(four shorter pieces rather than the usual three longer ones, nothing to make out of that.)
At some point in my life , I watched a newsmagazine profile of Muhammad Ali. This was post-boxing, post-Parkinson’s diagnosis, and may have even been post-Atlanta Olympics. During the profile, there’s a scene where Ali passes the time with some of the crew by doing some sleight of hand magic. And then the voiceover notes that because it’s against Islamic practice to deceive in the way stage magic is performed, Ali immediately reveals the trick he just performed. That image has always come back to me, and thinking about it now, I think I’ve been modeling some of that behavior in quiz bowl.
A lot of quiz bowl writing is like a magic trick. There’s a certain amount of deception through misdirection which informs how clues are placed or not placed in a question. There are lots of clues which exist as clues purely because they play against the expectations of people. And it’s these clues which serve to gratify the writer when they slip past the player unnoticed, and the player only realized what that clue meant a few moments later. Sometime the inverse occurs and they player’s exultant reaction to a clue gives a brief connection between writer and player. How clever the player is to pick through those subtle phrases and rise above the writer’s clever plan. Some questions are written to take the player on an emotional journey, through confusion to revelation, and hopefully with a moment of sheer wonder. And the writer’s best trick is when they make the player into the magician.
I feel better and players feel smarter when they realize there’s a trick to the question, and aren’t fooled by it. But equally, I gain satisfaction by showing a new player a trick, and watching them use that trick later.
It’s taking me a long time to reveal all my tricks because sometimes I don’t even realize it’s a trick someone can use. But on some level, I feel duty bound to reveal all I can in the book.
I highly recommend grabbing the BBC Radio 4 quiz program feed on your podcast player of choice. During my listening to Radio 4’s Brain of Britain competition for this year, I ran into something that I tried to will into existence during week 175’s discourse on spelling questions. When faced with the task to spell an answer, the contestant, rather than spend time on the task, simply said “NO!” This was well after the match had been decided, the spelling question was right where it needed to be at the bottom of the stack, and the player had been prompted to spell by the question opening “Can you spell…?”, But it’s probably as close to the answer I sought as I’ll ever see.
And now a hilariously hypocritical turn from talking about revealing your secrets, but I can’t talk about this yet until I hear from all parties involved. The reason this week is so brief is that I spent my weekend doing the quiz bowl equivalent of a bar rescue. I would note that around the world, there are many, many formats that are close enough to what we consider quiz bowl that we can help them to get through troubling times simply by offering things that we’d be doing anyway. If we are aware of the trouble, we’re aware of the problem, we can apply our talents quickly and get people back on their feet in little time. But key to that is being aware of the problems when they happen.
Today is my folks’ 54th anniversary. Without them deciding to get together, you wouldn’t have this weekly ritual deconstruction of academic competition. And lately, I’ve tried to catalog just what it is that each of them gave me to get me to this point.
As we’ve spent the last two years emptying that house, I’ve gotten a little extra view of the environment my mother group up in. The long parade of non-fiction and reference books which that house had collected tell me that she grew up with a respect for education, science, a healthy disdain for people’s self-puffery, and the need to push back and move past such people..
My father gave me my powers of observation, my need for perpetual self-improvement, my ability to look at systems and spot their flaws, and the salesman’s ability to take slamming doors to the face while still moving forward.
Without my mother, I wouldn’t have played quiz bowl. I mean that literally and figuratively, I don’t think our school district would have joined a league for quiz bowl without somebody on the school board pushing to give kids the opportunity. But without my father, what we’ve done with quiz bowl wouldn’t have happened.