In Part I, I described how my troubles with Jennifer and Evans began. Herein, I will show how they escalated their vendetta against me over the next three years, turning my old friends against me and increasingly manipulating the Scrabble scene to shut me out.
People have to pretend you’re a bad person, so they don’t feel guilty about the things they did to you.
The next time we crossed paths was at a tournament in Charlottesville in March 2017. By this point I was over Jennifer completely. I played Evans twice and Jennifer once. Evans continued not talking to me at all, but I acted like nothing unusual was happening. I didn’t attempt to get a handshake before the games, as I knew he wouldn’t want to do so. I tried to make some friendly chat after the closer of our two games about possible strategic and tactical decisions for him. He said nothing and just walked away.
When I played Jennifer, I did offer a handshake, but she politely declined saying that she had a cold, which was visibly true. Our game was cordial enough. If she was uncomfortable playing me this time, she didn’t show it. She never gave me anything like the silent treatment that Evans did, and she did not behave in an untoward way to me.
The next time I was in the same place as Jennifer and Evans was the Niagara Falls tournament in May. I never played or talked to either of them at that event. There was at least an occasion or two when I noticed that Evans saw me in the tournament room and immediately looked away. He couldn’t bear to see me, let alone interact with me.
One moment sticks in my mind. At one of our meal breaks, I had left the playing room and almost gotten to the exit doors of the Convention Centre when I came near a group that included Jennifer and Evans. I was ignored by everyone and didn’t attempt any interaction with them. Moments later, I crossed paths with Chris Lipe outside and said something about all the people avoiding me. Chris said, “I’m sorry this is so awkward for you.” My response, “This isn’t awkward for me. It’s awkward for them,” genuinely surprised him. We didn’t have a long conversation, but I communicated that if there were any justice in the world the other people would be hanging out with me and spurning them, because they were the ones being rude to me, not the other way around.
Chris saw that he had misunderstood the situation. I believe he abandoned plans to join their lunch group and ate with me instead. We didn’t talk about it more. In the big picture, there are many ways that I have been dissatisfied with how Chris has responded to their behavior, but this was a moment when he did right by me.
In August of 2017, Jennifer and Evans organized a tournament in Nashville, Tennessee, concurrent with the solar eclipse happening in that region. They rented a house to use for the tournament and lodging. In what became the archetype of the pattern they would follow in future years, they reached out to a bunch of their friends privately and got them to sign up in advance so that the event could be full before registration ever went public.
The timing of that event happened to be when I couldn’t have attended even if I were welcome, as it was just days before the World Scrabble Championship in Nottingham, England. I am sure that Jennifer and Evans were aware of the impossibility of me attending at that time, and I’m also sure that I was not the only person they were interested in excluding. I heard through an inside connection that they specifically did not want Joey Krafchick to attend. Joey was a young and talented Scrabble player, who was living in Atlanta and playing a lot of CSW. Around this time he had also become an outspoken pro-Trumper, alienating himself from many Scrabble players.
None of this bothered me. For me, their tournament was moot, as I had much bigger things on my plate. I led the World Championship for most of the first half and finished in 11th place. I won the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship (BMSC) a few days later, also in Nottingham. But I made a mental note of what Jennifer and Evans were doing.
On one of the evenings during the BMSC, I went out to a bar with Brett Smitheram. He is a Londoner, a close friend, and the winner of the 2016 World Championship. Brett has done many media appearances and feels it is the duty of a World Champion to help promote and grow the game. I’m inclined to agree with him.
David Eldar, an Australian expat who also lives in London, had just won the 2017 World Scrabble Championship a day or so before. Brett told me that the BBC had wanted to do a TV interview with both Brett and David, as the outgoing and incoming World Champions, but David had declined the interview. Of course, they weren’t going to have the old Champion on without the new one, so the whole piece got canceled. Brett was understandably annoyed that David hadn’t been willing to go along with this.
Immediately after the two tournaments in Nottingham, I traveled with Chris Lipe to Stockholm, Sweden. Chris and I were competing in the Continental Scrabble Championship the following weekend, but we had a few days to be tourists first. One afternoon I was enjoying a few G&T’s made from a nice bottle of gin that I’d bought at Gatwick Airport. On a Facebook group called Scrabble Snippetz, populated mostly by UK players but also by more than a few of my North American CSW brethren, there was a discussion about whether tournament competitors ought to be able to opt out of live annotation of their games for internet coverage. Some players were embarrassed about having their racks, plays, and errors shown to the world.
David and I made contributions to the discussion, and we were in vociferous agreement. Both of us espoused the position that if a tournament is getting any kind of outside sponsorship for prize money, then players should not be able to opt out. Doing our part to help the promotion of the event ought to be a condition of getting to compete for that prize money.
In one comment, David said “It would be as absurd as professional athletes refusing to be on television in their games.” I have never been one to hold back from jibing my friends for their apparent hypocrisy. Already a few drinks in, I couldn’t resist. I made a one-line response to David saying, “It would be as absurd as the World Scrabble Champion refusing to appear on BBC.” The previous dialogue was paraphrased, but I remember his next reply exactly: “Do you talk to your partners this way?” I was baffled by his phrasing, but I knew that he was not taking my words in good humor. I clarified that I was tipsy and meant the comment light-heartedly, adding a smiley. That seemed to smooth things over.
A little while later Chris and I went out to dinner at a cool medieval Swedish restaurant. I enjoyed the meal, and Chris buried his face in his phone, checking the Scrabble gossip online. Suddenly Chris said, “You might want to check Snippetz. Eldar is trashing you really hard right now.”
After reading the brief exchange between David and me, several other Scrabble players had asked him whether he had turned down a BBC interview. He made a brand new post on Snippetz to address it. This post was nothing less than a full-blown ad hominem attack on me. He said that I was a passive-aggressive jerk and that I would never win the World Scrabble Championship. He furthermore explained that the BBC interview was in Manchester, and that was the main reason he had turned it down. He had really wanted to get back to London without delay, and furthermore it seemed ridiculous to him that the BBC couldn’t do the piece in London, considering that both he and Brett lived there.
While I appreciated the explanation of the Manchester thing, which Brett had not mentioned, I thought David’s personal attack on me was completely unwarranted and outsize, in response to what I had clearly communicated was an alcohol-laden attempt to joke with him. His egregious attack caused a pile-on effect. A lot of people liked David’s post, including people whom I had considered good friends in the Scrabble community, even though it was so obviously inappropriate. A close friend of mine made a long comment that was an even more vicious and personal attack on me and not in any way related to what David was talking about. My internal reaction was, “All these people hate me, and they’re looking for an excuse. As soon as one person gives them permission to attack me, it’s the trendy thing to do.”
