Vowel Language

The champs' first play is OUTVIE. They spin the board around and, as it rotates, I say, "Out-vee?" Their coach, Mark Fidler, a math teacher at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, corrects my pronunciation "out-vhy" and gives an impromptu lecture on why players should not pronounce Scrabble words out loud. Without warning, the Survivor motto (outwit, outplay, outlast) swims into mind, and I quickly understand that Nick Amphlett and John Ezekowitz, the two BB&N Middle School students sitting across from me, aren't messing around. They're sending a message.

Nick and John, known collectively as the Green Team, took home the 2003 National School Scrabble Championship, held here in Boston. No small feat. They outperformed 98 teams, some of which traveled from Texas, Oregon, and California to vie for the title. In five rounds of play, the boys went undefeated and earned 704 points. On April 24, the pair of 13-year-olds will defend their title at this year's tourney at the Copley Marriott. I wanted to see what they're all about, so last month I teamed up with my pal Fletcher, who is, like me, a grown-up, to square off in a friendly match at BB&N School.

Though John and Nick play once a week at school and quite often online, their lives aren't just word hooks and vowel dumps. (They've only been serious about Scrabble for two years or so.) John is an amateur golfer who has played in the Titleist Junior PGA Golf Tour, and Nick's into baseball, basketball, and soccer. The boys even look like ordinary seventh-graders — Nick has braces and freckles; John's blue Patagonia shirt has a tiny stain on it — but let's not get carried away. Fact is, they're ringers. Killers. Scrabble sharks.

We play FIVES as our first word, and go up by one point: 21 to 20. It would be our last lead. The Green Teamsters quickly dominate the board, employing tiny oddities such as LEK and LEY to great advantage. We furrow our 30-something brows and strain to make the biggest words we can manage; they place an F, spelling EF on a triple-letter-score square, to rack up 26 points. The boys whisper when they strategize, which underscores just how young they are. Easy to imagine them whispering some scatological joke to each other. I think, "Scatological! Can we play it?" Our letters don't come close. We put down another unmemorable, low-scoring word, only to have Fidler show us the 61-point opportunity we missed. They are, it's now clear, messing with us.

How did Fidler match these two guys up? "I picked the two strongest people," says the soft-spoken but proud coach. "I do my best to get the two best players together."

Talk turns to Martha Stewart, on whose TV show the boys recently appeared. "She'll probably get off," says John. "I don't really know the facts of the case, but she's good at what she does."

The guys are good at what they do. They put down AGITATED. As Nick counts up the points, "6, 7, 9, 18, 68," I find myself feeling quite AGITATED. Mercifully, they soon put us out of our misery. The Green Team goes out on the word DORS (a dor is, according to Scrabble.com, "a black European beetle").

The final score isn't really important, is it? But I will say this: As soon as the tiles are collected, my embarrassment morphs into admiration. There are no egos here; even though these boys have a kind of objective respect for their talent, they're not arrogant. They're kids: They whisper, they plot, they chew gum, and they could not care less about a stain on a shirt.

"We're like the Yankees of Scrabble," Fidler says to me later. It's an analogy Boston readers might not appreciate, I tell him, after which he recovers like any good Scrabble player whose opponent has just filled the spot on the board he was eyeing. "They're like the Red Auerbach Celtics," he says.