http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/01/SPELLINGBEE.TMPDanville boy wins Scripps Spelling Bee
Zachary Coile, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007
(05-31) 20:25 PDT Washington -- Just moments after winning the 80th annual Scripps Spelling bee, eighth grader Evan O'Dorney of Danville found himself on live TV explaining to ESPN anchor Stuart Scott why he actually much prefers doing math and playing piano concertos to spelling.
"Spelling is just a bunch of memorization," the 13-year-old boy said.
But it's something the lanky, bespectacled teenager with a big gap-toothed grin has clearly mastered. He beat 285 of the best young spellers in the country by spelling such difficult words as Zoilus, laquear and schuhplattler. The homeschooled spelling phenomenon received a golden loving cup trophy and $20,000 -- money the young college-bound scholar says "I'll probably give to my parents."
He narrowly beat out the Canadian favorite, Nate Gartke, an eighth grader from Edmonton, who misspelled the coryza, a word for the common cold. "I knew it, I'd studied it, I just momentarily forgot it," he said after the competition.
O'Dorney won despite missing what had become his pre-spelling bee ritual: Eating fish. In particular, a tuna fish sandwich from Subway.
"Fish is good for the brain," he said. He had to skip his fish protein meal to attend a luncheon in honor of the spelling bee competitors.
He's become a seasoned pro at the bee. He first competed in 2005 when he was 11 years old and made a strong showing for a first-timer, reaching the finals before being bounced out in the eighth round. He was disappointed but boasted that he would be back and do even better.
"I was born with the gift of spelling," he told the Chronicle at the time.
He finished 14th in last year's bee. This year he seemed to almost skate through the competition.
He breezed through a multiple choice test with tough words such as malocclusion, syssarcosis, takt and Bewusstseinslage. In the second round, he lucked out with an easy word: boundary. But the words got tougher in later rounds -- compunctious in round three, corrigenda in round four, affiche in round five and corrine in round six.
In round seven, before a live national TV audience, he didn't flinch as he was handed a Spanish word for scorpion fish: rascacio. He drew gasps when he correctly spelled schuhplattler, a Bavarian courtship dance, and then laquear, a Latin word for the recessed panels in a vaulted ceiling.
He only seemed flustered once - when a TV make-up artist dusted his cheeks and forehead with a tan blush.
The kids have become so sophisticated - cynics would say obsessive - in their word studying tactics that the judges can no longer throw run-of-the-mill SAT words at them.
"We try to make it as difficult as possible while still trying to be fair to everybody at the same time," said Carolyn Andrews, whose son Ned Andrews won the competition in 1994 and who now manages the bee's word list.
O'Dorney finally won with a series of relatively simple words - at least for him: pappardelle, an Italian pasta; yosenabe, a Japanese soup; and his winning word - serrefine, small forceps for clamping a blood vessel. An unusual practice technique may also have paid off for O'Dorney: His mom, Jennifer O'Dorney, quizzes him daily on words out of Merriam-Webster's dictionary as he juggles as many as four balls while walking around his home.
He said he sees mathematical patterns while he's juggling and spelling words aloud.
His dad, Michael O'Dorney, a BART train operator, said his son's secret is a combination of mental abilities: "He's got a great memory and he's got a great understanding of how to analyze the structure of words and find root words."
Jennifer O'Dorney homeschools him, and said they generally spent only about an hour or two a day on spelling. She said she had increased the workload in recent weeks. Last week, they spent eight hours locked in a room going over words from the Merriam-Webster's dictionary.
"The thing he wanted most was for people to hear his piano concerto on ABC," his mom said. A previously taped recording of O'Dorney at the piano was broadcast by the network during the competition.
O'Dorney's parents are proud that he remains a well-rounded kid. He has a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, takes piano lessons at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and plays piano to accompany his church's choir.
Despite his talent for spelling, his favorite subject is math. He placed 5th in a recent Northern California Mathcounts competition. He earned a perfect score in American Mathematics Competition in a test made for 10th graders. He hopes someday to be a math teacher or a composer.
E-mail Zachary Coile at zcoile@sfchronicle.com