I believe that if I were valued and loved in this community, other people would have spoken up in my defense. That did not happen. I was the lone voice who defended myself.
That incident with David—not anything with Jennifer and Evans—made me snap. From that moment onward I decided that if no one else in the Scrabble community was going to defend me, to speak out against the wrongdoing done to me, to shut down those who attacked me, I was going to do it my damn self. I made a decision right then and there that anyone attacking me publicly on social media would be met with the nuclear option. I was going to attack, embarrass, and hurt them back so badly that I would cripple their ability to ever attack me again. I would come out so hard in response to anything like that that I would intimidate those who were even considering attacking me.
I stand by that decision, even though it has made my relationship with the Scrabble community even more fraught than it was before.
From age 11 to 18, I grew up with a monster in my house. My mother had a live-in boyfriend who was emotionally abusive to me and my three sisters. He did many inappropriate and harmful things, often in front of my mother. My mother let it all happen, almost never raising her voice, nor complaining, nor doing anything to stop him, no matter how outrageous his behavior was. Her passivity was complicity, and she normalized his abusive behavior. When I was 18, I was the one who finally called the police and had him removed from our home. My mother got a restraining order against him. Later she canceled the order without telling her children, and she started letting him come back to the house when her children were not around. This happened until he accidentally showed up when I was home. I screamed at him from the doorstep, threatening to call the police and doing everything I could to attract the neighbors’ attention, until he went away.
Ever since that time, I have intentionally taken a pro-confrontation attitude. I believe that we only solve our problems by facing them head on, by having the hard conversations, by standing up to our abusers, by doing whatever it takes to make sure that they can never hurt us again.
Nothing in David’s screed against me nor the comments on it even mentioned anything related to Jennifer and Evans. I have no idea whether David knew anything about that situation. I think it is likely he did not and was just dealing with his own demons. However, I am sure that the pile-on that I experienced was in large part due to the perception of my history with Jennifer and Evans. (I knew this intuitively right away, and it was confirmed by a much later conversation with the person who wrote the long comment on David’s post.) It was not the first time that I was treated differently because of what people thought that I did, but it was when the dam broke open.
My next tournament after returning from Europe was in Asheville, North Carolina, in November 2017. This was the first time I have ever played in a multiday Scrabble tournament and not had any after-hours socialization with the other players. In fairness, Matthew Bernardina did meet up with me the night before the tournament for a couple of hours at a cute little board game cafe. But on Saturday night after the games, I ate dinner by myself and called it an early night. Most of the people in the CSW division were at a group dinner that I was not invited to. The person who organized the dinner is someone who I have considered a longtime friend. We have socialized for over a decade, and I have stayed at her home multiple times. I have had essentially no relationship with this person ever since Jennifer and Evans have been together.
Jennifer and Evans were not even at the Asheville tournament.
I don’t know when I became cognizant that Evans had started back-filling annotations of our games on cross-tables, only games that he had won. I don’t think I noticed this until long after he had done it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had done this as a way of trying to assert superiority over me, perhaps thinking that I might be hurt by it. The effect was completely the reverse. Like his behavior during our game in New Orleans, this reinforced to me how much I was in his head, and what a huge psychological advantage I would hold over him in future games.
In late 2017 Jennifer and Evans moved together to Tacoma, Washington. It didn’t matter to me at the time, but fate decided that it would become a significant fact in my life not much later. They organized a tournament in Hood River, Oregon, for Presidents Day weekend 2018. They treated it the same way they had the Nashville tournament, getting their friends to fill up all the spots before the tournament became public. On the cross-tables page they claimed there was a waiting list for anyone else who wanted to play, but they kept the names and order on the list private.
This event was on the opposite side of the country from me, and it wasn’t a good time for me to go anyway. But again, I stayed aware of what they were doing and guessed what their frame of mind must have been. Their private registration method made it impossible for me to sign up. Meanwhile, they got all the best CSW players in the Pacific Northwest to come, as well as a number of strong players from elsewhere.
I was swamped at work. My team had delivered a new product in the fall which drastically increased our maintenance burden and made my on-call shifts hellish. It was disrupting my sleep and taking a serious toll on my health. Around the New Year, I learned about an opportunity on a different team at my company that was a good match for my interests and skills and had virtually no on-call responsibility. This team was located at my company’s headquarters in Seattle.
I had been working at this company for four years—longer than I had known Jennifer—and I had already made many business trips to Seattle. I liked the city. I had organized Scrabble get-togethers with the handful of players in the area who played CSW.
I was also tired of working in our office in suburban Northern Virginia that kept me too far out of Washington DC for so much of the time. As I talked about in the previous part, most of my opportunities to play CSW Scrabble around DC had evaporated over the last two years.
As soon as the possibility of the Seattle job arose, I immediately knew there could be some problems. Tacoma and Seattle aren’t right next to each other. They’re like DC and Baltimore. But the CSW Scrabble scene is small. If I lived there, I was sure to cross paths with Jennifer and Evans, and we would want to play with the same players and at the same events. Furthermore, Jennifer and Evans were quickly filling a vacuum and starting to become the preeminent CSW organizers in the area, not just with the Hood River event but also a number of one-day tournaments.
The Seattle job was already on my radar, but I wasn’t sure if it was the direction I would go when I next crossed paths with Evans and Jennifer, at the New Orleans tournament in January 2018, one year after all this hubbub had started. Evans won his first 12 games in a row and looked like he might run away with the tournament. As soon as I sat down at the top board to face him in round 14, I thanked him for refusing Sam Kantimathi’s entry to the Hood River tournament. I didn’t get him to say much, but he at least looked at me and made an acknowledgment that he heard me, which was more than I’ve gotten from him any other time we met since these things started.
If you haven’t heard of Sam Kantimathi, the quickest way to get up to speed is to read the public post I made on Facebook calling for him to receive a lifetime ban from the game. My arguments were entirely about Sam’s cheating and the integrity of the game. Additionally, in the responses other people brought up Sam’s terrible treatment of women. After I made that post, Sam withdrew from all of the tournaments he had signed up for, but he gradually began reentering events soon afterward. Some directors started disallowing him from events, and some players started working within the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) to investigate his wrongdoings toward women and attempt to get him banned. None of this has yet resulted in an expulsion. The 2018 Hood River event was one of the first test cases in which the directors were successful in disallowing him. I had learned this through the grapevine.
The board Evans and I were playing on was being broadcast on the internet, so there was a contraption with an overhead camera looking down on the board. When the game was about to start, I extended my hand across the board to try to shake Evans’s hand. This is the only time I have done so since he surprised me with his refusal at this same tournament the previous year. I said aloud something like, “C’mon Evans, you’re not going to refuse to shake my hand with the camera on.” He ignored me, and my hand hung awkwardly in the air for too long.
