PORTLAND — I should have known that this trivia thing was getting out of hand when I realized that I hated the sound of people cheering.
When you play Pub Quiz, some teams cheer a lot. Winning teams, losing teams. Doesn’t matter. Teams make a lot of noise if they get a challenging question right. Or if they weren’t 100 percent sure about an answer when one of their members wrote it down. They shout, “Yeah!” or “Yay!” or “Woo hoo!” or some such thing. Of course, such exclamations when quizzing are customary. You’re in a bar, you’re playing trivia with your friends, you’ve got a shot to win money. You’ve probably got two or three Red Hooks in you. Why not cheer?
But for much of the two years when we played Pub Quizzes, my team rarely made a sound, other than the occasional high five or Tiger Woods-style fist pump. We weren’t there to screw around. We collected our handouts at the beginning of the night. We filled them out. We listened to the Bingo clues. We turned our handouts in at the end of the night, and more often than not, when the scores were tallied, we’d beaten the crap out of everyone else. Of course, we did have a good time, win or lose. We loved being out, meeting new people, flirting awkwardly with waitresses, and giving each other crap around the table. But one thing we rarely did was cheer.
“You know what I like about us, other than the fact that we win most of the time?” I once asked my friend Barry.
“What’s that?” Barry asked.
“I like that we don’t cheer,” I said. “We don’t have to cheer.”
Barry nodded grimly. Scott, one of our teammates who also happens to be an amateur boxer, sat back in his chair looking bored. “Just pay us our money so we can go home,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I felt so smart.
The final round was almost over. The quizmaster, who had graded everyone’s answer sheets, was almost done reading the answers.
“Question No. 26,” he said over the mike, “in our A to Z round for the Letter Z: This president died in office July 9, 1850. The answer… Zachary Taylor.”
Every other team cheered. But in vain. The quizmaster announced the point totals, and we were on top (again). We got the next question, the final challenge question, right, as we usually did. My teammates and I split $85 three ways. After paying for my Guinnesses and my Reuben, and overtipping the waitress and the quizmaster, I had something like $2.50 in my pocket.
All in a night’s work.
Why, you might ask, was I playing bar trivia if I wasn’t outwardly having a good time? Why would I go back if I usually wasn’t making anything more than a few dollars after I’d paid my tab? Easy: I am competitive. It’s Portland and there’s always a game happening somewhere most nights a week. I like hanging out with my friends. At the root of all of it, though, it’s probably a chemical thing. I like the little dopamine rush that comes when I’m right about something.
I like it even better when I am right and you are wrong.
I like the game.
I like the hustle.
I like the action.
• • •
Pub quizzing started in Europe, probably Britain, sometime in the 1970s. Games vary from place to place, but essentially players answer trivia questions, usually read by a host with a microphone, or on handouts, or some combination of the two. Lame versions of the game consist of someone reading Trivial Pursuit questions right off the card. Better games, like the ones put on by Pub Quiz USA here in Portland, have staffs of paid writers and fact checkers, with the questions posed by a professional host. People play for everything from bar credits to cash. Pub Quiz is all about cash. Bars welcome pub quizzes because it draws people into the venue on slow nights, usually during the week.
Players are a diverse mix. Gen X’ers and 20-somethings, eccentrics and hipsters, “Star Trek” types and jocks; mostly just people out having a good time. Many teams are regulars. Some of them take their quizzing seriously.
Some are out to beat people. Some are just out to have a good time. And for the two years I played Pub Quiz in Portland, I loved taking money from either.
Where else can a guy like me be this competitive and do well? I loved basketball once, and took my weekend games very seriously, but I was never very good. I tried to take up golf a few years back, and really, really sucked at it. But this bar trivia thing, this I can do, because I know some things that you probably don’t.
I know the name of the third man to walk on the moon, Pete Conrad, and the last to do so, Eugene Cernan. I know who The Beatles picked to replace Ringo Starr in 1964 when Starr got sick: Jimmy Nicol. I know that gamma rays are emitted from atomic nuclei and can penetrate several feet of rock. I know the latitude and longitude of Eugene: 44 degrees north, 123 degrees west.
I did not have to look these things up. I’ve known these facts for years. Now I’m sharing them with you, and I am just getting started.
I know that in 1981, the Fourth of July was on a Saturday, and in 1977, Halloween fell on a Monday. The No. 1 song on America’s Top 40 the day before that Halloween was “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone. The name of the guy who hosted that very same Top 40 show is Casey Kasem, something you probably did know. Maybe you also know that he’s the voice of Shaggy from “Scooby Doo.” If so, congratulations. But you probably don’t know where Casey Casem’s ancestors are from. They are from Lebanon.
Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics hit the first NBA three-pointer. John Ford won Best Director four times. Academy Award statues are made of brittanium, which is mostly tin. The symbol for tin is Sn. The atomic number of tin is 50. The atomic number for molybdenum is 42. Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics wore 42 for the Celtics when he hit the first NBA three-pointer.
I know I am not impressing you. None of these facts is interesting. They’re loose, little, and dry. They’re annoying. They’re unattractive. If they were on the outside of my skull instead of inside, you’d suggest that I moisturize my scalp. And it’s not like I’d be good enough to get on “Jeopardy!” — I wouldn’t. I’ve heard about the entrance exam, and even if I could get an audition and take it, I’d fail it. “Jeopardy!” people are Harvard professors and research scientists, the George Clooneys and Meryl Streeps to my Héctor Elizondo.
Worst of all, you know stuff that I don’t. Important stuff. Stuff I wish I knew. Like, what the best tasting nitro beer is, or what the Black Eyed Peas sound like. You probably know what size jeans you wear (I never can remember) or where your keys are at this very moment (I don’t). Actually, I don’t know very many things at all. You know things; I remember them.
Facts have driven me since I was 6 and taught myself to read with a set of encyclopedias that I found in the attic. After college, I became a newspaper reporter partly because I thought there’d be a use for my random facts. There wasn’t. I had to learn new useless facts about zoning that even I didn’t care about. I thought teaching would be better for the useless facts thing, until I got my license and found out that kids don’t care about the chemical makeup of mafic rocks. Nor should they.
It used to be that knowing a lot of random crap qualified a person as “smart.” Now we know better, or at least I think we do. Kids in school used to have to memorize the names of the presidents and the elements on the periodic table. They had to diagram sentences. If they could do these things, we said they were smart. Then, starting in the 1960s, things started to change. Memorizing facts and calling it “education” was branded as old fashioned. The focus on became teaching kids how to find knowledge instead of just express it, to explain how they solved a math problem rather than just doing it. A professor in my master’s program referred to the way we used to do things — children confined to neat row of desks and chanting their times tables like verses from the Qur’an — as “child abuse.”
A principal of mine, early in my teaching career, derided what I knew and what I expected my students to know, at least in part, as “‘Jeopardy’ knowledge.” He wasn’t giving me a compliment.
With 13 years of teaching under my belt, I sort of see where they were coming from. I guess memorizing facts isn’t important. I guess kids should know more higher-order stuff, like how to find information themselves. They should then learn how to process or present it in a novel way. I get that. Teachers shouldn’t teach knowledge, they should “facilitate” it. If you really need to find out when the Civil War happened, you can do it, probably in seconds, depending on your wireless connection. You don’t need me.
I guess the new educators are right. But still … something about a population of people who can’t find the Mediterranean on a map without Wikipedia kind of bugs me. I don’t know why, but it does.
I do know this: If you or your friends ever find yourselves in trouble, trivia-wise, and you need a constant stream of facts and the bonus points that come with them, you probably should call me.
You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
• • •
You should try bar trivia sometimes. Don’t let this overdone bit of prose fool you. It’s supposed to be fun, and it is, regardless of how competitive you are, or how strong you are at states and capitals. It’s cheap, you get to hang out with your friends, and who knows? Maybe some of that extra pop culture knowledge you’re carrying around will come in handy. One of my favorite Pub Quiz memories is of Kate, a teammate’s wife, who is normal and therefore didn’t contribute many answers. We liked having her around anyway. She was nice. One night, though, the category was “Music You Might Hear at Outdoor Festivals,” which probably is how she spent much of undergrad. She nailed all 12 songs and artists. I sat back and relaxed for once. I even cheered with everyone else, but haven’t admitted it until now.
There are deeper reasons that pub games like trivia are important. In 1995, Robert D. Putnam wrote a book titled “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” Putnam argued that the United States was losing its way, becoming a nation of couch potatoes and suburbanites who were so involved in raising children, amassing possessions and struggling to get ahead that they’d stopped interacting with their friends and neighbors. Fewer people were bowling — or meeting their neighbors at all. We were losing our sense of community.
With that in mind, I’m glad to drive through neighborhoods here in Portland and see people playing ultimate frisbee and kickball in the park, like they did when they were kids. These are people who know their neighbors and have friends down the street. Pub Quiz is the same way. Pub Quiz was our bowling night.
