Teach
12-30-2013, 10:10 AM
This is a story about a friendship, a rivalry and a board game.
He resembled one of the characters in the 1984 movie: "Revenge of the Nerds". He was bright, thoughtful, and for many years, my best friend. His name was Howie Foster.
Well, I first met Howie when we both attended the same Boston high school. He was "the brain" (come to think of it, I was kinda "nerdy" myself) of our Dorchester-Mattapan group. Oh, he'd play sports with the rest of us, but I know - by his own admission - that he wasn't one of the better athletes . In fact, he once told me that he was fitted for glasses when he was only one year-old.
One of the things Howie and I shared was a love of the Boston Red Sox. We would both avidly follow the Sox in a day and age (late-1950s to early 1960s) when Boston had fielded a host of mediocre teams.
Yet, the one game that Howie and I enjoyed the most had nothing to do with baseball but everything to do with square-tiled letters with numbered values - Scrabble.
During this time -- Howie was a senior in high school and I was a junior -- we played Scrabble three or four times a week. We approached our Scrabble games with the same intensity that Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky had when they played their chess matches.
Picture two brainy (well, at least Howie was brainy) guys sitting at the table bent over a board game. We were both fixated on the board in front of us pondering our next move. You could literally hear a pin drop.
What made our matches so interesting was that we both had good vocabularies (six years of Latin will do that for you).
Well, things got so competitive between Howie and me that I started reading the dictionary on the throne. While other boys my age might have been oogling Playboy, Sir or Oui on their bathroom hopper, I had my trusty Funk & Wagnalls.
Yet, our Scrabble matches were not simply coming up with the best words that would lead to the most points, they were also about not setting up your opponent with a possible triple-word score or a highly-valued triple letter score.
As was usually the case in our head-to-head, mano-e-mano matches, the outcome would often come down to the last letters. It was usually easy to get rid of vowels during the end-game, but consonants - they posed a greater problem. It was at times like these that you'd be thinking about the musical scale, or type sizes, or prepositions as a way of getting rid of all yours letters. However, being stuck with a Q or Z at the end of the game would often pose a serious problem.
Well, after several months of playing Scrabble, we both decided to make our matches more interesting. We were going to add a monetary value as prize. We were going to play for "K". No, this wasn't the "K," as in: This job pays $50k, e.g., $50,000. This represented the value of the letter "K" in Scrabble - 5 points, or simply stated: a nickel (hey, we were poor kids growing up in an inner-city Boston neighborhood).
What would happen, just before we started the game was that either Howie or I pointed to the letter "K". If the other person nodded (sounds like some secret society with secret handshakes and code words), the winner of the match would receive a nickel from the loser. We did this, by the way, because Howie's mother was opposed gambling in her house. This was a way to get around it.
Well, it's been several years since Howie and I have played a Scrabble match (I haven't seen him in well over a decade). Yet I know if I ever do see him again, we'll definitely have sit down and play yet another Scrabble match.
Only this time, maybe we can double up the value of our matches. If that turns out to be the case one of us will point to the letter "Q" -- and the other player will simply nod.
He resembled one of the characters in the 1984 movie: "Revenge of the Nerds". He was bright, thoughtful, and for many years, my best friend. His name was Howie Foster.
Well, I first met Howie when we both attended the same Boston high school. He was "the brain" (come to think of it, I was kinda "nerdy" myself) of our Dorchester-Mattapan group. Oh, he'd play sports with the rest of us, but I know - by his own admission - that he wasn't one of the better athletes . In fact, he once told me that he was fitted for glasses when he was only one year-old.
One of the things Howie and I shared was a love of the Boston Red Sox. We would both avidly follow the Sox in a day and age (late-1950s to early 1960s) when Boston had fielded a host of mediocre teams.
Yet, the one game that Howie and I enjoyed the most had nothing to do with baseball but everything to do with square-tiled letters with numbered values - Scrabble.
During this time -- Howie was a senior in high school and I was a junior -- we played Scrabble three or four times a week. We approached our Scrabble games with the same intensity that Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky had when they played their chess matches.
Picture two brainy (well, at least Howie was brainy) guys sitting at the table bent over a board game. We were both fixated on the board in front of us pondering our next move. You could literally hear a pin drop.
What made our matches so interesting was that we both had good vocabularies (six years of Latin will do that for you).
Well, things got so competitive between Howie and me that I started reading the dictionary on the throne. While other boys my age might have been oogling Playboy, Sir or Oui on their bathroom hopper, I had my trusty Funk & Wagnalls.
Yet, our Scrabble matches were not simply coming up with the best words that would lead to the most points, they were also about not setting up your opponent with a possible triple-word score or a highly-valued triple letter score.
As was usually the case in our head-to-head, mano-e-mano matches, the outcome would often come down to the last letters. It was usually easy to get rid of vowels during the end-game, but consonants - they posed a greater problem. It was at times like these that you'd be thinking about the musical scale, or type sizes, or prepositions as a way of getting rid of all yours letters. However, being stuck with a Q or Z at the end of the game would often pose a serious problem.
Well, after several months of playing Scrabble, we both decided to make our matches more interesting. We were going to add a monetary value as prize. We were going to play for "K". No, this wasn't the "K," as in: This job pays $50k, e.g., $50,000. This represented the value of the letter "K" in Scrabble - 5 points, or simply stated: a nickel (hey, we were poor kids growing up in an inner-city Boston neighborhood).
What would happen, just before we started the game was that either Howie or I pointed to the letter "K". If the other person nodded (sounds like some secret society with secret handshakes and code words), the winner of the match would receive a nickel from the loser. We did this, by the way, because Howie's mother was opposed gambling in her house. This was a way to get around it.
Well, it's been several years since Howie and I have played a Scrabble match (I haven't seen him in well over a decade). Yet I know if I ever do see him again, we'll definitely have sit down and play yet another Scrabble match.
Only this time, maybe we can double up the value of our matches. If that turns out to be the case one of us will point to the letter "Q" -- and the other player will simply nod.