I didn’t think he was going to shake my hand. I did it because I wanted the rest of the world to see that I was treating him normally, while he was being rude. My attempt was unsuccessful. I checked the online footage later. The overhead camera was capturing the board but neither of our bodies, and there was no sound. So you could see my hand hanging over the board, but with no other context it wasn’t even obvious that it was an attempt at a handshake.
This was the first moment in this entire story that I became angry at Evans. I totally understood him losing his cool the year before, but he had had an entire year to get over himself and calm down enough to actually talk to me. Instead, he had completely avoided having any communication. He never said a word to me, and I could tell from his body language every time we were in the same place that he couldn’t stand even being in my presence. He never even wanted to look in my direction, and now he had finally insulted me to my face, while I had done absolutely nothing but be a civil human being to him the entire time.
Part of me wanted to chew him out right then and there, but I knew it would be useless and counterproductive, both because it was clear that he hated me so much that nothing I said would get through to him, and because letting him stay mad at me gave me the advantage over the board. I shook with anger on the first play of the game, but I quickly calmed myself. Then I beat him at Scrabble.
Evans’s consolation was that he beat me in our round 18 rematch, a game in which no conversation or handshakes were attempted.
Shortly after the tournament, I interviewed with several people on the team in Seattle, and it became clear that it was a good career fit. They wanted to work with me, and I wanted to work with them. Everything in my life suggested that this was a good direction to go in, except for the situation with Evans and Jennifer. In the end I decided I wasn’t going to let their behavior get in the way of making the right decision for me. I met up with an old friend in DC and told him a little bit about the story and my concern about the tension when I went to Seattle. He said optimistically, “Maybe this will force you all to deal with it.”
I came to Seattle in early March 2018 for a business trip, during which I ramped up with my new team and did an apartment search. This was a very busy time, so Scrabble wasn’t much of a priority. I had a text chat with Chris Grubb, a CSW player who lives in Seattle, who revealed to me that there was a group of players meeting on Fridays downtown that started when Jennifer and Evans moved to Tacoma. Furthermore, Jennifer and Evans had told his fiancee Rachel, also a player, that they would not come if I was there.
Chris wrote, “Don’t know how to say this, but rumor has it that there is some problematic history between you and them (?)… not that I know or care about any of that. I hate drama.”
My response was, “Yes, they’ve been complete assholes to me ever since they’ve gotten together and I’ve done nothing to them. Curious what they’re telling people though.” This was not something I had any bandwidth to deal with during this trip, but again I was taking mental notes about what they were doing.
I found an apartment that wasn’t going to be available until late April, so I went back to the east coast and worked remotely for my new team for the next month and a half. Shortly before I made the move, I played in a Scrabble tournament in Princeton, New Jersey, where one of my competitors was Walker Willingham, another CSW player who lives in the Seattle area, on Bainbridge Island.
I could tell Walker wanted to talk to me about my move to Seattle. We went out to lunch. He made clear that Evans hated me, but that he (Walker) didn’t want to know what the drama was about. Then he tried to negotiate some arrangement where we would have the CSW players meet on alternate Fridays with me and with Jennifer and Evans. I said that this was not acceptable to me.
Walker was the first Scrabble player to whom I told the whole backstory. I had told a therapist and a few close people among my family and non-Scrabble friends, but I had been keeping it out of the purview of Scrabble players and trying to stay above the fray. However, I now had evidence that Jennifer and Evans were directly talking to other players about their version of events and trying to reduce my chances to play Scrabble in Seattle. This was fifteen months after the New Orleans tournament that Jennifer and Evans were still holding a grudge about.
I told Walker not only about what happened leading up to and at the 2017 New Orleans tournament, but also about Evans’s treatment of me since, and about what he and Jennifer were doing to keep me out of their “private club” tournaments, even though I wasn’t even trying to sign up. And that they were now surreptitiously gathering the other Seattle CSW Scrabble players and trying to get them all to agree to keep me away.
Despite all of that, I continued to Walker, I had no problem getting together with them and all the other Seattle CSW players to play games. It was only they who had mistreated me and they who were trying to avoid me. I shouldn’t be left out of anything on account of their misbehavior. Furthermore, this was all something which easily could have been ironed out at any time in the more than a year that had passed since that time, if they would have ever just talked to me.
It was ridiculous. Not only had I organized get-togethers with the other Seattle CSW players before Jennifer and Evans had even moved there, but I had also introduced some of them to each other. Jennifer and Evans needed to get over themselves, and the rest of the group needed to say no to their divisiveness.
A couple of weeks after I moved to town, Walker sent out an email to all the local CSW players, including Jennifer, Evans, and me, suggesting a get-together at the same bar where they had already been meeting. Walker would later let me know that shortly after he sent the email Evans responded only to him saying “Was this a slip up?”
Evans and Jennifer attempted to browbeat the other Seattle area Scrabble players into excluding me from their casual Scrabble get-togethers, and when the other players did not comply, Evans and Jennifer stopped attending. They did not respond to any group emails, and they never showed up once in the entire time I’ve lived here. Walker and I continued including them on the group emails for a while, but we eventually gave up because they were not responsive.
The only players who showed up for that first session after I arrived were Walker, Judy Romann, and me. Chris Grubb and his partner Rachel came sporadically to later meetings, as did Bharath Balakrishnan. But it was difficult to get a critical mass. Often it was only me, Judy, and Walker. Sometimes knowing that we would have an odd number, Walker wouldn’t bother to come, so I would just spend the evening playing against Judy. This was part of the problem: Jennifer and Evans weren’t just organizers. They were a significant chunk of a small CSW Scrabble community. Without them, it was hard to achieve a critical mass.
A week after that first Seattle get-together, there was a one-day tournament in Portland. I offered to drive, and Walker, Judy, and Bharath all came with me. Jennifer and Evans also played in the tournament, which turned out to be the last time we ever played at the same event, and the second-to-last time that we have ever been in the same place.
This was a small event of only eight players, played in the dining area of a pizzeria. Of course, the moment I walked into the room, Evans looked down at the table where he and Jennifer were sitting, and he ignored me the entire day. In the fourth round, he and I played. I did not offer a handshake. He was due to go first, so I shuffled the tiles in the bag and said, “You may go first, Child.” There was no other conversation.
In the final round I played Jennifer. This was only the second time we were playing after New Orleans, as we’d happened not to get paired at the few other tournaments we both attended, except for Charlottesville. Prior to this game, I attempted to reach my hand out for a handshake, simply because it was the civil thing to do and I wasn’t aware that Jennifer had any problem with it. She declined. At least she wasn’t obnoxious or abrasive about it. We had a little bit of polite conversation about the game afterward. That seemed to put her in better spirits. Perhaps she was starting to come around to the realization that I’m just living my life and have no issue with her.
