Chasing Popeye: A Story About a Savant, a Midget, and The One True Team

“If you ain’t first, you’re last!”

Ricky Bobby, Tallegega nights: the legend of ricky bobby

It was cold and late, and I was dejected. We had lost – again. It was past 11 on a Saturday night in early March 2019, in River Forest, a Chicago suburb I visit once a year for the sole purpose of participating in this event. This year’s contest had ended about 10 minutes earlier. I’d said my goodbyes to my five teammates, muttered the obligatory “we’ll get ‘em next year,” and made a beeline out to my car in the parking lot at Trinity High School.

As I drove home, I thought, “maybe that’s it.” The team I captained had competed hard – we beat 100 teams and lost to one. By any measure, that’s pretty good, and we were pretty good. I’d captained various editions of this team in this event in eight of the last nine years and we finished first twice, second five times, and third once. Objectively, not bad – always on the medal stand. But on that night in 2019 it hit me that the prospect of ever again walking out of that gym in first place – as champions, carrying the traveling trophy reserved for winners – was waning.

The juggernaut that had me pondering retirement was known as Popeye Jones’ Ugly Brothers. Popeye first entered the tournament in 2013 and promptly dethroned my team – The One True Team – by the narrowest of margins. The One True Team reclaimed the title in 2014, with Popeye finishing third. Then, Popeye went on a run. It finished first out of 72 teams in 2015 (we were third); first of 84 teams in 2016 (we did not enter); first of 92 teams in 2017 (we were second); first of 102 teams in 2018 (we were second); and first of 102 teams in 2019 (again, we were second). A five-peat for Popeye. The One True Team had settled in as a bridesmaid – or groomsman, I suppose.

It wasn’t just that Popeye was winning every year; the margin of victory was growing. From 2017-2019, Popeye won by 4, 7, and 14 points, respectively. We were losing ground. Popeye was Secretariat in the last furlong in the 1973 Belmont Stakes – and we were the horse in second, destined to be forgotten. We’d tweaked the roster and tried different approaches. But nothing seemed to work. As I headed home, I wasn’t sure I’d be back 12 months later.

A Trivial Pursuit

If you see photos of The One True Team and of Popeye Jones’ Ugly Bros. – and you will, if you keep reading – you’ll figure out that the contest I am writing about does not involve physical prowess of any kind. No one will look at those pictures and say, “I want those guys on my side in a street fight.” More likely: “Those guys need to get out in the sun a little more.” There may not be a single elite athlete among them, but sports is very much at the center of their competition – more specifically, they compete in the not-so-rough-and-tumble world of sports trivia. If you’ve ever attended a trivia night fundraiser, you know the drill. Get some friends together, have a few drinks, play a little trivia. This contest is like that – but on steroids. And all about sports.

The aptly named St. Giles Men’s Society is made up of a group of men who are parishioners at St. Giles Catholic Parish in Oak Park, which borders River Forest. Before the explosion of Sports Trivia, the SGMS was best known (to me, at least) for its “Retreads” men’s basketball league. Team captains actually draft teams and they compete over the winter in the church gym. The elbows fly, lungs burn, and hamstrings pop. Local orthopedic offices greet the start of every season with the same refrain: cha-ching!

Sometime prior to February 2009, some SGMS genius came up with the idea of staging a sports trivia contest on a weekend night to break the monotony of a long, cold Chicago winter. The idea was elegantly simple: form six-man teams, serve beer and pizza, run a sports trivia contest, and maybe raise a little money for charity – or at least to cover the pizza and beer. The inaugural event in 2009 – Sports Trivia 1 – drew 14 teams and was held in a church fellowship hall most memorable for its linoleum floor. Twelve years later, SGMS Sports Trivia has earned the tagline on its web site: Chicagoland’s Premier Sports Trivia Charity Event. The last three events each drew around 100 six-man teams. If there were any women on those teams, please forgive me for not noticing. At this event, ladies are as rare as a Seth Jones – the unicorn NHL All-Star whose father, Popeye, played in the NBA.

Sports Trivia Teaser 1

Which Chicago Bear scored the team’s last points in the 46-10 win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX? What uniform number did he wear? Where did he play in college?

