masuga.com

I just received a postcard advertising ESPN’s upcoming coverage of the National Scrabble Championship finals. This postcard looks like it arrived 28 years after it was sent out. Maybe it was sitting in the dead letter office all that time (cue polite laughter). I’m sorry, but this card isn’t going to make anyone who already wasn’t going to watch it want to watch it.

Don’t get me wrong - I love Scrabble. I’m actually a card-carrying member of the National Scrabble Association of America. I joined shortly after reading Stefan Fatsis’ entertaining Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players and discovering that Grand Rapids had a decent club going that met every Tuesday night at the Barnes & Noble on 28th street. To further confirm my utter Scrabble geekdom, I own:

• A set of custom tiles
• A digital Scrabble Clock - the Adjudicator 3000, no less
• the ‘OWL’ or Official Tournament and Club Word List, available only to members
• the PC game Scrabble Complete
• Everything Scrabble
• The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Third Edition)
• Scrabble Game folio
• one a’them fancy 50th Anniversary edition spinning boards with the recessed squares for your tiles

I realize that making Scrabble look anywhere near as cool as other borderline -boring TV “sports” (i.e. Poker, Chess) is a significant challenge. To most people, Scrabble isn’t cool. They don’t need or want to know that there are 96 good 2-letter words and that AA is one of them (consider that my free Scrabble tip of the day - you can play ‘AA’ and it’s alright). That’s fine. But for God’s sake, man, if you’re going to send out a postcard representing your “sport” because you’re finally getting national air-time, take a moment to make it interesting!

I guarantee that you can take a dramatic photo of someone (cool) involved in dense cerebral activity. Witness Mr. Bogart. Try shooting them from below. Accentuate the light a little in Photohop. Shoot someone that doesn’t look like your 7th-grade teacher Mr. Fangle. Crop the photo. Don’t photograph people with mullets. Put Stefan Fatsis on there! I’m sure he’d love to do it. The man loves Scrabble and writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal. He contributes on NPR - he’s respected.

This might be much ado about nothing, but I felt I had to say something.

This entry was posted 4 years, 1 month ago on Monday, September 27th, 2004 at 10:36 pm and is filed under General. Obligatory RSS 2.0 feed for these comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.