ESCAPEs by Daniel Tunnard

Author:Daniel Tunnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Florence 267, Buenaventura 232

7

When I started playing in Spanish, after the Atlanta fiasco—I mean, I really should have learned from the Atlanta fiasco—it was pretty much an open secret within the sport that the Spanish game was utterly, irreparably corrupt, and the source of such corruption was the Gilbert sisters and their crooked ways. Several of the more squeaky-clean players grew disillusioned with the way Scrabble was being played or, if you want a more honest interpretation, they soiled themselves heavily on realizing that the Scrafia was exactly the mafioso movement they’d been denying it was, the corrupt racket that had been bankrolling the game since the early 1990s, and they hotfooted it and formed a rival Spanish Scrabble organization, the FISE. (The acronym originally stood for Fedération International des Sports Extrêmes, as a joke, but the kind of joke that ends up being a bit too true, and then they changed it to something far more prosaic when, by tremendous coincidence, they discovered that there already existed an actual international federation of extreme French sports.)

But, but. You want to see for yourself. You don’t want to believe the rumours. Also, you want to win the World Cup in Spanish and make a pile of money. And you hope beyond hope that this man you married will go back to being the man you met and not the man he’s become.

(We did ponder for some time what extreme French sports there were. Fire pétanque? The mind boggled.)

Buena never stopped looking for whatever he was looking for. It was like he was using Scrabble as a stepping stone to something bigger. What could possibly be bigger than Scrabble? Idiot. After the Olympics he was offered some advertising work: a couple of whisky or beer ads, the face of Webster’s Dictionary (as if it needed a face), quite a lucrative one for Camel in Japan. (Perhaps the most improbable detail of this unlikely story is that Spanish-language Scrabble was just huge in Japan for much of the mid- to late nineties, and I mean screaming-schoolgirl, overexcited-TV-host huge. Escobar lapped it up. Of course he did.) Then he acted, or appeared, in a film. Conveniently Yours, starring Kevin Kline and Sandra Bullock, the kind of romcom more sympathetic critics called a merry jape, featuring a cameo from world Scrabble star Buenaventura Escobar as a grumpy English professor. Escobar is good at many things, but acting most certainly isn’t one of them. He didn’t do that again. He formed a band, Saarländischer Rundfunk, with Alex Winter (the one in Bill & Ted who wasn’t Keanu Reeves) and a former member of Soundgarden, some unlistenable prog album called Hyppolyte Wouters that’s still selling reasonably.

One great illustration of what Buenaventura was like, of who this man was whom I’d so hastily married, can be found in TV footage of the 1995 Worlds. Prior to televisation, Scrabble had been a solitary affair; you were alone with your letters, and no one ever knew what they were or what better things you might have done with them.

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