Who Needs Sudoku?

Every decade or so, a fad comes out of nowhere and sweeps the world. It helps if it’s inane: Frisbees and hula hoops (the ’50s), polyester pant suits (’70s), the Macarena (’90s). Then the fever subsides and disappears, leaving parents to explain to their kids what the commotion was all about. The usual lame response: “It was…fun.”

The latest fad is Sudoku, a number game in a box, In less than two years, the puzzle has won a popularity that verges on the epidemic. It now appears daily in newspapers on all six inhabited continents and has spawned hundreds of magazines, not to mention dozens of books that elbow traditional puzzle volumes off the Barnes & Noble shelves.

What might give Sudoku brain cred to a veteran puzzle-solver like me? Two things. About a dozen of the book versions of the game carry the august authorship of Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword, and star of the spiffy new documentary Wordplay, which opens this weekend in select cities. And among Sudoku’s greatest fans is my sister-in-law, Pat Thompson Corliss.

Pat, who next Tuesday celebrates her the 45th anniversary of her wedding to my brother Paul (note to readers doing math computations: he is waaaaaay older than I am, though it’s said he looks younger), was the person who introduced me some decades back to the crossword magazines put out by Dell. At the time, Dell was the gold standard in puzzle publications (as well as a leader both in mass-market paperbacks and in comic books, especially those produced by Disney). I was hooked, instantly and eternally, not so much by the crosswords as by the number and word games that filled out the Dell pages. So I figured I owed her, and Shortz, a grudging attempt to get with the Sudoku program.

Based on a Japanese phrase for “single numbers,” Sudoku is actually an American invention. In 1979 Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games featured a puzzle called Number Place: nine boxes of nine boxes —imagine a big tic-tac-toe board with a tiny tic-tac-toe board in each square. The object is to fill in the numbers 1 through 9, nine times, so that no number is repeated in a horizontal or vertical line, or in any of the small boxes.

Number Place (whose unacknowledged constructor, Shortz later determined, was Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indianapolis) ran once in a while in the Dell magazines, as well in the much slicker, savvier Games magazine, of which Shortz was an editor. The puzzle also ran in the magazines of Penny Press, a Norwalk, Ct., outfit that had the smarts to hire as editors some of the bright young folks from Games. The Penny Press magazines contained a more attractive mix of posers, and I found myself spending much more time with each issue of, say, Variety Puzzles, than with Pencil Puzzles & Word Games. (Apparently, others did too. A few years ago, Penny Press took control of Dell — another example of an upstart engulfing and devouring a staid old American institution.)

Those of us who wasted fruitful hours filling in the blanks in all these publications determined that Number Place was a pleasant enough diversion, if not nearly so demanding or compelling as Cross Sums (aka Sum Totals), a crossword with numbers, or that sublimely torturous form of the crossword known as the Cryptic, about which more later.

Then the Japanese picked up the puzzle; a New Zealander named Wayne Gould put them into his own magazine and peddled the idea to the Times of London. In a trice, like home electronics, and autos and anime, this Japanese imitation overtook the American original, making Sudoku the Toyota of puzzles.

Lady Pat wants to convince me that Sudoku is the caviar of puzzles, an ideal mind expander, opening a world of numerical possibilities with a minimum of means. All right. I acknowledge the game’s elegance. And, heaven knows, I’m a number freak. Attach a few of them to a pitcher’s or batter’s record, and I’m off in Rotisserie or SABRmetrics dreamland. Ahh, slugging percentage! Oooh, WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched)! Those numbers have meaning, personality, clout. They lend biographical nuance and historical comparison to the game of baseball.

But what do you learn from Sudoku? Where’s the allusive fun? The numbers in a Sudoku box are dry, curt, numbing; they live only in their own, square, self-contained universe; they refer to nothing but themselves. Numbers lack the allusiveness of words, their reverberations, their playfulness — how they rub up against one another and transform themselves. Add an S to comic and get cosmic; add one to laughter and get slaughter. You don’t get this alchemy with numbers.

Playing with numbers is the job of Nobel Prize-winning mathematicians. Wordplay is more like an obsessive hobby, a benign infection, a sweet kink of the mind, a kind of delightful dyslexia, In Wordplay, puzzle creator Trip Payne recalls that, when he moved from Manhattan to Fort Lauderdale a few years ago, he couldn’t help mentioning to his new boyfriend that Intercoastal (the word for Florida’s inland waterway) is an anagram for Altercation. In the movie, we see veteran constructor Merl Reagle driving past a Dunkin’ Donuts shop and saying, “Put the D at the end, you get Unkind Donuts, Which I’ve had a few of in my day.” Spotting a Noah’s Ark, he says, “You switch the S and the H around, that’s ‘No! A shark!'” From ark to shark, Genesis to Mi>Jaws, in one flick of an agile brain.

