Marlon Hill is going to Reno and show them.
Two weeks ago in Dallas, he broke into the elite of competitive Scrabble by finishing second in the National Scrabble Championship. It was a performance worth $10,000. Now he figures the overwhelmingly white, male universe of top Scrabble players is watching him and wondering: Can this black man from East Baltimore be for real?
Just watch, he says. On Thursday, Hill plans to walk into a Scrabble tournament at the Sands Regency Hotel in Reno with his set of 100 letters in a bag, a black cloth pouch marked with a big X. The X is for Malcolm. On a cord around his neck he'll wear a black wooden fist. The best players will resemble so many Johns Hopkins biochemistry majors. Hill, a stocky man of 31, will take his seat and begin tournament play, determined to demonstrate that he belongs.
"The main reason I'm going to Reno is not for the money, but to prove Dallas was not a fluke," says Hill. "You get looks saying, 'You're not the real McCoy.' I am certainly the real McCoy. I don't cut Europeans any slack on that. You can tell when someone is attempting to be condescending."
Europeans are white folks. Lots of them populate the highly competitive, if not very lucrative, world of championship Scrabble. Perhaps Hill correctly reads their dismissive behavior, perhaps not. Either way, he's a demographic anomaly on the Scrabble tournament circuit. Among the top 50 rated Scrabble players in the country, only three are black, says the National Scrabble Association.
One of them is Hill. Despite his antagonistic rhetoric about the United States and race, he's a friendly man with a ready smile. He lives on North Wolfe Street with his mother and his long-time girlfriend.
Hill has a reputation as an astute Scrabble strategist, knows thousands of words you never heard and has a gift for anagrams. He glances at the nameplate on a visitor's car and instantly spots one: "Integra, that's gratine."
Asked what it means, he laughs, shrugs. Who knows? Who cares? Scrabble may be known as a game for word lovers, but at the tournament level words are about points, not meanings.
Gratine is a cooking term from French meaning a covering or crust. Whatever. The point is this: Play the word and you've got a "bingo." That's Scrabble talk for using all seven letters in your rack at once for a 50-point bonus. To win tournaments, you have to make a habit of playing those.
