S-p-e-l-i-n-g S-u-k-s

As a sports fan, I love this time of year. It’s the time of year when I start cheering against the LA Lakers and the Detroit Red Wings and the nation is captivated by America’s Pastime (pretending to like baseball). But don’t forget one of the truly great sporting events of the year: the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Some of you are asking if spelling is a sport. Well, to decide that, I use this rule of thumb: If I can’t do it and it’s on ESPN, it is a sport, so spelling is definitely a sport. For those of you who have never watched the National Spelling Bee, you should stop having a life and watch one. The first one I can remember watching was in Mr. Day’s English class in high school. I don’t really remember why we were watching ESPN instead of doing work, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with several of us claiming it had to do with English and Mr. Day being close to retiring and not really caring at that point.

Anyway, it gets pretty intense. These poor children stand up there in front of this huge crowd with cameras and bright lights in their face and have to spell a word that the officials clearly made up five seconds ago. Most of the kids get this stunned look of fear and confusion; if you’ve ever seen my face while someone is explaining the concept of catheters (I’m assuming here that you haven’t) then you know the face. But it’s embarrassing to just come out and say they have no idea how to spell the word, so they stall by asking questions that clearly have nothing to do with how the word is spelled, like “What is the country of origin?” Often they ask the same question twice. Of course they always ask the judges to use the word in a sentence, but the officials always choose a sentence that doesn’t help you at all, like “Bobby opened a book and saw the word guerdon,” or “Bobby was asked to spell the word guerdon,” or “Hey look! It’s not a guerdon!” Finally, the kid’s time runs out and he tries his best to spell the word but inevitably fails, and the crowd goes “awwww,” and the kid tries their hardest not to cry. And it was always a word that was pronounced simply enough but for some reason (once again, I blame the French) contains way to many b’s, x’s, and h’s. For instance, the word will be pronounced “Ball” but it will be spelled “Bhauxle.”

Of course, some kids manage to somehow get these words right (my guess is steroids). This year’s winner was Kavya Shivashankar, who correctly spelled Laodicean, which is some kind of city in Asia (although I always thought that they couldn’t give you proper nouns; or at least that’s what I contended when I misspelled Tennessee and Connecticut in a middle school spelling bee). For some reason, Indian children tend to be really good at Spelling Bees, probably from all the practice they get trying to spell each other’s names. Last year’s winner was named Sameer Mishra and one of this year’s runner-ups was named Aishwarya Pastapur (but then again, the other runner-up was named Tim). Another thing that all of these children have in common is that they are all from boring little states where there probably aren’t a whole lot of things to do and practicing how to spell words is considered a jolly good time. For instance, kids from Kansas win a lot of these things. Just take a look at the states that the top six spellers this year are from: Kansas, Virginia, two from Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. If you told me I could either take a month-long road trip to these states or stick my foot in a bucket of live eels the next thing you would see is me running off to Chinatown barefoot.

Needless to say, people in Hawaii rarely have a rooting interest in these things (although I would like to see if Kavya can spell Kaahumanu and Liliuokalani). But this year, one speller, eighth-grader Talmage Nakamoto managed to place eleventh despite being from my hometown and going to the same school system I went to. This of course is a great source of pride in town, which happens every time someone from Konawaena does anything remotely intelligent (which is not as often as you would think of a school system that produced such a super nova of intelligence such as myself). This of course brought back memories of my days as a speller in middle school. Yes, believe it or not, I once tried to compete in our school’s spelling bee, and I, like Talmage, had dreams of competing under the bright lights. Unfortunately, that dream ended when I was unable to spell the first round word, which was (brace yourself): spaghetti. I am completely serious, I didn’t know how to spell spaghetti (actually, I still don’t, but when I just typed it in the red squiggly line appeared under it so I auto-corrected it; I’ve also used auto-correct every time I have used the word unfortunately in this story). Now, my excuse was that I don’t like spaghetti and rarely eat it, but for some reason the judges didn’t care. This whole situation is sad on several levels. For one thing, it shows you what kind of school I went to where “spaghetti” is even in a spelling bee. So obviously, my failure at the spelling bee was just the start of a life-long trend of failing at sports. Which is ironic, since I work as a sports journalist. Kavya may be the National Spelling Bee Champion, but I can spell Wally Szczerbiak from memory.