In one of my early conversations with Judy in Seattle, she mentioned that she had asked Jennifer in the restroom one time before I moved to town about why she didn’t want to play with me. Judy told me that Jennifer said it wasn’t really her, it was Evans.
The irony is that the person with whom I most want to play Scrabble in the entire Seattle area is Evans Clinchy. I don’t care whether he likes me or not, but he is my best possible sparring partner living nearby. We’re very close in playing strength. If he and Jennifer had ever been willing to come to any of our gatherings, he would have seen that I had no issue with him and was happy to play. He might have calmed down and just enjoyed the games. It might have eventually opened up an opportunity to have a conversation that would help him make peace with the past. However, he and Jennifer have done nothing but put up walls since I have moved here.
In late 2017 and early 2018, Jennifer and Evans had just been starting to ramp up organizing more CSW tournaments in the region, but that changed significantly after I came to town. There was one holdover one-day event at their home in Tacoma in June, about a month after the Portland event, that they had already put on the calendar before I moved to town. I think it was probably already full before I got to town. I didn’t make any effort to try to get in. The only time they ran an event at that same location again was during the 2018 World Championship, in which they knew I was competing.
They almost entirely stopped going to the monthly Portland tournaments. They’ve been mostly inactive in the Scrabble scene in the Pacific Northwest publicly, except for their two signature annual events, both of which they started in 2018. The first of these was the Hood River tournament on Presidents Day weekend, which I mentioned earlier.
The other event was scheduled for Labor Day weekend at a lodge on the Oregon coast. They had already put this event on the calendar before I had moved to Seattle, and they pulled the same shenanigans with signups as they had for the Nashville and Hood River tournaments. This time they didn’t manage to quite fill up all of the spots before the registration went public. I know this because a Portland-area Scrabble player tipped me off with a Facebook message shortly before I moved from Virginia. I guessed by the way he brought it up that he must have heard something through the rumor mill and was trying to stir the pot. At the time, I was fully occupied with a cross-country move and didn’t have the energy to even try to engage Evans and Jennifer about the tournament, and by the time I got settled in Seattle the event was already full. It is not an exaggeration to say that they invited all of the CSW Scrabble players in the Pacific Northwest to play in that event except me.
I crossed paths with Jennifer and Evans precisely one more time. Chris Lipe and Randi Goldberg were having a small destination wedding in Aruba, with only about 20 guests in total, roughly half of whom were Scrabble players. Randi mentioned that Jennifer and Evans would be there, and that they weren’t making any seat assignments for the small dinner on the beach.
I wanted to go to support Chris and Randi, and I loved the idea of getting away to Aruba. I easily imagined what this was going to look like. The Scrabble players would probably all hang out together in the days around the wedding, playing games, having meals, etc. If I joined them, Evans was going to pull his usual shtick of not looking at or talking to me. There was part of me that wanted to join the group as much as possible, just so all the rest of them could see that I had no problem interacting like a normal human being, while he was the only one being ludicrously uncivil. However, I didn’t want to escalate things at a wedding, out of respect for the bride and groom.
Fortunately, I had started dating Emily early in my time in Seattle, and she agreed to come to the wedding with me. She wasn’t a Scrabble player, so there would be no pressure to hang out with the other players, and we could just have fun on our own. I informed her of the backstory with Jennifer and Evans before we headed to Aruba, so she wouldn’t be surprised by anything from them.
Emily and I arrived at the resort in Aruba on an afternoon in the middle of July, two days before the wedding. After checking into our room, we crossed through the lobby on our way to the beach. Mina, a Scrabble player and good friend, waved to me. She was sitting with a group of Scrabble players playing a different board game. Evans was with the group, but Jennifer was not. Emily and I walked up, and I said hello and introduced her. Several people got up to introduce themselves and shake her hand or give her a hug. Everyone gave her a friendly greeting except Evans. Evans stayed seated, averting his eyes. He wouldn’t look at or talk to me or anyone associated with me, apparently. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he didn’t even say hello. He just muttered, “Evans.” Neither I nor anyone else called him out on it. Emily and I said our goodbyes a minute or so later and walked away. We didn’t see the other Scrabble players again until the wedding.
The wedding ceremony was short, and as I expected there were about 11 or 12 Scrabble players in attendance. During the cocktail hour, Emily and I chatted with Mina and her date César, as well as Stefan and Terry Kang Rau, all longtime friends of mine from Scrabble. None of the other Scrabble players made any effort to talk to us. Emily and I hovered near the open bar, refilling our drinks several times. I have to give her credit. She sensed a lot of the awkwardness, but she was a champ, never showing any displeasure.
At a moment when Emily had slipped away, Jennifer came up to the bar. Unexpectedly, she said hello to me and asked how I was doing. I said I was doing great, probably a bit too loudly and awkwardly, taken aback that she was interacting with me at all. That was the extent of the conversation, and she walked away.
Emily was back, and cocktail hour was winding down, with guests starting to take seats for dinner. There were only four tables, not including the little table for the bride and groom in the middle. Two of them were for Chris’s and Randi’s families, and the other two were on opposite sides of the dance floor that had been set up on the beach. All of the Scrabble players were starting to gather at the table on the far side from the bar area.
Emily and I lingered by the bar. She whispered to me, asking whether it would be more awkward to sit with the Scrabble players or not sit with them. I said, “It’s going to be awkward either way.” We waited until everyone else had sat down, and as expected all the other Scrabble players had filled up the other table. The two seats that were left were at the non-Scrabble friends table.
Emily and I sat down and got to know Chris’s and Randi’s other friends, who were mostly from Saint Louis or climbing buddies or both. We are both very outgoing people and had no trouble making new friends. The other people at our table knew all the other Scrabble players were at the other table, but they were too polite to say anything about it. At a wedding with two non-family tables, I was sitting at the table where I knew nobody instead of the table where I knew everybody.
When the reception was nearly over, Chris and Randi left their table and made an especial point of coming up to me and Emily to talk to us on their way out. On the surface this might have seemed like a nice gesture, but it was already clear from earlier conversations that the Scrabble players were going to gather in the lobby of the resort, which was only about a hundred feet or so from where we were sitting, to play some more board games, right in the same spot where Emily and I had run into them two days earlier. While Chris was trying to be polite and graceful, he was essentially saying goodbye to me and Emily because he was about to go play with his other friends. He didn’t say that I wasn’t welcome to join them. He just assumed that I wouldn’t.
Emily read right through it. The moment he walked away, she whispered again to me, letting no one else but me see how pissed she was at him for being a lousy friend to me. Chris’s behavior bothered her more than me in that moment. I was unsurprised by his behavior, but the fact that Emily was piqued on my behalf was an act of kindness to me. It was the best thing about the entire experience at the wedding for me.