So you should play. The republic depends on it.
• • •
Pub Quiz is a little like that radio show, “This American Life.” Every week has a theme, and every night is a variation on that theme. Unlike “This American Life,” though, Pub Quiz actually announces a theme and sticks to it. (It doesn’t try to shoe-horn a bunch of random things to fit the theme, and then throw in an essay by David Sedaris.) Sometimes you know a lot about the theme and want to play. Sometimes you don’t know much, but you play anyway and hope for the best.
Even we had rough weeks. Punk Rock Week and Grunge Week kicked the crap out of us. Monty Python’s Flying Circus week — total disaster. None of us, unexpectedly — thankfully — knew anything about Monty Python. So we lost, didn’t even come close to finishing in the top five. We felt normal, for once, had fun jeering at all of the dorky Monty Python fans and their stupid stock phrases.
But sometimes the themes treated us very, very well, and we became the nerds again.
My defining moment came during Star Wars Week. “Star Wars” was the first movie I ever saw in a theater (Sept. 2, 1977) and “The Empire Strikes Back” is my favorite movie, and I don’t give a damn who knows it. That week, we won the Monday night game when, on the final question, I knew the name of the Imperial general who leads the assault on the Rebel base on Hoth (General Veers). We won on Tuesday night when I was able to correctly name each Rebel fighter craft. (There are five of them. Just trust me on this.) We won the next night on something about Admiral Ozzel. Then … on Thursday night … paradoxically my crowning and most embarrassing moment, the question that both defined me and made me feel oh so dirty. The question was, “What star system does Han Solo say the Millennium Falcon is near before he decides to visit Billy Dee Williams on Bespin?”
Trust me, you don’t want to know.
But I don’t care what you say. That week, my friends and I won at least $300. So suck it.
• • •
We weren’t the only ones who took Pub Quiz a little too seriously. One night, as everyone was filing into the bar, a woman stopped by our table from another team. We’d seen her around. She seemed pleasant enough. I was just about to buy her a drink when she looked at me and said, “We don’t like you.”
“What? Why not?” I asked.
“We just don’t,” she said. “We used to win all the time here. Then you showed up.”
I kept waiting for her to smile, or whack me on the shoulder. Something. Anything.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Do you know what Festivus is?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the ‘Seinfeld’ thing. You have the pole instead of a Christmas tree. And feats of strength, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “There’s also the airing of grievances.” She paused for effect: “And this year, you were our grievance.” She walked back to her table. I still wonder how much she was kidding.
• • •
The end of the road for us came in January. Two very nice things happened.
One, my trivia buddy Barry met a woman on another team, one we used to play against at the Thirsty Lion in downtown Portland. They dated, got engaged and moved to Vegas. We won our last game as a team, of course. One thing I don’t remember is what the final question was. I am sad that I don’t remember it. When we were done, we walked out of the Thirsty Lion with a few more dollars than we’d walked in with, and walked off in different directions. It was like the end to “Oceans 11″ or something.
Two, I decided that I’d spent enough time sitting around in bars. My tutoring business, which I’d started as a way to make extra money after work, was taking up more and more of my evenings. Plus, I decided that I’d like to actually write trivia for Pub Quiz instead of play. I could make actual money. Not a lot, but a lot more than I was making playing. Plus, I could keep a lot more of that money for myself. On top of that, I like writing trivia. I like putting these useless facts to use. (I guess then they’d be useful facts.)
Of course, I told myself that I was also being less nerdy by taking this job. One night, one of the counselors from my work came in to a bar where they put on my first quiz. She asked me if I was excited to be writing trivia. I said I was, but not because I was overly interested in trivia anymore. I’d outgrown it. I was only doing this because it would help pay for my son’s boxing lessons.
She smiled. “Oh, cut it out,” she said. “You love this stuff. You enjoy it.”
She’d caught me. She was right. I had to admit that I did. The night of my first quiz, even though I wasn’t required to do so, I went in to see how the teams liked the rounds I’d put together. People were having fun because of something I had put together. I saw them discussing the questions I’d written, leaning over and whispering answers to each other, so that other teams wouldn’t hear. I saw them trying to figure out the titles to the page of football movie posters I’d put together. They were using their brains. Best of all, they were with their friends and having fun. They felt smart.
And here’s the best part: When they got answers right, they cheered. I didn’t hate it. It sounded like music.
