Friday, April 18, 2003

Craving Excellence When I was young, I was really into the Guinness Book of World Records. I loved to read it and reread it, marveling at the crap in that thing. I couldn't believe it. But as I got older, the luster started to wear off, largely due to the fact that, excepting the sports section and the Human Freak section, the rest of the book is packed with moronic gimmicks. I was no longer amazed at the number of prunes that some idiot ate in thirty seconds--in fact, I was more interested the aftermath of that event, if you catch my drift. What drew me to the book initially, and what continues to draw me, is a fascination with competitive excellence. A fascination with dominance in one field or sport or game. I love to read about people who are so good at something (competitive, of course--there has to be some winning and losing here) that the rest of the competition fades into Bolivian, as Mike Tyson would say. I'm not talking here about your run of the mill championship team, or whatever. I'm talking about true dominance. For instance, I can remember reading a Bill James article about the most unbreakable record in baseball. I'm no longer much of a baseball fan, but I know a fair amount still about baseball stats and history, and I love to speculate on this. James argument, if I recall correctly, was that Nolan Ryan's strikeout record would never be broken, because the person to do it would have to effectively lead the league in strikeouts for two decades in a row in order to do it. That's dominance. I don't remember how James dealt with Cy Young's freakish 511 wins, which quite obviously is completely and totally unbreakable. But it was the amazing accomplishments of Nolan Ryan that did it for me. I also don't have to have any interest in the activity or the sport to love hearing about someone truly dominating. A fine example is wrestling. Two people pop into my head. One is Dan Gable, an American wrestler who went undefeated in the entirety of high school, 118-1 in college, and then won the '72 Munich Games without surrendering a point. Incredible. The other is Alexander Karelin, the Russian Greco-Roman wrestler, who, prior to losing to some unknown fatass farmboy, something like 65 years his junior, in the 2000 Olympics, had never lost a match in international competition, and hadn't given up a single point in ten years. I have no interest in wrestling, but I absolutely love that sort of stuff. I'm just finishing up the book Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis--a birthday gift from my man Scott Jorgensen. Fatsis' book was a bestseller a couple of years ago, and I'd been dying to read it, but then it sort of fell off of my radar screen before Scott wisely sent it my way. It's about competitive Scrabble--Fatsis dived completely into the elite Scrabble scene, became a very competitive player himself, and writes about the personalities and the game, history and all. It's a great, great read, and a nice case study into a totally f'd up subculture. I combine these two topics because reading the book has made me realize that the level of obscene excellence that I'm fascinated by is far out of reach for me, in Scrabble at least, and probably beyond that. It's hard for me to fathom just how great the wrestlers are, or Nolan Ryan, or even NBA players. But I can read about the giants of Scrabble and understand how big the gap is. These are people who basically memorize every word of seven letters and under in the Scrabble Player's Dictionary, and categorize them in their heads by the alphabetical order of the letters in the words, so they can look at the jumble of letters on the rack and know what words they can make out of it almost instantly. They rarely know the definitions. It's incredible. Mindblowing. After reading Fatsis' book, I will never call myself a good Scrabble player again. I'm not bad, probably capable of beating the pants off of 85-90% of people. But the gap between the top 1% and me is WAY bigger than the gap between me and the worst Scrabble player in the world. And I'm fascinated by that, because I love excellence, and because unlike many other things, I can actually understand what these people can do in contrast to my own abilities. I want to be the best at something. I'm pretty good at a lot of things, very good at some things. But except for a short period in which I was actually a beyond-the-pale great college debater, I've never really been the best at anything. Unfortunately, I don't think I have what it takes. These Scrabble guys study word lists all the time. That's what they do. Many (most?) the elite players are social misfits. I'm not interested in that. So I don't have the time or the inclination to sacrifice many, many good things in my life to be the best at something. And it's no small issue that I don't think I have the talent to be the best at anything, to be the dominant one at some game or sport. For a while, I was getting pretty far into Boggle, playing a ton with a lot of people live and online as well. And I'm a scary good Boggle player. To put in perspective (bear with me--the point here is not how great I am, but how not great I am, as you'll see at the end of this story), I used to play at debate camps against six or seven people at once, and we'd combine their scores against mine, and I'd generally get four or five times what they did combined. On the website where I played, (technically not called Boggle--Internet Park called it Jumbles and it had a slightly different scoring system, but the game was the same) I was climbing the ranks, finally resting in third place on the overall ranking list. There were maybe four or five people that were just behind me that could get higher scores than me sometimes, the games remained competitive. But the two people above me were literally from a different universe. I can remember one board where there were about seven or eight people playing in this one room, and I was playing well. And then the game was joined by the number one player, whose call sign was "Misery". I'm thinking that this is my chance to look good in front of a lot of people. Misery didn't play that frequently, so when she joined the game several others jumped over to play or watch from the rest of the website. So there's maybe twelve or thirteen people playing in this game. It turns out to be a really big board, with a lot of six, seven, eight letter words. I typed without stopping for more than half a second for five minutes straight, and blew everyone away with about 450 points. Everyone, that is, except for Misery, who scored nine hundred. I couldn't believe it. And that really helped it click for me. There's good, and there's great, and there's excellent, and there's the top-of -the-heap elite. I would love to be in that last category in something. But time's a wastin', and once you're in your thirties the number of things that you can dive into and excel at starts to plummet. Sports are out, as they always were. Debate is over for me. I'm a good game player, but do I have the time, inclination, or talent to become elite at any game? I suppose my best chances are in Scrabble, Boggle (and I don't know if professional Boggle even exists) and poker. But am I likely to go for it in any of those? Nope. Oh, well. What's Salieri say at the end of Amadeus?  Something about God blessing the mediocrities. 2:18:09 PM    Let's hear it. []