When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, “Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”, he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover’s favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can’t match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds.

A SHORTZ HISTORY OF CROSSWORDS

The most dispiriting thing about the popular talk shows, reality programs and buddy movie comedies is that they’re often about stupid people. Well, I don’t want entertainment to show me the lowest common denominator. I want to see people who are smarter, funnier, cleverer than I am. And there are plenty. Most of them, I suspect, are in Wordplay. And if they had a leader, it would be Shortz: President for Life in the Puzzle Principality, King of Crosswords.

“When you imagine Crossword Guy,” says Jon Stewart, “you imagine he’s 13 to 14 inches tall, doesn’t care to go more than five minutes without his inhaler — and yet [Shortz is] a giant man. He’s the Errol Flynn of crossword puzzling.”

Shortz is indeed a tall, genial fellow and the best salesman crosswords could have. A puzzler from youth, he took a doctorate of Enigmatology (in a course of study he invented for himself) at Indiana University, was named the fourth crossword editor of the Times in 1993. That was the year of Shortz’s 40th birthday and crosswords’ 80th. The first one, devised by Arthur Wynne, appeared in the New York World on Dec. 21, 1913, and made the game an immediate sensation. But it was the achievement of Margaret Farrar, who became the Times’ first crossword editor in1942 and served in that capacity until 1969, to codify the form.

The daily puzzle hasn’t changed since her early days. It’s still a 225-space grid, 15 by 15, with 180-degree symmetry and about a sixth of the squares black. The words, of no fewer than three letters, are interlocked. And nothing naughty, please. Reagle, one of the puzzlemakers who appears in Wordplay, mourns that he is forbidden to use vowel-rich words like urine and enema. (I’d guess that somebody somewhere has created R- or X-rated crosswords — English is as at least as rich in obscenities as it is in four-letter words for Irish slave — but I haven’t seen them.)

Farrar was succeeded by Will Weng, and then by Eugene Maleska, a New York City school teacher. I remember being pleased to read of Maleska’s accession, for I knew his name as a Dell puzzle constructor. But Maleska was a conservative chap, a one-man Academie Francaise of English. He seemed to believe that the language had frozen decades before. Cultural references tended toward opera trivia and the novels of long-dead white males.

His management of the crossword franchise was severely traditional as well. On Sundays, for example, the Times devotes an entire page to puzzles. Maleska’s selection of puzzles never varied. On top was a large, stately crossword, as imposing and exciting as Queen Victoria’s bustle. Beneath it was one of three puzzles: an acrostic (twice as much work for half the fun), a diagramless crossword (you’re given the clues but not the grid — why?) and, once in four weeks, Mel Taub’s Puns and Anagrams — sort of a kindergarten cryptic. You never saw the features that made Games magazine such instructive fun, such as Flower Power or the Spiral, and rarely found those puzzles’ authors, some of the brightest minds in puzzling.

Enter Shortz, nearly 40 years younger than Maleska, and eager to revive the Times’ most carefully studied page. A John XXIII to Maleska’s Pius XII, Shortz embraced the modern: slang, hipper pop references, more devious wordsmanship. He also instituted a sliding scale of difficulty for the puzzle week: the easiest one on Monday and Tuesday, the most challenging on Friday and Saturday.

Into the stale Times stable Shortz brought both the best of the old guard, including Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, who had been creating cryptic puzzles for The Atlanticsince 1976, and some of the young geniuses, like Henry Hook and Patrick Berry, who had made their names at Games. And for the first time, the Times gave credit to the authors of the daily puzzles, who had previously been anonymous. (The daily crossword was the one place in the paper where the cult of personality bypassed the author and resided only with the editor.)

The new guy’s innovations didn’t please every Times solver. “You are sick, sick, sick,” goes one of the letters Shortz reads aloud in Wordplay. Another correspondent is polite but perplexed: “This kvetching thing that’s going on, I can’t seem to get a grasp on it. ‘The kvetcher’s cry’: ‘Oy vey’? I don’t get it. How is it used? Is it a Northern thing?” But most puzzlers I know are pleased with his work. More than that: he has given fresh life to their daily preoccupation.