Trivia brought to you by the one true team

After first graduating to the church’s gym, Sports Trivia ultimately got so big that it was moved down the street to Trinity. The organizers ramped up the silent auctions and raffles, brought in late-night snacks, wooed corporate sponsors, and goosed the entry fee – these guys are Catholics, after all, hard-wired to raise money. At some point, the proceeds from the night were earmarked for a school – Christ the King College Prep – on the West Side of Chicago. In recent years, the drum corps from the school gets the jam-packed assembly of 600+ trivia nuts hyped at the start of the night.

For sports trivia geeks, this is the night that vindicates years of poring over box scores, reading Pete Maravich biographies, playing in fantasy leagues, and watching meaningless games on cable. And, for the less socially inhibited (most of the crowd), it’s simply an awesome night out with some buddies. Good old fashioned guy time. As American writer Chuck Palahniuk said, “We don’t see a lot of models for male social interaction. There’s sports and barn raisings.”

Among other things, Sports Trivia participants are treated to the stylings of hands-down the best organist in the history of Chicago sports (with apologies to current Blackhawks organist Frank Pellico).

Nancy Faust was the long-time organist for the Chicago White Sox, keeping fans entertained at the variously named Comiskey Parks between 1970 and 2010. During those 41 seasons, she missed five games – apparently dialing up some lame excuse about giving birth to a son. She also played the organ at the old Chicago Stadium for the Bulls and then the Blackhawks between 1975 and 1989 – among many other gigs. Now retired, Nancy moved to Arizona with her husband and tends to a couple of donkeys. One more fun fact about Nancy: she attended the same high school in Chicago – Roosevelt High – as my mother, father, and oldest sister. (Wikipedia rules.)

Some genius – again, the SGMS is full of them – thought to track down Nancy and ask her to provide the running sound track for SGMS Sports Trivia. For the last five years, she and her husband have made the trip back to Chicago every winter, lugged her organ out of storage, showed up at the gym, and entertained the masses before, during, and even after the event. Her ability to play snippets of songs in real time that track the questions is uncanny. A question relating to the Yankees or Mets might prompt her to belt out a few bars of “New York, New York.” One year, a question about a penalty assessed in a golf tournament brought “I Fought the Law (And the Law Won).” Whatever SGMS is paying Nancy, she’s worth every penny.

For all the pomp and circumstance, the key to the success of the event is the questions. Each year, SGMS curates a set of questions so balanced it would make Olga Korbut proud. From reasonably easy to really hard, from current events to decades ago. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf, racing, Olympic sports, boxing, cycling. College sports, actual amateur sports, professional sports. For sure, the questions tilt to the four major American sports, but you name a category, and at some point it has been covered, and many are covered every single year.

The gym buzzes at the start of the night, as teams of six wander into the gym with bags of snacks and settle themselves into wobbly folding chairs in a sea of round tables. The questions are broken into between six and 10 themed rounds. By themed, I mean a round might be titled: “Color My World” and the answers or questions might include some reference to a color – perhaps A.C. Green, Vida Blue, Eric “the Red” Davis, Downtown Freddie Brown, or the Alabama Crimson Tide. The questions sometimes call for multi-part answers, and partial credit is given. It’s not multiple choice – you need to come up with the answers cold. After questions are read, teams confer in whispers and answers are written down. At the end of each round, answer sheets are turned in, scores tabulated by an army of scorers in referee shirts, and the standings are projected – thanks to yet another unsung SGMS genius who keeps the tech humming behind the scenes. In terms of overall difficulty, most teams in the competition nail at least half the questions; the winners usually answer about 80% correctly. After 12 years, the night runs like the 10:05 from Munich to Augsburg.

