Not-so trivial pursuit in the Land of Oz
A visit to the nation's largest trivia contest, held in Stevens Point

by Chad Zdroik

Jim Oliva, owner of Mom’s Computers, lives at 1556 Elk St., an older picket fence neighborhood in Stevens Point not far from where the end of Main Street meets the Wisconsin River. He has long called this town home.

But this town has long called Jim Oliva something else; he is to Stevens Point what Professor Marvel is to Emerald City. Both men are known for their extraordinary talents, shrouding themselves in mystery and hiding behind curtains. Jim Oliva’s curtain happens to be the college radio station.

For the past quarter century, Oliva has orchestrated the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s annual marathon trivia contest, billed the world’s largest. He spends the majority of his Saturdays writing the 432 questions with his friend John Eckendorf. Just before the contest begins. Oliva organizes all events around the competition, including registration and a parade. From there, he mans the complaint line throughout the competition, taking calls from contestants who dispute answers for one reason or another.

It is this man the town knows best, the man it calls Oz.

Stevens Point hugs a large bend of the Wisconsin River here in the heart of the state - or just above the palm if you are using your right hand for a map. Its 24,551 denizens make up an eclectic and enthusiastic community dedicated to a strong social, athletic, artistic and political culture. Point is a spirited school town, one films like Dead Poets Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus strive to emulate; UWSP - now in its 110th year - nests in the city’s center.

Yet nothing Point offers arouses the community’s energy more than the trivia contest held every April. Not Riverfront Rendezvous over the forth of July weekend; not Brews, Brats and Bands in late August on the grounds of the Point Brewery; not October’s Art in the Park. Even Christmas pales in comparison and serves more as a reminder the contest is less than four months away.

The trivia parade kicks off the long-awaited weekend on Friday at 4 p.m. Friday also trumpets the suspension of overnight parking rules. Vacant hotel rooms become sparse. Reservations at the Hilltop Bar and Grill are a must, long waits at other restaurants a sure bet, and most places schedule extra workers through the whole weekend. On Friday, County Market and Copps food stores brace themselves as if it were Thanksgiving (the latter might have shot itself in the foot when it recently pulled out as a sponsor for the event, only for the former to replace it). Friday morning is the last time most will wake from their beds until Monday.

A Journey

The 54-hour-long trivia contest is broadcast from UWSP’s own radio station, 89.9 WWSP-FM. Within the station’s small studio, where the compact discs still compete with records for shelf space, university students take turns announcing the questions and answers into the microphone’s mesh.

“Moving right along, Question Six of Hour 18 reads as follows: After a boring 10-minute narration by Lowell Thomas on a standard 35-millimeter black and white screen, a triple-sized color screen opens, putting us into the front car of a roller coaster, giving the viewer the most memorable part of the movie. What is the name of this Academy Award-nominated flick?”

From the station, located on Reserve Street along the university’s Communication Arts strip, Question Six ripples out to more than 500 teams in homes, apartments and rented hotel rooms in Central Wisconsin. In 2003, the contest went live online for the first time, allowing even people in the great Kansas prairies or near the harbor Down Under to play along.

The 500-plus teams personify the drive behind the contest, sporting names like Gene Autry’s Ninja Warriors, Yoda’s House of Polish Wisdom and Beavers’ World Order. And their sizes and ages range broadly. Some teams are as small as three or four players; some players are as young as three or four years old.

Question Six will be met with an almost unbearable silence by most of these teams as each concentrates on every word issuing from Bose Waves or General Electric Superadio IIIs. Silence comes with every question eight times an hour and stops as soon as the music resumes. It is a necessary silence - a cherished silence - for the next few minutes’ searching requires each contestant understand precisely what is being asked. To speak during this time is to commit the cardinal sin of trivia, as unassuming yappers quickly learn.

“I’m the naggy one when it comes to questions, saying, ‘Shut up! I can’t hear it!’” says Maggie Beeber of the team Ah bin Hyp-mo-tized!!!!!!!!!!!! “I’m usually typing the questions while somebody else is writing in the book and we’ll both look at each other and go, ‘Shut up!’”

The question is repeated for clarity’s sake. Then, as the first of two interstitial songs starts over the airwaves, the yelling begins in the team headquarters. The clock is ticking and discourse is limited to only the trivial. 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.

The Discovery of Oz, the Wonderful, the Terrible

Oliva has an unassuming disposition, his smile hardened into his features after 58 years of use, with kind eyes behind thin-rimmed frames and curly bed-head hair radiating from his scalp. He exudes a hint of a rebel, one seduced long ago by rock ’n’ roll and Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Oliva’s path to becoming Oz and moving to Stevens Point was one of serendipity and nuns. A wide variety of interests and hobbies fed his interest in pop culture and an intense lifestyle strengthened and trained his memory. He went to an all-boys Catholic middle school and high school, where nuns were teachers and diagramming 25 sentences a night was the norm. During the summer, while polio was a constant threat outside, little Jimmy Oliva spent most of his time away from neighbors and on the floor inside, head resting on palms and watching everything from both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions to the McCarthy hearings. Television would later have to compete with his long-standing love for music when he made for the local rock radio station one night on a whim and learned to spin. After a decade-long peripatetic career, Oliva eventually earned a degree in education, later teaching junior high.

All of these things would come into play much later when Oliva moved to Stevens Point, discovered 90 FM and asked for a job. He was on air inside the hour. A few years later, Oliva took over the reins of the contest and immediately revamped its personality, upping the competitiveness and expanding the format. Today he takes pleasure in answering the complaint line throughout the weekend, having finally finished writing the questions and triple checking them. During those 54 hours he spends all but seven on the phone. “It’s a game…I want to be a smart ass, a blowhard. I want to play the role of Oz.” (Flugaur recalls playing for that first time and discovering Oz himself answers the complaint line. “I just couldn’t believe it was actually him - Oz! - using the phone like he was like an everyday Joe.”)

Oliva remembers a heated phone conversation with Network a few years back. A player from the team was arguing that while Oz claimed the mayor of a show’s town was Becker Chamreta, Network had an episode guide in hand saying the actual mayor was none other than Bob Benido. After a few minutes’ back-and-forth, there was a pause on Oliva’s end, then, simply: “I am Oz.” The conversation ended there. Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful.

Home Again

Stevens Point mayor Gary Wescott claims the contest is like “a real live-action game,” but for many the true spirit has little to do with the contest itself. “It’s the ultimate holiday,” Flugaur says. “It is better than Christmas because Christmas is one day with family … trivia is an entire weekend spent with friends.”

For most, though, trivia is an annual reunion of both family and friends. “It doesn’t matter where you live or where you are in your life,” Phillippi says with a smile, “those three days are marked off years in advance and that weekend you know you’ll be in Stevens Point.”

Beeber nods with a smile of her own. Her closest comparison to the contest, on a grander scale, is a UW Badgers football game. “There is something special there that brings back alumni time and time again. They love coming back for it, and I think trivia does the same. If you graduate from Stevens Point, even if you move away you will want to come back. This offers an excuse. There aren’t many people who don’t like Point.”

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