Money, membership in an elite club, and the certainty of having spelled better than the rest: these are the guerdons of Scripps and the honors of knowing your argot. By and large spelling bee champions make the most of it.
“It’s one of the most unique, odd clubs you can be in,” said Dan Greenblatt, a software engineer, voice actor and winner of the 1984 Bee (his winning word was luge). “There’re only 90 of us, give or take, in this little club.”
The US has crowned a Spelling Bee champion almost every year since 1925, and those champions have mostly pursued careers in fields that reward dedicated study and a knack for jargon, such as medicine, law, chemistry or engineering. But given a hefty cash prize, a trophy and a résumé line that could justifiably read “orthography prodigy”, a few follow more idiosyncratic paths.
Pratyush Buddiga, 26, won the Bee in 2002 (prospicience) and won $840,000 playing poker in 2014 . “I found after the spelling bee I really missed competitions. Competing to be the number one student in your class isn’t that exciting, or the same as winning a tournament,” Buddiga said. “Once I found poker, that was a new avenue to try to be the best.”
Like the spelling bee, Buddiga saw poker on TV and his dabbling quickly turned into a consuming ambition. “When I was in third grade, I think, and saw the spelling bee and decided I wanted to win,” he said. “I saw poker on TV about in high school, and got serious about it in college.” He is competing this summer in the world series of poker in Las Vegas.
Spelling bee winners described the contest as a mix of puzzle-solving and sheer memorization. Contestants learn the root words and spelling patterns of various languages – especially Latin and Greek – and then can often piece together a word based on the spelling of its roots, even when they’ve never heard it before.
But all agreed that at the national level, spellers need to start perusing the dictionary, in the verb’s correct sense (“to read with great care”). Greenblatt said that about a third of contestants were eliminated when dictionary words came into play – and that the contest is far more competitive today than 30 years ago.
Buddiga framed some of the Bee’s appeal in classic terms of the American dream: “It gave me the confidence that no matter what, I can do whatever by working the hardest. I would say even today that winning was still the greatest moment of my life.”
He sees poker in some ways as a progression: a game of logic, psychology and “imperfect information”. Rather than just pure gambling, he likens it to chess: “At its highest level poker is just people implementing strategies, and over the long run it’s whichever strategy will win, not any on hand.”
Zander Reed, 12, of Ames, Iowa, gets a kiss from his father, Todd, after incorrectly spelling his word during the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP‘The crying room’
Buddiga, who was 12 when he won the Bee, said that he was too young to realize the pressure that he and other contestants faced. Greenblatt said that the pressure affected other kids in sometimes painful ways.
“When I was there we joked that there was a room called ‘the crying room’,” he said, “because when they escort you offstage after a wrong word, there’s a lot of crying going on. I know there were a lot of broken hearts out there in the side room.”
Samir Patel, a five-time contestant who never won the Bee – in 2007 he lost on ‘clevis’ to Evan O’Dorney – said the pressure mounted as the years wore on. “The first couple times I was really too young, and it was just kind of fun. I was nine or 10, on TV, there were kids all around and we were at a fancy hotel eating all this cool food. Then once I’d come in third and in second, as it wore on, there was more and more gravity to it and pressure from my family.”
Patel later finished a degree in biochemistry and now works for a hedge fund in Dallas, and said investors still recognize him at conferences. “And I’ll say ‘really, guys?’ But it’s going to be part of my identity forever.”
“On the one hand you learn at a very early age how to handle a huge workload and the value of working hard, but on the other hand you’ve also just memorized a bunch of obscure words that you forget later.”
Eudaemonic elucubration
Spelling Bee champions often earn degrees from prestigious schools and put them to immediate use. Barrie Trinkle (1973, vouchsafe) worked as a Nasa aerospace engineer and Amazon editor; Susan Yoachum (1969, interlocutory) was part of the San Jose Mercury News team that won a 1990 Pulitzer; Jacques Bailley (1980, elucubrate) teaches classics at the University of Vermont and is the “official pronouncer” of the Bee.
Amanda Goad (1992, lyceum) and third-place Srinivas Ayyagari (1994, Ned G Anderson won on antediluvian) went on to win more than $25,000 each on Teen Jeopardy! Both are attorneys (Harvard Law, University of Pennsylvania).
