SPECIAL EDITION

National Spelling Bee Edition 
 

I received messages from several people today reminding me about today’s finals of the National Spelling Bee. Funny how a guy who never made it to the Thursday rounds can inspire so many people to follow what settles for, I guess, a sport of the mind a la poker or video games or whatever else ESPN deigns to be a sport these days. But hey, I went to the show... twice... so at least I remember a thing or two about how the tournament goes down... 

I would by no means call what I did on that stage in the Grand Hyatt Washington an athletic endeavor, no matter how many pounds I sweated out on that stage in the grand ballroom wearing the official poly-blend polo shirts they doled out to every speller. Of course, being from Wyoming, I was the guy at the dead end of the line, with a tie-dyed shirt on underneath the polo for good luck or flair or just plain adolescent pontification on my status in the scheme of things. I stood up to spell after nearly forty-five minutes of watching first one, then another, one of my peers take their turn at the microphone. 

I stepped up to the microphone. The announcer -- you know the one if you’ve ever come across the spelling bee errantly on ESPN while thumbing the remote, the guy with the gravelly voice who has to read the etymology and the definition and the pronunciations and use each word in a sentence -- read me the word. Hmmm... decuman...? Was that it? 

I requested the definition... that was hopeless. 

“Adjective:

1. large or immense, as a wave.

2. (in ancient Rome) of or pertaining to the tenth cohort of a legion.” 

So I ask him to say it again... and it comes out another way... decumun? Decumen? I can’t get a read on how this guy is saying the damn thing. I’m sweating in the polyester under the blinding lights, just waiting for the bell to send me to the crying room with all the other rejects. Back then they didn’t have this written pre-bee test. We just got thrown on stage... which means at least you get one moment in the sun during your trip to D.C. -- right? 

I ask for all the usual things to stall time and play this thing out in my head. I keep hearing the U... so I go with it. (The dictionary lays it out thusly: [dek-yoo-muhn]  I stand by my thought process.) 

D-E-C-U-M-U-N 

Ding! 

And off and away I go, and onward and forward to round four went the rest. Thanks for the trip, and we’ll have lots of functions and more opportunity now to see the city. Whatever... I made it, just somebody who capitalized on being from the smallest state in the union in population. Hell, the newspaper that sent me both years doesn’t even exist in the same unmerged format anymore, the town now only having one daily that satisfies its news needs, and that merged behemoth has no need to sponsor a speller on its own anymore. Now the state has formed the Wyoming Spelling Bee Collaborative, which sent sole representative Sage Weber, an eighth grader from the University of Wyoming Lab School in Laramie. I wouldn’t even be there, probably, had I been an eighth grader in this day and age... 

Sage didn’t get bounced in the third round like I did in 1997, you see, the second and final time I went to Washington to contest the Bee. Yet there she was, not in the second-day picture... and I still try to figure out just where and why she was eliminated. Answers will be forthcoming. As for me a dozen years prior, it was t-a-r-t-a-r-E-o-u-s that stumbled me. I had correctly spelled twice before throwing out an unnecessary I instead of the obligatory E. So there I was, munching on cookies and craving a cigarette after having been on stage for nearly three hours... 

Yeah, the tie-dyed kid straight out of the wilds of Grand Teton National Park was cut from a different cloth. I certainly would not have been material for the documentary Spellbound which chronicled, among others, that year’s winner Nupur Lala as eight youths spelled increasingly sesquipedalian words en route to determining Lala’s status as the 1999 champion. Oh, to have been born two years later... 

But victory is sweet no matter what the year... just ask this year’s champion, Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kansas. Kavya had been in the finals thrice before, steadily improving from tenth to eighth to fourth to this year’s championship. Perseverance is rewarded in spelling, I guess, just as in any other contest. So is diligence, training, and the benefits of experience... especially when one is faced with a word like L-A-O-D-I-C-E-A-N for over $40,000 in prizes and cash... 

But that’s the beautiful thing: even a champion can attest that experience can only take you so far. The beautiful thing about the National Spelling Bee is that, win or lose, there is but a finite window up until eighth grade or the age of fourteen (whichever comes first) where a kid can spell their way onto sports coverage alongside the heroes of the NBA and NHL playoffs, the tennis stars competing at Roland Garros, or the host of other stars out there in the wider world. Only the rarest of talents get to be heroes on a national level in their respective sports at such an age; but there are the brainiacs, taking center stage for two days on the Potomac. For two days following Memorial Day, Shivashankar and the rest of the record field of 293 spellers honored their communities and put the sport of spelling on the map... 

Is it a sport? Perhaps that’s where the poly-blend polo shirts come in along with the stage lights... they say that if you sweat, it’s a sport -- right?