So after the first day of the New Orleans Scrabble Tournament, I packed up my stuff and began to head out to my car to make the hour and half drive back to Baton Rouge. With each step, the night seemed darker and the drive seemed longer. I started to think how fun it would be to hang out with people and talk about Scrabble. But here I was, slipping away like a shadow in the night.
"Why can't I stay the night?" I wondered to myself.
"Well, for one you don't have a room." I rebutted.
Everybody from the tournament was meeting at the nearby Copeland's. Somebody suggested that if I went out to it, I could try to find somebody to split a room with.
"At worst", I thought, "I can find a cheap flea-bag motel down the road."
So I flagged down the last car to Copeland's and met up with the twenty odd Scrabblers waiting for a table in the Copeland's doorway. I started telling people that I had decided to stay in New orleans rather than drive back and that I was looking for someone to share a room with. Almost immediately one of these strangers offered me his room.
"What's yor name?" I asked.
"Danny Kidd," he said.
We all sat at the same table and Danny started telling us all kinds of stories, all with a Scrabble twist, of course. Danny is retired. He winters in the Florida Keys, but he lives in Michigan. He decided to stop and play some Scrabble on his way back north.
When he started talking about his retirement he offered up this profound statement: "Scrabble saved my life". But he wasn't just talking about a game or about something to pass the time. He was also talking about a sense of community, and the competitive spirit (not just the will to beat your opponents, but the will to always get better).
Danny explained how although he didn't really have any degrees, he was still successful in his career. And I could tell from listening to him that he was somebody who was always thinking, and who liked to make decisions for himself.
But above all, he's a generous man. When we were hanging out in the hotel lobby, he overheard a kid asking the desk clerk if he could charge a can of soup from the hotel commissary on his parent's room. Before anybody could do anything, Danny already had a dollar out to buy the kid's soup for him. The next morning, when I offered to give Danny money for the room, he wouldn't accept it. Instead he challenged me to do the same for somebody else sometime down the line. He's the kind of guy who made friends with everybody that he talked with.
And he's full of stories. He's friends with the people who made the LeXpert program. He's hung out with a lot of the top players, and has a lot of stories about them--the good, the bad, and the ugly. He says his game is as good as it is, not because he studies a lot, but because he always plays people who are much better than him.
He asked me if I was studying the 1000 most probable 7 letter bingos. I told him I was, and that I would move onto the 8s after that. He said, "Forget the eights. Get those 1000 most probable sevens and learn all the fours, and you'll be a strong 1200 player, if not better."
We stayed up late, watching television obituaries of the pope, and talking about religion, labor unions, war, Scrabble and whatever else came to mind.
I hope sometime down line, I'll be able to take him up on his offer to stay at his place in Michigan for their big yearly tournament.
Oh yeah, Danny Kidd's NSA profile is kind of funny too.
Posted by Mike Waugh at April 25, 2005 08:33 PM | TrackBack