Success is in the cards for spelling bee contender

Associated Press

CENTREVILLE, Va.

One of the favorites to win this year’s National Spelling Bee lay face down on his living room floor wearing a black shirt, blue jeans and white socks, his torso supported by a couple of big pillows. His hands seemed to be on nonstop autopilot as they folded colorful paper into origami shapes.

Across the room in a big chair sat his younger brother. Between them were stacks and stacks of oversized, homemade note cards, bound by rubber bands and arranged like a city skyline on a large footstool. They are only a fraction of some 20,000 cards in the house, each printed with a word, its origin, pronunciation and definition.

These particular stacks contained the really hard words, the ones 13-year-old Tim Ruiter hadn’t mastered yet.

“Murumuru,” said 11-year-old Charlie Ruiter, stumbling just a bit over the syllables.

“Murumuru?” Tim answered.

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s a palm tree.”

“M-a-r-u-m-a-r-u,” Tim guessed.

“M-u-r-u-m-u-r-u,” his brother replied, giving the correct spelling.

“Agh,” Tim said, his eyes fixed on his busy hands the whole time.

Charlie put the card into the pile Tim will have to review again.

It’s a familiar scene in the Ruiter household — sometimes with mother Vicki, father Jon or little sister Juliana — as the Scripps National Spelling Bee approaches. There’s little time for the electric guitar that sits by the front window or the collection of science- fiction movies on shelves near the back door of the family’s town house.

Good thing his father gets a discount on printer ink at his job as a Geek Squad computer repairman.

“We killed our old printer, printing cards,” Jon Ruiter said.

Tim came out of nowhere to finish second in last year’s bee — the only non- teenager to make the finals — and now he’s considered a major contender to take home the top prize when 273 English-speaking spellers from across the U.S. and around the world descend on Washington, D.C., for the three-day competition this week, with the semifinals on ESPN and Friday’s finals live in prime time on ABC for the fifth consecutive year.

Last year, he was anonymous. This year, he’s a celebrity, at least for the one week each year when it’s super-cool to be considered a spelling nerd. Other kids will likely go out of their way to seek his autograph today at the annual spellers’ picnic.

A TV crew wants to meet with him during bee week at the official hotel, where he gets a room even though he lives only 25 miles or so from the nation’s capital. Tim, it’s believed, has a chance to win it all, assuming he can master words such as “jacqueminot” and “byssinosis.” He knows he’ll never use them in conversation — unless it happens to be with another bee participant. One stack of his cards has the riveting label “German etymology but not really from German.”

“The whole bee,” Tim said, “is largely focusing on almost — but not entirely — useless information.”

Tim discovered his gift for spelling in second grade, when even the sixth-grade word lists were too easy. Eventually, Tim said, his teacher just gave him the dictionary and said, “Here, pick some words that look challenging that you like.” After the fifth grade, he asked his parents if he could be home-schooled.

“I wanted kind of a faster pace and more challenge,” Tim said, “kind of more freedom with what I was doing, but still covering all the bases.”

As a home-schooler, Tim fits a popular spelling bee champion’s stereotype that is mostly a myth. There hasn’t been a home-schooled winner since George Thampy in 2000. The closest candidate over the past decade has been 2007 champion Evan O’Dorney, a charter-school student who received much of his education at home.

Julia Miglets was the winner of The Vindicator’s 77th Regional Spelling Bee in March, earning the chance to participate in the national event.

Julia, 13, is in the eighth grade at Springfield Intermediate School.

The stereotype that emphatically fits Tim — as well as nearly everyone else at the bee — is the one that can’t be avoided: the nerd factor.

The nerd issue came up recently when Tim, filling out a questionnaire for the bee, wrote down Spock from “Star Trek” as his role model.

“We were like, ‘You can’t put that down; people are going to think you’re a nerd,’” Jon Ruiter said. “And he said, ‘Helloooo.’”

“He said, ‘I’m in the National Spelling Bee. I’m already not cool, OK? There’s my nerd factor already,’” Vicki Ruiter said.