Some younger winners have sought entrepreneurial careers. Rebecca Sealfon (1997, euonym), although only 28, has already acquired three degrees, started a research venture and also works as a software engineer. Sealfon has expressed ambivalence about the bee, writing in 2012 that it reminded her of The Hunger Games.
“Competitive spelling is a very American contest; Americans particularly enjoy watching winners win and losers lose,” she wrote, adding that though she could write her own story, “I [have also] said that the bee shouldn’t exist, that there’s no reason to pit such talented people against one another and that the event would be just as entertaining if we celebrated all of our talents.”
Former champions mostly described the experience of winning as surreal. Under pressure and surrounded by lights and a forest of microphones, spellers sometimes act with surprising aplomb.
Greenblatt said he “did this kind of Andre Agassi pose”, for instance, and Sealfon has the distinction of being one of the internet’s first memes: she shouted every letter of her winning word at the judges while jumping up and down, a cheerleader to her own eudaemonic victory. Winners then go to late-night shows, morning shows and befuddle CNN anchors on air.
“They have a lot of these made-for-TV moments,” Greenblatt said of the contest’s appeal. “And a lot of kids do these kind of funny things when they get something right or something wrong.”
“It’s become a spectacle in part because it’s always been kind of fascinating to see very young children doing things that educated adults have trouble with,” said Shalini Shankar, a professor of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology at Northwestern University.
Shankar, who is researching spelling bees, attributed Scripps’ success in large part to the high production quality that ESPN has devoted to the “brain sport”, featuring statistics and spellers’ profiles.
And although South Asian Americans seem to dominate the contest, Shankar said “it’s kind of an anomaly among these families to get your kids involved.” Regardless of ethnicity, she said, most contestants come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, “with families already pretty well educated, who would emphasize that their kids study – and even within that, the kids really do love it”.
All the winners said they’d at least watch some of this year’s contest, and at least a few said they wouldn’t mind going back. Paige Kimble (1981, sarcophagus) is now executive director of Scripps, and Scott Isaacs (1989, spoliator) is a spelling coach to four current contestants. Isaacs said that what started as a lark – responding to a Craigslist ad for a spelling coach – became a rediscovery of his love of language and teaching.
“In the back of my mind I’ve always loved languages, learning linguistics and being able to decipher words, and then I’ve always enjoyed this sort of competition,” he said. “So it’d be great to pass that on.”
“It’s one of the most unique, odd clubs you can be in,” said Dan Greenblatt, a software engineer, voice actor and winner of the 1984 Bee (his winning word was luge). “There’re only 90 of us, give or take, in this little club.”
The US has crowned a Spelling Bee champion almost every year since 1925, and those champions have mostly pursued careers in fields that reward dedicated study and a knack for jargon, such as medicine, law, chemistry or engineering. But given a hefty cash prize, a trophy and a résumé line that could justifiably read “orthography prodigy”, a few follow more idiosyncratic paths.
Pratyush Buddiga, 26, won the Bee in 2002 (prospicience) and won $840,000 playing poker in 2014 . “I found after the spelling bee I really missed competitions. Competing to be the number one student in your class isn’t that exciting, or the same as winning a tournament,” Buddiga said. “Once I found poker, that was a new avenue to try to be the best.”
Like the spelling bee, Buddiga saw poker on TV and his dabbling quickly turned into a consuming ambition. “When I was in third grade, I think, and saw the spelling bee and decided I wanted to win,” he said. “I saw poker on TV about in high school, and got serious about it in college.” He is competing this summer in the world series of poker in Las Vegas.
Spelling bee winners described the contest as a mix of puzzle-solving and sheer memorization. Contestants learn the root words and spelling patterns of various languages – especially Latin and Greek – and then can often piece together a word based on the spelling of its roots, even when they’ve never heard it before.
But all agreed that at the national level, spellers need to start perusing the dictionary, in the verb’s correct sense (“to read with great care”). Greenblatt said that about a third of contestants were eliminated when dictionary words came into play – and that the contest is far more competitive today than 30 years ago.
Buddiga framed some of the Bee’s appeal in classic terms of the American dream: “It gave me the confidence that no matter what, I can do whatever by working the hardest. I would say even today that winning was still the greatest moment of my life.”
He sees poker in some ways as a progression: a game of logic, psychology and “imperfect information”. Rather than just pure gambling, he likens it to chess: “At its highest level poker is just people implementing strategies, and over the long run it’s whichever strategy will win, not any on hand.”
