#109. Trivia Night (Friday, March 24, 2006)

#109. Trivia Night (Friday, March 24, 2006)

What was your best day…of being overly excited for something insignificant?

First off, a bit of context on quizbowl1. It’s an academic competition mostly played at the high school and college level, where two teams of four try to answer knowledge questions – mostly in legit subjects like science, literature, history, etc. but also some sports, pop culture, etc.2 – as quickly as possible. There are two sanctioned forms of quizbowl in North America:

  • Reach for the Top (played by Canadian high school students, video example here): derisively called “bad quizbowl” because of the prevalence of: (1) mindless buzzer-race questions like “What is the capital of Argentina?”; and (2) hose questions that could mislead you into giving the wrong answer, e.g. “Flea is a member of the rock band The Red Chili Peppers. What instrument does he play?” (where a knowledgeable person would naturally interrupt the question early and answer “The Red Hot Chili Peppers”, and be wrong)
  • NAQT (played by U.S. high school students and all college students; video example here): called “good quizbowl” because it didn’t have (1) or (2) above, but instead just listed clues to an answer into an answer in decreasing levels of obscureness, and thus (in theory) better rewarded deep knowledge on a topic

I was on my school’s Reach for the Top team in my freshman year, but wasn’t very good (yet) so was only a seldom-used substitute for city preliminaries – and didn’t even go to city finals or Provincials in Toronto (where we finished 10th).

Early in my sophomore year, our team was approached by Brian Scott, a former Reach for the Top player currently playing NAQT at the University of Ottawa, who was on this mission to bring “good quizbowl”3 to Canadian high school competition. And so, we quickly got familiarized with NAQT, and we became the first ever team from Canada to qualify for U.S. Nationals in Chicago in May.

Now this was a pretty big deal, but since I was still firmly on the B-team (and thus not going to Chicago), I wasn’t involved in most of it. Except, to raise money for the trip, our team decided to organize a Trivia Night at the school. Which I was super pumped about.

So, in the weeks leading up, I (over-)excitedly contributed my part: writing my share of the trivia questions4, as well as going store to store in downtown with Nigel and Brian Hurst (another senior member) hanging up posters and relentlessly – and for the most part, unsuccessfully – asking for sponsorships.

Finally, the Trivia Night came, and there were about 15 teams of three5. A pretty small showing, all things considered, but I was beyond hyped.

And as the very first question in the literature round came up, I could see the host6 asking who wrote A Farewell the Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and The Old Man and the Sea. (Hemingway.) It was my question! It was a wildly amazing feeling – and, of course, completely disproportional to its significance.

Despite not actually going to Chicago, I was probably the most involved person on the team there.7 I managed the screen projections and transitions (with an A.V. Club friend), I collected the answer sheets from participants at the end of each round, I even volunteered to go up and announce the winner at the end. (I actually had to do that multiple times, since we initially thought it was a tie, but then Brian Scott pointed out that we had missed his team’s8 correct answer of Dale Begg-Smith so I went up to announce them as winners again. It was probably very awkward, but I was too excited to notice.)

It was a successful Trivia Night. And, despite all the small things I contributed being achievable by any random person on the team (or random person period), I held onto that night as an irrational point of pride.

Until my next quizbowl-related success, that is.

  1. Since it’ll be coming up many more times in this list.
  2. So-called “trash”.
  3. Sources differ as to whether he was the one who originally coined those terms. In any case, Brian’s mission got pretty intense: at Reach for the Top provincials the year before, he got a cease-and-desist from the organization for distributing quizbowl promotional materials to the participants there.
  4. I don’t recall all the specific questions, but I do recall wasting the precious sports/baseball question on John Wetteland and the 1996 World Series of all things (my faulty logic being that other people actually followed baseball closely and would be tricked into thinking Mariano Rivera got saves in all four Yankees wins). The question didn’t end up getting included.
  5. Including my history teacher, who henceforth was extremely accommodating in giving me extensions on assignments because I was missing school for quizbowl (will be very relevant later).
  6. The father of Sean (one of the subs), whose distinctive old-person voice combined with the classical music playing in the background just added to the amazing feeling.
  7. I even had Sean go pick up my Italian B.M.T. without olives from Subway, which I was eating about once a week back then.
  8. Named the “Fighting Mongooses” (yes, that is the correct pluralization).