  |
||||
      |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
(not-so trivial pursuit, cont.) Certain questions need to be asked by the teams about the question in question, as Brandon Flugaur will tell you. “What are they asking for? What are they looking for? What character name or TV show or actor do we need to find?” Flugaur is a 20-year-old Point native, a UW-Madison junior, and, since 2001, a prominent player for the team Festivus for the Rest of Us. He says he and his teammates fall into certain roles and rhythms throughout the weekend. When the time comes to crack a question, some rush to the Internet, others their notes, books, DVDs, CDs, friends or family. The contest lives and breathes at this frenetic energy and pace. Keeping up with the Joneses … and Jim Then there’s the competitive thing, a certain out-for-blood force unique to the time of year that swirls and swells as the weekend nears, finally climaxing Monday just after midnight when Oz reads off the final scores and the top 10 teams. Most teams have rivals they are trying to beat, usually with comparable track records over the years. Mark Phillippi plays for the Hyp-mo-tized team while Jacki Stroik plays for their rival, Raging Tyrannosaurus of Despair. They are husband and wife. Winning is essential - winning means having bragging rights for an entire year. “When we found out what team she was on…” remembers Beeber, Mark’s teammate, failing to end her sentence with a loss for words. “We’ve always been at neck-and-neck. Out of 500 teams they’ll be 26, we’ll be 27. We’ll be 15, they’ll be at 16. It pushes us to work harder, they’re so good.” “We have a conflict coming up,” Phillippi says of his wife, the conflict being their first-born baby - a boy - due in March. “The big question is: who will the little one play for?” “We have to start working on him early,” Stroik adds with a determined smile. All evidence points to her already having a head start on this matter. Winning is certainly something Network knows about. It is arguably the most envied of teams and, after more than 25 years, one of the oldest. Network pulls in more 500-pointers than most other Stevens Pointers, the maximum number a team can win per question. Ray Hamel will be the first to dispel many of the myths swirling around his team’s magic. (His favorite is that the team does not start until six hours into the contest to better scope out the year’s territory. Rubbish, he says.) Nailing a 500-point question is still a thrill, and Hamel insists there is no formula for success, save perhaps being organized and prepared in tackling questions. And often, Hamel asserts, Oz has a formula for each question’s structure. “Some of his questions are what I call sort of double-jump questions where he doesn’t say, ‘In the movie The Gunfighter, what was the name of the first man Johnny Ringo shot?’ He’ll say, ‘What was the name of the first man Johnny Ringo shot?’ You can’t go to your Gunfighter notes unless you know it’s from The Gunfighter. If you don’t know who Johnny Ringo is, you’re stuck.” The character’s name is actually Jimmie Ringo, played by Gregory Peck in the 1950 film. Officially, three movies have used that same title, the other two released in 1923 and 1985. So it is not only a matter of having taken notes on the right gunfighter, it’s a matter of taking notes on the right Gunfighter. And as any player of any team will tell you, taking good notes is key. Many teams, especially the more seasoned ones, boast databases of notes 10,000 or more pages strong, saved (and backed up) in Microsoft Word. These massive documents often include notes on countless films and all past questions and their answers; therefore, when Oz recycles, teams can call up the answer in no time. “I chastise [Oz] for being too lazy,” Hamel says, “He sometimes uses too many questions from the same movie, say. Why not spread it out a bit more?” Yet it seems doubtful Oz can be too lazy, or teams would not work as hard as they do in preparing every year. Flugaur shares an apartment with three friends (including yours truly) in Madison. At all times a spiral notebook - 70 sheets, college ruled - can be found on the coffee table, so when a noteworthy item flashes on one of the two TVs someone will be sure to write it down. Aside from notes, the Festivus crew is skilled at sniffing out garage and estate sales to find cheap books and collectibles, magazines and records. Anything to help counter-balance the decades-long head start Oz has on them. This all may seem amusing to the outsider, but is serious business for those involved. The average player lists note taking and preparing alongside grocery shopping and mowing the yard, ranking it somewhere between necessity and tradition. All the better to go up against Oz. |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
