‘Word Wars’

An offering at the New Jersey Film Festival takes a look into the subculture of Scrabble addiction.

By: Bob Brown

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Three-time National Scrabble Champion Joe Edley, well-known for his unbreakable concentration, is one of four players followed in Word Wars.


   Maybe you’re pretty good with words. You do crossword puzzles in ink. You don’t have to look things up in the dictionary. You always win when you and friends sit down to a friendly game of Scrabble. But if you have time to read this newspaper, then you’re totally inadequate.
   There’s a whole other world to discover in Word Wars, which was inspired by Stefan Fatsis’s book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, and directed by Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo. This is a window to the subculture of Scrabble addiction, which dominates the lives of the four nationally ranked players who are its subjects: We follow them in the nine-month period of tournaments leading up to the 2002 national tournament in San Diego. Sponsored by Scrabble-owner Hasbro, this is the Big Kahuna, where the overall winner walks away with $25,000. It’s not a huge pot by sports standards, but, hey, this isn’t championship golf with high-profile sponsors and well-heeled player-spectators. This is a board game that your grandmother plays. But the way these guys play it is a whole other level.

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   The four men couldn’t be more different. Joe Edley appears to be a calm, centered man with a wife and daughter. He practices Tai Chi and gets acupuncture before big tournaments. "If you focus too much on winning," he says, "you will have many wins and many losses." It’s a self-perpetuating emotional roller-coaster that he defeats by "getting rid of the negative stuff…That extra step — champion — is basically someone who has total control over their responses." He gets lost in the hotel lobby.
   Matt Graham, a wired young guy whose house is a jumble of word books and journals ("Here’s the International Journal of Verbal Aggression"), works anagrams in his sleep. "I do use brain-function stuff," he admits, "but I’m actually a little low on it at this point, which is one reason maybe why I got slaughtered in my last tournament." From "Picolinate," one of his supplements that isn’t in the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary, he casually teases out "antipolice," which is.

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Trash-talking Scrabble player Marlon Hill’s eccentric behavior make for many humorous moments in the documentary Word Wars.


   The slight, sickly looking "G.I." Joel Sherman ("The G.I. stands for gastrointestinal reflux") interrupts his games for trips to the john. He’s constantly belching and wiping stomach acid from his lips. He denies being a genius and accepts that "I have developed one skill beyond what most people would dream of. But it is not a skill which most people would pay you to develop." As such, he doesn’t have meaningful work. His waking hours are spent on word lists and strategy.
   Like Sherman, Marlon Hill, a foul-mouthed, dope-smoking denizen of East Baltimore, is "happily poor… I do absolutely nothing for a living." What he does is follow the tournament circuit, hoping to make a little here, a little there. "$10,000 is good. But $25,000 would be nicer." He shares dirt-cheap rooms with Graham in tournament towns, where they fill idle time by playing Scrabble. "He thinks I’m his friend," Hill says of Graham, with whom he has a chummy rapport. "But I’m not."

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"G.I." Joel Sherman is one of four Scrabble enthusiasts highlighted in Word Wars.


   Each ranked player has a different approach to the game, and to life. But they all share one trait: For them, Scrabble is beyond a game, it’s a life. As John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association notes, "It’s not enough to know the words and be brilliant." The top players are not affluent. "They structure their lives to devote four to five hours daily to Scrabble."
   Is success based on the luck of which seven tiles you draw in each round? "You can beat God if you get the right tiles," says a grizzled hobbyist player from the informal Washington Square Park regulars in New York. Is a wide vocabulary an advantage? "Word meanings are absolutely useless in this environment," scoffs Hill. You don’t have to know what "et," "re," "ef," "mo" or "al" mean, just that they’re accepted by the official dictionary. They’re the kinds of words that can bridge two longer words down the board to build big points, perhaps even the elusive "Bingo," a word that uses up all your seven tiles and earns you 50 bonus points.
   By centering the film on the coming national tournament, the filmmakers build tension and drama into what could have been just a peek at a kooky world of social misfits. You come to care about the characters and their fortunes. And you develop hunches about who will bag the prize on tournament week, an exhausting four-day span of eight timed games a day, 25 minutes per player. The clocks start whether you’re at your board or not. It’s a surprisingly amusing nail-biter.
   Since the film was made, Scrabble has become almost as popular as tournament poker. In 2003, ESPN and Hasbro co-sponsored the first televised national tournament. Just this month, the National Scrabble Association announced that the 2005 national tournament will be held the last week of August in Reno, Nev., and that the event is now annual. Prize money, too, has grown with the audience. It’s four times the pot offered just three years ago. Perhaps now "G.I." Joel could even get a sponsor contract from the purple pill, Nexium.
Word Wars will be screened at the New Jersey Film Festival, Rutgers University, Scott Hall Room 123, 43 College Ave., April 8-10, 7 p.m. Matt Graham will answer questions following the April 8 screening. Tickets cost $6, $5 seniors/students. For information, call (732) 932-8482. On the Web: www.njfilmfest.com