Confessions Of A Quiz Bowl Geek
From the archive: It might just be a game, but I have to destroy you.
This piece is from the What Am I Making Archives. It was first published on August 29, 2023. This version has been lightly updated and edited for this posting.
Many people will tell you that Trivial Pursuit is simply a board game; a cocktail party diversion, or just a way to get the family together for pizza and laughs on a Friday night. For most folks, at least the nerdy ones I know, this statement is entirely true. For a few people, people like me, the game is a death match of intellectual cunning.
I am by nature, a pretty nice person. Regularly, I will observe people in social settings to assure they are comfortable and having a pleasant time. I make an effort to be interested in people's lives and am a generally gregarious fellow. Bring a box of Trivial Pursuit to the table, and it's like inviting the fox to the hen house. All social mores are tossed aside, politeness bites the dust. It is on.
My Aunt Melody first introduced me to Trivial Pursuit on Christmas Day, 1981. She had given the game to my mother as a gift. My parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles, after playing a full game or two, were kind enough to let me play along even though I was just nine years old.
We were playing in teams, so my age was less of a liability than you might imagine. Occasionally a question would come along that I knew the answer to and the adults would let me shout my answer proudly. These were fairly easy questions, still it was a great feeling.
I got to hang out with adults and they were proud of me for knowing the answers to stuff. There was no shame in getting a question wrong and success in getting it right. Suddenly, knowledge became a very valuable commodity to me.
Trivial Pursuit games became a regular obsession at our house. Anytime family or adult friends came over, the game would come out and I was always made to feel welcome. This wasn't so much an effort by my folks to show off my child prodigy-esque skills, but more of a chance to simply include me in their fun.
While it seems very likely they felt there was an inherent intellectual benefit in my playing, I just loved the chance to play at the big table. To this day, I have to wait my turn at Thanksgiving for a hand of euchre, but I get first dibs on Trivial Pursuit. If this gives you the impression my euchre skills are poor, you might be on to something.
Rarely in my life have I been a braggart. I am a good cook, but I know lots of good cooks. There is a great deal that I know about things like baseball, music or movies, but I always wind up meeting someone who knows at least as much as I do, so I never feel like I should thump my chest too loudly over such things. Yet, trivia is a different issue for me altogether. After careful consideration, I can only deduce that it was high school that truly made me this way.
By my sophomore year I had entered into the world of quiz bowl. Our team had matching V-neck sweaters as uniforms. My teammates quickly became my best friends. . They were funny and genuine and actually liked me. For the first time in my life I no longer pretended to be someone I wasn't. I could be smart without being shunned. I could reference a foreign movie or talk about a Smiths record and wasn't made to feel like a shit heel weirdo for it. I was a quiz bowl nerd and I was home.
The physical configuration of quiz bowl competition is fairly simple; desks are set up with a low-rent, Jeopardy style buzzer system and four contestants team up and try to correctly answer questions ranging from history and math to music and geography.
It works exactly like you would imagine; a room brimming with anti-social nerds oozing with useless knowledge showing off to each other and trash talking about how they were the first to nail how many sonnets Shakespeare wrote or what the capital of Bulgaria might be.
My high school experience was as awkward as that of any suburban teen without aggressive athletic skills or an early growth spurt. I was short, skinny and interested in things that most people found weird and unusual. There is nothing so awful in a small high school as being unusual
Our team was pretty good, and during the season of my senior year we were invited to compete on a new show called Quizbusters. The show was produced by the local PBS affiliate and featured most of the schools from our area. I don't recall exactly how many teams were involved, but I vividly remember there was an NCAA type bracketing system and I remember for damned sure that the team who won the tournament received free tuition at Michigan State University for four full years.
We rolled through the early rounds and mopped up our opponents. A sense of destiny began to fill my thoughts. I imagined myself attending a prestigious university, walking to class, meeting cool people who liked weird records and art films; people I belonged with, not some dumb jocks from a small farm town.
My parents had enough money to send me to school even if we didn't win, but I felt like the Quizbusters scholarship was my ticket to enter the world I was interested in, like some poor kid from the ghetto dreams of the NBA. Also, if I won a scholarship, Michigan State might overlook my meager 2.67 GPA. A GPA which on its own merits, would certainly not provide acceptance into a Big Ten school unless I arrived on an athletic scholarship. I built this competition up to be my escape, even though it almost certainly was not.
Our team continued to careen to the finals with big win after big win. It seemed so easy as we swatted aside opponent after opponent. Then came the final round against our local rivals, the Williamston High School Hornets. The entire match was nip and tuck. The lead changed hands at least a dozen times. Bonus rounds swung back and forth and rapid fire questions came from all angles as the clock ticked down to the lightning round.
As we entered the final 60 seconds of competition, a flurry of questions worth ten points each rolled in. Sweat ran down my acned forehead and on to my nylon Bath Fighting’ Bees Quiz Bowl v-neck sweater. When the buzzer sounded the match was over. The scoreboard read that we had won by 10 points - just a single question. The score was 320 to 310 and my teammates and I began to celebrate. In my gut there was an unsettling feeling.
After several minutes of hushed conversation between the Williamston players, advisers, and the host Matt Ottinger, it was decided that the game officials would look at the replay. Yes, the replay!
I was unaware of it too, but quiz bowl allows for instant replay. Minute after agonizing minute ticked by until finally the details were announced. Somehow, in the middle of the lightning round, our team had answered a question incorrectly. More specifically, I had answered incorrectly, and I knew it before everyone else on my team received the tragic news.
The disputed question had been asked about halfway through the lightning round. It was a simple question and I knew the answer, but my mouth had said the absolute wrong thing. How could I have been so stupid? The answer was so damned easy.
Ottinger had asked, "Where are the halls of Montezuma located"? Obviously, the correct answer was Mexico, but my mouth and my recollection of the Marine fight song in which those words appeared, blurted out Morocco. MOROCCO! That is where the fucking shores of Tripoli are. What the hell was I thinking?
As a result of my gaffe, our 10 points for answering correctly were erased from the board and our lead evaporated to nothing. I felt awful and wondered what the quiz bowl overtime rules were. Then, the enormous kick in the gut was delivered as the host announced that we would also be deducted 10 points for the incorrect answer. In a flash we had lost. It was over. We had lost and it was completely my fault.
I am certain now that this event has affected my personality when trivia games are introduced in to a room. It is the only opportunity I ever have to redeem myself for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. In this case, that wrong thing meant defeat at my own hands.
Numerous times throughout my life, I have said the wrong thing at the wrong time, but never with such swift, cold and painful results. My teammates forgave me. My parents comforted me. I could never do either for myself.
My life has turned out quite well and I am a generally happy individual. I can live with never having played second base for the Detroit Tigers as I dreamed when I was 10. It will be okay that I never acted in a Quentin Tarantino film, ran for public office or wrote the great American novel.
Fucking up the lightning round of a local PBS affiliate quiz show and costing myself and my teammates a free education will never be okay. And that is why, when we play trivial pursuit, I will destroy you. It will be because I have no choice.
Cheers,
Matty C
As soon as I read "it might just be a game but I have to destroy you" I thought "he'd whip me in Trivial Pursuit". Thanks Matty for the morning coffee smile