The face of Sports Trivia is a guy named Mike Andolina. Mike’s a friend, and will forever be  known in New Jersey high school hoops circles as the Jelly Donut Guy. Mike was a sturdy, skilled point guard who was a dead ringer for the guy in the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial pictured above. Legend has it that rival high school student sections showered him with the “Jell-Lee Dough-Nut” chant whenever he had the ball. Year after year, Mike shoehorns himself into a tux and dishes out the questions from the podium. The fact that he also tries to down a beer between each round makes all participants grateful – especially deep into the evening – that the sometimes nuanced questions are also projected on huge video screens. (Our mutual friend and fellow SGMS committee member Kyle Rettberg deserves some credit for contributing to the questions and, more importantly, regulating Mike’s booze intake.)

Andolina drew me to this event – as a St. Giles parishioner he was among its early Pied Pipers and helps develop the questions.  After occasionally bouncing questions off me for a couple years when Sports Trivia was cutting its teeth, he said, “you know what, you should get a team together this year – it’s going to be great.” I figured, why not? So I formed a team and entered Sports Trivia 3 in 2011.

I’m half-embarrassed and half-proud to say it was not my first rodeo in competitive sports trivia.

My Road

What happened? How did I come to retain a lot of useless information about sports? I think the correct answer is “osmosis” – not the scientific kind, but the other one: “the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.” Though my wife might disagree, my interests have diversified considerably as I have aged. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve been unconsciously preparing to captain a sports trivia team forever – or at least since I learned to read and to turn on a television set. As I told a reporter once (really) who asked what I did to prepare for SGMS Sports Trivia, you cannot really prepare for a sports trivia contest, you just kind of have to pay attention to sports – like, for your entire life.

Putting aside time spent in school, sleeping, eating, building snow forts, riding bikes, and playing pinball at the Chinese grocery on Irving Park Road, I estimate that I spent around 80% of my childhood playing, watching, or reading about sports. Sports was my best friend. As the youngest of nine trailing the rest of the pack by five years, I wasn’t quite an only child but I was definitely on my own when it came to entertaining myself and filling my free time.

As a kid, I played everything. Counting high school, I competed (meaning playing in organized games or tournaments) in about 10 team or individual sports. And by a wide margin, I spent far more time playing sports in schoolyards, alleys, front yards, back yards, and parks in my Chicago neighborhood. Basketball was my favorite and best sport as a kid, and I played in my yard as long as there wasn’t snow or too much ice on the ground. In a great stroke of luck, an especially heavy, wet snowfall took down our detached garage on the alley, making room for a near-regulation quarter court. My Dad – a big sports fan himself and rare city kid who became an avid golfer – even let me tag along to the dimly lit driving ranges on River Road or at Diversey and Lake Shore Drive to hit golf balls on summer nights, at least until the mosquitoes or an empty wire basket chased us home.

But my passion for sports – and the reason I have accumulated loads of information that is useless for 364 nights a year – had more to do with what I was doing when I wasn’t playing sports. If there was a game on TV, or radio, I watched or listened to it. I was blessed to grow up in a big city, where we got as many as seven or eight channels. I watched everything. The pros: Cubs, Sox, Bears, Blitz, Bulls, Blackhawks, Sting, Cougars, and probably a few defunct teams I have forgotten. I watched college football, Monday Night Football, college basketball, Wide World of Sports, PGA golf, the pro bowling tour on Saturday afternoons (huge fan of Earl Anthony and Carmen Salvino). I rotary dialed SportsPhone over and over to get round by round updates of the NBA draft. You get the picture – and now you are warned to never turn to me for advice on hunting, fishing, tying knots, or myriad other more useful endeavors.

By far the biggest contributor to my accrual of sports knowledge was the thousands of hours I invested reading about sports. Beginning probably in 5th or 6th grade and for many of my adult years, I’ve read the sports pages of my local newspaper front to back, and in my formative years that included the box scores. I was a Sports Illustrated subscriber for almost 40 years, only pulling the plug recently in protest to new owners gutting the editorial staff. I bought and devoured publications like Street & Smith’s, which did annual basketball and football previews. I was an early devotee of Bill James and his revolutionary handbooks on baseball. Sports books? Check. Baseball, football, hockey and basketball cards? Check (I didn’t really collect them, I bought them and read them). Played hand-scored seasons of Strat-O-Matic baseball (a dice-and-card based board game) endlessly? Check.

