 Spot the Clinamen Over on our site in development (wait for it, wait for it), we had an interesting discussion about Scrabble and this year’s British National Champion, the fantastic Mikki Nicholson.
In principle, I like all games until my children start winning. And until recently I was a big fan of Scrabble. So much so that on my shelves I have a copy of Word Freak, by Stefan Fatsis. I have this book partly because The Times claims that ‘Stefan Fatsis is the Hunter S. Thompson of Competitive Scrabble’, but also because the book was published by Yellow Jersey Press in the days (2001) when Yellow Jersey published brilliant sports books no-one else would touch.
The story follows US sports-writer Fatsis as his Scrabble Rating rises from zero to 1697, and you’ll have to believe me that 1697 is both unimaginably good but also not quite good enough. Like being British No 3 at tennis.
I remember not quite sharing Stefan’s passion for Scrabble as far as 1697 – I was perhaps rooting for him whole-heartedly as far as about 1501, but nearly ten years later the best way of remembering what I liked about the book is to cite the sentences I marked with pencil in the margins.
‘But this – the money, the pressure, the tension, the egos, the pride, the prestige. This isn’t just about playing a board game. This is about skill and achievement and self-worth.’
‘The distances and location of the premium squares are just right. The game is a carefully choreographed pas-de-deux, a delicate balance between risk and reward.’
‘For Matt, as perhaps for James Murray, William Minor, and Joe Leonard, words are the objective reality of life.’
‘In the Book of John, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, Quid est veritas? (“What is truth?”). His answer is an anagram: “Est vir qui adest” (“It is the man who is before you”). The word anagram itself anagrams to the Latin ars magna, or great art.’
Scrabblers and cross-worders preserve the cabalistic talent for anagrams that the internet otherwise makes banal – Richard Beard as Drab Hard Rice in a millisecond at http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ However, there comes a stage in every Scrabble player’s development when language turns to maths. The game becomes a riddle of patterns, not meanings.
Maybe this happens in every field, for anyone who thinks long and hard enough, about anything. And everything. The other lesson Scrabble teaches is less exotic: don’t hold out for better letters. Make the best of what you have now.
At least I think that’s true. If not, it may explain why my children beat me – they believe in the luck of the life to come.
 New French Stash I know I keep promising to post up the first pages of J’suis pas plus con, or rather, I promised once and I always keep my promises.
I have, however, been distracted by two issues. Computer malfunctions, which are boring. And stash.
As an ambitious rugby player, I used to have the same hunger for stash as everyone else. ’Stash’ was the stuff that came with selection to a team. Stash is the extras, the perks, the over-and-aboves, and in those days, before the ease of printing onto synthetic materials, stash was expensive and therefore reserved most often for representative teams. It was worth having.
Typical items would be tracksuits, training tops, match shorts, maybe even a team-branded bag. It was the players’ version of been there, done that. Or if you were picked on the bench, been there, haven’t done that, but got some stash so my time wasn’t completely wasted.
Stash in sport is now out of control. There is even a company called Stash, who provide exactly the kind of accessory gear I’m talking about it (as well as this magnificent design for a rugby shirt, as enabled by modern print technology) . Every team in the land, turning their backs on natural fibres, gets personalised stuff because … well, because they can.
What happens to all this gear? It gets used for its original purpose, just out of the packet for the important match. Then it doesn’t get used because you’re dropped from the team, or move regions and don’t want to make enemies. Then it’s worn once more for validation when you’re training juniors, as a reminder of who you once were (both to them and to yourself.)
After that the stash stays in the attic for sentimental reasons until time drains it of meaning. I have a collection of fading sportswear emblazoned with the names of forgotten sponsors, usually local accountants or providers of ‘building services’.
 Those were the days Well this week I was reminded that stash also exists for writers. I’m immensely pleased with the bookmarks and the posters made for the French edition of Dry Bones by In Octavo. Stash for the writer, like stash for the rugby player, is confirmation that the core activity (the writing/playing) doesn’t come anywhere near reflecting the amount of work that goes into even the smallest triumph. Stash is tangible evidence that the effort was intended to create a world that can grow, that is growing, that can generate clothing and stationery and (why not?) cigarette lighters.
My X 20 Zippo cigarette lighter, the brainchild of Harper Collins, remains the best bit of writer’s stash I’ve ever had.
 man on the boundary The ball is dark and already falling from the blue summer sky. Like a minor, tragic, ill-fated character in a futuristic totalitarian novel (set in the kind of world where adjectives spread berserkly) I am conditioned to run. I run. The ball is a long way to my right. The boundary rope is inches to the side of the soles of my cricket boots. If I leap and stretch out my hand the moment of glory will surely be mine.
Though watch the ball. I have to watch the ball! First rule of cricket.
Which means Im not looking where I leap. The foot lands and then the knee somehow snaps, with an audible crack. And my first thought? I have not caught the ball.
Later, when the ambulance is parked on the field (the driver stops respectfully on the non-playing side of the boundary-line) I learn I’ve snapped the tendon that connects the upper half of my leg to the lower half. This explains why I no longer have a visible kneecap, just an unpleasant depression where the kneecap used to be. Crystal, who is my personal paramedic from heaven (likes bicycling, It’s a Knockout and Ibuprofen, dislikes old ambulances, the night-shift and her knees) immobilises the leg and loads me onto a wheeled stretcher.
Oh well, I think. I’ve had a good run.
