The Lush Places Heavyweight Championship of Scrabble wasn’t what you’d call a gala event. It was held on a cold autumn Saturday at the dinner table with the heater on and a view of all the leaves that needed tidying from the garden path.
The players hadn’t made much of an effort, either. They both wore slippers, one hadn’t shaved, and neither had bothered doing their hair.
No wonder the only spectator to turn up got bored, started cleaning herself and then went back to bed.
But for the two facing off over the board, this was to be a clash of the titans, a one-game decider as to which member of the Lush Places Scrabble Club was to have bragging rights as champion for 2024 and would become holder of the club’s coveted winner’s trophy, the Golden Sheep.
The loser, meanwhile, receives the Graham Henry Booby Prize (it commemorates the All Blacks’ pathetic 2007 World Cup quarter-final loss to France), and I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be me who’d be getting it. One doesn’t like to brag, but on previous form, I was the clear favourite. The club’s records, although incomplete and disputed by one member, show twice as many wins for me. At Lush Places, I am the Tiger Woods of Scrabble.
Michele, however, is much the better speller, has a broader vocabulary and reads three books a week. She also claims she has what Vladimir Putin would call “kompromat” – an impressive 19-point word meaning compromising material – on her opponent.
She asserts – though never proven in a court of law – that she once caught me looking in the bag for a better letter tile, which in Scrabble is a Lance Armstrong-level of cheating that, if proven, could have me given a life ban from the club.
I wish to make it clear that whatever Michele says, this event never took place. It is simply a deranged accusation from an unscrupulous competitor, a complete fiction used by her to play mind games with me when she’s losing.
For any further comment on the matter, I direct you to my lawyers, Sue, Grabbit and Runne.
Scrabble is a noble game. However, those who play it, amateur or professional, can exhibit some wildly ignoble behaviour. In 1996, for example, a US woman from Hagerstown, in Maryland, was charged with second-degree assault after her husband was struck in the forehead with a Scrabble board. In Leicester, in the UK, a 5-year-old boy once reportedly called police to complain that his sister was cheating.
Then there’s Allan Simmons, a star British player who authored books on the game, as well as covering it for the Times newspaper. Back in 2017, the Association of British Scrabble Players banned him for three years when three independent witnesses saw him put a hand with freshly drawn tiles back into a bag to draw more tiles. Imagine doing that? What a cad.
By comparison, and despite all the sledging, the Lush Places Heavyweight Championship of Scrabble 2024 was a less controversial affair. As she does every game, Michele swore in frustration each time she took new tiles out of the bag, and inevitably she demanded to know whether I could “remember that time you were caught looking in the bag”, though she did wait an hour before saying it.
For the first three-quarters of the game, it was closely fought as we traded words and insults over the board. She got “brat” in early, saying before she played it, “This is what you are.” Two moves later, I said, “This is what you’re doing to me”, as I made the word “irk”. Then she played “something I am, but you’re not”, which turned out to be “adult”.
However, it was her far-from-sheepish “bleat” that changed the game, with Michele jumping out to a 30-point lead that I could not pull back.
As I presented her with the Golden Sheep and shook her hand, I thought I sounded sincere in my congratulations. But in my heart, I was sneakily looking in the Scrabble bag for six new tiles, a “B”, a “U”, a “G”, another “G”, an “E” and a “R”.