As a consumer of sports, I peaked in high school and college. I read an article once about how and when we develop our musical tastes and why we so easily remember lyrics to the songs we listened to in high school and college. The basic point of the article was that most people develop a long-lasting affinity for the music they listen to through their teenage years, give or take a year. I am not an expert in cognitive development, but I suspect part of the reason I have sports trivia stashed in my brain is that I acquired a lot of it at a sticky time, cognitively speaking. How else would one explain the fact that I instantly recall the jersey numbers of probably 75% of the roster of the 1985 Bears, but would be hard-pressed to tell you what I ate for lunch yesterday?

Sports Trivia Teaser 2

Four American universities claim both at least one Super Bowl-winning quarterback and a President of the United States. Name the four schools, the quarterbacks, and the presidents.

trivia brought to you by the one true team

I kept playing and watching and reading through high school and college. As a freshman at the University of Illinois, I mustered the courage to approach Illini Hall on John Street, walked down a flight of stairs to a basement, and opened the door that said “The Daily Illini.” Sent to see a cranky upperclassman in an untidy corner of the newsroom who was the Sports Editor, I introduced myself. He said, “So you wanna write?” I said “yes,” and he assigned me to cover an intramural basketball tilt between Sigma Chi and Alpha Tau Omega that night. It was a test. I knocked out a short game story and passed the test. I spent much of the next three-and-a-half years covering games, writing features, writing columns, and working the night desk designing the pages or copy editing. It was exhilarating. I covered the lacrosse club, women’s cross country, men’s golf, women’s basketball and many other sports. Finally – as a junior – I reached the Holy Grail of college sports journalism, covering Big Ten football and basketball shoulder-to-shoulder with people who were doing it for a living. And I actually even made pretty good money doing it – the DI was an independent, self-supporting newspaper that paid students who wrote and edited and sold ads and did everything else it takes to run a paper.

As luck would have it, once in law school I gravitated to a bunch of guy who loved sports too – go figure. We played intramurals (shout out to the Rugworms) and found time to watch a lot of sports on TV, start up a Rotisserie baseball league, and even took road trips to watch early-round NCAA tournament games if our rigorous studies permitted. Some of my housemates may have also dabbled in sports wagering to make the games we watched more interesting – it’s a vague memory, I cannot be sure.

However it came to be acquired, my reservoir of sports trivia ended up coming in handy. As a college freshman, it led me to be recruited by a true sports trivia savant, who told me about a midget.

The Savant and the Midget

I entered Illinois in 1983. On the first day of classes, my bike was stolen from outside my dorm, and I almost choked to death on a piece of leathery beef in the cafeteria at Hendrick House. Otherwise, it was a fine day. My very first semester in college presented the answer to a trivia question: Illinois’ football team went undefeated in the Big Ten, most notable not because it led to the Illini’s first Rose Bowl appearance in two decades, but because that team was the last Big Ten football team to beat every other Big Ten team in the same season.

When Hendrick House residents entered the cafeteria, one of the resident advisors was stationed at a table and checked IDs – the most noticeable was Jimm Crosby. Jimm was in his mid-20s and  pursuing a Master’s in accounting. But he looked nothing at all like someone headed for a Big Eight accounting gig. He was wiry, had a bushy beard, and a shock of only occasionally combed brown hair. And he had eyes that never stopped moving; he was seemingly always on the lookout for … something. He struck up conversations with everyone. And he had an attractive undergraduate girlfriend who lived in the dorm – my friends and I all thought, “what’s up with that?” I also remember that he played underwater hockey – a sport played with a weighted puck maneuvered toward goals at the bottom of a swimming pool. When Jimm was the meal ticket taker, he’d ask me and anyone else passing through the line a sports trivia question. I cannot remember if the questions were particularly hard, but I probably did okay. I didn’t think much of it.

Unbeknownst to me, I was being tested. Jimm was recruiting. One day early in the second semester, he popped the question. “Do you want to be on my sports trivia team?” I’m sure I said something like, “Sure. What’s that?” That was the Eddie Gaedel Memorial Sports Trivia Bowl, an annual trivia contest that was the brainchild of someone at the university’s campus recreation department andwas held at the sprawling Intramural Physical Education building – affectionately known as IMPE. The tournament featured dozens of teams facing off in a bracketed, single-elimination format. Each team had four players who would sit on opposite sides of an aisle, armed with Jeopardy-like buzzers to try to answer toss-up questions. If answered correctly, the toss-ups led to bonus questions.

