Funding Adult Spelling Bees

After doing my taxes early this (Sunday) morning, I decided not to go to church but simply to flip the channels glumly before writing out a big check to the IRS and the State of Oregon. But when I began to focus on what I was actually seeing on TV, I got an idea. Well, what you see on Sunday a.m. TV, in between programs that tell you, alternatively, how to cook fattening meals and how to lose weight, are a huge number of sporting events. Most of the sporting events are what we might call 2nd or 3rd tier events--the Family Circle Cup (Women's Tennis), the 2006 women's volleyball championships (US v. Turkey), the 2007 Roll to Riches bowling tournament from Columbus OH, a lacrosse match between the Buffalo Bandits and Rochester Knighthawks, the Samsung 500 NASCAR race from Fort Worth, Boxing matches on the Spanish-language station, the Ginn Open (women's golf), but there were also the "major" sports (NBA, NHL playoffs, MLB). What struck me, especially among the more "minor" contests, was how they were anchored by a sponsor, who no doubt enabled much of the tournament to "get going." For example, Motel 6 is the "official motel" of the bowling tournament. Ritz-Carlton probably wasn't even approached...

The Proposal

Well, if Motel 6 can sponsor a bowling tournament and award $150,000 to the winner (the names are a who's who of the bowling establishment, for those who know that world), why, I thought, couldn't some enterprising person in the area of adult spelling recruit a sponsor and begin to offer some serious prize money for adult spellers? Once one had a "major sponsor" onboard, one could then develop a lot of regional events, building to the big event of the year. We could use the model of any of a number of sports that have gone from shoestring budgets to having "professional" athletes in the past generation (track and field, bowling, etc.). There are probably tons of people around who know how to "create" a new sport, get funding and public backing for it, make it work. Where there is money, there will be "athletes." Already the adult spelling community consists of hundreds of very dedicated spellers, and more will "sign up" every day as the baby boomer generation ages. Indeed, I think the baby boomers and their/our kids, because of our competitiveness and desire for measurable signs of our accomplishment, would swamp this new "league" with hundreds and thousands of potential contestants. I only address in this essay the finding of a sponsor and the building of a movement.

Finding a Sponsor

Most of the people I have met at adult spelling bees to date are accomplished professionals who "pay their own way" to events. We have worked at careers for thirty years, raised our children, saved up a few dollars and then found, to our gratitute, that there were others like us--people who were fascinated with knowledge acquisition, word-knowledge, and the intellectual challenge of getting words "right." But some of us also believe that the "knowledge game" in American has received short shrift over the years as the "sports game" has developed. America seems like it has an insatiable appetite for more sports, while not caring about knowledge/spelling bees. But, in fact, I don't think this is true. Just as there are loads of people out there who know that the cutesy celeb-culture is really more of a plastic than a real world, so there are tons of people who know that athletic-oriented sports aren't the "only" thing that people can do well in competitive environments. Spelling words correctly is becoming an honored/respected activity.

I would think that we should approach a sponsor in the "knowledge industry," perhaps a newspaper, a book publisher, a wealthy author, or some other person or entity that is concerned with the "wordness" of our culture. With a person skilled in building sports from shoestring to cash-cows, we could develop such a "spelling" sport. T-shirts, mugs, videos, fan clubs, cheerleaders etc. will come as time goes on. But we need to begin with a discussion for sponsors. How much would we need? How would we begin to set up the process, etc? Those would be first order discussion possibilities.

A League of Our Own

Once we have recruited the expertise (a person who knows how to "build" a sport) and a sponsor, we need to fund a series of regional bees that would lead up to a "national" bee. There are already in place dozens of periodic bees in America, from the weekly bee at the Mississippi Pizza Pub in Portland, OR, to the montly bee at the Rebar in Seattle, to an annual bee in May in Southern CA to the National Senior Spelling Bee in June in Cheyenne. That is, a sort of network already exists, which would be easy for someone with money and motivation to capitalize on in order to recruit more spellers. If, for example, people knew that there was a monthly spelling bee in X city, the prize money for which would be $5,000, for example, I bet a lot of people would begin to love to spell. Individual spellers would then get their own sponsors and maybe even agents.

Conclusion

This emphasis on competitive spelling would, I am convinced, have dramatic payoffs in our society. As people became more "word" conscious, they would become more "knowledge-oriented." They would begin to ask hundreds of questions about words, the history of our language, the way that words are used to describe things, the way that our descriptions of things shapes our understanding of them. It might, eventually, lead to the "clarity" revolution, where people are actually honored for being able to explain and know things, rather than just for filling up pieces of paper with their ramblings. We would also, as a word culture, become more open to other languages, as we see the extent to which our language is a pastiche of so many others. New worlds open up through words; funding adult spelling bees is a way to make this happen.

2595