Zander Reed, 12, of Ames, Iowa, gets a kiss from his father, Todd, after incorrectly spelling his word during the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP‘The crying room’
Buddiga, who was 12 when he won the Bee, said that he was too young to realize the pressure that he and other contestants faced. Greenblatt said that the pressure affected other kids in sometimes painful ways.
“When I was there we joked that there was a room called ‘the crying room’,” he said, “because when they escort you offstage after a wrong word, there’s a lot of crying going on. I know there were a lot of broken hearts out there in the side room.”
Samir Patel, a five-time contestant who never won the Bee – in 2007 he lost on ‘clevis’ to Evan O’Dorney – said the pressure mounted as the years wore on. “The first couple times I was really too young, and it was just kind of fun. I was nine or 10, on TV, there were kids all around and we were at a fancy hotel eating all this cool food. Then once I’d come in third and in second, as it wore on, there was more and more gravity to it and pressure from my family.”
Patel later finished a degree in biochemistry and now works for a hedge fund in Dallas, and said investors still recognize him at conferences. “And I’ll say ‘really, guys?’ But it’s going to be part of my identity forever.”
“On the one hand you learn at a very early age how to handle a huge workload and the value of working hard, but on the other hand you’ve also just memorized a bunch of obscure words that you forget later.”
Eudaemonic elucubration
Spelling Bee champions often earn degrees from prestigious schools and put them to immediate use. Barrie Trinkle (1973, vouchsafe) worked as a Nasa aerospace engineer and Amazon editor; Susan Yoachum (1969, interlocutory) was part of the San Jose Mercury News team that won a 1990 Pulitzer; Jacques Bailley (1980, elucubrate) teaches classics at the University of Vermont and is the “official pronouncer” of the Bee.
Amanda Goad (1992, lyceum) and third-place Srinivas Ayyagari (1994, Ned G Anderson won on antediluvian) went on to win more than $25,000 each on Teen Jeopardy! Both are attorneys (Harvard Law, University of Pennsylvania).
Some younger winners have sought entrepreneurial careers. Rebecca Sealfon (1997, euonym), although only 28, has already acquired three degrees, started a research venture and also works as a software engineer. Sealfon has expressed ambivalence about the bee, writing in 2012 that it reminded her of The Hunger Games.
“Competitive spelling is a very American contest; Americans particularly enjoy watching winners win and losers lose,” she wrote, adding that though she could write her own story, “I [have also] said that the bee shouldn’t exist, that there’s no reason to pit such talented people against one another and that the event would be just as entertaining if we celebrated all of our talents.”
Former champions mostly described the experience of winning as surreal. Under pressure and surrounded by lights and a forest of microphones, spellers sometimes act with surprising aplomb.
Greenblatt said he “did this kind of Andre Agassi pose”, for instance, and Sealfon has the distinction of being one of the internet’s first memes: she shouted every letter of her winning word at the judges while jumping up and down, a cheerleader to her own eudaemonic victory. Winners then go to late-night shows, morning shows and befuddle CNN anchors on air.
“They have a lot of these made-for-TV moments,” Greenblatt said of the contest’s appeal. “And a lot of kids do these kind of funny things when they get something right or something wrong.”
“It’s become a spectacle in part because it’s always been kind of fascinating to see very young children doing things that educated adults have trouble with,” said Shalini Shankar, a professor of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology at Northwestern University.
Shankar, who is researching spelling bees, attributed Scripps’ success in large part to the high production quality that ESPN has devoted to the “brain sport”, featuring statistics and spellers’ profiles.
And although South Asian Americans seem to dominate the contest, Shankar said “it’s kind of an anomaly among these families to get your kids involved.” Regardless of ethnicity, she said, most contestants come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, “with families already pretty well educated, who would emphasize that their kids study – and even within that, the kids really do love it”.
All the winners said they’d at least watch some of this year’s contest, and at least a few said they wouldn’t mind going back. Paige Kimble (1981, sarcophagus) is now executive director of Scripps, and Scott Isaacs (1989, spoliator) is a spelling coach to four current contestants. Isaacs said that what started as a lark – responding to a Craigslist ad for a spelling coach – became a rediscovery of his love of language and teaching.
“In the back of my mind I’ve always loved languages, learning linguistics and being able to decipher words, and then I’ve always enjoyed this sort of competition,” he said. “So it’d be great to pass that on.”
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