For Scrabble Players, It’s a Jumble Out There

Hers was a world in which a person’s connections spell success or failure.

Which explains why nearly 100 of the Los Angeles area’s most fervent word lovers were intently hunched over game boards and connecting letters Sunday at the annual Ethel Sherard Celebrity Scrabble Tournament in Pasadena.

Sherard was an Eagle Rock resident known as the “Scrabble Lady” when she died six years ago at 95. For thousands of players, she was the person who wrote the book on the game.

The best players have memorized most of the 100,000 words Sherard compiled in “The Double-List Word Book”--which arranges them by both the letters they begin and end with.

As a child growing up in Georgia, Sherard was a consistent spelling bee winner. She became hooked on Scrabble when she received a game as a Christmas gift in the early 1950s.

“When she played, she looked like this little old lady, someone you could take advantage of,” said tournament competitor Pete Skaggs. “But you couldn’t. She was winning right up to the last days of her life.”

Skaggs, a 44-year-old videotape editor from Westchester, is an expert Scrabble player. But he had just lost a playoff game, 431-336, to the tournament’s “celebrity” honoree--Los Angeles Scrabble club director Alan Stern.

That put Stern, 38, a Shadow Hills courier service dispatcher, in the running for the tournament’s $100 expert-division first prize.

Money wasn’t the motivation for Sunday’s five hours of competition, however. Enjoyment of mental stimulation was the force causing players to nervously watch their 25-minute game clocks as they drew random letters and tried to connect them into words that would win them points on the board.

The world’s highest-scoring Scrabble player was there. Mark Landsberg, a retired board-game inventor from Laguna Hills, scored a jaw-dropping 770 points in a 1993 game played in Los Angeles against Stern. It landed Landsberg a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

“I’m not the best player in the world. I just happened to have one of the luckiest games in the world,” said Landsberg, 60.

The element of luck--and surprise--keeps North America’s estimated 33 million devotees of Scrabble scrambling to find words.

“Scrabble is fresh from the beginning in every game,” said George Heussenstamm, a classical music composer and college professor from La Crescenta who was serving as a judge for Sunday’s games.

That required him to prowl the competition floor armed with a word book that he used to settle spelling disputes, such as the challenge that Beth Fleisher’s opponent made over “torsade.” (It’s a real word and it means “twisted cord,” according to Heussenstamm.)

Except for the player who rankled opponents by trying to psyche them out by placing letters upside-down on the board, players were genteel.

“You don’t have standard opening moves like you have in chess. Scrabble is much more dynamic,” Heussenstamm said.

Sunday’s tournament was the 10th annual Ethel Sherard event. It was organized by Sherard’s daughter, retired history professor Gwen Bishop of Eagle Rock. Bishop said the tourney started as a birthday celebration for her mother and became a memorial competition after Sherard’s death.

Over the years, the contest’s $40 entry fees have raised more than $48,000 for the United Negro College Fund.

In a word: nice.