For me, it is the stuff of nightmares: a question I’ve written for Wednesday Night Trivia that is not just wrong, but simply, utterly inaccurate. Last night’s Heisman Trophy question earns the stamp, “Epic Fail.”
On the Monday after the Ohio State/Oklahoma game, I was in the truck, listening to ESPN’s Mike and Mike, when a discussion of Baker Mayfield’s Heisman chances included the frequency of the feat of finishing in the top four in the balloting three times in a career. Archie Griffin was credited at some length as being the only other player to have done that (more on just how wrong that was later).
I pulled the truck over. They were still talking about Griffin and Mayfield. I typed the info into my phone and smugly drove on. I was disgusted by Mayfield’s behavior after the OSU game; the juxtaposition between his character and Griffin’s was an irony too beautiful not to savor…and a WNT game was born out of my pig-headed set of sports blinders.
Some explanation is in order.
Inspiration for a question or theme often comes after I have read or heard an interesting piece of trivia, then try to build a game around it. Sometimes that presents a problem, most often because I’m so in love with that one question that manufacturing nine other good ones becomes an exercise in reaching for connections instead of digging for corroboration.
Even after all this time, writing ten good trivia questions remains among one of the biggest challenges in a career of teaching writing and writing for the outdoor press. After all, it’s entertainment. After a slow game earlier in the year, one of our regulars came up to me afterward, his face red: “Too hard, too wordy, and NO FUN! And that’s the consensus of our entire table!”
Problem was, he was right…for himself and for his team. It didn’t matter that I’d done what I always do in preparation, conduct a word count on the game; it was among the three most concise of the season. Didn’t matter that three other teams had scored over 100 points. What mattered was that a table of good people who’ve come nearly every week for several years had had no fun. That’s a problem.
The game has to be fun, first last and always. It should at least provide a little fodder for humor, both from me and from our guests, who have to have fun at their tables bandying around possible answers. Oh, and one more thing about fun: the questions must stay on the right side of the line between “trivia” and “minutiae.”
That the game must be accurate and fair goes without saying. Papa Boo’s and Budweiser stake their reputations on the integrity of the questions and answers. Besides, mistakes mean that the game grinds to a halt, as Shelli fields concerns from teams who’ve checked their phones against the answer, then check with me before correcting score cards. So a critical part of my job is protecting the game and always, always, protecting Shelli, who has the most difficult job of the evening, even on a flawless night, let alone one in which there are problems built into the game.
Along with accuracy comes fairness. If what we will accept for a right answer is petty or technical beyond what’s fun and reasonable, we’re wrong. That’s always a judgment, but over the years, Shelli has become an invaluable arbiter and recommender. She’s honed a great sense of audience and purpose and spirit of the game, and her input is invaluable when we’re trying to keep people in the game. When in doubt, we try really hard to err on the side of giving credit. It’s a game. We want people to score.
So the game has to be fun, it must be accurate and fair, and it has to be…well…doable. Wednesday Night Trivia is like shotgun games, like my beloved sporting clays. The targets have to be challenging, but you want shooters to come off the station thinking, “I should have hit that,” rather than, “Annie Freaking Oakley couldn’t have hit those!” If people don’t break most of the targets, they won’t come back.
The ideal WNT game, for me, would have every team scoring 90 or above with one point separating each of the top three teams. That’s how people stay in the game. That’s why they come back, week after week. They KNOW they can do better, and they are intent on proving it.
I mentioned “varied.” Not only should the questions be pulled from a variety of topics and cultures (several years ago, one bored team sent their scorecard up with “Music. Movies. Sports.” written over and over on their card) to pique interest, but the longevity and growth of our Wednesday night business depends on courting diversity in our crowd. Trivia makes for strange bedfellows, where the WWE hops in bed with Broadway shows, science, film, popular music, professional sports, weather, nursery rhymes, food, NASCAR, superstitions…
The questions are deliberately written to court “generational knowledge.” Our players range in age from those just legal to enjoy an adult beverage to treasured, honored long-time players in their 90’s. If there is never anything for the younger or older folks to answer, if they can’t contribute to their team, that’s no good for the game and absolutely no good for our Wednesday Night business (which is all about bringing folks in to eat, drink, and have a good time on a night that’s usually pretty slow in most establishments). The questions will never be all things to all players, but they have to strive for that every week, ten questions at a time.
Our players are bright people with really good memories. Of course I would prefer not to repeat a question or even a theme from the same calendar year, or even a recent calendar year….but it happens. I do a search from the trivia files that date back five years, but even so…
I can never forget one September a number of years ago as our servers were sweeping out the bar after the last game of the season. One of them brought me a stenographer’s notebook found under a table. In it was every single question I had asked for the past three years (and this was before the questions were posted online after the game), meticulously written out in longhand.