The competition was named for a midget – Eddie Gaedel. In 1951, Browns owner Bill Veeck – later the White Sox owner – signed Gaedel to a contract. In the second game of a doubleheader, Gaedel, wearing the jersey number 1/8, strolled to the plate and pinch-hit for the Browns’ leadoff man. He walked on four pitches – all too high. He jogged to first, a pinch-runner was sent to replace him, and Gaedel’s major league career was over. He retired with the best on-base percentage in MLB history.

“He was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball. He was also the only one.”

bill veeck, veeck – as in wreck

During each night of the tournament, the organizers would ask at least one question somehow related to Gaedel – maybe asking for his height or weight, the name of the pitcher who walked him, or some other factoid. In addition to me, Jimm had recruited two other Hendrick House residents to be on his team, which was named The Frank Saucier Fan Club. Saucier – Jimm told me – was the Browns’ outfielder for whom Gaedel pinch-hit in the bottom of the first.

So we played. And we won. And Jimm was ridiculously good. His recall of dates and lists and winners of MVP awards and first-round draft picks was otherworldly. I mean, I thought I knew a lot about sports, and I knew a fraction of what Jimm knew. It became clear he was … different. In early rounds, we would destroy teams. Four kids from some dorm would sign up, walk in, and we’d beat them like 410-50. If you buzzed in for toss-ups, you were on your own – no help from teammates. We had Jimm. He typically owned the toss-ups, but I’ve never forgotten one he missed – it tells you a lot about Jimm.

The question was: what time of the day did Bobby Thomson hit the famous ‘shot heard ‘round the world?’” (In 1951, Thomson of the New York Giants hit a homerun off Ralph Branca to win the National League pennant in the first-ever nationally televised baseball game.)  Jimm buzzed in and blurted out:  “3:04!”  The emcee said: “Incorrect,” and gave the other team a chance to steal. Before the time expired (the other team had no idea), Jimm leaned toward me and whispered in a pained voice, “he’s right – it was 3:58 – I gave him the time Flight 191 crashed.”  I looked it up, and it so happened he was right – American Airlines Flight 191 went down at 3:04 p.m. after taking off from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport bound for Los Angeles on May 25, 1979 – it was one of the deadliest air crashes in U.S. history.

So, yeah – Jimm was pretty good – maybe even a sports trivia savant. He had, like me, been a voracious consumer of sports growing up on the South Side of Chicago. In the later rounds of the Gaedel tournament, when the competition got tougher, he (maybe) needed the help his three teammates could provide, particularly on a few sports that were not in his wheelhouse. We won the competition in 1984 and 1985, shortly before Jimm alighted for The Ohio State University to pursue some other degree. Three years later, I tucked the Eddie Gaedel experience into the “Other Interests” section of the resume I used when I was seeking work as a summer associate at law firms. Occasionally, someone would bite and ask me about that item. Especially if the interviewer was a sports fan, the rest of the interview tended to fly by.

The One True Team is Born

I didn’t have the time or inclination to take Jimm’s approach to assembling my squad for Sports Trivia 3 in 2011. I was 26 years removed from my last sports trivia competition – the second of our two Eddie Gaedel wins – and I had no idea what level of competition to expect. I knew there would be beer and pizza, and that was enough. I quickly signed up three colleagues — Kevin Fee, Chad Schafer, and Dave Johnson. We were still two players short of the allowed six, and Johnson offered up his son, Erik. At the time, Erik was in his mid-20s and spent a lot of time playing on-line poker and watching sports on TV – so he was perfect. (If you ever assemble a sports trivia team, recruit some youth and, ideally, underemployed youth.) We never got a sixth man, and it cost us. We lost the competition by one stinking point, and it will forever haunt the five of us. We missed a question that fell in the “fairly easy” category: who was the first foreign-born basketball player not to have played in college to be drafted #1 overall in the NBA? The answer – so painfully obvious – was Yao Ming. We overthought it and guessed Andrea Bargnani – who was drafted #1 overall, but four years later.

