1,000 Greatest Drivers: Red Byron

No longer the best Byron but certainly still worthwhile.

I thought Red Byron was the next driver on my schedule after Rex Mays, but I didn’t realize I had a blank space for March 11, so I was gonna do Thierry Tassin Wednesday and Byron yesterday, but I ended up struggling to find sufficient information for Tassin in English. For starters, his Wikipedia page does a terrible job of properly demonstrating his greatness. The Tassin page has been so difficult for me that I started it and aborted it twice, but I do know that I need to cover him since in addition to being the first four-time 24 Hours of Spa winner, he’s also the highest-rated Belgian touring car driver in my model and he won three consecutive titles, which his Wikipedia page didn’t even bother mentioning, while pretty much only mentioning a bunch of races he didn’t win. I also went to the Neurodivergent Support Group at Unique Peerspectives on Wednesday and I needed to complete a long, dense assignment at work.

As for Byron, he seems to have gotten a bum rap from a lot of recent fans who view NASCAR as indistinguishable from all of stock car racing history. When the members of one of my previous Discords voted on the top 100 drivers in NASCAR history, Byron didn’t make the list because people were only looking at his two Cup Series wins and ignoring his accomplishments in 1947 and 1948. This was a mistake. Even though I’ll probably concede that Red isn’t the best Byron anymore (it’s closer than you think, though), he was pretty clearly one of the top two or three stock car drivers from 1947-1949, and his performances in the proto-NASCAR National Championship Stock Car Circuit in 1947 and the inaugural NASCAR Modified title in 1948 (where he was competing against pretty much exactly the same drivers that he would compete against in the Cup Series, including a number of greats and won 20 combined races) clearly make a case for his greatness that looking at his 1949 does not. I also realized his 1946 and 1950 were worth rating too, and I noticed that his birth and death dates that appear on most sites including official NASCAR sources were wrong, so his birthday wasn’t actually March 12 at all. While I think NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers List was a mistake, I don’t think this was one, nor do I think Byron making the NASCAR Hall of Fame was a mistake. But really, I wanted to talk more about something else.

I’ve certainly mentioned in passing that I used to be a tournament Scrabble player. I don’t think I’ve ever done a full deep dive here, but Stefan Fatsis, whose Word Freak was one of the three main influences on Nerds per Minute, and whose Unabridged I just started reading a couple weeks ago, just launched his Substack last week and wrote a post on last year’s National School Scrabble Championship, and I wanted to recommend it. I have been so lonely in this decade for anyone to talk to at all that it got me feeling nostalgic. Even though I go way, way back in Scrabble all the way back to 1994 (which was coincidentally the same year I watched my first auto race), when I finally got into tournaments, I didn’t enjoy it. Part of it was because I set such high standards for myself because I started so much younger than even a lot of players who ended up being vastly better because I refused to do the work to actually complete my word study, and part of it is that I just didn’t connect socially.

You might instantly read this and go “duh” because of my autism, but I don’t think that was actually it. There’s loads of autism in the tournament Scrabble community just as in all other board game/video game communities and they are disproportionately neurodivergent in general. I think it’s because I came from a working class/borderline lumpenproletariat background while almost all the other players (particularly in my generation and younger) came from yuppie/professional managerial class backgrounds at least. Obviously, any hobbies in the physical world have gotten more and more expensive, and a lot of working class people have been priced out of them; they’ve been gentrified. That’s why most of the broke nerdy autists wound up playing online video games instead because they are much cheaper than live events, even though they are probably far less fulfilling socially.

Another thing I noticed was that whenever I was in any sort of intellectual circles, I always felt like a charlatan. Whether it was Cornell classmates, the people I met at state math league meets, Scrabble players, Nate Bowen at the Ultimate Typing Championship, etc…, I seldom felt I wasn’t smart enough to hang with these people, but I constantly felt I wasn’t erudite/cosmopolitan/sophisticated enough. I was fundamentally a trailer trash meathead by disposition regardless of my academic abilities. I grew up on Catholicism, NASCAR, classic rock, and schlocky family sitcoms and I never entirely shook that and properly developed taste. Even if a lot of Scrabble players were similarly socially awkward, they didn’t share this same milieu. They were refined, mannered, and sophisticated, while I never properly progressed and outgrew being the clever 12-year-old I have always been and feel like I will always be. I feel like I never found my people because while I am an economic leftist and I certainly never had any interest in voting for Republicans, I was like a right-leaning centrist socially and a conservative culturally who never developed the refinement or sensibilities a successful professional managerial class type person has (and I guess I never wanted to), which is probably why I got rejected in nearly all PMC circles, even more than my autism. I ended up enjoying competitive typing more precisely because those people were less intellectual and seemed more down to earth (had nothing to do with the fact that I was the best typist in the world at the time, which is something I didn’t really care about that much, while I was merely a decent Scrabble player). For sure, I could quickly rattle off several dozen Scrabble players I considered friends and I’ve thought of getting back into it just for social reasons because I’ve been desperately lonely, but I just got the feeling I never belonged there. It’s telling that almost none of them really had much to say to me after I quit and I think a lot of it is that we had nothing else in common. I think I would have enjoyed the original tournament Scrabble scene as Fatsis described it in Word Freak more than that of my peer group because it did seem more working class and down-to-earth to me, but that could be me looking at it through rose-colored glasses. I’m also admittedly losing my interest in most forms of competition these days while looking for communities that are less consumerist and more communal…

But I have been feeling really nostalgic lately even though I don’t feel like I want to play again, and I told most of my story in the comment section of the Fatsis atricle, so I thought I’d reprint it here.