Later in 2018, Jennifer got herself elected to the Advisory Board of NASPA. A little while later I saw a newsletter blurb about how NASPA was making rule changes to allow directors to disallow a player from entering their tournaments if the directors felt that the player would disrupt the safety and environment of the event. There was a further clarification that directors could not disallow players simply because they disliked them. I immediately suspected that Jennifer might have been involved in that rule change, but I did not act on this or say anything to anyone about it at the time.
On the evening of September 12, 2018, a week and a half after the Oregon Coast tournament, I went to cross-tables.com and saw that the second Hood River tournament would occur on Presidents Day weekend in 2019. Not having had opportunities to play in local tournaments for many months already, I wasn’t in the habit of checking the listings regularly, but it must have been kismet that I happened upon this shortly after they had advertised the event. Jennifer and Evans had again signed up most of their friends in advance, but four spots out of twenty were still open.
I thought about what to do. I knew that Evans and Jennifer had been waging a silent war against me, but I hadn’t been doing anything. I literally had never contacted either of them since my email to Jennifer on January 5, 2017. We had been in the same place only six times since then: at the New Orleans, Charlottesville, and Niagara Falls tournaments in 2017, and the next year at New Orleans, the Portland one-day in May, and the wedding in Aruba. Even if Jennifer had seemingly gradually calmed down, Evans had behaved distastefully toward me on every single occasion—and even toward my date at the wedding. But neither of them had ever expressed to me what their grievances were. They had simply cut off all communication.
I had already decided that the way to handle them at the few tournaments where we crossed paths was just to ignore their awkwardness and act like it wasn’t happening. That was the classy thing to do, I thought. So I asked myself, what would I do if they weren’t behaving like this? The answer was to sign up for the tournament. They had listed both of their email addresses as directors and given instructions to send them via PayPal a $250 fee, which covered both the tournament fee and lodging cost for the weekend.
I wanted there to be no possibility of them painting this as me harassing Jennifer, so I sent the money to Evans’s email address. It was late in the evening when I did this, and I didn’t want to bother him at that hour, so I waited until the next morning to send a brief email to Evans, notifying him of my entry while complimenting him on some of his other recent achievements.
from: Dave Koenig
to: Evans Clinchy
date: Sep 13, 2018, 8:29 AM
subject: Hood River entryI paypalled you payment for the Hood River tournament last night.
Congrats on your big win at Nationals, and good luck at the Alchemist Cup.
See you in February, if not sooner.
Cheers,
screenshot in appendix
Dave
Later that same day, I received a notification that Evans had refunded my PayPal payment. He did not respond to my email, but Jennifer emailed me and copied him on the message.
from: Jennifer Lee
to: Dave Koenig
cc: Evans Clinchy
date: Sep 13, 2018, 1:37 PM
subject: Hood River tournamentHi Dave,
Thanks for your interest in the Hood River tournament. Evans received your $250 payment for the entry fee and lodging. I am writing on behalf of myself and Evans as the co-directors to explain why we have refunded that payment back to your PayPal account.
I am aware that you have actively disparaged me, my character, and my reputation to several other members of the Scrabble community. You previously sent me harassing emails, which culminated in a written threat from you that you would take action to intentionally cause me emotional distress at a Scrabble tournament in the playing room. Your actions have made me feel threatened and unsafe.
The Hood River Open takes place in an intimate lodge setting where players share common housing. This format requires goodwill and close cooperation among all attendees. Your actions, behavior, and threats have consequences. As co-directors of the Hood River Open, Evans and I are responsible for providing a safe and positive environment for all attending players. We believe that your attendance would disrupt the tournament and detract from our efforts to provide that safe and positive environment. For these reasons, we are returning your entry fee. We appreciate your understanding.
Thanks,
screenshot in appendix
Jennifer
My reaction to the email was largely positive. This was the first time they were ever addressing me about their grievance. Regardless of how they felt, a small window of opportunity for communication was opening. I waited three days before deciding how to respond, and then I wrote this email, which I did not send.
Jennifer,
Thank you for taking the time to write this out and give me this explanation. I am not certain how much of what you wrote here you actually believe, and how much what you have written is just what you feel you have to say, to be consistent with the case you would make to NASPA if I were to challenge your decision on this. But let me put your mind at ease in one way immediately: I have no desire to escalate this to NASPA, and I respect your decision. I don’t even really care about whether I go to this tournament or not; what is much more important is resolving the tension in this situation.
I do not have any problem with you or Evans. It is only the two of you who have a problem with me. I completely understand how the two of you have gotten to the point of having the interpretations and feelings that you do, but since neither of you has been willing to communicate with me for the last year and three quarters, you have given me no opportunity to correct the situation. As such, I have felt that the best I can do is just continuing living my life, playing Scrabble, and ignoring your behaviors and the fact that you have been afraid of me and Evans has visually and viscerally hated me ever since January of 2017.
I signed up for this tournament, not out of any desire to make life difficult for the two of you, but simply because it is what I would have done if you two were not behaving the way you were, and I thought it might provide an opportunity for you to actually address your problems with me. I am glad that you have done so.
I am 100% sure that if you and I were to sit down and have a conversation in good faith about what happened between us in late 2016 and early 2017, we could alleviate the misunderstandings and get along fine from this point forward. It’s precisely because we were not having any conversations in person and all our communication was over email, text, and a very limited amount of voice communication via phone that we got to a point of such bad tension and misunderstanding. I do not hold myself blameless in this. There were a lot of things I could have done better, and there were a lot of things you could have done better. But your assumptions about my intentions and attitudes are way off base.
I do not feel like I can have this conversation well in writing, for one thing because I am not clear that you are willing to have a conversation about this in good faith. Part of me suspects that you will refuse to respond to this at all and simply use anything that I say about that time as written evidence to hold against me in the future.
I will, however, explain just one thing about the time before the California Open in December of 2016. Anything after that, we will have to talk about in person. You and I last spoke on the phone in early November of 2016, shortly after Trump was elected. At that point, I do not think you had yet signed up for the California Open, or at least if you did, I did not know about it yet. That phone call ended awkwardly, and I understand that you were probably not that eager to talk to me again after that, but you had not at this point ceased all communication with me.
Shortly after that, when I saw your name show up on the list of entrants for the California Open, I easily intuited that you were going there because you wanted to hook up with Evans, and that you were likely to get into a relationship with him after that. You had given me more than enough hints over the previous year to make this obvious to me. I was immediately concerned, not because I was jealous or wanted to stop you, but because I *specifically* wanted to avoid getting into exactly the kind of situation that we are in now.