That was a pretty good window into how seriously some of our players take their competition…which is another line to walk. If the game doesn’t mean anything, if there isn’t legit competition, there’s no juice. Very occasionally we have folks who get caught up in “winning,” who forget that we’re playing a dopey bar game for fun on a Wednesday night in Buckeye Lake, Ohio, for a $20 trophy and a weird sort of bragging rights…but if there isn’t some level of edge to the competition, we’ve lost something that matters to most of our players, many of whom have been wildly successful in life precisely because they care about being good at what they do.
As I’ve said before, the game takes about four hours to write each week. I keep a bank of questions on my computer and add to it year ‘round. The process starts either with inspiration, like the ill-fated Griffin/Mayfield item, or draws from that cache of questions. After that, it’s finding a relationship, connections that contribute to the theme. “Half-Baked In The Sun” began as “Almost A Baker’s Dozen.” That was too general. “Butcher. Baker. Candlestick Maker.” Too limiting. Then Irma hit, and the thought of the Florida sun and the adobe question birthed the final theme.
Yes, there are books of trivia on my shelves and online websites I have tabbed. In the early days, there were Trivia Pursuit games lying around my writing room. Sometimes those are useful when I am desperate for a place to start. But they are never good for writing the game. Part of the appeal of Wednesday Night Trivia is that it’s original and tailored to our crowd. No outside source can do that, because no outside source has a relationship with people or with teams, a connection I’ve cherished for more than a decade.
But that also means that at some point, it’s just me, the computer, several dogs who don’t understand why I am not paying attention to them, a blank screen, and questions: Will enough people know about that? Did we use that same topic for a bonus last week? Do the sports questions have a broad enough appeal? Is there anything in there that’s going to ring the bell with that table of 20-somethings? How do I edit this question down to the bare necessary info, while still keeping it interesting?
At times, the dogs and I get up and go to the horse lot. The horses care less about trivia than the dogs. They want a treat. They want their ears scratched. The dogs, if I’m not watching, want to eat horse poop. That’s when I wonder if the game I’m writing will be anything OTHER than horse poop. More often than I would like to think, I have gathered my crew, tramped back into this drafty old farmhouse, and saved the game I was working on for another day, starting over on an entirely new tack.
Which brings us back to the Epic Fail from last night. I vet all the questions to the best of my ability…except when, like last night, I don’t. I try to find two, and better yet, three disparate, credible sources to back the answer. Where I get into trouble is when I lapse into being a fan of my own question and don’t check enough, or trust a source that I feel is impeachable. ESPN, with its huge research staff, is one of those reliable sources. But just as I did earlier in the year when I left out Ben Roethlisberger on a list of quarterback milestones, I didn’t dig deeply enough.
I am not a casual college football fan. There was a time, in another life, when I really thought I was going to be a college football coach. I pay uncommon attention to the sport. I can forgive myself for missing Herschel Walker (though I followed his career intently because I was still coaching then, and even went to see him compete in indoor track…what a terrifying specter he was thundering down the straightaway in the sprints, earning two All-America awards), but not Tebow. Not Tebow.
But I had tunnel-visioned that Mayfield/Griffin connection, and I flat out just didn’t do my due diligence. And that, in the world of writing Wednesday Night Trivia, when as many as thirty teams and Shelli depend on me to be right, is inexcusable.
For the record, the answer I had from ESPN was flawed in an embarrassing number of ways (and I’m guessing that after I turned off the radio, canny listeners took them to task). Baker Mayfield finished fourth in the Heisman balloting in 2015; he was third last year. If he finishes in the Top Four for a third time in 2017, that actually puts him in the company of four other Heisman candidates….and none of them is named Archie Griffin.
Messrs. Inside and Outside, Army’s Blanchard and Davis managed that feat from ’44-’46; the original one man Pony Express from SMU, Doak Walker, finished 3-1-3 from ’47-49. Nobody else would have three top four finishes until Herschel Walker did it from ’80-’82.
Griffin and Tebow had three season of Top Five (not Top Four) or better ballot years, as players politely and reasonably pointed out to Shelli and me last evening.
Thus, my Epic Fail was only salvaged by Shelli’s toughness and willingness to roll with my mistakes and make things right, as well as, more importantly, the graciousness of players who didn’t lose their minds when we all learned I was grossly in error.
So there you have it, a sort of “behind the green curtain” look at how we got things sideways last evening. The only comfort 24 hours later is the knowledge that we will be back next week and, according to our bosses, next summer, too, our 25th year at Papa Boo’s, trying to get Wednesday Night Trivia right for our guests, one question, one game, one week at a time.