It isn't all about winning

 All Fun and Games : Prompt 5                         It isn’t All About Winning

Andrew loves to play Scrabble at the club for people like him, who have physical disabilities, which he attends each week. He is not greatly disabled but with increasing age, and following a stroke a few years ago, he has been finding walking increasingly difficult.

The aim of the club is twofold – to give the disabled person a little outing and a chance to mix with friends in a setting outside his own home, and also, maybe more importantly, to give his carer, in Andrew’s case his very patient wife, Jean, a day off from caring responsibilities.

When I say that Andrew loves to play Scrabble, that is with one proviso – he has to win! The long-suffering club-members he plays against regularly each week have come to accept this. Very occasionally someone manages to get out before him, but they know he doesn’t like it and is likely to sulk. He isn’t playing for fun. He is playing to win.

To this end the game has been stripped of most of its fun elements. Primarily, no record is kept of points scored. The game is reduced to the bare bones of “first one out wins”. Multiplier squares, such as double or triple letters or words, are to be ignored.  Of course, if you are not scoring, these are pointless anyway, but this takes away the fun of working out the most profitable place to put a word. And, of course, any other extra point scorers, such as managing to use all seven letters to make a word, are clearly redundant as well.

 At least all the players may sometimes experience the small delight of possibly finding a particularly obscure word in the Scrabble dictionary (which they are all allowed to make use of) so as to find uses for the difficult letters like Q, X and Z, or to find  never before heard of two letter words, to fit into small corners.

Andrew’s longest standing opponent, a sweet-natured old lady named Joan, has long ago learned to accept that it is better to let Andrew win, so she doesn’t try very had to outsmart him. On the odd occasions when Andrew hasn’t been well enough to come, Joan has taken great delight in having a chance to enjoy winning. When he is there, no pleasure can be taken from beating Andrew, since he is so peevish about the situation.

Another occasional adversary, a delightful and very intelligent lady called Bernie, has struggled uncomplainingly, all her life, with the disabilities caused by cerebral palsy. She only comes once in every few weeks because the taxi she has to use to get to the club is too expensive for her to be able to afford it every week. Bernie used to belong to a similar group, which met on a different day of the week, with a much livelier bunch of people. There, they played Scrabble by the generally accepted rules, and Bernie, with the assistance of a volunteer helper in the club, to draw out and place letters for her, frequently won games. But now, limited by Andrew’s insistence that they don’t score, she is robbed of the opportunity to play high-scoring words, and win the game as she often used to before.

The final regular player at the Scrabble board is Brian, another stroke victim, whose speech and movements have both been left slightly below par. He is a late comer to the club, having only started attending in the past year, compared to the many years the others have been attending and doing the same activities (such as Scrabble) year in and year out, for as long as they can remember. Brian is, fortunately, a cheerful undemanding soul, content to take things as he finds them. He therefore goes along with Andrew’s way of doing things and never complains about anything.

One can’t help but wonder if Andrew has always been so self-centred, when playing games? Was he always such a bad loser, even in his youth? Has he so rarely succeeded at anything in life that he has to now make up for past failures by almost bullying his opponents into submission, robbing the game of all its fun for everybody concerned?

Was he never any good at games at school; never picked first for either team?  Was he always a fumbler of the ball in cricket, or always scoring home-goals in football, never scoring aces in tennis or tries in rugby?  Perhaps he was never very successful in his chosen career either – a career which maybe chose him, as he ended up having to take over the family business, rather than do the job he would have chosen for himself.

 Had his marriage proved less successful than he had hoped?  Was his wife a little inclined to be a bit too critical of the way he did things, never satisfied however hard he tried to please her? Had their children turned out to be rather a disappointment, moving away from their hometown, as far as they could, as soon as they could, and barely keeping in touch at all now, apart from annual birthday and Christmas cards? He and Jean scarcely ever see their grandchildren.

The pleasures he had enjoyed when he was younger and fitter, like playing golf and gardening, which relieved the boredom of his less-than-stimulating employment, have now been taken away from him by failing health. Who can really blame him for being less than sparkling company? What a pity though, that he can not now learn to play a game just for the fun of it. How sad that he can’t, once in a while, share the enjoyment of someone else’s triumph, when they get the chance to win.

Sadly, this is the fate of so many older people. when advancing years combine with increased health problems to take away so many of life’s pleasures. But not all of them turn into killjoys like Andrew. What it comes down to is an individual’s attitude to life, which has probably been formed by his upbringing. Did his parents ever praise him for anything less that total success? Did his teachers never make him realise that doing his best was enough, even if he didn’t come out on top in all situations?

Maybe if he had been more successful in all aspects of his life and he had been shown that there is so much joy to be experienced, without the need to compete and win every small battle, as evidence of his superiority over all his fellow travellers through life. So many things conspire to make people behave the way they do.  We may all play a part in forming the attitudes of those we meet. And what about our own attitudes? Are our attitudes to circumstances and to those around us potentially harmful? Does the way we see the world cause us to steal our neighbours’ joy, as Andrew does each time he plays Scrabble.