Wellington Jighere, 32, from Benin City, painted
Nigeria in gold when he won four straight games in the best-of-seven final round
against Lewis MacKay, 30, from Cambridge, who is ranked 19th by the body’s
players’ association.
For the first time, an African won the English-Language
World Scrabble Championships.
Jighere, who was sponsored by the Nigerian government, used
words like “dacoit”, meaning a member of a class of robbers in India and Burma;
“yow”, Australian slang for keeping a look-out, and “katti”, an alternative
spelling for a weight used in China as he beat his opponent.
Jighere started playing Scrabble in 1996 after an older
brother introduced him to the game, according to enthusiasts’ website Scrabble
TV Live.
He only recently completed his national service and
university degree and had taken time out of finding work to train for the
tournament, which he said would be his last after coming third in Mumbai in
2007 and 11th in Malaysia in 2009.
In African Scrabble circles, he was already a household
name, having won the Africa Scrabble Championship in Nairobi in 2008 and
defended his title in 2010 in Accra, Ghana. But he is little-known outside the
continent.
In Perth, he won the final game with 448 points to Mackay’s
426. The Nigerian team accompanying him also emerged as the best of the
championship, with five of its six players finished in the top 50 of the
tournament.
Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian president, was among the
first to offer his congratulations on the surprise win, saying Jighere had
“done the country proud”.
Sulaiman Gora,
president of Nigeria's Scrabble federation told the BBC that Jighere and his
teammates had trained for a year in a succession of “Scrabble camps”, and that
the new world champion was a quiet person whose "greatest strength is
humility".
His win was, he added in an interview with the Nigerian
Vanguard newspaper, “testimony of the potential of Nigeria as a country”.
Credit: telegraph.co.uk, vanguardngr.com
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