Although you had never been willing to label what you and I had a “relationship,” let’s face it, we were in a de facto relationship for the better part of two years. And we had never been good at ending it cleanly and had several times gotten back together after several months apart. Even though we hadn’t been “dating” in a while, you and I had still hooked up in June of 2016 at the Atlanta tournament, and you had still sent me a birthday gift in the mail in October of 2016, with a sweet note that was an attempt to stay somewhat emotionally connected to me. There were still a lot of unresolved threads and emotions between us.
During the rest of November 2016, after I found out you were going to go to the California Open, but before you left for the tournament, I tried to reach out to you for another phone call, because I wanted to break up with you *cleanly*. I wanted to tell you, “It is far more important to me than anything that happens between us that Scrabble is my sanctuary, and I *refuse* to get caught up in a love triangle within the Scrabble world. Once you date anyone else in the Scrabble world, it is over permanently between us. We can still be friends, but we will never be lovers again.”
According to my personal morals, it would have been a shitty thing to have that conversation with you over email. After the better part of two years together, I was intent on being a nice enough person to have the break-up conversation via voice communication. However, you never gave me the opportunity to have that conversation.
I am not your enemy, and I am not Evans’s enemy. The enemy for both of you is the incorrect perception of who I am and what I think, that you both have built up over the last two years. If either or both of you is ever willing to fix this, all it will take is actually having a conversation with me. If you prefer not to fix this and to continue to carry a grudge for years into the future, that’s your problem, not mine.
There is no danger of me making things awkward at your Scrabble tournament or any other one that the two of you are at. The only people who are making things awkward are the two of you, by your refusal to communicate with me and continuing to hold a mistaken impression of me.
Sincerely,
DaveP.S. Nothing in your email was surprising to me, except the sentence about disparaging you. I have no idea what this refers to. I have spoken about things between you and me to only a very few people in Scrabble, who are close personal friends, and whom I would trust to be discreet about it. If you have a problem with something I’ve said to a particular person, you’re going to have to tell me what it is that you think I said and to whom in order to get me to address it.
screenshot in appendix
SENT TO CHRIS AND JEREMY, NOT JENNIFER.
When I look back at what I wrote, I question whether I should have sent it. I still think I said exactly what I needed to say, but my faith in my own judgment had been so rocked and the social cost to me had been so high for what other people had perceived that I had done wrong over email, that I felt it was necessary to vet my words with friends first. I sent that proposed email to two people who were mutual friends of Jennifer, Evans, and me. The recipients were Chris Lipe and Jeremy Cahnmann.
Jeremy was the only other person in Scrabble to whom I had told the entire backstory aside from Walker Willingham. He had accompanied me on my cross-country drive to move to Seattle, and I spilled the story on one of the last days of the trip. Chris, of course, had vague ideas of my problems with Jennifer and Evans, but I have still never told him the full story. He has not been as receptive as I would like when I’ve tried to talk about it. I saw both of these guys as being more socially savvy and well-liked than I was, and I knew they both had a lot of communication with Jennifer and Evans and would have some idea of what their emotional condition was.
Both Jeremy and Chris thought that sending that letter would make things worse. Based on their feedback, I completely scrapped it and rewrote it two more times until I produced a letter that they both approved of. This is what I actually sent.
from: Dave Koenig
to: Jennifer Lee
cc: Evans Clinchy
date: Sep 17, 2018, 5:49 PM
subject: Re: Hood River tournamentJennifer,
Thank you for taking the time to write this out and give me this explanation. To put your mind at ease in one way immediately: I have no desire to escalate this to NASPA, and I respect your decision.
Let me get right to the heart of the matter.
I stepped over the line when I wrote the following two sentences: “So if you do not meet with me before New Orleans, I will say what I need to say to you directly to your face across the Scrabble board in the tournament room with all the other players able to hear. I am almost certain that if that happens you will regret not having had this conversation in private.”
I was under a lot of emotional stress at the time that I sent that email, and as often happens in distressed situations, I was much more focused on my emotional needs than the impact of my words upon you. I know it may be hard to reconcile, but I did not intend to threaten you at the time that I wrote that. However, in retrospect it is obvious to me how those words come across as threatening. My mental state at the time seriously impaired my judgment. I am saying this not to defend my behavior at all, but only to explain that the words came out of a mental state that I was in a year and three quarters ago that is not at all where I am at now. I was wrong, and I am truly sorry.
Sincerely,
screenshot in appendix
Dave
Literally everyone I have shown this letter to, including family, other friends, and a therapist, thinks that it was pitch-perfect. I kept it brief. I didn’t challenge their point of view. I apologized for the little bit that I could. I didn’t put any expectation of a response on them. I just threw them some good will.
I hate it. I feel it is fundamentally dishonest. I still believe and will continue to believe for the rest of my life that I did nothing wrong. I fully understand how the second sentence that I quoted could be interpreted as a veiled threat, but it was not. The sense I intended was not “I’m going to make you sorry,” but instead that of a prediction. I was Cassandra in this story, seeing in advance exactly the bad things that were going to happen, but unable to get others to listen to me and thereby avoid this miserable fate.
I understand how in writing my words could be misinterpreted. I understand how Jennifer was also in a fragile emotional place at the time. But clarification was impossible because she forced all of the communication to happen over email and refused to talk to me.
Jeremy thought I needed to “fall on my sword,” to apologize and take the blame even if I didn’t believe it. That’s the wrong metaphor. What I did was sacrifice myself to other people’s demons.
He and Chris might have been right that my initial attempt at the email would have been ineffective and not changed anything with Jennifer and Evans. However, the email I did send was no better. They have never responded, and I have had no interactions or communication with them since I sent it. Furthermore, they have continued to escalate the situation within our Scrabble community in unhealthy ways, as I have learned from other people. If I had sent the first email, at least I would have had the mental peace of saying what I needed to say.
More than half a year later, in May of 2019, I was having dinner and drinks with the Raus in Edinburgh. We had competed in a tournament the previous weekend, and we had spent many days socializing together along with other Scrabble players, who had all left town by this point. I spent a long time telling them the entire backstory, which was now a great deal longer than when I had told it to Walker and Jeremy.
Two and a half years after all of this started, I finally had the experience of telling the story to other Scrabble players and finding the recipients of it completely on my side. It wasn’t just a matter of me being calmed and practiced enough to deliver the story effectively, though that surely helped. It was also because Terry and Stefan had been bothered by the behavior of Jennifer and Evans over the last few years. They were not on the “in group” list of invitees for the events that Jennifer and Evans had been running in Oregon. They pointed out how NASPA tournaments were not supposed to be private parties and by rule were supposed to be open to all comers.
