By GENE KEMMETER
of The Gazette
Knights of Neek captured the 2004 WWSP 90FM Trivia Contest last weekend, outscoring the defending champion Network by nearly 1,000 points, 9,560 to 8,620. Network, which has won the most contests, played this year's event as "The Deadhead Is All Wet-Network PSIS.
A total of 443 teams paid $30 each to participate in the contest, with an estimated 11,000 players.
Graduates of a Lesser God finished third with 8,085 points, Tin Man was fourth with 8,025 points and Basementality: Return of the Kinks was fifth with 7,455. Rounding out the top 10 were Beer Eye for the Caker Guy in sixth with 7,025, The League of Extraordinary Beerpigs with 6,860, Yaargh! Curse of the Pearl Necklace! with 6,795 points, Norms Stool: Feel It Ooze or Is It Oz? with 6,750 points and WRTM: Thanks for the Memory with 6,740 points.
Early Saturday morning Knights answered a couple of questions that turned out to be worth 400 points apiece, vaulting into first place. Network came back to take the lead but by Sunday afternoon Knights was back in the lead and never relinquished it again.
The contest, "Trivia 35: Thanks for the Memories," was written by Jim "The Oz" Oliva and John Eckendorf, and was a tribute to Bob Hope, who died in 2003. Hope's theme song was "Thanks for the Memories."
While the contest was sprinkled with questions pertaining to Hope, the questions touched on a number of areas, with eight questions being asked for 50 hours, 10 questions asked for two hours and four questions for two hours. Also included in the contest were three musical snippets of eight songs each, two running exercises with 20 questions, 24 photos to be identified and three sets of "Trivia Stone" clues that led players around the area trying to follow clues to recover a "Trivia Stone."
By Wednesday, Oliva said he was still feeling tired after getting only two hours of sleep during the weekend but felt pretty good about the contest, which had some scary moments because of storm warnings for the area. Although the storms never materialized, he said station personnel were concerned and were monitoring the situation.
High winds did cause some problems with the station, which went briefly off the air twice within five minutes. "It was really weird," Oliva said. "Half of the computers went off and it didn't even bother the other half. About five minutes later it did the same thing but it must have been a shorter duration because we were able to keep everything up."
The third brief outage, he said, was due to a strong wind blowing the studio transmitter dishes so hard that they didn't face each other, causing them to lose their connection. "We didn't lose any big time," he said.
He's come to expect those glitches during the contest. "If everything went really well, I wouldn't know what the hell to do," he said. "It would be truly scary."
The search for the "Trivia Stone" stymied some, and Oliva attributed that to someone moving a landmark identified to trivia players. Players were looking for a heart that was part of a clue, he said, but the property owner cleaned the yard on Saturday morning and moved the heart back inside, before the clue was given. "We do the 'Stone' clues in advance and then go back and check them again," he said. "We checked that one Thursday morning."
The Sunday morning running exercise on Stevens Point's north side on Sunday morning also produced two changes, after two businesses changed signs that players were supposed to get information from.
Oliva said he and Eckendorf ask the business manager or owner if they'll leave the signs up for the next week so they can use them for the contest, but sometimes the word doesn't filter down to all employees. Changing the sign doesn't usually matter, however, he said, because players still get 150 points if they get the remaining answers right on the exercises.
The contest also went back to an old practice of asking players the name of a song played during the previous hour or two. "We just wanted to see if people were on their toes," he said. "New players you have to teach them to pay attention. Old players, I figured, that some stopped paying attention so I decided to ask them."
One hour included questions seeking answers of bald people. "I wrote the bald hour long after we'd already written the other parts," Oliva said. "We went back and did them later."
One surprise of the contest involved the question of who was the first Major League Baseball player to hit home runs in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico while playing in a Major League Baseball game. Record books identified Jose Vidro as that player, but other sources indicated it might be Tony Batista.
"It's in every book you look at," he said, "but then you find out something different. That's the only thing in the contest that really upset me."
This year marked a return to streaming the contest on the Internet, and Oliva said he's received favorable comments about that, which he hopes will continue in the future.
Film crews also came to town to film the contest, visiting various teams to record the action. The same producer filmed the contest previously and hopes the latest film will entice investors to help produce a documentary on the contest.