The Crossword Century by Alan Connor

The Crossword Century by Alan Connor

Author:Alan Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-25T16:00:00+00:00


BREAK THIS WITH SOME EGGS?

FAST

The urge to time your solve

Got up

Had shave

Did Times crossword

Had another shave

—ROGER MCGOUGH

The wonderful 2006 documentary about crosswords, Wordplay, shows us two very different worlds. There are the famous solvers—Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, Mike Mussina—and those who are not so renowned outside crosswording circles. Or you might think of the same two groups as the casual puzzle fans, who grab a crossword when they can, and the devotees, who see each puzzle as training for the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, in which they will race other super-solvers at the Marriott hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, each year.

I see them differently. I see the happy solvers and the damned.

Clinton, Stewart, Mussina, and the others smile as they describe their relationships with the grid—in these moments, it is a movie about pleasure. In invidious contrast are the faces of the time-obsessed entrants, in particular that of the astonishingly gifted Al Sanders.

The movie follows Sanders and other contestants as they prepare for and then attend the twenty-eighth tournament. The viewer might well wish that he or she were there, too. It’s a weekend away from everything except puzzles: collegiate, mutually supportive, occasionally silly, and always proud. Yes, it’s an alluring world—except for the actual business of the timed tournament puzzles.

Al Sanders makes it to the final. He looks every inch the winner. And, in fact, he finishes first—but after he announces “done,” he notices that he has omitted to fill in two squares. The shots of the moment of realization—Sanders hurling his noise-reduction headphones to the floor, then gasping, red-faced and bent double—are heartrending. But they are also evidence of the inevitable result of timing crosswords.

You see the same thing in a book by solver Marc Romano called Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession. Romano enters the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and his is a tale of anxiety, apprehension, and anguish that ends with the competition wreaking psychological and physical havoc as he collapses at home, a broken man.

It’s the same at the British equivalent, the Times Crossword Championship. There, the winner is the same man every year, a finance director called Mark Goodliffe. His solving is enjoyable from afar—losing some valuable seconds considering whether RAISINY is a word before returning to his relentless decryption of cryptics. More enjoyable, though, is the annual response from perennial runner-up Peter Brooksbank.

Goodliffe skipped the 2007 final because his wife had given birth two days before. Brooksbank quipped: “If he could be persuaded to have another one, that would be useful.” A later wheeze, to create a distraction: “You could slip a mobile phone into his pocket and get someone to phone it.” In 2010 he was terser: “I’m going to have to kill him.”

These are gags, but ones delivered through gritted teeth. They are also a warning not to get involved. Usain Bolt might be able to run the 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, but that doesn’t mean there’s no point in the rest of us ever exercising. Indeed,



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