants. (Maybe the army needed him for the same reason.)

And I didn't plan for the possibility of a power outage, which 20 years ago was a routine inconvenience. It would have sabotaged the tournament. It didn't happen -- until a couple of hours after we finished, and it socked out the hotel's electricity for the rest of the day.

AS THE DAY approached, and my anxiety mounted, I realized the bright side: I would discover other Scrabble aficionados. From the time of my aliya, it was my dream to lose a game of Scrabble. (It was a dream that has come true. Plenty.) Funny thing is, directing all those tournaments, I couldn't play in them.

Who played Scrabble in this country? I had no idea. Maybe Haim Haviv was right, and everyone was three times my age.

Sitting at a desk in the hotel lobby that Thursday afternoon, July 1, 20 years ago, ready to greet the stream of players, I watched the front door intently, convinced that the first to arrive would be the archetypof my new Israeli Scrabble friends.

Many people I met that day remained close friends lo these many years. Some I see at the Jerusalem club every week. None of them were the first to arrive.

Marganit Weinberger-Rotman won that first tournament -- ironically, a native-born Israeli -- she finished first, but didn't arrive first.

A fellow named Steve traveled by bus for nine bumpy hours from Eilat. At 18, he was the youngest player -- but not the first.

There were people three times my age (now, little old ladies are only twice my age), though about half the participants were under 40. They came from cities, towns, kibbutzim, moshavim, from the entire length of the country. There were nine married couples, a bevy of young women, Holocaust survivors, an ex-stripper, yuppies, professors, students, scientists, farmers.

After eying that door expectantly for hours, the first one arrived ... at last! My typical Israeli Scrabble player!

Warawut Seahko.

He barely spoke English, and he left the country a couple of days later. But he would have to be the first, after delaying his world travels for so long. The pity is, we could have been playing Scrabble (and eating Chinese food) during his four-month furlough.

Next in But Seriously: spell-binding recollections from those 20 years.

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