The clack of Scrabble tiles. The excitement of throwing down a word such as "lemuroid" (pertaining to lemurs) to rack up the big score.
Maybe it's not quite the NFL, but ESPN is bringing the cerebral thrills of big-time Scrabble to the small screen tomorrow with a televised account of the Scrabble All-Star competition held at the Rhode Island Convention Center Aug. 15-18. It airs at 3:30 p.m.
John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association, says this is the first nationally televised Scrabble match in history. The competition was jointly sponsored by ESPN and Hasbro, which makes Scrabble.
Mike Humes, a spokesman for ESPN, said the cable sports channel covers poker and spelling bees, so why not Scrabble? "It's a niche sport," Humes said.
Is Scrabble a sport?
"Well, some say it is, some say it isn't," Humes said. "It's a popular game with a lot of fans."
Indeed, 40 million people play Scrabble, according to the Scrabble Association, located in Greenport, Long Island.
Williams said ESPN spends the first 20 minutes of the hour-long show describing the competition, the players, and setting up the showdown between the finalists, Georgia software engineer Ron Tiekert and South Carolina math professor David Gibson.
The rest of the show is devoted to the last match, with the winner getting $50,000.
The ESPN camera goes back and forth between the isolated room where Tiekert and Gibson are going letter-to-letter, and a larger room equipped with a giant Scrabble board where Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak, a best-selling look at the Scrabble subculture, and ESPN anchor Cara Capuano provide the play-by-play and color commentary.
Williams said getting the game on TV has been a long-term goal of the Scrabble Association. When he first pitched the idea to ESPN a year ago, he said, the sports cable channel needed some convincing.
Williams pointed to those 40 million Scrabble players, and to Scrabble's rising cultural profile.
Fatsis's book Word Freak has been optioned by moviemaker Curtis Hanson, who did L.A. Confidential and 8 Mile.
Williams said there's another Scrabble movie in the works, a romance called Your Word Against Mine that's set at a Scrabble tournament.
"I knew if I could just get in a room with these guys, I could persuade them," he said.
Williams said he hopes tomorrow's Scrabble broadcast, which will be repeated several times on ESPN (Nov. 23, Dec. 23, Jan. 2) will lead to more Scrabble programming.
The next national championship, for example, is set for New Orleans next summer, and Williams is hoping ESPN will be there.