Shortz doesn’t spend all his time at the Times. He is also the puzzlemaster for NPR’s Sunday morning news show. (“I’m blessed,” he says, “to work for the two greatest news organizations in the country: the New York Times and National Public Radio.”) He occasionally contributes puzzles to Games. And since he was 25 (he’s now 53), he has run an annual crossword puzzle tournament at the Marriott in Stamford, Ct. He founded it in 1978, mostly out of an urge — a strange one, considering the solitude in which crosswords are constructed and solved — to meet other puzzle people. At the first tournament, the guest of honor was Margaret Farrar. And in 2005 filmmaker Patrick Creadon brought a crew there to record the competition, which would be the centerpiece for Wordplay.

SHORTZ’ SUBJECTS

The Times puzzle under Shortz’ aegis has some famous fans, and Wordplay has tracked down most of them. Stewart, attacking a Tuesday puzzle, says, “I’m so confident, I’m gonna do it in glue stick.” Dan Okrent, a former TIME executive who was the New York Times’ Public Editor, notes that the best crossword solvers are mathematicians and musicians. (This applies especially to cryptic puzzles, a British refinement of the form that was imported to America when Stephen Sondheim created 40 or so for New York magazine in the early ’70s. A few years later the cryptic became a regular feature of Harper’s magazine in puzzles constructed by E.R. Galli and Richard Maltby, another Broadway lyricist. One of Maltby’s songs: “Crossword Puzzle.”) A pair of musicians, Indigo Girls, confide their shock and pleasure when they found themselves as an answer to a Times puzzle.

Yankees ace Mike Mussina, a Stanford (but not Stamford) grad, is a noted solver, in ink, of crosswords. (He enjoys other word and trivia games. A couple weeks ago the Times noted that Moose and his catcher whiled away a rain delay compiling a list of TV actors who had starred in three hit series. Anyone? Anyone? Hint: consider the initials H.L. and M.L.)

Ken Burns, the doyen of TV documentaries, notes that a city like New York is founded on “a sense of grids. You know, it’s all about boxes. You live in a box, and you ride in a box [the subway] to go to work in a box. Then we have this wonderful newspaper that’s boxy-shaped that has in it this page, which is my favorite page in the whole newspaper. And there are a set of boxes in which you kind of practice the wordplay of this particularly exquisite language.”

Bill Clinton says he would work on a Times crossword in those White House lunch breaks — when for a few moments, he would be disturbed by neither aides nor interns. Our last smart President found a life lesson in puzzle-solving: “Sometimes you have to go at a problem the way I go at a complicated crossword puzzle…You start with what you know the answer to and you just build on it, eventually you can unravel the whole puzzle… And I think a lot of difficult, complex problems are like that: you have to find some aspect of it you understand and build on it, until you can unravel the mystery that you’re trying to understand”

Clinton and his opponent in the 1996 Presidential race were the subjects of the most famous daily puzzle in Shortz’ reign (and, the editor says, his favorite). In that Nov. 5 puzzle the clue for the central entry (two seven-letter spaces) read: “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper!” It could be solved as either CLINTON ELECTED or BOBDOLE ELECTED. How? Each intersecting Down clue yielded two answers

Black Halloween animal (CAT or BAT)
French 101 word (LUI or OUI)
Provider of support, for short (IRA or BRA)
Sewing shop purchase (YARN or YARD)
Short writings (BITS or BIOS)
Trumpet (BOAST or BLAST)
Much-debated political inits. (NRA or ERA)

Through some clear, clever graphics, all this is spelled out in Wordplay. What you won’t learn in the movie is that the puzzle’s constructor, Jeremiah (Jerry) Farrell — a Butler University professor of, what else, mathematics — had submitted a simpler version to the Times for election Day 1980, with CARTER and REAGAN as the interchangeable words. Maleska turned it down, supposedly asking, “What if John Anderson wins?” (I still shake my head in wonder at Farrell’s brilliance, and Maleska’s myopia.) Sixteen years later, Farrell revived and revised the idea. Though Shortz typically revises about half of the clues in an average puzzle, and did tweak the surrounding clues, he left the central section gloriously intact.

Wordplay is every bit as smart as the Times puzzles, puzzlemakers and puzzle solvers. Creadon is a master of the suave segue—as when Okrent observes that “Using Reagle on Tuesday is like using Barry Bonds in Little League,” and the film cuts to a clip of Bonds getting struck out by Mussina, leading to the star pitcher’s segment.