Johnson the Elder was responsible for naming our team. Dave is a devout atheist, and the only one I’ve known to  read the Bible cover-to-cover, for fun. The name pokes fun at our Roman Catholic hosts – devotees of the “one true church.” As a Lutheran, I was on board with the name choice.

Sports Trivia Teaser 3

Christian Laettner famously hit a turnaround jumper at the buzzer to beat Kentucky and send eventual champion Duke to the Final Four in 1992. Four-part question: (1) How many shots — including free throws — did Laettner take that game? (2) How many did he make? (3) Who threw him the pass before “the Shot”? (4) Which Kentucky freshman’s chest did Laettner stomp on in the first half – earning a technical foul but not a deserved ejection?

trivia brought to you by the one true team

“Who can I get?”

The one-point loss in Sports Trivia 3 irked me. Shorting the team one player likely cost us – anyone I would have added surely would have known one answer the rest of us could not pull. For the next several months, I thought long and hard – “who can I get to round out The One True Team?” To be honest, it was more like “who can I get to put us over the top?” At some point, I had the Eureka! moment: I needed Jimm Crosby.

I’m fairly certain I never spoke to Jimm between the Spring of 1985 and late 2011. Our friendship turned out to be transactional – it was all about sports trivia. He left for Ohio State, I finished college and went on to law school. Our paths never crossed and we didn’t have any common friends. But I decided to take a flier. I went to an online U of I Alumni Association directory and searched. There was one hit for a James Crosby. A South Side street address. No phone number. No email address. So I wrote a letter and sent it to him in the U.S. Mail, not even sure it was the right James Crosby. I didn’t keep a copy of the letter, but I’m sure it started: “You probably don’t remember me, but …” About three days later, an email from Jimm hit my inbox, “Of course I remember you!” I had told Jimm about the SGMS contest in my letter, and he badly wanted to play.

Before I officially invited Jimm to join The One True Team, I took him to lunch and we caught up. As it turned out, the fact the letter reached Jimm at all was somewhat miraculous. The address was his father’s, and Jimm happened to be in town at the time staying with him. He told me that after finally running out of degrees to pursue he had spent his career in various teaching positions – many focused on preparing foreign-born students for the placement tests they need to take to enter American universities. Jimm, a bachelor, has worked all over the world and has visited 153 countries. If you need a guy to head off to Rwanda for a year and prepare Rwandans to enter American universities, Jimm’s your guy. Since our reunion in 2011, he has traveled back to Chicago from Rwanda, Mongolia, and Saudi Arabia to participate in Sports Trivia.

Adding Jimm made a difference; we were first of 43 teams in Sports Trivia 4, the last of the pre-Popeye contests. Jimm was still very, very good at Sports Trivia – but maybe not quite as dominant as I had recalled him being in 1984-85. He admitted that he read less and watched less sports than he had earlier in life – owing in part to his globe-trotting in the name of diversifying American universities. One thing 2012 taught me was that it takes a village – or at least five guys – to win SGMS Sports Trivia. I’d added Jason Coyle, a friend and digital sports media impresario, to the mix. So Jimm, Jason, Dave, Erik and I manned the table (still short-handed due to Kevin’s late scratch), and we won by a half point (don’t ask how that happened, I don’t remember).

The next several years are something of a blur, but SGMS’s awesome web site helped me piece it together. In 2013, Popeye showed up and promptly won. We took second of 51 teams by a single point. By 2014, I finally managed to put together a full team. Jimm and I were the only holdovers from the 2012 champs. Dave Johnson will falsely accuse me of “banishing” him, but it’s more like he was recruited over. That’s actually not true – Dave moved out of state and started spending winters in Las Vegas, so he fell out of the rotation. Erik started a real job that kept him away for several years. Jason had a conflict, so Jimm recommended Matt Scalise, a “kid” in his mid-30s from Jimm’s South Side circle. Youth! I added Eric Mennel, a college friend whose arrested social development has led to him spending many weekends well into his 50s in Lincoln Park bars watching sports. I recruited Jeff Carroll, a second-career lawyer and former sportswriter. I also added Peter Brown that year, a kids’ baseball acquaintance recommended by a mutual friend as an ace. We were good. That version of The One True Team won its second crown and Popeye somehow stumbled to 3rd of 58 teams.

