Editorial
Front Page - Friday, December 10, 2010
Are we there yet?
Words and memories
Jay Edwards
With the cold moving in last Sunday it was a day for food, fire, sports and Scrabble. I gave in to the latter somewhat reluctantly, to save the marriage.
I had lost my wife, Kathy, to the Ipad version of the 70-year old word game a week before, and decided if I wanted to still have a relationship with her then I would have to sign up myself on “Words with Friends.”
We’ve played twice and I’m 0 for 2. I’ve got a pretty good lead in game three but I’m not that confidant. Actually, I’ve got five games going on as I write this and am leading in every one. But it’s still early.
Scrabble through wifi. Now you can play with anyone in the world, as long as they play in English or you speak foreign languages.
I doubt that the inventor of Scrabble had this in mind. That would be one Alfred Mosher Butts, who in 1938 was an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie, New York. One day Alfred decided he would invent a board game. You might say it caught on, as today a hundred and fifty million of them have sold worldwide.
Sunday I was in a close game with Kathy. The Cowboys had just beaten the Colts and Tiger had just lost with a four-shot lead. To say the world was upside down would be an understatement.
There Kathy and I were, having one of those special “Hallmark” moments that only husbands and wives who have enjoyed 30 years of marital bliss can appreciate.
She, in the leather chair and me on the couch, a roaring fire and sleeping dog between us as we both stared down at the soft glow of our Ipads. It doesn’t get more intimate than that.
I hate to admit it but I never really played the traditional Scrabble. If I had I would have surely known that there are only two letter P’s available. What happened was I was behind in our first game by 15 points and had the word JURY already out there.
I had the letters “E” and “R,” so a “P” would have let me spell PERJURY, which with a double letter and triple word square I would have gotten like a million points.
So I began exchanging five letters every time, losing a turn and waiting for the P that would never come, because they were already played.
Kathy won that game by over a hundred. And I learned a valuable lesson. Stick to watching the NFL or golf on TV. No thinking required there.
•••
The biggest surprise I got while attending the Broyles Award on Monday was not that Gus Malzahn was named the winner but that Don Meredith had died.
“Turn out the lights, the party’s over,” I can still hear him singing on Monday Night Football.
Other notable sayings from “Dandy” Don are -
“If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts, wouldn’t it be a merry Christmas?”
On teammate Walt Garrison: “If you needed four yards, you’d give the ball to Garrison and he’d get you four yards. If you needed 20 yards, you’d give the ball to Garrison and he’d get you four yards.”
His comment when Vice President Spiro Agnew visited the Monday Night booth: “I didn’t vote for you, but you do have a nice suit on.”
On playing for Tom Landry: “He’s such a perfectionist that if he were married to Dolly Parton, he’d expect her to cook.”
It also seems surreal that Meredith’s death came just three days before the 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon.
You may be like me and heard the news of Lennon’s death from Howard Cosell while watching Monday Night Football.
Washington Post reporter Cindy Boren, in an article about Meredith, wrote that the broadcasters were divided on whether or not to announce the news about Lennon.
Frank Gifford thought they should while Cosell disagreed. Gifford won and as the NFL’s only British player, John Smith, came on the field to try a field goal for the New England Patriots, Gifford said,
“Three seconds remaining and John Smith is on the line; and I don’t care what’s on the line Howard you have got to say what we know in the booth.”
Cosell responded with the following words in that way and voice only he had.
“Yes we have to say it, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of The Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital.
Dead…On…Arrival.”
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