November 2007
The Glorie of Defeet
How losing the national spelling bee five years in a row made Samir Patel a man.
Samir, photographed at his home, in Colleyville, on September 7, 2007.
Photograph by Randal Ford
The Glorie of Defeet: VideoJust minutes into the live coverage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee semifinals on Thursday, May 31, 2007, ESPN’s Stuart Scott sets up for a shot near an entrance to the Independence Ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Washington. Scott is one of the marquee anchors of the hugely popular SportsCenter, known for his mashed-up play-calling style and his catchphrase “Booyah!” He can usually be found interrogating star athletes, like LeBron James and Tiger Woods. This morning his subject is a thirteen-year-old with a black mop-top and braces.
“Dan Marino: seventeen years, one of the best quarterbacks ever, never won a championship,” Scott says. “Samir Patel right here: This is his fifth spelling bee. One of the best young spellers we’ve ever seen, but you’ve never won. You’ve finished fourteenth, second, third, twenty-seventh. How are you going today to pull off what Marino never could?”
“Well, you know, there’s so much luck involved in the spelling bee,” Samir responds. The kid is stupefyingly professional. He makes eye contact like a debate team captain and doesn’t seem vexed by any of the awkward eccentricities that usually plague great child spellers. Only the bee uniform—a white polo buttoned all the way to the top and a placard hanging around his neck emblazoned with his number, 247, and his sponsor, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—supplies the requisite notes of nerdy pageantry that most fans associate with the contest.
“You can’t necessarily really say just that I’m the best speller, because there’s so much luck,” Samir says.
“There’s luck and there’s confidence,” Scott replies. “Some of these students, they get up here and they get a little nervous. Confidence will knock a person over if he’s standing next to you.”
Samir doesn’t smile or shrug. Such assessments no longer faze him. Since 2003, he has been at the center of more media attention than any speller in history who’s never actually won the national bee. By age ten, he was already legendary enough to be the subject of an entire chapter in a book about spelling bees. Following the 2003 bee, Samir found fame as a “lifeline” on televised celebrity spelling contests and now has devoted fans worldwide. He has rubbed elbows with politicians, actors, Olympians, and enough notables to fill his book of autographs. Women approach him in supermarkets; bee nuts write about him online, dissecting his record, calculating his proficiency. In the run-up to this year’s bee, one blog posted a photo of Samir picking out his official polo shirt.
Samir’s string of four consecutive high-profile losses is part of what accounts for the interest. Analysts compare him to challenged sports legends and teams who never win the big one, like Michelle Kwan or the Buffalo Bills (God help him). He’s been devastated after every loss, trying desperately to wrap his head around defeat. Floyd Patterson, who used to sneak out of stadiums after losing boxing matches wearing a fake mustache and glasses, once said that anyone can be a good winner. “It’s in defeat,” Patterson observed, “that a man reveals himself.” Samir, of course, is not a man. He is a kid, and every year after hearing the dreaded ding that indicates an incorrect spelling, he has done what all kids do when the world doesn’t make any sense: He has cried a lot.
This year, he is once again the front-runner, and the blogs are all over him. “This is his fifth straight trip, and final one,” said the Bee Blog. “He’ll be too old next year.” (Next year, as a ninth-grader, he’ll be ineligible for the Scripps bee, which is limited to elementary and middle-schoolers.) Deadspin, a sports news site, warned, “Seriously, Samir Patel, if you lose, you’ve wasted your childhood . . . Last chance, kid: Don’t choke.”
By today, Samir has comfortably made it through the quarterfinals—in which 227 ten- to fifteen-year-old wunderkinder from all corners of the English-speaking world dinged out—by nailing “decor” (ornamentation) in round two, “trumpery” (deceit) in round three, and “sunglo” (a green Chinese tea) in round four. Fifty-nine spellers remain this Thursday as the semifinals begin. Now that the field is smaller, the commentators regale viewers with the contestants’ personal stories: a struggle with a brittle-bone disease, a mother in a coma.
