Tournament Time (finally)

So, believe it or not, here are my vague recollections of my very first official scrabble tournament. Post traumatic stress disorder may have deleted or warped some of the events, but I will do the best I can (or at least the best I feel like). So this event, like most I have subsequently encountered, had something called a commuter fee. This lovely concept (which is not present in magic or chess tournaments) is that to play in the tournament, you first have a choice to make. You can either stay in the hotel chosen by the organizers (usually exorbitantly expensive or rundown and sketchy) or you can pay the fee and choose a lodging that you might actually stay at if you were in town for some other more sane reason. This particular tournament's organizers impressed me by finding a place that charged like an elegant Hilton Hotel, but looked like Paris Hilton around five in the morning (That's so not hot...). The concept is (I am guessing here) that if enough people stay at the place that the tournament occurs, the hotel will give a discount to the organizers for the conference room or business hall or unused parking in the back or whatever that they are renting. I would rather just have everyone pay a higher entry in the first place or, God forbid, find a nice clean place that is not attached to a hotel. Peggy managed to do this for the club sponsored tournament and the earth did not stop spinning (though I am sure a couple scrabble players somewhere lost their last bit of sanity to make up for the deficit of crazy that her sensible decision caused). Since I did not feel like paying hundreds of dollars for the right to be stabbed by cockroaches, I paid the commuter fee and worked on finding other options for lodgings. I was "lucky" enough to find out my in-laws were going to be R.V. camping relatively near the location of the tournament (twenty minutes as opposed to the four hours from my house).
They would conveniently be in the area the weekend before the the actual event... I asked them if they would be willing to switch the dates, they said no. I asked the tournament organizers if they would switch their dates; they said we play and organize scrabble, we don't have dates, but if we did we would take them to the movies and then take them back to our place for scrabble and sensuous massages and certainly not "switch" them (unless they were into that kind of thing, we wouldn't know, we don't have dates...). So back to the in-laws and after weeks of begging, pleading and shrewd negotiating I had a place to stay I could afford and reasonably expect to live though (all I had to promise was a month of grass cutting, two truck washings, and promise to not actually go to the tournament, who says in-laws aren't kind and gracious?) Maybe it was just a dinner at a nice restaurant, I just remember being horribly traumatized. With that load off my mind, I continued to diligently practice at the club and with some of the members on additional days as well. I pored over word lists (I tried pouring first, but I kept getting sticky and it didn't seem to make my scores go up). I even harassed my poor students into helping me:
"Good morning class. Your quiz today is to list as many five letter words as you can, containing a 'z' but no 's' in the next five minutes."
"What does that have to do with To Kill a Mockingbird?"
"What doesn't it have to do with To Kill a Mockingbird? You must not have read carefully. And you only have four minutes left now, hurry up!"

Finally the big day arrived. The four of us (in-laws, wife and me) drove up together each with our own warped motivations. Her parents to obtain an indentured servant, me to make people and influence words, and my poor wife to check firsthand if the man she had married had gone crazy a decade or so earlier than what she was anticipating when she signed the pre-nup. I was able to get a decent night's sleep after turning down her parents generous initial offer of "special" sleeping arrangements (a sleeping bag on the roof seemed unfair somehow and I still maintain it shouldn't count as sleeping under the stars if it is raining so hard you can't actually see the stars) I got to the tournament and stepped inside the building attached to the hotel that would be the site of my few triumphs and multiple humiliations (ironically, the game I played five rounds later when I actually got to use the word triumph, I lost by two hundred points). I will give the organizers credit for one thing. This place was huge. Like airplane hanger huge (though it smelled more like pigeons than 747s). There were around 150 of us there and we easily could have fit three times that inside (maybe that is how many came but the others actually stayed in the "recommended hotel"and I mean stayed as in "You can check in any time you like, but..."). I was in the bottom of four divisions with around 40 other people who had also decided, hey I think I'll play scrabble with strangers for fun and, uh, profit? Some of us, like me, were complete newcomers (or at least were willing to lying about their identity for the chance at winning a couple hundred dollars, no joke I heard rumors concerning a suspiciously good "new" player in my bottom division), some of us played casually and used these tournaments as an excuse to travel and see new places (gotta love the eccentric rich) and some of were former scrabble stars that time and/or non prescription medication had reducing to slumming with the rest of us. There was a short presentation given to the new players to familiarize us with how tournaments work.
"You are not at the kitchen table anymore. You have to use a clock. You both have to record your scores. You can't call your opponent names. You can't get up in the middle and go watch Matlock."
"Is Matlock on right now?"
"Um, as far as you know, no, no its not and you can't have your commuter fee back even if it was."
I met a nice lady during this speech. She told me she was just here to have fun and to make new friends. She said she loved to learn new words and didn't know why everyone took the game so seriously. She seemed agreeable and well adjusted. I should have known this was a bad sign. We were randomly paired for the first round and I looked forward to a pleasant start to my first experience as a "real" scrabble player. We smiled, shook hands and wished each other good luck.
Then the round started. It soon became apparent that what she lacked in word knowledge she made up for in psychosis.
" What's your score?"
"I'm not sure, I'm still counting."
"Hurry up."
"But I'm the one using time from my clock..."
"Your time is my time!"
"Huh? What does that mean?"
"Don't you 'huh' me young man, just hurry up." Then on her turn...
"Shhh!"
"I didn't say anything."
"You're breathing too much!"
"But I need oxygen!"
"That's my oxygen, you little punk!"
"I don't think you are supposed to call your opponent names..."
"Did they say I couldn't shove tiles up your big oxygen stealing nose?"
"Sorry, I'll try to breathe less, Ma'am."
"That's a good boy."
I lost a very close game (and several brain cells from only breathing every other minute) and afterwards it was as if a switch was flicked back.
"What a nice game. I hope you have a wonderful day. It was nice meeting you and good luck in your next round."
"So you aren't going to asphyxiate me?"
"Ooh what a wonderful new word! I knew this would be a fun learning experience!"
"I'm just going to back away slowly then..."
"You silly young people. I hope we get to play again soon..."
The next round I was paired against one of the two people I knew who had also come from the club. The debacle that ensued (and led to my desperate need for a duck) will have to wait for next time in Tournament time Part Two: "No you can't quit and you're too young to watch Matlock anyways."