Spent the past week in New Orleans at the National Scrabble Championship. Did shittily (more on that later), but some of you may have seen this story in the "Offbeat" or "News of the weird" or "Strange but true" section of your local newspaper or AP feed. In the words of Iñigo Montoya, lemme 'splain.
About ten years ago, a Holocaust survivor was horrified to find that the second edition of the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary (OSPD2) contained the term JEW, as a verb, meaning "to haggle". They notified the Anti-Defamation League, who in turn complained to Hasbro (Scrabble's North American manufacturer). Despite the English language actually CONTAINING THE WORD IN QUESTION, Hasbro decided that JEW, and dozens of other words deemed "offensive" should be removed from the next edition, OSPD3 (including such patently dangerous words as BOOBIE, GRINGO and FART). Of course, this is silly, since in Scrabble, words are merely tools for scoring - I actually had a player from Thailand, who spoke little to no English, lay down FUCK against me in one of our games without batting so much as an eyelash. At any rate, the National Scrabble Association (NSA) pushed Hasbro and Merriam-Webster to create a list of words only - no definitions - that would be used as the official source for tournament Scrabble play. Thus the Official Tournament and Club Word List was born.
Fast-forward a decade, to this year's announcement that none other than ESPN wished to make a one-hour special condensed telecast of the NSC finals. Well, except for the fact that there ARE no finals - the winner has always been determined on win-loss record, with cumulative spread (the number of points by which you defeat your opponents) serving as the tiebreaker. But this is ESPN, so they contrived a best-of-five finale, and also made the provision that since certain words could not be broadcast on television, that they could not be used in the finals. The only problem is that this list was either never prepared, or never agreed upon by ESPN and the NSA, or never provided to the finalists, or some combination of the foregoing.
The 400 or so of us that had gathered to watch the finals on closed-circuit TV didn't even notice it at first when Trey played LEZ (a slang term for "lesbian"), since we were so inured to the OSPD3 exclusions. Then suddenly Joe Edley (three-time national champion) throws his hands up in the first row and shouts "Hey! He can't play LEZ!". The players certainly didn't notice; it never dawned on the word judges, and for about a minute, nobody in the room knew what was going on - was play going to continue? Did someone alert the players/judges/TV crew? They immediately called an emergency meeting of the Advisory Board (who oversees general aspects of tournament Scrabble) as well as the Rules Committee.
As the article says, LEZ eventually did come off the board, but not before ESPN pretty much decided they didn't object to the word. I thought (only half-jokingly) that someone might have to put in a call to GLAAD to see what their opinion was on the matter, but ultimately - and rather ironically - the NSA was the one that made the call to censor their own game. A very strange situation indeed. In the end it didn't make a difference, as Trey won his third straight match, but it certainly made for the most interesting finals issue to ever arise...
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