I was unaware how much the Scrabble scene had changed since I quit. I started very early in the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail SIG (Special Interest Group) in 1994 when I was eight. Back in the ‘70s, my mom was one of the top three players in the group along with Ken Clark and Tom O’Bannon. She rejoined Mensa and the Scrabble SIG in the late ‘80s and at one point had the second-highest game score (718 behind only Bob Lipton’s 784). When the SIG started (which was before OSPD (the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) existed) all players used W-3 (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary), so there were lots of useful words like QT, QRE, and QRI before QAT and QI existed. When OSPD was introduced, players had a choice between OSPD and W-3. Usually the original players went with W-3 while the newer players (often from the tournament scene) preferred OSPD. There was also an option to play either OSPD only, W-3 only, or either with “all 2s and 3s” from both dictionaries. Because it was a mail Scrabble group, there were never any prohibitions on looking up words because how could you possibly enforce that? As a result, OSPD won out once word lookup/anagramming guides like the Blank Book, Wordbook, and eventually the Franklin OSPD were all introduced in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. Mom had all of these but we were poorer than almost all the other players so we didn’t get them until years later.

Both my parents were Mensa members. I was never interested in trying to join Mensa (although admittedly I’ve thought about it lately just for social reasons, although I’d probably fit in just as poorly as I did in tournament Scrabble if I qualified for the same reasons) but I was interested in joining the Scrabble group; at some point in the ‘80s the group ruled that non-Mensans could join so I was in. The top two players in the group in the ‘90s were tournament experts Bob Lipton and Luise Shafritz. Lipton was the group’s first ratings compiler and Shafritz was the group’s statistician when I joined. They were both Mensans, but allowing non-Mensans to join led to the entries of a bunch of other tournament players in subsequent years. (Chuck Armstrong, who at one time won more tournaments than any other player, and the first World Champion Peter Morris were even members! Admittedly they were both in the group only very, very briefly; hilariously, Armstrong played only a single game, set the then all-time high score record, and never played again.)

I would always open my mom’s games and read the group’s newsletters before she got to them and try to find plays. One time when I found a better play than she did, she got all pissed and asked if I wanted to play my own games and I said yes. At the age of 14 in 1999, I became the group’s statistician and turned what was then a 5-page statistics column into a regular 20-page column every month. I invented lots of statistical categories no one had ever thought about before and wrote blow-by-blow sports report-esque commentaries of games. Under me, the statistics column, which was kind of a minor part of the newsletters in the ‘90s, suddenly became a centerpiece. I quit the statistician role in 2003 to focus on college and then the group coordinator Bob Heasley had a heart attack a few months later and the group never really recovered. It lingered on until the late 2010s or so and I had returned as statistician while doubling up as the group’s third ratings compiler after Lipton and Dick Lazaro, but it was never the same.

There were some hilarious moments. After I joined, a bunch of the other yuppie players in the group (who were usually not very good players) pretty much forced their similarly-aged kids into the group to compete with me, and they were all matched in games with me and only me. I was blowing the crap out of all of them so badly they all quit before the games were half-over. One of their parents accused my mom of making my plays for me. She did not. I made my own plays. Of course, I searched for words using the Franklin OSPD, but all the adult players were doing that too, so... I didn’t even WANT to play the kids! I wanted to play the adult players but some of them didn’t want to play me because they “didn’t want to be beaten by a kid”, but I was pretty much universally accepted by the end of the millennium.

Scrabble-by-Mail play was different than regular play because every four months, a game would be released that had a particular “letter sequence”. Players got to see all 100 tiles in order in advance, knowing exactly what was coming. So the strategy was very different as the objective was simply to force the bad tile combinations on your opponent, keep the good tile combinations for yourself, and set up unblockable bingos with complete certainty. This really showed up in my adult playing in tournaments also. My strategy was always better than my word knowledge. I know everybody likes to say that, but Scrabble-by-Mail gave me a lot of experience in strategy and setups and shit like that, but I never quite got around to diligent word study like I was supposed to. There’s even mathematical proof for what I’m saying. According to Josh Castellano’s Random Racer site, I had the lowest probability of bingos played among every player ever. That HAS to mean my strategy was carrying me well over my word knowledge, right? Which ties right back to my background where I expended a lot of energy on strategy but not enough on word acquisition. Even though I had both the OSPD1/OSPD2 and Wordbook in the house at an auspicious age and I was already well aware that tournaments existed from mentions in the Scrabble-by-Mail newsletters, I just never bothered memorizing everything even though I had all the tools, mainly because I was in Syracuse, I was poor, and neither of my parents ever went anywhere so I had no access to tournaments or clubs. Boy, I WISH school Scrabble had existed then to motivate me or something. I kind of feel like based on my background and how young I was, I eventually should’ve become some championship-caliber player or something and I set way too high expectations for myself while refusing to put in the work for diligent word study, so it was perhaps inevitable that I was miserable once I finally entered tournaments as an adult. I am the aftergifted poster boy. (Of course I later became this niche celebrity gamer, the supposed fastest typist of the 2010s, and finally found my niche as an author, enjoying that more than I ever enjoyed Scrabble tournaments or actually competing at typing really...)

