14/6/02

Cross words

We've had some funny, frantic and frightful moments in 20 years of Israeli Scrabble tournaments.

 

Scrabble is a sedate game played by friendly people, with a book of rules and a squabble-proof dictionary, so running a tournament should be nice and easy, right?

Not exactly.

We've seen it all in more than 30 Scrabble tournaments. Going right back to the first one -- egads, 20 years ago this week! -- there was a fellow who left in the middle of the tourney to go fight in a war, and a retired ex-stripper who enjoyed baiting prim old ladies by playing shocking words. In one game, the vaudevillian played DILDO, cackled, and was promptly challenged. I rushed over with my dictionary, dutifully looked it up, and poker-faced, pronounced it good.

"What's it mean?" the innocent old girl asked.

"Uh, I can't say," I stammered.

The ex-stripper goaded me. "Tell her! Tell her!"

I hid behind the rules book, which prohibits me from defining a word during play, "but after the game," I smiled back at the exposeuse, "you tell her."

A tournament director has to be strict and sometimes forceful, which was a problem for me, because I was young (26 when it all began), and still constrained by my parents' edict to respect my elders -- which most of the players were.

So you can imagine my horror when this happened: an elderly gentleman took umbrage after losing a challenge, arose in the middle of a game, loudly announced his outrage at me, and said he was quitting. I had to quickly subdue him before he upset the other players, and persuade him to continue, but without yielding to his petulance. It so happened he was a rabbi. A venerable rabbi. A former chief rabbi of South Africa. And my parents were right there, at nearby tables, playing in the tournament. And I think my father would've spanked me right there had I opened a mouth. What I did, was whisper into the rabbi's ear that he was making a fool of himself, setting a bad example for others, embarrassing me in front of my parents, and besides, he was dead wrong. He accepted all but the last point, and resumed play.

Funny thing is, what set him off was a disagreement between his Book and mine. He had played CRAZEST, was challenged, I looked it up, and said sorry, unacceptable. He blew up. He insisted that any verb can be conjugated biblically with the suffix EST: "Thou goest, thou doest, thou crazest," he thundered at me. I pointed out, respectfully, that at a Scrabble tournament this is the Bible, and thou canst arguest all you want, if it ain't there, it ain't good.

He scowled through the rest of the competition, but he did get in the last word: afterwards, the Voice of Israel did a radio program about the tournament, and wouldn't you know, the interviewer chirpily called upon the rabbi for comments -- obviously assuming he'd have nothing but kind words. Well! She happened to ask him: "Did you play any interesting words?," and we proceeded to debate the silly issue on air.

A year later, in 1984, I respected my elder for as long as I could, but then let 'im have it. He wasn't even a participant. His wife and her opponent had come to me and said they couldn't complete their game. Why not, I asked.

"She plays too fast," one said.

"She plays too slow," the other said.

I reminded them that this is a tournament, not kindergarten, and they're adults, and they should work out a way to finish the game. They refused. Well, I had enough to handle with 73 other players milling about and needing me for one thing or another; I ruled that if they could not provide a final score, then both would forfeit and be given a loss.

The husband, whose wife was winning the game at that point, plowed into the crowd around me to defend her. Shouting and berating, he capped his tirade with an ominous threat: "I'm going to complain to the Scrabble authorities about this!"

With all the lung power I had, I blasted back at him: "SIR, I AM THE SCRABBLE AUTHORITIES!"

I should consider myself lucky I wasn't sued. That happened to the Scrabble authorities in England, because they failed to watch someone's pees and queues. A player successfully sued the organizers of a tournament, because he wasn't given sufficient time to go to the bathroom -- there was a long queue, because the tournament players were sharing the hotel with a cowboy convention -- and he was late for his next game.

YOU SHOULDN'T get the idea that these tournaments are all confrontational. Really, they're lots of fun. Sometimes, a person even laughs...

The legendary Roz Grossman had a cold, but it didn't keep her from playing either Scrabble, or after sessions, the piano. She had to take very large pills, which her son dispensed on schedule. She was hamming it up between games, and as usual, drew a crowd. She grabbed one of the two pills, flicked it down -- and fell silent. It was stuck in her throat. It wouldn't go up or down, she was gasping desperately for breath. Nothing we did helped. After 10 minutes, amid growing panic, she couldn't fight for breath anymore, and she was turning blue. Some people started crying. We figured, this is it. Her son leaned over her, and a hush fell upon us. "Ma," he said gravely, opening his hand, "does this mean you're not taking the second pill?" Everyone burst into laughter -- including Roz, and the pill discharged from her throat. (Which proves that laughter is the best medicine.)

