The Glorie of Defeet

How losing the national spelling bee five years in a row made Samir Patel a man.

by Katy Vine

November 2007

(Page 3 of 3)

“Does not come from air,” Samir whispered repeatedly. “Does not come from air.” When a bell rang, indicating that his minute of bonus time was up, a judge said, “Samir, it’s finish time.” The pit of his stomach twisted as he spelled “a-e-r-o-m-o-c-a-u-s-i-s.” There was a pause, then the ding of the elimination bell and a gasp from the audience.

Samir walked off the stage in tears, more disappointed than he had been any other year. He had pushed himself like a marathon runner in the final stretch. “You tried,” Jyoti said, looking to cheer him up. But Samir was inconsolable. After some time in the comfort room, Jyoti and Sudhir took him to their hotel room so he could wind down. Like any competitor who had sacrificed and come up short, he asked himself the inevitable question: Why am I doing this? “No matter how hard I study, it’s not affecting my performance,” he told his parents. “I could have gone in, not studied a single bit, and I would have the same results.”

He wanted to get back to a normal life, watching Dallas Cowboys games and hanging out with his friends. “Can’t we do this next year just a little bit?” he asked. “Like, let’s say, an hour or two a day? Not, like, try and really study-study for it?” He was interested in alternative medicine and had begun making teas and concoctions. He had been wanting to enter some math competitions—he was great at math. A speller applying himself to math found its patterns so beautifully predictable.

These distractions kept him safe from the biggest fear of all, the possibility that he’d lose one last time. And then what? Many people take decades to learn how to accept an unwanted fate, if they ever accept it at all. Ask a politician who has lost an election and spiraled into depression. Ask a football player who has lost the Rose Bowl and spent the remainder of his life believing everything would have been better, the sky a little bluer, if only he had won. Navigating directly through the worst-case scenario tests cowardice at its most basic level, and when a game has woven itself into a competitor’s identity, the stakes can be blinding enough for him to create excuses with acts of laziness and self-sabotage.

Jyoti knew this, and she was firm. “If you do it,” she said, “you have to give it your all.”

“Origin, definition, please?” Samir asks, turning his head slightly to the side of the microphone.

“‘Klev-es’ might be from Scandinavian,” Bailly says. “A ‘klev-es’ is ‘any various connections in which one part is fitted between the forked ends of another and fastened by means of a bolt or pin passing through the forked ends.’ ‘Klev-es.’”

It has to be c-l-e-v-i-s, Samir thinks. That schwa sound there at the end, though—what was that? He has begun to slouch, and he straightens up. “Repeat the origin?” he asks.

“Uh, probably Scandinavian,” Bailly says.

“Are there any alternate definitions?” Samir asks.

Brian Sietsema, the associate pronouncer, reads from his dictionary: “A ‘klev-es’ can also mean ‘a fitting for attaching or suspending parts as a cable to another structural member of a bridge or a hangar for supporting pipe that consists usually of a U-shaped piece of metal with the ends drilled to receive a pin or bolt.’”

Samir stretches his arms behind his back and bows his chest slightly. Scandinavian? No—probably Scandinavian? Maybe it’s not c-l-e-v-i-s. Don’t rush. Just a floating brain and mouth.

“Okay,” he says. “‘Klev-es.’ C-l-e-v-i-c-e. ‘Klev-es.’”

There is a pause while Samir looks at the judges. And then the ding of the bell.

A month later, the Patels’ brick home in Colleyville was as quiet as a library. Samir entered the room barefoot, wearing black jeans and an orange-and-red plaid short-sleeve shirt buttoned all the way to the top. He sat on his heels on one of a series of long leather couches that lined the room, inching closer to the edge of the cushion as he engaged in conversation.

“There are a lot of movies I haven’t seen,” Samir said. “I’ve been watching The Terminator and Mission: Impossible. I like Spider-Man, you know. They’re going to show the new Harry Potter movie at the IMAX Theater, so I’m gonna go see that.”

“We have been working hard for competitions in the last five years,” said Jyoti, sitting on another of the leather couches. “So we just decided to really chill. He’s been watching a movie every night.”