That’s when I realized that Jennifer’s and Evans’s way of running these tournaments was hurting a much wider circle of people than I’d thought. I had already known for a long time that the steps Jennifer and Evans were taking to avoid me had been hurting the entire CSW Scrabble community in the Seattle area. The other players wanted to play with me and them and just have everyone get along, both at casual get-togethers and at tournaments. However, I hadn’t perceived that there were other interested CSW players from further away who wanted to come to these events but had never had the opportunity, because of the cliquish way they had been organized.
After I talked about how Jennifer and Evans kept me out of the Hood River tournament, Stefan spoke up. He had been on the Advisory Board of NASPA with Jennifer. His judgement in retrospect—now that he knew my story—was that Jennifer had used the idea of keeping Sam Kantimathi out of their tournaments as a smokescreen to get the rules changed to keep me out of tournaments. His conclusion was based on what he had heard directly from her on Advisory Board phone calls.
I mentioned above that I had been suspicious about the change in NASPA rules when I saw it in an email newsletter. I did not hint at this in any way to Stefan. He brought this up of his own accord, and the conclusion he came to about Jennifer’s motivation was entirely his own. I didn’t say anything about this issue until after he told me his conclusion.
Shortly before the end of 2019, Evans announced in public Facebook posts that he would not play in or direct NASPA events anymore, and that he and Jennifer were starting a new association called the Collins Coalition, or CoCo for short. The expressed reasons for doing this were problems working internally with NASPA leadership, including their refusal to ban Sam Kantimathi for life. The plan was to keep running their two annual Oregon tournaments under this new banner, and they recruited a number of other Scrabble players around the country to run tournaments as part of their new association.
I started writing this story before Evans and Jennifer started CoCo. It was not what motivated me to speak up about their behavior. Whether they run tournaments under the NASPA or CoCo flag doesn’t have much immediate impact on my life in Scrabble. Either way, they are the only ones running CSW tournaments with any kind of decent turnout in the Pacific Northwest. As long as they continue blacklisting me, I am in a bad situation of not having local opportunities to play. Even before they started CoCo, they were depressing the CSW turnout at the few NASPA tournaments in this area that they did not run by hardly going to any of them since I moved to the area. They had already made virtually the entire CSW scene in the Pacific Northwest a private clique to which I am not invited, even before they decided to put a new label on it.
I do not doubt that Jennifer and Evans have other motivations for starting CoCo beyond just blacklisting me, but I also think that anyone would be a fool not to recognize that I am a nonzero part of their motivation. They do not want to have to answer to anyone else. They do not want to have to worry about me protesting to NASPA about anything they do in the future to keep me out of tournaments.
Using Sam Kantimathi as the sole pretext for starting CoCo was unconvincing. NASPA had been allowing them and other directors to keep Sam out of their events for a few years already. Furthermore, it was odd timing, as shortly before they publicly announced CoCo the California Open in San Francisco had been held with Sam not being allowed to attend. This is the largest tournament in the area where Sam lives, and it is one where he had been allowed to play and sell his wares for the two previous years, after he had returned from suspension and the stories of his abuse and harassment of women had become public.
Evans and I have both been involved with Scrabble politics for a long time, and part of what is so frustrating about this situation is that we are in alignment about almost everything, except for his hatred of me and desire to exclude me. We both are very dissatisfied with the job that NASPA leadership has done for many of the same reasons. We both want Sam Kantimathi to be banned from the game for life. We both want to grow CSW Scrabble on this continent and eventually get the entire continent using the same word list as the rest of the world.
Despite all of my misgivings about NASPA, I have held firm during my entire time in tournament Scrabble that starting a renegade association is a bad idea. A different renegade association named WGPO was started years earlier and still exists, dividing our tournaments and tournament population. The creation of CoCo divides us further. There is no value in a Scrabble association that does not have a relationship with Hasbro and/or Mattel, the corporate owners of the game. There is negative value in having multiple associations in the same country.
The end goal that I have always sought is unity. That means getting rid of the WGPO/NASPA split and getting rid of the CSW/TWL split. We need all tournaments in North America to run under one association with one rating system. We need all tournaments in North America to use the same word list as the rest of the world, so that we can attract the greatest number of overseas players and have bigger events. This creates the conditions for the most growth of competitive Scrabble both here and around the world.
Furthermore, it is laughable that Jennifer and Evans have specifically tried to promote their new association as a welcoming and inclusive one. From the very beginning of them running tournaments together, they have been intentionally exclusive. They have gotten their friends to sign up before they made public postings for literally every single one of their events.
Even if an association like CoCo was a good idea, which it certainly is not, Jennifer and Evans are a terrible choice of people to run it. They have maintained a massive grudge over three years and used their misunderstanding to vilify me.
Although I think that supporting CoCo is a bad idea and hope that other Scrabble players will come to the same judgment, it’s not worth my energy fighting against it. Instead, I believe the appropriate response is mockery. So I’m not going to call it CoCo anymore. Its new name is Cliquish and Dickish.
I stayed for a week in January 2020 at the home of César del Solar and Mina Le. During that stay, I talked to them for the first time about the issues I had been having with Jennifer and Evans. Like Stefan and Terry, they were completely supportive. Shortly after we talked, Mina spoke up on a Facebook post about how hypocritical it was for Cliquish and Dickish to call themselves an inclusive organization when they were banning one of the top CSW Scrabble players in their region from their events. Mina told me that Evans responded in a nasty way, shutting down the conversation and claiming that she did not know what the person had done.
A couple months later, Mina sent me a message:
we had a sitdown with Jenn and Evans for over an hour this past week to talk things out. i asked whether you’d be welcome to play a coco tournament where they’re not present, and they responded you’d be welcome to play a coco tournament where they ARE present as long as they’re not organizing or directing. FYI
screenshot in appendix
I didn’t ask for Mina to represent me in any of these ways, and I have never even tried to enter any of Jennifer’s and Evans’s tournaments, with the lone exception of the 2019 Hood River tournament that I signed up for specifically to open up a line of communication. Yet, Jennifer and Evans are preemptively setting rules to keep me out of tournaments, when they have no valid justification for doing so.
Their behavior has been outrageously offensive and abusive toward me, not the other way around.
I have done everything I can not to make this a conflict. From my point of view, there is no feud between me and them. It only exists in their minds. I haven’t fought to get into their tournaments, even though they have been fighting to keep me out.
There is a specific reason I did not want to protest to NASPA to allow me into their tournaments. In my Facebook post about Sam Kantimathi, I exhorted tournament directors to bar Sam from their tournaments even if it was contrary to the rulings of NASPA. I believe that directors have the right to keep individuals out of their tournaments, and I did not want to take any steps that would undermine that right. However, directors must wield that power sparingly and responsibly, which Evans and Jennifer have not done in my case. I believe that the proper way to address what they have done is not through an appeal to NASPA but in the court of public opinion.
