Trivia World
Crossing over
from crosswords to trivia
There is a
surprising crossover between the worlds of trivia and
crosswords. Fans of one tend to be fans of the other. Ray
Hamel learned this first hand.
When the librarian
at the University of Wisconsin’s primate centre went to a
crossword-solving contest in Stamford, Connecticut, the host
asked how many people in the crowd had tried out for
Jeopardy. “Eighty percent of the people put up their
hand.”
He learned about the
trivia–crossword connection in another way at that contest.
“I’d been running trivia at college and word got around that
I was the guy to go to if you needed help with a clue,” says
Hamel. New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz
was one of the people who heard about Hamel, so he asked him
to run a trivia event at the contest.
The New York
Times comes calling
 Some
time later, the Times decided to add a trivia quiz to
its new Web site and asked Shortz if he knew anybody. He
did. Hamel ended up writing some 550 quizzes, called Noodle
Nudgers, which the Times ran twice a week until 2001,
at which point the paper dropped Hamel. “They decided that
there were enough quizzes that they could rerun the old ones
and nobody would notice.”
On the other hand,
he’s written special quizzes for them since, and the
Times did publish a book out of the quizzes (The New
York Times Trivia Quiz Book) and a handheld trivia game.
Many of the quizzes were recycled from radio shows he did,
and his collected works since 1979 have been turned into a
database, which he can mine to fill special requests from
other people.
(By coincidence, his
database consists of 15,000 and, as of June 2004, our
consists of 16,000.)
“I was trying to
write 100 questions a week, but now it’s more like 25,” he
says. “I always carry a notebook with me and I’m always
writing down things I read or see. I’m up to my 26th
notebook now.”
More crossword
connections
Although the
Times gig was the highest profile gig he’s had, he
started out writing for Games Magazine,
which runs word and puzzle games. It was also
owned by Penthouse. You can write your own joke here.
After that, in the
late 1980s, he began publishing a ‘zine of his own called
Trivia Quotient, which consisted of articles about
trivia, fresh quizzes and news about contests around the
country. (His
links page is still one of the best on the Web for news
about trivia events.) At its height, the ‘zine went out to
about 400 subscribers, but for Hamel “it was a great calling
card for getting work from other places, because I could
send them what I do and ask if that’s what they wanted.”
Another
crossword–trivia crossover, Random House’s Stanley Newman,
hooked Hamel up with the Smithsonian Institution, where he
was the writer-presenter of a one-day program called "The
Trivia Trove" in 2000. “The Smithsonian gig was giving a
short lecture about the history of trivia games from radio
of the 1940s through Millionaire, followed by hosting
an hour-long trivia game as part of a brain-building lecture
series put together by Stan Newman and Random House.”
His crossword
connections paid off in another way, too. Many of the
Millionaire writers were drawn from the New York
crossword community, and many of them were friends of
Hamel’s. He was offered a job and the salary was generous.
“But I have no interest in moving to New York, no matter
what the money is.”
WWSP
mega-winner
One of Hamel’s ties
to Wisconsin is the legendary WWSP trivia contest in Stevens
Point, which 11,526 people played in 2004 as part of 443
registered teams. Because the questions are aired over the
radio, and because everybody knows how to Google, the
questions are extremely difficult.
However, Hamel’s
team, called Network, has won the contest 16 times since
1980, including a run of seven in a row that began in 1989.
Remember, this is in a field of hundreds of teams, in a
marathon event that runs day and night over three days. “The
team was started by locals who were in high school
together,” says Hamel. “Now people fly in for it from all
over the country and that’s why I go … to see people again.”
But the growth of
the Internet since the late 1990s has taken much of the fun
out of the radio game for Hamel. “The Internet will spell
for the end of this type of contest. It becomes a race
against the computer instead of a race against each other.
I’d much rather play in ‘memory games’ where it’s not about
looking things up on a search engine. It’s about what you
know.”
While still playing
the WWSP game, he describes himself as “semi-retired,”
noting, “I don’t work very hard; I just point people in the
right direction and show them where to look.”
Nevertheless, if you
have the Times trivia columnist, a man offered a
writing job on Millionaire no less, showing you where
to go, a man whom even the Smithsonian calls on, then you
know you’re probably going in a lot of the right directions.
July 2004
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