John D. Williams - Word Nerd: Dispatches From the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground

to Jane Ratsey Williams and George Merritt

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

OVER THE YEARS, PEOPLES REACTION TO my work has always been a blend of bemusement and bewilderment.

You may quite possibly have the most random job in the United States, a Los Angeles Times reporter once told me.

I bet youre a really good speller! at least 372 different people have remarked to their own amusement at various social gatherings.

I hate you. And if you insist on taking words like asshole, cunt and spic out of the SCRABBLE Dictionary, youre going to be sorry. I know where you live, and what you look like. This note was received from a disgruntledand anonymousword lover who had read a news story about the proposed cleansing of the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary .

Dad, next time can you please walk behind me? That was my thirteen-year-old daughter as we passed three boys from her class on the sidewalk in our small town. Hi, Mr. SCRABBLE! the boys had shouted to me.

John, this is a business. If you want to keep doing this, you have to think more like a marketing person and less like a SCRABBLE player, a senior Hasbro Games executive told me in a meeting.

John Williams cares nothing about the game and tournament players. I bet he doesnt even play SCRABBLE! Hes only in it for the money. That was posted by a West Coast veteran tournament player on a popular gamer website. A quick check of the official tournament statistics page revealed my SCRABBLE rating was almost 200 points higher than hers!

My wife and I have played a game of SCRABBLE every night for 47 years. I honestly think its keeping us alive! Thank you, a man from Ohio wrote.

We have to always remember that this game is bigger than all of us. That was from my wife and business partner, Jane Ratsey Williams.

Okay. Thats what some other people have said. Now its my turn.

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, my parents summoned me into the small den of our suburban home on Long Island. They sat me down opposite them and proceeded to outline a plan.

Look, John, we all know that your sister is the smart one, my father began as my mother nodded in agreement, so weve had to make a family decision about college. Your mother and I have agreed that we have to save our money so your sister can go to a well-known, prestigious school.

He then produced an envelope and withdrew five brochures. They were all from small, private mens colleges, each located in the middle of nowhere in Virginia, New England, or Pennsylvania and each with a bargain-priced tuition. It was up to me to select one.

Four years later, when I was twenty, my parents followed up that earlier confidence builder with a second sit-down in the same spot. My fathers tone was pretty much the same as well.

John, we need to be honest with each other here, he started out. By almost any criteria youve pretty much underperformed in college. For openers, you went from being a National Honor Society student at a very competitive suburban high school to a C student in college.

My mother was not going to be left out this time. Fortified by a couple of martinis, she jumped in. You screwed around too much. Youre completely irresponsible with money. Youre very immature.

While Id like to say those accusations were unfounded, the truth is they were not formed in a vacuum. So I said nothing.

Since this is your senior year in college, my father continued, its time to discuss the best plan for you after graduation.

My best bet, he said, was to find a large company that was willing to give me a chance. Once there, I needed to make sure that I did whatever they told me, showed up on time every day, and kept my mouth shut. And dont be a wise guy, he added.

Just follow that plan, and youll have no problems, my mother urged. Then you stay at that company for thirty or forty years. So when youre sixty-five, theyll take care of you until you die.

I remember considering their advice. For about five minutes. This book is about what I did instead.

Ill do us both a favor and bypass the early work experiences: the lemonade stand, the lawn mowing, the paper route. Weve all done some variation of these tasksdesigned to teach us the value of a dollar, project management, and other realities of working for or running an organization.

Moving forward, I need to clear up a couple of things. First, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, everything described in this book really happened over the last thirty years in the world of SCRABBLE. That said, there are a couple of disclaimers. For example, in some cases Ive changed names or completely left them out when legally necessary.

Ive also changed the venue in a couple of placesfrom a boardroom to a restaurant, from Chicago to Los Angeles, that kind of thing. Thats pretty much it. Oh yeah, I should also say that I suffer no illusions about my own role in all these stories. I have it on good authority from a disturbingly large and well-credentialed roster of people that the case could be made that at times I was overconfident, clueless, evasive, lazy, political, and dead wrong. And, of course, all the observations and opinions expressed in this book are mine only.

Mostly, though, Im proud of what Ive accomplished and experienced. I am humbled by the people Ive met and worked with. They include famous authors and journalists, numerous celebrities, brilliant game players, legendary word nerds, corporate CEOs, television and movie executives, my own colleagues at the National SCRABBLE Association (NSA), kids in the National School SCRABBLE Program, and so many more. All of them had critical roles in our collective mission to first revive a sagging SCRABBLE brand and then craft a plan to ensure the future of this glorious game. And Im thankful for all the remarkable people Ive met and worked with and the wild, random adventures this job afforded me.

Im thankful as well for the spectacular work atmosphere I enjoyed all those years. My office was in an old sea captains house on the East End of Long Island, almost exactly a hundred miles from midtown Manhattan. At the height of the NSAs activities, there were ten of us working there, the women outnumbering men two to one. Depending on the day, there were also as many as three dogs hanging around. We had a screened-in porch where we held our summer meetings and a kitchen where soup was invariably being made in the winter. The phone rang constantly; many days we fielded well over fifty calls. They ranged from people wanting us to settle a dispute over a rule or word to someone asking us to send a ninety-year-old lifelong SCRABBLE fan a birthday letter to a Hasbro executive asking for input on a new game idea.

Ironically, very little SCRABBLE was played on the premises during the workday. We were too damned busy. Among our core responsibilities:

Overseeing the activities of more than two hundred official SCRABBLE clubs throughout North America

Scheduling and sanctioning nearly three hundred SCRABBLE tournaments annually

Publishing the SCRABBLE News eight times a year

Maintaining the official tournament rating system

Coordinating up to seventy-five literacy fund-raising events annually

Working with publisher Merriam-Webster on updating the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary

Reviewing SCRABBLE book manuscripts and new product ideas for Hasbro

Searching the media and Internet for SCRABBLE knock-offs and trademark violations

Overseeing the National School SCRABBLE Program and doing outreach to schools, parks and recreation departments, educational conventions, libraries, and more