Even if I had appealed and won my way into their tournament, I know exactly what it would have gotten me: all of us sitting in a room terribly awkwardly, with them hating my guts even more than before, and the rest of the Scrabble world believing that I have been harassing Jennifer and making their life miserable.
I have been angry and sad for over three years. Not because they hate me or are mistreating me, but because they are getting away with it. Because I have paid a social cost with the rest of the Scrabble community due to their mistakes. Because I have had so few opportunities to play Scrabble locally. Because many others have been complicit in their exclusion of me. Because so many of those complicit had been friends of mine for well over a decade. Because when I have spoken up, I have too often not been believed and supported. Because I do not trust the rest of my community to stand up to Evans’s and Jennifer’s appalling behavior and do something to improve this situation. Because I still fear that people will think I am the bad guy even after reading this, or that they just won’t care enough to help me.
To me a friend is someone who would have taken the initiative to ask me about what happened and, after learning the full story, would have taken every possible opportunity to get in Jennifer’s and Evans’s face about it. To make them uncomfortable. To make sure that they are the ones paying the social cost of their mistakes, instead of me.
That’s exactly what I would do for one of my friends, if you had been in my place.
Epilogue
Many times when I have started to tell the story of what has happened, people have asked me to give a quick summary, and I have struggled to do so. Now that I have written all of it out, I think I can.
Jennifer and Evans got the impression that I was harassing her based on two emails that I sent to her on December 19, 2016, and January 5, 2017, and two text messages that I sent her in between, on December 20 and December 25. They, especially Evans, behaved disrespectfully to me at the 2017 New Orleans tournament in response to their perception of these communications, and at every time we have crossed paths in the three years since that time. They attempted to blacklist me from the tournament Scrabble scene in the Pacific Northwest, cut off all communication, and avoided even being in the same place as me, preventing any hope of improving this situation. Furthermore, they painted an image in the minds of many other people in the Scrabble community that I was a harasser, leading to bad treatment of me. I have been very angry in that time, primarily not because of the attitudes of Jennifer and Evans, but because of their influence on the rest of my community and the way it has eroded my relationships and opportunities to play Scrabble.
I have explained how my actions between December 19, 2016 and January 5, 2017 were not in the wrong, but were aimed at making a peaceful closure of things between me and Jennifer, even though they were badly misunderstood. Furthermore, I have done nothing to exacerbate the situation in the more than three years since January 2017. Meanwhile, Jennifer and Evans have spent more than the last three years mistreating me and reshaping their Scrabble world so that I am not in it.
Their actions have affected far more than just me. They have intentionally cut out at least one other Scrabble player, Joey Krafchick, and their methods of doing tournament registration have excluded others as well, whether or not it was intentional. They have made the Pacific Northwest CSW Scrabble scene more divisive and less pleasant, and they have denied other Seattle area CSW players the opportunity to play games against me and them at the same gatherings. Jennifer got herself elected to the Advisory Board of NASPA and attempted to change the rules to give them more leverage to keep me out of tournaments, something which would also potentially in the future help them to keep other people out of their tournaments capriciously. Then they left NASPA and created a renegade association, further dividing our Scrabble community.
Their behavior is classic passive-aggressiveness. I’m not denying that they have additional motives besides me. However, they have been behaving for a long time with bad intentions toward me, and they have been doing everything they can to obscure the fact that they are doing these things because of a personal grudge.
I have reflected on why they felt it necessary to start Cliquish and Dickish and to promote it as an inclusive organization. Admittedly, this is completely my conjecture about their motivations. I think that they have seen that their method of registering their friends secretly in advance has had ill effects of excluding more than just the people they intentionally wanted to exclude and that they had to change their modus operandi if they wanted to keep growing. However, they knew that doing so would make it harder to keep me out, and they quite possibly understood that their grounds for trying to keep me out of their tournaments were weak. Even though I never appealed to NASPA about their decision to exclude me, there is a good chance that if it ever came to that, they would lose. They wanted to create their own organization so that they could make whatever capricious decisions they wanted about who was not allowed to play in their tournaments without having to justify it to anyone else, and in so doing be able to make their tournaments more widely available to everyone except for the few they wanted to exclude.
I just want to play Scrabble. If Evans and Jennifer want to hate me forever, I am not going to lose sleep about it. However, when they get in the way of me being able to play and they influence other Scrabble players to be complicit in excluding me, they cross the line. I do not need anything from them, if other players are willing to stand up for me and force them to end this madness. At the same time, I have understood for a long time that the simplest way to fix this situation is to heal my relationship with them.
They don’t need to be my friends, and I don’t need to be their friend. However, it is best for Scrabble, especially CSW Scrabble in North America, if we can all get along well and coexist at the same tournaments. I believe this is easily within reach if Evans and Jennifer can change their attitudes. There is nothing about my attitude that needs to change. I am already happy to compete in events alongside them and play in the same casual get-togethers.
I need to make a big decision in the near future about where I am going to live and work. In the past, I chose my location based primarily on what was good for my career. What I discovered when I came to Seattle was that ostracism from the local Scrabble community had a serious impact on my quality of life. The trauma that I have experienced has often been physical and has had a deleterious effect on my health. I was so reactive and stressed that it left me ill-equipped to handle the challenges of my professional life. Eventually I decided to take some time off of work. While there were also other positive reasons for my hiatus, I made a promise to myself that I would not go back to work until I told this story.
I hope that others, especially other west coast CSW Scrabble players, will consider deeply how complicit they have been in excluding me and whether this is the kind of community they want to build. I still like the Pacific Northwest and would like the opportunity to be connected to its CSW Scrabble community, but Jennifer and Evans have created such a stranglehold on it that I may at some point have to give up and decide that I can only be happy elsewhere. While they might be satisfied with that outcome, is that what the rest of you want? Do you want to drive off one of the ten best players in the country because of a three-year-old grudge held by two people who have twisted a misunderstanding into a character assassination?
Appendix
Figure 7
Chris Grubb first notifying me that Jennifer and Evans were trying to keep me out of Seattle Scrabble get-togethers. This exchange happened nearly two months before I moved to Seattle, while I was on a business trip there and doing an apartment search.
Figure 8
Email to Evans entering the 2019 Hood River tournament. This is the only time I have attempted to enter a tournament run by Jennifer and Evans.
Figure 9
Jennifer’s response to my entry to the Hood River tournament. Evans did not respond.
Figure 10
Email to Jeremy Cahnmann and Chris Lipe including full text of the first draft of my response to Jennifer about the Hood River tournament.
Figure 11
Email that I actually sent Jennifer and Evans in response to her email about Hood River. This has been the last communication of any kind between us.
Figure 12
Message from Mina about Jennifer and Evans. This was in no way solicited by me. I had not requested entry to any CoCo event, nor had I asked Mina to speak to them about it.
