Congratulations are long overdue for my friend Chris for attaining the rank of black belt in tae kwon do last week - he tested and successfully passed in his first attempt. I have yet to actually see him get to lay waste to someone but he's recounted a few tales - makes me glad to be his friend and not his enemy. I studied karate for a couple of years back in middle school and high school (along with many, many other things I don't do anymore, like piano lessons, Cub/Boy Scouts...boy, my parents kept me busy!) and got as far as orange belt. I had to miss my chance at testing for purple belt because I had to take my SSATs, and so ended my training to become the next Daniel-san...
November 2003 Archives
Just read this story on the Boston Globe web site. In case the text of the story has gone away, apparently in the town of Powell, Wyoming, there's a road named County Road 6FU, and residents have started to complain about its name. Notwithstanding the inherent humor in, for example, ordering a pizza and having it sent to "6FU", the proposed name change to the road is "Sheep Mountain Road".
Now...call me crazy, but is that any better? After all, couldn't the new name be interpreted as F-ewe?
(baa...)
My family has always been a game-playing family. Growing up we played plenty of board games and a ridiculous amount of cards. For the most part we don't play as much anymore, but there are still some traditions that revolve around games - Pictionary marathons on New Year's Eve, 99 when our friend Sinclair comes to visit, pinochle with my grandparents, and now mahjongg with the in-laws.
When I was probably 9 or 10 my father and I started playing Scrabble together. Just casual games around the table based on a fairly normal vocabulary. The games would stretch out almost interminably, which is what kept my mother and my middle brother from even sitting down to play us. In eighth grade I got a book called "The Ultimate Guide to Winning Scrabble". It's out of print now but the dog-eared copy is still floating around my parents' house somewhere. I immediately devoured it and started to challenge my father with my newfound strategy. The next year there was a decree from an English teacher at my high school that anyone who could beat him at Scrabble would get an A in his class. On my third try, I managed to eke out a win...and still get a B- because he wasn't MY teacher.
Around this time, or maybe a little bit after we moved to Maine the next year, my little brother Joey started playing Scrabble with me as well. For the first few years I would destroy him on a pretty regular basis, but once I went to college and found an online server, he started playing it more than I did, and improved very quickly. I went to my first tournament around 1995 and he started a year or two later, quickly passing me in the ranks. He's since won a bunch of big tournaments, qualified for the US team at the World Championships two years ago, and has basically been ranked higher than me for most of the last five years. We still play each other almost every time I go home, and despite the fact that he's a world-class player, our matches are closer than they should be - I probably beat him about 40% of the time even though I should only beat him about a quarter of the time. Now that I've been playing competitively for almost ten years, it's amazing how fanatical and devoted we all are, and how numerous.
But for the most part, Scrabble had never really gotten much coverage from major media. That all changed a couple of years ago when a Wall Street Journal reporter and NPR contributor named Stefan Fatsis published Word Freak, his 2001 book about the world of competitive Scrabble. It describes how he started to write the book, only to discover that he actually had an acumen for the game and decided to turn it into an experiential account rather than an observational one. Like I told a few people, it was the first book I've read where I actually knew some of the characters. It's a fascinating read even if you've never played the game before, and if you have, it's that much more engrossing. I've actually played (and beaten) the author a couple of times and had the pleasure of a dinner with him, Matt Graham (one of the central characters of the book) and the late Bob Felt, one of the game's first true geniuses.
Once Word Freak came out, the buzz around it was bigger than anything had ever been in the Scrabble world, and media outlets began to take notice. Apparently two separate companies have optioned the book for a movie, and the most recent culmination was this past weekend, when at 3:30(ish) they aired almost a full hour of the Scrabble All*Stars championship. The tournament itself was a little bit contrived - they basically invited anyone from the US who'd ever won a national or world championship, and then filled the rest of the field of 24 with the top X number of players - which just happened to include my brother.
The field played 18 games, and then the top two finishers squared off in a best-of-five match, which was the real meat of the program. Stefan was one of the announcers, and they really gave the whole thing the ESPN treatment - the graphics detailing players' records, the colored cloth backdrop for interviews, the players' names and information along the bottom of the screen...ESPN was actually recognizing us, even if it was only for 53 minutes. They had running commentary (edited, of course) for three of the four games, and while there wasn't anything spectacular pulled out during those three, it was once again quite a trip to have coverage of people I know and have played against. My proudest moment though, was seeing the final standings of the main event, and the name "Joey Mallick" in fifth place, with an 11-7 record. My brother ended up winning $2500 for that fifth-place finish, which is more than twice as much as he's gotten for WINNING other tournaments. I've gotta study more...
