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B OOK R EVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS / REZENSIONEN 119
Stefan FATSIS,
Word freak: heartbreak, triumph, genius, and obsession in the world of competitive Scrabble
players. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 23.6 x 16.0 cm, xii + 372 pp., b/w diagrams.
ISBN 0-618-01584-1. Price: USD25.00.
Fatsis’s book on the tournament Scrabble subculture in America is ostensibly a journalist’s
attempt to come to terms with a modern-day “mind sport,” a thinking person’s
competition that nevertheless embodies the sports-like passions carefully selected for the
subtitle. Fatsis mentions chess often, as do Scrabble players generally, though his own
traditional mind sport was backgammon and its variants plakato and moultezimi as learned
in summers on his father’s ancestral home on the Greek island of Chios (p. 23). Only
now, Fatsis is a sportswriter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of a well-received
book on the revival of minor league baseball in the American Midwest. It is while “searching
for a quirky subculture to write about,” he confesses in a press release, that he comes
upon S.L. Price’s article on the world of tournament Scrabble, “Your Words Against
Mine,” in, of all places, an issue of Sports Illustrated magazine (December 18, 1995).
But unlike all his other writing projects, ranging from athletic contest negotiations
to minor league baseball management, Scrabble converts Fatsis bit by bit until he alternately
forgets about journalism (p. 307), excuses his enthusiasm by attributing it to journalism
(p. 326), and takes pride in being a Scrabble player (p. 331). He renounces his
image as a pseudo-athletic George Plimpton, the iconic journalist who, for the sake of
a story, temporarily became a second-string member of a major American football team
(Paper Tiger, 1965), and he begins to see himself as “an athlete who has to work harder
to compensate for limited natural talent” (p. 284).
Thus, what seems at the beginning like a firsthand account of a subculture starts to
look suspiciously like a memoir, pure and simple. When Fatsis writes about driving out
to Stanfordville, New York to visit the white colonial house and tiny archives of the late
Alfred Butts – the uninspired and unemployed architect who was tinkering with Scrabble
precursors by 1933 before developing the real thing (pp. 89 ff.) – he is no longer describing
what the average or even the curious tournament player thinks about the legendary
Butts, but trying to flesh out his book with privileged information. Some of the scholarly
digressions on the history of games and dictionaries were likewise prompted by
Fatsis’s own more immediate lugubrious states of defeat at the Scrabble table (p 267). Ten
of the twenty-two chapters (plus epilogue), including the last five, are titled with a simple
four-digit number designating Fatsis’s rating at those stages in the story. The book is
primarily an account of the author’s climb to the level of “expert,” Fatsis is himself the
“word freak” (singular) of the book’s title, and any interpretation of the game will have
to be abstracted from that three-dimensional though articulate life.
The reading is therefore exciting but a bit frustrating. Word Freak is meant as a sports
autobiography and is unburdened by endnotes or index, though the author thoughtfully
provides a beginning “note” containing the basic rules of the game and an explanation
of the conventions for notations used throughout the book, especially the handful
of diagrams of key stages in some of the more illustrative games. Also included are three