The Crossword Puzzle Master

Determination and a good vocabulary made Will Shortz a full time crossword puzzle professional.

A Peculiar Talent

Awful! Worse! Wham! Damn! Will Shortz is at it again, volubly criticizing himself as he wins yet another game at a table tennis club in Westchester County, New York. Five years ago, he was mediocre. Today he's one of the country's top Ping-Pong players in the over-50 category.

Shortz's unique, twist-of-the-wrist slamming seems a far cry from his even more unusual day job as the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times. But in his view, "the two games are heads and tails of the same coin. Both are confined to a small space. Both involve strategy and guile. Both drive you obsessively to excel."

The Indiana kid started out as a straitlaced Hoosier, a bookworm who got his thrills from words. "I was a nerd back then," he admits, "but that's hardly a put-down. I say it with pride." What other kid lapped up books with titles like Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities? "This is the classic work on logology, the study of wordplay," Shortz explains. "And I devoured it."

At 14, he wrote the author, Dmitri Borgmann. "I asked if he thought I could make a living as a puzzle maker. He wrote me a very nice, long reply saying, basically, no."

That didn't stop Shortz. Encouraged by his mother, a children's author, he sold puzzles to a kids' magazine and kept on selling them while attending Indiana University, where he made an epochal decision. "The university allows students to create their own major," Shortz says. "And ransacking a dictionary, I found just the word I wanted for my thesis: enigmatology, the study of puzzles."

The enigmatologist graduated cum laude and went on to law school, but his heart just wasn't in it. "I started law school with the idea that I'd practice law for ten years, make a lot of money, and then retire to do puzzles," he says. "But then I thought, Why should I spend ten years of my life doing something I don't love?"

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Finishing up our work at a trade show in San Diego, my co-worker Maureen and I decided to go sightseeing across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. While there, we went shopping and bought a few pieces of clay kitchenware. As we crossed back into the United States, a customs official asked if we had anything of value to report. "Not really," Maureen replied, digging in her bag for the bean crock she had purchased. Everyone around us froze as she continued, "I only bought a little pot."

-- Russ Tompkins