Now firmly entrenched as a Sports Trivia force, teams were coming for us. Besides Popeye, teams made up in part with employees of the Big Ten Network and ESPN Radio entered. The level of the competition was ramping up. (Public service message: there are very few teams full of freaks like The One True Team and Popeye Jones – maybe a half-dozen or so. Don’t be scared off if you want to enter this event in the future – you’ll do fine and have fun.)

In 2015, we lost Peter to a work conflict and Popeye’s five-year run of dominance began.

From that point, The One True Team’s roster morphed a bit. Erik came back, freed of a restaurant managing gig. A client, John Calkins, came on board somewhere along the line. Jimm, Matt, Jeff, and Eric were firmly in the rotation. One year we found ourselves short and Jeff dragged along a guy who was touted as a Cubs expert. Narrow, deep knowledge of one professional team doesn’t cut it. I don’t remember his name; he did not return.

Heading into 2019 the The One True Team comprised seven “regulars” – and that year marked the first year someone had to voluntarily sit out because all seven of us were available. It didn’t matter though; Popeye just kept winning and winning. The other teams – many of whom come back year after year – were starting to get annoyed. Now, when the Popeye Six strolled up to the stage to accept the prizes doled out to the winners, some in the crowd showered them with (mostly) good-natured boos and catcalls. No one really noticed that, in most years, The One True Team was lurking nearby.

Late in 2019, when I got wind of the date for 2020, I recalled my flirtation with the thought of dropping out. But for whatever reason, I decided to give it one more shot.

Sports Trivia 12

As always, I forwarded the “save the date” email from SGMS to what had become the regular crew – Jimm, Erik, Matt, Jeff, Eric and John, meaning we had seven guys for six spots. If all say, “I’m in,” I have to figure out who is going to sit out – not something I relish. Eric had graciously offered to sit out in 2018, so in fairness he needed to be back in.

As the emails flowed back, my lineup problem was solved, with a punch to the sternum. Jeff was out, something about tickets to a Lumineers concert, a wife, and yada yada yada. Jeff’s good – that’s a big loss. More surprising, Jimm was out. This year, he was in Somalia or Somaliland (if those are two different things) and had not been able to finagle a trip back to the States from his employer.

So while one problem was solved – no one had to sit out – I was back to recruiting a sixth man. Somehow, I remembered a few random conversations I’d had in recent years with a neighbor and golf buddy, Kevin Hartbarger. I sensed Kevin had stored up some trivia along the way – I knew that to be true of music trivia, and had some inkling it might be true for sports as well. I asked, he accepted. So we were back to six.

I read a quote a couple years ago to this effect: whether you are happy in life is a function of the comparison of your expectations and your reality. In other words, if you have low expectations, you are less likely to be disappointed by your reality, and generally more happy. Heading into Sports Trivia 12, I had low expectations. Not – oh my God, Jimm and Jeff are out and we’re going to finish 50th expectations, but I did not think there was any way we could catch Popeye. Sure, we had been second several years running, but we were missing two “starters,” and Popeye had just grown stronger in recent years.

My low expectations set up perfectly for a really enjoyable, low-pressure night. Drink some beer, eat some food, play a little trivia. Maybe try to stay a step ahead of the team named Five Lawyers and Someone You’d Really Like – which featured several friends of mine.

The first two rounds came and went, and to my surprise we were neck-and-neck with Popeye. The vibe at the table was great. Everyone was contributing. The sometimes chaotic chatter which led to educated guesses on the toughest questions was less chaotic than usual. On one occasion, Kevin very calmly corrected me on an answer I’d written down that he (correctly) was firmly convinced I’d gotten wrong. I came up with a buzzer-beating answer as the scorecard was being whisked away when I recalled that the 2001 NL saves leader with the palindromic last name was – of course! – Robb Nen of the Giants. And each of us pulled answers that impressed our teammates. The One True Team was, truly, a team that night. We were ham-and-eggs, peanut-butter-and-jelly, chips-and-salsa, Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance.

