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These Scrabble players play it tough

By Edward Cifelli, Times Correspondent
Posted: Jun 06, 2008 11:37 AM

Steve Glass, left, places tiles as Roy Dixon follows closely during a Scrabble game recently at the Highlands at Scotland Yards clubhouse.

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ADVERTISEMENT Steve Glass looks over his tiles in a game with Roy Dixon. Both are highly ranked by the National Scrabble Association.

DADE CITY — Steve Glass and Roy Dixon are like a lot of semiretired people who enjoy playing Scrabble at their community clubhouse. But don't ask these guys for a friendly game. They're Scrabble sharks. Tournament tested.

Glass, 53, is among the top 3 percent of Scrabble players in the country, according to the National Scrabble Association. Dixon, 60, is in the top 10 percent. (Who knew such rankings were even kept?)

In Florida, Glass is ranked No. 5 and Dixon is No. 15. In the Tampa Bay area, they are one and two.

"It's an addicting game," Glass says, "extremely competitive, and a great way to keep your mind sharp."

Glass's ambition is to finish memorizing the dictionary, a mind-blowing project for most people, but something top players often do. Every afternoon, after a morning of tennis, he settles down to work on word lists.

And it pays off. Odd words fall quickly from his tray to the board, like T-A-E-N-I-A-E, a seven-letter, 50-point-bonus, "vowel dump," as he calls it, which also happens to be a head band worn in ancient Greece.

Dixon says he doesn't have quite the same drive to study word lists that he had when he first entered the Scrabble tournament world in 1985, so he limits himself these days to a few select championships.

He likes meeting up with old friends from the circuit, but make no mistake about it, he adds, "I still play to win," even if it means playing a vulgar or offensive word, "if it happens to be the best play on the board" and as long as it appears in the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary.

One of Dixon's favorite plays is A-T-L-A-T-L-S, an aid for throwing darts, which is another of those prized 50-point rack-clearers, a "bingo" in Scrabble parlance.

Glass and Dixon met in August 2002 in San Diego, where some 700 top players from around the world gathered for the biennial National Scrabble Championship. Winners in each of the six divisions took home a share of the $36,000 in prize money, and there were smaller cash prizes for those who placed and showed.

There isn't enough money in tournament Scrabble to support full-time professional players, so even the top earners, with lifetime winnings approaching $150,000, hover somewhere between hobbyists and hustlers. And they all have full-time jobs.

Over the past 20 years or so, Dixon has earned about $9,000 playing Scrabble while Glass has won about $12,600. At his day job, Dixon is in charge of sales at a legal service firm. Glass is a semi-retired accountant who works during tax season.

The 2002 contest featured live coverage of the finals on ESPN and next-day coverage with interviews and analysis on NBC's Today show. Glass finished third in his division of 103 players and Dixon was 29th out of the 136 players in his.

Dixon's wife, Pat, also met Glass' wife, Beth, at that tournament and the families became such good friends that today they are neighbors.

Glass and Dixon continue going to competitions around the country, sometimes together, sometimes alone. Glass just returned from the late-April Boston Area Tournament, the second largest competition after the nationals, where he was edged out from the winner's circle in the last game. And Dixon played in a May 16-18 tournament in Buffalo.

Both say they'll be in action July 26-29 at the Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando for the upcoming nationals.

Spectators are not allowed at the National Scrabble Championship, but ESPN is expected to continue its coverage of the finals, fitting them in, perhaps, between Arena Football and the X-Games.