Samir’s chances increase as one chair is left empty, then another, and another. Michael Girbino, a twelve-year-old with brown haired and eyeglasses that slip down his nose, looks wide-eyed and terrified when given the word “retiarius” (a Roman gladiator armed with a net and a trident). The elimination bell dings, and he thanks the judges as if he is grateful to leave the stage. Rebecca Rehberger, a fourteen-year-old from South Dakota who towers over the other spellers, scribbles her word, “siphonogamous” (adjective, “accomplishing fertilization by means of a pollen tube”), on the back of her placard and stares at it like a superhero utilizing her X-ray vision. At the sound of the ding, she looks as if she might crumble into a pile behind the microphone.
Finally, it is Samir’s turn. Rising from his chair, he confidently walks across the stoplight-red carpeting to center stage. He holds his hands together behind his back. He ignores the glare of the lights. He tunes out the cameras and everything buzzing around the stage. Previous experience has taught him that at this moment, he should aspire to be no more than a floating brain and mouth.
He faces the official pronouncer, Jacques Bailly, who sits at a navy-blue judges panel. The sounds of the word come rolling out of Bailly’s mouth with precise enunciation: “‘klev-es.’”
Ah, Samir thinks, I know this one.
English is one of the most complicated, untamable languages in recorded human history. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, the official dictionary of the bee, lists more than 476,000 English words. Compare that with roughly 100,000 words in French or 200,000 in German. A mongrel tongue like no other, English began as a wholly Germanic language and then welcomed a massive infusion of French (due, initially, to the Norman conquest of 1066), then Latin (because it was the language of the church and of higher learning) and Greek (mainly for scientific terms). And when the colonialist period began, English pillaged the world’s languages for their treasures (“avocado,” “raccoon,” and so on). Other words were just invented out of thin air. Shakespeare alone coined more than 1,500 words, and these days we’re adding as many as 20,000 a year (“blog,” “d’oh,” “ringtone”). On the language farm, English is a big fat pig.
Is it any wonder a sixth-grader holding a spelling workbook looks so pitiful? Words with practically the same etymology often have very different spellings. The Latin root gentilis, for example, produced “gentle,” “gentile,” and “genteel.” A keen eye capable of detecting emerging patterns is quickly disrupted by interference. Pronunciation can give a speller hints, but as Bill Bryson pointed out in his 1990 book, Mother Tongue, English possesses more sounds than almost any other language: at least 44, compared with about 20 in Italian or just 13 in Hawaiian. Spelling, in most other languages, is simple: Sound it out. A Spanish spelling contest would be a joke.
English’s inconsistencies didn’t bother anyone who spoke the language a few hundred years ago, since there was no uniform spelling. The idea of dictating language seemed as silly as policing hairstyles. While France and Italy assembled academies to act as caretakers of their languages, England considered the idea, then nixed it. It was decided that a language belonged to those who spoke it and not to a government. As a result, even after the printing press necessitated standardized spelling, the process was painfully slow. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words, a 2,543-word volume published in 1604 and widely considered to be the first dictionary of English, spells “words” two ways on the title page (“wordes” and “words”). No wonder Samuel Johnson’s 42,773-word Dictionary of the English Language, completed in 1755, was a big deal.
English spelling like Johnson’s, which retained the u in “honour” and the re in “theatre,” chafed the founders of the United States. A more phonetic and Americanized English was required to set the New World apart from the Old. Benjamin Franklin suggested a whole new alphabet, complete with six new characters, an idea that was as well received at the time as it would be now. The massive undertaking of systematizing American spelling finally found its champion in the self-righteous, hardworking Noah Webster, who, in 1828, finished a 70,000-word compendium that caused his compatriots’ hearts to swell: the American Dictionary of the English Language.
It was during this time that the spelling bee phenomenon was born. James Maguire explains in American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds that young Puritans and immigrants wanting to show themselves as educated began gathering together for “spelling matches” in schoolhouses. By 1875, the president of the American Philological Association was declaring these contests an “epidemic.” An 1877 edition of the New York Times reported that, following a heated spelling match, two female contestants had gotten into a catfight, resulting in five days of jail time. Drama aside, these showdowns were relatively small affairs. The spelling bee as we know it today didn’t begin until 1925. The first national bee was sponsored by the Louisville Courier-Journal. More than two million kids entered. Competition began on the local and state levels, and eventually the number of contestants was pared down to nine for the finals in Washington, D.C. The first spelling bee champion, eleven-year-old Frank Neuhauser, of Louisville, won by spelling the word “gladiolus” (a genus of plants native chiefly to Africa). As of last year, the non-agenarian still grew them in his garden.