Dwelling on the negative is not a Patel trait. When recalling the past five years, the family would prefer to discuss Samir’s cameo on Broadway in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee or his recent appearance on the Food Network’s Dinner: Impossible or the time he chatted backstage on the set of The Great Celebrity Spelling Bee with Alice Cooper, who gave him a CD and then assured Sudhir, “This doesn’t have any bad words in it.” (Cooper did not fare well in the celebrity bee, dinging out on “odyssey.”) And anyway, Samir would rather look to the future. He’s focusing on math competitions. He’ll be taking some college courses (“I looked at my biology textbook; I am, like, ‘Wow. This is really deep and interesting’”). He’ll continue serving as an official pronouncer for the North South Foundation spelling bee (something he’s done since 2006). The Van Cliburn Foundation has invited him to speak at schools all around the district as part of a program called Musical Awakenings that relates spelling to music.

“Everything is not about competition,” Jyoti said.

“I started swimming for the fun of it and for exercise a couple years ago,” Samir said. “I was in my first swim meet, and I got really tired, and I didn’t get a great time, but I think I’ll continue just for fun. I don’t think I’ll be a great swimmer, but, you know, it’s one of those things that you do.”

But in the bee postmortem, mother and son traded barbs like an old married couple. “To this day I will maintain that last year, 2006, was extremely unfair,” Jyoti said. “The word he received was not fair in that round, and he did get cheated out of achieving the position he deserved. This year it was in his hands. He ruined it.”

“Because this year I knew the word,” Samir said without flinching.

“That’s where we’re having a bit of a tiff,” Jyoti said with a laugh. “I’m still mad at him.”

Samir coolly explained: “She feels, for some odd reason, that you cannot second-guess yourself. She doesn’t believe that’s possible. Which is obviously incorrect. So that’s where we’re having arguments. And it’s, like, in 2006, okay, I agree that the word was unfair, but I think you just have to go into competition realizing that it is not going to be completely fair.” He shrugged. “So that’s just my view on it.”

“If you really knew the word, you wouldn’t have guessed at it,” Jyoti said.

“I didn’t guess at it, actually,” Samir said. “I knew it, and I just second-guessed myself. That’s why we’re having arguments. She just—I don’t know if it’s something she learned in school, but she just seems to feel that you cannot forget something and you cannot second-guess yourself.”

“Not at such an important point in the competition,” Jyoti said. “That’s my view.”

“So, as you can see,” Samir said, “that’s mother and son, teacher and student, having different views.”

While Jyoti was careful not to hurt Samir, she was as blunt as any coach about her own feelings; each year that he lost, the pain stung more. “I kept on going because my whole point is to teach him to persevere,” she said. “But it was that much harder.” This being his final year, it was the worst. “I’m still not over this one,” she said.

“‘Klev-es’ is c-l-e-v-i-s,” says Bailly.

Samir stares out from the stage. He is too shocked, at first, to feel anything. He looks down for a second, almost nodding, then he quickly turns from the microphone and walks, almost goose-stepping, offstage. He shakes hands with the bee escort while the audience and all the kids on the stage rise from their chairs and give him a thundering standing ovation. Some are laughing with disbelief, others are slack-jawed, others look panicked and confused. The king is dead.

“That is absolutely shocking,” says one ESPN anchor. “I think it’s going to take a few moments for everyone to regain their composure after that,” her partner responds. (Later on, Stuart Scott would tell a blogger from the Washington Post, “It’s like the Mavericks losing in the first round. That’s exactly what it is, the Mavericks losing in the first round this year of the NBA playoffs.”)

While Jyoti sends in an appeal to the judges to be sure Samir received all the required pronunciations (he did), Sudhir rushes through the audience to join his son in the comfort room. He arrives, fearing the worst, to find Samir strangely dry-eyed. He doesn’t want a glass of water or a cookie or a hug.

At the end of the day, thirteen-year-old Evan O’Dorney, from Danville, California, will win the bee and say this about his hard-earned prize: “Spelling is just a bunch of memorization.” But perspective is easy for the winner. Various emotions will wash over Samir in the days and weeks ahead—anger with himself for missing a word he knew, disappointment, some heartbreak. But it’s funny. These feelings don’t scare him anymore. He doesn’t need a brave face. He doesn’t yearn for a trapdoor to escape.

“Do you want to take a minute before going out there?” Sudhir asks.

“No, Dad, I’m fine,” Samir says.

“Okay, there are hordes of people out there. Cameras and reporters,” Sudhir says.

And then, right there, it happens. With his hand on the doorknob, as he’s about to go out and face the bright glare of public scrutiny, Samir turns to his father, at peace in the moment that has made him a man.

“No problem,” he says. “I’ll handle it.”

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