To make a too-long story short. We took Popeye down, ending an amazing run that earned that squad my undying respect. How’d we do it? Well, it turns out The One True Team pays attention to obscure sports logos. Most years, the organizers designate a “speed round.” They pass out a packet with pages containing visual clues and you write down answers to written questions about the images. The clues might be old trading cards, or magazine covers, or some other such thing. This year, we were simply asked to identify the teams associated with several sheets of team logos – some still used and relatively recognizable, and some very obscure. College teams, defunct teams, and random sports-related logos of all sorts. And we nailed it. I was able to identify the logos of the Fort Wayne Mad Ants (an NBA G League team) and Wabash College. Kevin knew the Montgomery Biscuits’ logo (minor league baseball). I think Eric pulled the University of San Diego Toreros. I bet every person at the table knew at least one or two logos that others would not have known. Of 52 logos, we got 45 correct. That gave us a little bit of daylight ahead of Popeye, and we held on to win.

At the end of the night, Andolina stepped up to the podium to announce the winners. He starts with fifth place and works backwards – Miss America style. When Popeye Jones’ name flashed on the enormous screens next to the words “Second Place,” a cheer went up through the gym – the streak had ended! No one else likely knew or much cared that it was The One True Team that had dethroned the champions – those who cheered were just happy to have a different name on top. Nobody roots for a dynasty.

Our table, of course, erupted. Low Expectations + First Place = Much Happiness. We each received a nifty official NFL football bearing the Sports Trivia 12 logo, a three-buck medal (that are decidedly not made of metal), and a hat. And that elusive traveling trophy. And – totally unexpectedly – the trophy’s generous cup was chock full of miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. My favorite candy and, since I am the custodian of the trophy, all mine.

A Postscript

The One True Team has now won three times – 2012, 2014, 2020. We have had 14 players over the years, and 11 of them have won championships. Every single player has brought a passion for sports to those cramped tables and wobbly folding chairs. Each of us brought a bank of knowledge to draw from that is a function of many things – age, where we grew up, which teams we followed, the schools we attended, the books we read. We’re not all savants, but we’re all pretty good. And in 2020, shorthanded, we proved something to ourselves – that no streak lasts forever, and that paying attention to obscure logos can pay off.

As I write this, most everyone has spent the last month at home thanks to your run-of-the-mill global pandemic. I can only imagine how much sports trivia the members of Popeye Jones Ugly Bros. are consuming, itching to get back on top. I presently captain a team of eight former champions – for six seats. Depth is good, I guess. I hope a gathering of 600 in a high school gym will be possible next February or March, and that we’ll have a chance to start our own streak. It will be nice to be the hunted, for a change.

I’m not insane. I do have a life. I realize that at most every level, winning a sports trivia contest doesn’t matter. The SGMS event is truly about fellowship and fun and – in recent years – helping out Christ the King. But I won’t make any excuses either; The One True Team will always play to win. After all, as Vince Lombardi said, “If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?”

(And by the way – the horse that finished second to Secretariat in his Triple Crown-capping win at the Belmont in 1973 was Twice A Prince. 31 lengths back. I knew the margin, but I didn’t know the horse.)

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Answers to Trivia Teasers

Q1. #70, Henry Waechter, a defensive lineman, tackled Steve Grogan for a safety in the fourth quarter. He played at Nebraska.

Q2. Stanford (QBs Jim Plunkett, John Elway; POTUS Woodrow Wilson); Miami (Ohio) (QB Ben Roethlisberger; POTUS Benjamin Harrison); Navy (QB Roger Staubach; POTUS Jimmy Carter); Michigan (QB Tom Brady; POTUS Gerald Ford)

Q3. (1) 20; (2) 20; (3) Grant Hill; (4) Aminu Timberlake (from Chicago’s DeLaSalle High School, and no relation to Justin)

trivia answers courtesy of the one true team