[greetings from Las Vegas. Reno was not Norbury bad, but I’m not going to return anytime soon. And rather than write out something useful while I could be outside sweating, I’ll put down what I wrote on the flight out here. Next week, I’ll be back at home.'']
A thought that has crossed my mind in the last few months, which R's retirement brought to the forefront is this: For a lot of events in the history of quiz bowl, not only am I one of the last active people to see it, but I'm also the last active person to even remember it. This got me to thinking about the pieces of quiz bowl's history that didn't get fully documented at the time. This is not to take away from Tom's work with College Bowl Valhalla, but these pieces represent a couple of points where everything turned.
I had thought that this might be the germ of the book after this one, but I don't think I can write this one. The cautionary bit that keeps me from considering this is that I'd almost be like F for Fake, where Orson Welles said "At the very beginning, I - did make you a promise. Remember? I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past seventeen minutes, I've been lying my head off." Only in my case it's whether I'd know if I remembered it truthfully, or if my personal memory is coloring the account. So with the exception of one of these items, we'd need more eyewitness accounts that I don't know how to get to get the full picture. I'm taking some of these from my perspective that quiz bowl since 1990-2002 was in a technological revolution, which made possible later periods of social revolution; as a result I'm including a few things that seem now like obvious developments, but by their presence opened up new possibilities.
A History of Quiz Bowl in the Revolutionary Era
The National Invitational Tournament 1981-3 (I'm actually guessing at this particular example being important, it's here representing the creation of independent tournaments.)
College Bowl Nationals 1987, it's on the Disney Channel, and the host is Dick Cavett, and the conflict between the host and the teams is a major factor in why ACF came to exist, and split the early circuit.
A group of writers challenge College Bowl to write a set of tournaments for intramurals and college invitationals. However this isn't the story you know. It's actually 1988, not 1996, and the company is Mentis. (I know nothing of this history other than what I read in the back issues of the next item.)
The West Coast Newsletter, Buzzer, and spreading of knowledge of quiz bowl before usenet.
The 1988 National Academic Championship which was more or less the first national broadcast of high school competitions. It's this and the two College Bowl broadcasts in the '80s which were in the memory of those in 1990's quiz bowl when set forth and started changing everything.
The first ACF championship
Cornell's 1992 and 1993 intramurals. This is not because this was my first experience in college play, but it represents the retirement of Ron Loomis as head of Cornell's Student Union. Prior to this he was the fundamental connection between ACUI and College Bowl, and the coach of Cornell's team. Cornell prior to that was a power team that operated under the rules set down by College Bowl and ACUI. This is basically the transition point from intramurals being a necessary condition for a team to exist every year to teams existing on campus continuously and as separate entities from administration. This wasn't the first school to do this, it happened at almost all schools in this timeframe, and that shift is the fundamental economic reason for everything in college quiz bowl that happened after.
The first fall invitationals. In a way, the first fall invitationals accelerated change in a way that the first invitationals didn't. Once there was a sufficient calendar of events in the fall, you could begin a team at the beginning of the school year. Or perhaps more concisely, you didn't need to and largely couldn't start a team from College Bowl Intramurals, which were usually held between late November and February.
Penn Bowl I, II, and III, this was the first time a large field occurred with a large number of matches for every team. The former was present in high school, the latter in college.
What happened to Friday night matches? Up to the mid 90's in college, if you had a large field and wanted to play a full round robin, you'd start your tournament Friday night. Then in one year Friday matches disappeared, and Sunday matches became possible. At least part of this was logistics of travel, and some of it was the decline of BYU as a national power with a large budget. With the need for online competition, it's interesting that Friday night and weeknights generally are still sacrosanct. The other question to ask here is “when did it become OK to not have a full round-robin?”
The Stanford Archive and the question of whether used packets had monetary value.
The fall and rise of ACF and its refounding.
The first Trashmasters and the first Trashionals (which on a related thread, was also held on a Sunday.)
Penn Bowl 1996 with the meeting on the 10th floor. This is the point where NAQT begins.
College Bowl NCT 1996 and the recruiting that took place outside the competition.
The age of mirroring. From 1995-6 to 1996-7, there was a fundamental shift in the number of tournaments that were either mirrored in multiple locations or were joint-writes. The 1995-96 season marked the last time that multiple editors in multiple locations produced distinct tournaments on the same weekend. By the next year, that situation was a mirror. That had three effects. It increased the number of events in a region, it allowed more teams to compete without needing to submit packets, but it dramatically reduced the number of editors having to work through the process of polishing an entire tournament.
College Bowl NCT 1997
The founding of PACE.
The rise and fall of the nationals at Lake Forest. At one point the American Scholastic Competition Network's Tournament of Champions was the largest high school national championship, drew a truly national field, and it ended with an attempt by teams to sue the ownership for fraud. While the history of the end is recorded, the eighteen years prior, and its rise is lost to history.
Meow and the end of the usenet group. The one good thing that came out of meow was that it forced the transition of the quiz bowl community off off usenet at exactly the right time to move to the web. If it had happened a year later, we might not have had NAQT, a year earlier, and ACF might not have been in a position to reach an audience. The worst part of meow was that it created paranoia and militancy in many of those who came after meow that any newcomer was coming to destroy quiz bowl again, and in doing so created much of the toxicity that stunted the growth of quiz bowl in much of the 2000's.
The 1999 Quincy Open, which reset the style of ACF for the next decade, and with subsequent national championship wins brought the doctrine of “write questions to improve your game.”
The game show era, where quiz bowl became the open secret of making money happen.