The near-disasters: we could laugh about them later.

A woman in her 80s fell and broke her collarbone, just as a tournament was about to start. She was rushed to hospital. She commanded the doctors to just wrap her arm in a sling and staggered back to the tournament, gamely playing the rest of the way.

People sure can be funny -- both peculiar and ha-ha.

A disagreement with a player ended abruptly when she stalked away from me, marched up to my mother, and complained bitterly to her about me. Can you imagine!

I must say, most people enjoy these tournaments, but you can't please everyone. After several years, I found out why. At the end of a weekend, a couple of ladies bellyached at length, and I realized it was a semi-annual ritual: they did this after every tournament. Well, I was always upset if anyone went home unhappy; I asked why they kept coming back, and one of them chirped: "Oh, we LIKE to complain, that's why we come!"

A curmudgeon objected to my use of first names on the tournament standings, insisting she be accorded respect as Dr. So-and-so. No one had ever complained about this, not other doctors, professors, rabbis or Leopoldo, the military attache of the Philippines, who played in our second tournament. "I will only call you 'Doctor,'" I responded to her tartly, "in a medical emergency."

I used to award a consolation prize to whoever finished dead last, but learned the hard way to ask first. One player, surprised to be "honored" at the awards ceremony, angrily thanked me very much for embarrassing her.

But there was one masochist who didn't mind. A player unknown to us registered for the Whiz Division, insisting that he wanted to test himself against good competition. We couldn't dissuade him. We at the cutthroat level (I played in that tourney) drooled in anticipation of a bonus baby, a rare treat. The unflinchingly courageous naif finished 0-13, -2411 (which means he lost every game by an average of almost 200 points); the next-worst cumulative differential was -325. His score averaged out to 246-438. Few people anywhere in the world have ever done as badly. Oddly, his best results came against the top three finishers ("the hare and the tortoise" syndrome), and he very nearly beat me. He was awarded the coveted Nice Guy Award, by unanimous vote, which proved that everyone loves a good loser.

IT'S A war of words, this Scrabble, and logomachy ("strife over mere words") sometimes breaks out. In the heat of competition, people can really crazest. There's a dictionary that eliminates all argument about acceptability, but some people just have to argue. Neophytes often presume that one has to know the definitions of wordsplayed; they don't always understand that words are just tools of the , and nothing more.

An English teacher stormed out after a game, declaring that the acceptablility of YA was the final straw -- while at that moment, two tables away, her husband was gloating over his clever use of the word YA. (English teachers make the worst players, because they think this is a game of literacy, which it ain't.)

Many players do poorly at their maiden tournament, but don't give up, become regular attendees at clubs and catch on -- then show their stuff at the next competition. (We like to pay as much attention to the bottom of the standings as the top.)

But of course, some folks, given every opportunity to learn, don't.

A nice lady from the Tel Aviv club -- not one of our best players, but never mind -- was listening intently to an expert waxing about strange words. She mentioned to tournament director Evan Cohen that she had learned all these exotic words, singling out OUGUIYA (which she pronounced like the Hebrew word for cookie). She said she looked forward to playing the word (which is a coin of Mauritania), but Evan explained that the likelihood of playing it were close to zero. It wasn't worth trying to remember such weirdies. Undaunted, she continued discussing her funky new word throughout the first evening. And wouldn't you know, the next day, Evan was making the rounds among the tables, heard this same woman kvetching about her awful opening rack, and peered over her shoulder at ... AGIOUU and a blank! Needless to say, she didn't find OUGUIYA. Evan never had the heart to tell her. She'll know now.

We've given away a lot of trophies in those 30 tournaments, and more than 1,000 prizes ranging from a box of Alpha-Bits (get it?) to a trip to San Francisco. One last-place finisher got the most suitable prize I could think of: a list of two-letter words. We had a player best described as the John MacEnroe of Scrabble, and somebody won an invitation to his wedding, as a booby prize. And I once awarded a special consolation prize to a woman who finished fourth: "My child." She was my pregnant wife.

After she cashed in that prize, I stopped directing tournaments, and I've managed to play in a few arranged by others. Just yesterday, I returned from a tournament in Turkey, organized by Ami Tzubery of Moshav Beit Zayit. I can't tell you the pressure I've been under to win that one. I already have two nice trophies on my shelf, but it's not enough: "Daddy, you have to get one more," my triplet daughters have been nagging me, "so we can each have one."

_