Trivia...

I have always had an interest in trivia. I love to read at any opportunity I get and I learn all sorts of trivia. I’ve loved the TV show Jeopardy even from the Art Fleming days. I was thrilled with the release of the game Trivial Pursuit in the early 1980s. I played many a game of that with my friends. Both Jonathan and Joshua participated on the Academic Teams at Ballard Middle and Ballard Memorial. I’ll admit I was a bit jealous. They never had anything like this when I was their age and I would have loved it.

I have noticed over the past few years the increasing occurrence of trivia nights or games by various groups usually for charity. I’ve never participated in one until recently. My work colleague and friend John Witte invited me to a trivia contest that was to benefit the Challenger Learning center. I accepted the invitation having no idea what to expect. I arrived to a packed room that I later found out had 43 teams of six each. I saw my friend (and legal counsel) Chuck Walter. He had the boys former teacher (and A-Team coach) Steve Quartermous on his team (who we call to this day Mr. Q). I knew that was going to be a formidable team and they ended up winning. Our team finished fourth which I thought was really good.

Here’s the basic format. Each team has six to eight members. There are ten rounds of ten questions each. Each ten question set follows a theme like Sports, History or even more specific categories like 70’s Music or Paducah Trivia. A narrator reads the question which also appears on a screen. You write down your answers on a sheet of paper. Some contests also allow you to have mulligans. These allow you to mark a question with a “mulligan” which means it will automatically be counted correct. You are given a minute or so after the questions are read to turn in your paper. The team with the most correct answers wins. You have to make a guess before you start as to how many questions you’ll get right, this serves as the tiebreaker.

Last week, Chuck called me to invite me to play on a team he was getting together. It was a benefit for the New Pathways Children’s Home (which I am familiar with) that was held at Broadway church of Christ. I was all for it this time and agreed to be there. This one didn’t charge an entry fee. You made a donation for the Children’s Home. With this donation, you got five “mulligans” to use. We started and did pretty well. We thought the questions here were a bit tougher than the previous trivia tournament we were in. I was able to contribute some answers so I felt good about that. We got to the final round with a three point lead and the final category was “Technology”. Of course, the pressure was on me to come through on that one. We got enough answers right to end up winning. We ended up getting a trophy made appropriately enough of “Smarties”. It’s what you see above.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed participating in these and hope to get the opportunity to do some more.