I recently had a reason to include the follwoing stats in a book of essays about to be published in Japan:
‘Research carried out at George Washington University has attempted to calibrate the injury risks of various different sports. The martial arts have the same injury rate as rugby football, about one per fifty hours of individual participation.
More dangerous sports do exist, like horse-riding and diving, but many other sporting pursuits are significantly safer. Basketball has one injury per hundred hours of participation, while running involves one injury per 200-400 hours. Surprisingly, given the intensity of the game, squash-players can expect just one injury for every 1000 hours of play, and tennis-players are even safer, with one injury every 1400 hours.’
Since my last serious injury (cruciate ligaments at stand-off for Old Bristoleans in 1993) I reckon I’ve played 25 (av. matches per season) x 80 (minutes per match) x 9 (seasons 1994-2004) = 300 hours of competitive contact sport. Six times the recommended dose (without even starting on the training, which is rarely uncompetitive because boys will be boys). I was due.
It seems to me the cure is not to stop competing, but to start competing in a different way. See ball, watch ball. Then instead of running, make a calculation that involves my current age divided by percentage of effort multiplied by the likelihood of injury. Equals: I may sometimes be guilty of pulling the leap.
I’m not Peter Pan.
 Imagine it. It could work. The Open this year is at St Andrew’s, and golf has the same problems as always. Everyone is walking in the same direction (pretty much – these are professionals, after all) and every player refuses to share their ball. This is not head-to-head sport for those of us who like a bit of direct to-ing and fr0-ing, the pitting of one player against another.
What golf neds is the equivalent of T20 cricket, and I have the answer.
The admin people at the R & A should stand on the first tee (if I remember correctly) and look over the North Sea to Holland. At the same time they should squint until the past comes into view: the future can be found in the ancient Dutch game of Kolven.
The singular of Kolven is Kolf, but the Wikipedia entry for the game of Kolven bears no resemblance to a description I once read in a 1947 book called Ball, Bat and Bishop, by Robert W.Henderson. This book was written and published before the Internet, so it’s almost certainly correct, and the information needs to be spread before it gets lost beneath the curse of the recent.
Henderson describes an outdoors golf game with sticks, but crucially, players use only one ball. There is an attacking side and a defending side. The attackers name a target that is at least four shots away, usually the door of a church or perhaps a distant gate across the flat Dutch lowlands. The attacker names a par score to hit the ball to the target. The defenders will probably laugh.
The attackers start off with three shots in a row. The third shot is where strategy begins, because after the third shot the defenders get their turn to hit the ball. The defenders must stop the attackers reaching the church door in their specified number of shots.
I imagine the defenders just whack it as far as possible. Or they might aim at a foxhole or the middle of a dike. Sadly, Henderson doesn’t discuss tactics, nor whether the defenders then have an attack of their own.
A variation on this game would give golf the direct contest and contemporary appeal it currently lacks. Instructions for the R & A are included below, and the commitee men can tweak as they see fit, but the basics are all here. The game uses existing courses. It retains the benefits of open air exercise and the basic shots remain the same. Accuracy is still at a premium, as well as an ability to read the landscape. The added value is in the reading of another player’s mind, and the need to evaluate his skills.
The rules:
A game for two players. It can also be played as doubles, in the Ryder cup for example.
The game is played tee to tee (as opposed to tee to green). There will be par 3′s, par 4′s and par 5′s. The committee can set up the course however they see fit, using whichever tees suit the purpose of the game.
Player 1 hits first. His objective is to land the ball on the nominated target tee. This is the tee Player 2 is defending.
Player 2 hits second. He hits the same ball as the Player 1, with his target the tee that Player 1 has just used as his starting point.
Players alternate shots. First to land the ball on the opposing tee is the winner.
Normal golf rules apply – Out of Bounds etc. A penalty shot gives two consecutive shots to the opposing player.
The Player who hits first can use a tee-peg, but no aids will be used thereafter. This means that the first striker (the server?) has an advantage.
First strike will either alternate or go to whoever wins the previous hole.
Hell, people, do some experimenting. See what works.
A final rule: The ball cannot be played backwards away from the target tee (otherwise the game could go on forever).
So now it’s over to the R & A. All I ask is a portrait next to Old Tom Morris.
Bad workmen blame their tools.
In South Africa there have been three major goalkeeping howlers after four days of matches. England, Algeria and Paraguay have all seen their keepers bamboozled by what most people would think was a familiar sight to the man in goal: an approaching round object known as a ball.
Apparently the official 2010 World Cup ball, the ‘Jabulani’, deviates unpredictably in the air. Some have blamed the manufacture, others the effect of altitude at some of the South African stadiums. A football is not a technologically tricksy idea. There is only so much that can go wrong, and most people have rightly assumed that the complaining goalkeepers have other ‘issues’. Like not being very good at keeping goal.
Or so I thought, until I looked at this picture in today’s Guardian. This Jabulani ball does not look round. It is round, and our eyes adjust to make it round like a football. But look at it closely. The illustrative design on the ball has created the optical illusion of a shape more like an egg.
This is a sensational discovery. Eggs don’t have a centre, as a ball does. If kicked, an egg would wobble.
When a goalkeeper is aiming to get his body behind the ball his eyes and instinct search for the centre of the ball as his target. The ‘centre’ of the Jabulani may be unclear because of an optical illusion caused by the branded decoration on the ball itself. This means that goalkeepers, especially under pressure, are more likely to misjudge the flight of the Jabulani and make mistakes.
This is the answer. Someone should be told.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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