Confessions of a Former News Editor - Trivial Pursuit
by Ryan Pugh
I’m not a competitive guy by nature but recently I have found myself getting ridiculously competitive at, of all things, bar trivia.
A friend of mine (I’ll withhold his name because as he says, there may be paper on him somewhere) and I started playing bar trivia earlier this summer basically as something to do on a Monday night (since I am no longer in the newspaper industry full-time, my evenings aren’t as full as they once were). The first time we played we won and I don’t know if that was similar the first hit of an illicit drug to my bloodstream, but I was hooked.
I have always seemed to have an affinity for trivia mostly because my brain remembers pointless things that will have no use in life outside of bar trivia. I remember in my freshman year of college my housemates and I would watch Jeopardy nightly and one night I was on a particularly hot streak and one of my roommates’ girlfriends looked at me and asked, “How do you know all this stuff and you are on your way to flunking out of college?” I had no answer for her. I guess I like challenging myself on my terms (Oh, and spoiler. I did end up flunking out of college after my freshman year. My consecutive GPAs of .95 and 1.3 just weren’t enough to keep me around. Happy ending: I did eventually graduate.) Classroom work just didn’t challenge me like regular trivia because trivia is about memorization, which I am good at. Classroom work involves thinking, which is not a strong suit of mine.
I have a novice level skill at trivia unlike those past winners of Jeopardy like Ken Jennings. Those dudes take trivia to a level I’m not willing to get to. To be that good, you must take every volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica along on vacation as a beach read (I know, I know, the Encyclopedia Britannica is available online now so a beachgoer would only need to bring along a phone or a tablet. I’m sorry, I miss books sometimes.)
The thing about my competitiveness at trivia is that I am not competitive with the other teams that take part in trivia as I am competitive with myself. If I know something but I can’t come up with the answer, it drives me nuts. I realize this is probably an unhealthy way to look at things.
The only time in my life I got competitive against another person was when I was about 12 and my parents got me an air hockey table for Christmas one year. It was a tabletop model but my dad built legs for it so we could play somewhere other than the dining room table. So, we set the table up in my room and my mom and I – when she was at home and not working – settled into a routine of playing air hockey nightly after dinner and night after night my mom kicked my tail. For you see, my mom packed cookies for the Archway cookie plant when it was in Rimersburg and she had extremely quick hands which she used to exploit every weak spot in my game. Here was the problem; mom was not a gracious winner. She rubbed it in mercilessly when she beat me. From that point forward, it was my mission to take her and her smug attitude down.
What did I do whenever I had the chance from that point forward? I practiced my tail off at air hockey. I was like Forrest Gump practicing ping pong shots repeatedly (minus the empty bedpan, obviously).
Finally, after months of ridicule I finally beat my mom at air hockey, and do you know what happened from that point forward? My mom would never play me again. She said she ‘didn’t feel like it anymore.’ No, she knew the tables had turned and she was ducking me.
The residual effect of my mom’s air hockey humiliation made me overly competitive when I got the opportunity to play air hockey again.
But trivia is different from air hockey because I am only holding myself to my own standards. I don’t care if I know more than the other guy, I just want to be better than yesterday’s version of me.
I just need to remember not to take it so seriously.