The puzzle to which Okrent refers is one Reagle constructed for the film. The theme is Word Play, and it uses the key words hidden in new configurations: word in “neW ORDers” and “cross sWORDs,” play in “PLAYa Del Mar” and “toP LAYers.” We see Reagle creating the puzzle, then Shortz accepting it and finally Clinton, Stewart, Burns, Okrent and Indigo Girls solving it. The first clue is “Warhead weapon,” four letters. Stewart and Burns jump on ICBM, while Clinton, who’s been in charge of these things, says, “it’s gotta be an ICBM or a MIRV.” As the theme becomes clear, he observes, “Not too hard but it’s very clever.”

As the celebrity solvers attack the puzzle, the box of the movie screen is divided into sections, highlighting the clues and the spaces for their answers. Like we said, smart people on both sides of the camera. The one thing the movie doesn’t reveal is why so many of these renowned puzzlers — Clinton, Stewart and Burns — are left-handed. Coincidence? Or conspiracy? We solicit an explanation from our Mensa-worthy readers.

THE BEST IN THE COUNTRY

The most expert puzzle solvers are an odd, rare breed, and one to be cherished. For the aficionado, Wordplay performs a special service. It lends faces to revered names, the heroes of puzzleworld: constructors Payne and Reagle, Stanley Newman, Mel Rosen and Fred Piscop. (I wish I could have found ’90s phenom Patrick Berry, to whom Maltby and Galli occasionally sublet their Atlantic cryptic page, and Henry Hook, the dark prince of cryptics and crossword editor of the Boston Globe.)

Solving a crossword takes brains and patience. Solving it in a few minutes, standing on a stage filling the spaces on a large board, with hundreds of people watching, demands poise, steel nerves and a killer instinct. These requirements strictly limit the number of serious competitors at the Stamford stampede. The same people tend to be finalists; in a 13-year stretch from 1988 to 2000, the top three slots were filled by only six players.

The small pool creates stars within the crossword galaxy. One of these is Ellen Ripstein, a researcher for a TV game show (could it be Jeopardy?) who, after a dozen or more years in the top five at Stamford, was profiled in a front-page Wall Street Journal story in 2001, and won the tournament that year, to chants of “El-len! El-len!” The lifelong New Yorker describes herself as “a little nerd girl,” but she knows her worth. “I had a boyfriend once” — once, she says — “who would sort of try to put me down. And I would say, ‘Well, what are you the best in the country at?'”

Among Ripstein’s regular opponents are Payne, who is given to theatrical effusions onstage, and Al Sanders, a friendly fellow from Fort Collins, Colo., who has been often a finalist but never a winner. But in 2005 a kid gunslinger hit town: Tyler Hinman, 20, a student at Renssselaer Polytechnic Institute, who can do the Sunday Times puzzle in six to eight minutes. He also has a shrine to beer in his dorm room.

Throughout the weekend tournament, Shortz bustles around, announcing the rules and the winners of each of the seven puzzles. On Saturday night there’s a talent show — the search for an “American Crossword Idol” — at which Ellen demonstrates her baton-twirling expertise. Another conventioneer, Vic Fleming, sings and strums a cruciverbalist’s country lament: “But if you don’t come across / I’m gonna be down.”

On Sunday the top three finishers have a brain-off in front of the judges and several hundred non-winners. In 2005 the finalists were Sanders, Payne and Hinman. We wouldn’t dare say who took home the trophy, except to note that the most dangerous word in the final puzzle was 1 Across. The clue: “Stark and richly detailed, as writing. (9)”

After Zolaesque exertions, and a little heartbreak, a winner does emerge. His victory statement: “Words are failing me. I’m just glad they waited until now to do so.”

Wordplay should prove “a feline bite (6)” — catnip — to the millions of crossword addicts, and to lots of others who enjoy a tough game played with smarts and heart. For me, the movie and its milieu induced a little ache of nostalgia. For a decade or so I solved the Times crossword every day. Then, in 1981, I discovered Sondheim’s book of cryptics, and the devious, luxuriant word play had me hooked. Now I search them out in Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic (where they have been demoted to appearing only online — shame!), Games and the book collections assembled by Newman, Hook and Cox and Rathvon.

Now that I’ve finished this story, I’ll go relax my nerves and stir my cerebrum with a good cryptic. The rest of you, try a Times crossword. And to Pat Corliss, happy Sudoku-solving. Sorry I never did figure out the appeal of that numbers game.