I never could afford to get to many tournaments so I almost entirely played online for years and I think that gave me a skewed perspective as well. Almost all the expert players wanted to play Internet Scrabble Club games at three minutes a side where if you go more than one minute over, you forfeit even when you’re leading. That really, REALLY stressed me out and was not fun for me. Now I realize why. Games like that are too short for anybody to properly strategize. Games of that length are 100% “Do you know the words? Do you see the best plays INSTANTLY?” I remember Matt Canik once thought I was a serious up-and-comer and then changed his mind after I lost to him 19 games in a row in a blitz marathon, but now I get it. My word knowledge was so poor relative to everyone I was playing against that they all saw great plays instantly and I did not, while I was always at my best at slow-burn strategies (the gap between my skill in full-length 25-minute games and my skill in blitz 3-minute games was WAY starker than most of the other players as a result, I think). But the fact that none of the good players wanted to play anything but blitz made me think I was worse than I was because fast play accentuated my weaknesses, but seemingly nobody good other than Ben Schoenbrun wanted to play slower games...

I know almost all the other elder millennials will say they got into Scrabble because of Word Freak, but it was the opposite for me. I got into Word Freak because Judy Yavner, one of the top Scrabble-by-Mail players for many years (but I don’t think she ever played a tournament), told me about the book when we were playing. In our game, I set up the nine-letter word iguanodon (using a wordfinder admittedly, but I already knew it), but one of the Scrabble-by-Mail oddities is that we used W-3 for words longer than eight letters while tournaments used Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate at the time (I think). Iguanodon was capitalized in W-3 but lowercase in MW10. That technically made the play unacceptable and she told me that, but Judy was so impressed she didn’t challenge. Anyway, she told me about the book so from then on I really wanted to go to tournaments. One of the reasons I was so excited to go to Cornell in 2003 was because I thought there was a regular Scrabble club in Ithaca, but Rich Baker (who ran it) had apparently just moved and it no longer existed. My first course at Cornell was a freshman writing seminar called “The Anthropology of Imaginary Subcultures”. We studied the SCA, Trekkies, and comic book fandoms; I guess this was several years ahead of its time. I convinced him to write my final paper on tournament Scrabble and I used Word Freak as the source for most of it. Eventually, I quoted it in my own typing history/memoir/guide Nerds per Minute. (Basically, I was trying to write the typing book equivalent of what Word Freak was for Scrabble, Ken Jennings’s Brainiac was for trivia, and Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein was for memory competitions, and I think I succeeded.) While I don’t think I regret quitting Scrabble and I think both that book and the current book I am writing were better uses of my time and more fun, I guess this post and Unabridged triggered a lot of memories for me.

I had an OSPD1 and OSPD2 in the house as I said, but I never bought the other ones once they were ironically no longer official either for Scrabble-by-Mail or for tournaments (I think I got a later edition in my swag bag at the 2014 Nationals). I had admittedly noticed there were more differences between OSPD and TWL than just the swear words and the slurs over time. Apparently, at some point TWL started adding lots of brand names like JELLO that OSPD was rejecting (correctly, I think; I’m not convinced anyone used jello generically the way they used xerox) and there were other words that you almost never saw uncapitalized like JURASSIC that dubiously made it in, so I guess that was the start of it? I remember Carl Johnson making fun of a lot of the words added in that update on his LiveJournal. I didn’t bother looking at any of the post-OSPD2 OSPDs so I was unaware of how much they had diverged. I don’t think I even knew JAKER (the “word” at the center of the controversy Fatsis described in his article)! But then, lazy studier and all. I had also never heard of the Scrabble Word Guide despite all the books I had at home.

I think ultimately, this article convinced me that the North American word list (all of them) should just go back to OSPD. I really did think the swear words, the slurs, and certain brand names were the only differences and I was unaware how far the North American Scrabble Players Association had spread its wings in the years since. But I guess now that there are apps based on all these individual word lists, that will never happen. I remember that quote from Word Freak about Joel Sherman wanting to see Scrabble become the hot new sport. That was never going to happen in the first place, but it’s CERTAINLY not going to happen with six different lexicons or whatever.

Yeah, most of you won’t care, but that was probably too good to be limited to the comments section of somebody else’s Substack, so that’s why I posted it here too.