Spell Him Champ : Across or Down, Stanley Newman Acts Like a Star

It’s not likely that Stanley Newman, a short, brainy New York bond analyst, will someday rank alongside such sports idols as Joe Montana or Steve Garvey. But that didn’t stop him from chattering like a champion moments after he had won the West Coast’s first major crossword puzzle tournament here Sunday.

“It was exhilarating,” he said. “I was so pumped up as I filled in those last couple of boxes. People had been talking about me as a has-been, so I wanted this--badly,” said an excited Newman after his impressive knockout of two challengers in the final round of the inaugural event for crossword puzzle lovers.

He finished the complex puzzle in 7 1/2 minutes, answering correctly all 64 questions almost twice as fast the other two finalists.

Top of His Game Newman, wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses, a distracting aqua-blue Hawaiian shirt and tennis shoes, made sure his accomplishment didn’t go unheralded:

“In crossword competition, a minute is a lifetime. Today I was on,” he said.

Newman talks like a high-priced jock because he is among the elite of a small but growing collection of puzzle-solvers who have come out of kitchens, lunchrooms, corporate offices and anywhere else “crossword fanatics” closet themselves to test their skills against the clock and each other.

They view themselves as “mental athletes,” who experience the same rush of emotions while competing as football or baseball players.

“Ask almost anyone here why they came, and they’ll probably tell you they wanted to see just how good they really are,” said Larry Ash, a UCLA professor, one of 50 entrants in the Greater Western Crossword Puzzle Tournament who paid $20 each to spend two days trying to solve seven puzzles. The top three finishers advanced to Sunday’s championship playoff at the Hyatt Los Angeles Airport Hotel.

Testing of Talent

“When you’ve been doing puzzles for 30 or 40 years, and you can solve them in 15 or 20 minutes, you start to feel your oats. You want to test your talent,” said Ash, who lectures about parasitic diseases in the university’s School of Public Health.

“But after two days here, I’ve been humbled,” he said, laughing.

To be tournament tough, the 32-year-old Newman said a puzzle-solver needs the obvious skills: a strong vocabulary, a penchant for trivia and a broad knowledge of current events. In addition, the cream of the crossword competitors, like Newman, who began clipping and filling puzzles at 5 and won the first U.S. Open Crossword Championship in 1980, have lightning-quick eye-hand coordination.

“As you’re filling in the answer,” Newman said, “your eyes must be scanning the next question.”

That was evident in Sunday’s championship, when Newman and the other two finalists--Ellen Ripstein, 32, a New York life insurance statistician, and Richard Goodale, 34, a Northern California corporate strategist--matched wits for the $500 first prize.

While several dozen crossword junkies looked on in silence, the three stood on an elevated stage and raced to solve the final puzzle, their work projected onto movie screens behind them for all to see. Their eyes never left their puzzles, as they frantically filled the boxes, occasionally erasing a letter or word, but rarely showing any signs of jittery nerves.

Newman finished first, followed by Ripstein, then Goodale, both of whom each had one mistake. Newman’s puzzle was perfect.

Joseph Pagano, a Carmel psycho-therapist who is publisher of Crossworder’s Newsletter nine times a year, believes crossword tournaments can eventually be packaged for television. He said an estimated 50 million people a week do puzzles, including such Hollywood celebrities as Frank Sinatra.

“Can’t you see it now,” Pagano said, “we could stage a kind of celebrity crossword contest, with Newman vs. Sinatra.”

Before television will buy the concept, Merl Reagle, a puzzle designer who organized the Greater Western tournament, said the public’s attitude about crossword players must change.

“This is just not for eggheads. The old stigma of a group of nerds sitting around doing crosswords just doesn’t fit anymore,” said Reagle, who has been a newspaper copy editor and a member of a rock ‘n’ roll band. “We’ve got housewifes, truckers and scientists here. Crossword puzzles are a staple of life.”