Team trivia DJ hits right notes

By Paul Della Valle, Globe Correspondent

Question 1 in the Education Category: What Nashoba Regional School District administrator is the undisputed king of team trivia in Central Massachusetts?

Answer: Joel Bates, the 39-year-old assistant principal at the Florence Sawyer School in Bolton and the manager of weekly team trivia games in communities from Boston to Worcester. Bates hosts two games himself, one at Mary Ann's in Brookline's Cleveland Circle on Mondays and the other at the Old Timer Restaurant in his native Clinton on Tuesdays. The Old Timer is where it all began for Bates. Last month, he marked his 150th weekly game there.

The games feature spirited but always light-hearted competition, with teams made up of a cross section of the community judges and architects, teachers and truck drivers. Bates said he's still trying to figure out what makes it work and what makes the game's devotees so fanatical. It's sure not the prizes. The first-place award is a $30 gift certificate for the team to share, second place gets T-shirts, third place gets a $10 gift certificate, and fourth place wins $1 cash.

"I don't know what the appeal of puzzles and games generally is, but it seems to be kind of a universal thing that we like to test ourselves," Bates said. "We try to keep it fun. Life's too short, and it's trivia, nothing that we should get too intense about."

Contestants are asked 20 questions divided into rounds of five. Teams each of which come up with funny or topical names (Designated for Assignment was one the day the Red Sox cut Mark Bellhorn loose, Three-Hour Tour was a team name the day Bob Denver died) can bet 1, 3, 5, or 7 points on each of the first four questions. Each bet can be used only once. The last question in each round is a bonus question with varied values assigned to it. The categories are announced before each round and have included sports, television, science, history, movies, and geography. The teams have the length of a song to come up with an answer, and the song is often a clue, many times a clue that calls for a bit of detective work.

For instance, the question that started this article, "Who is the king of team trivia in Central Massachusetts?" might have been accompanied by the theme song from the old Alfred Hitchcock show. (Aha! Hitchcock directed "Psycho" which was set in the Bates Motel, thus the answer, "Joel Bates.")

Question 2 in the Games category: Who is the most devoted team trivia player at the Old Timer? The song that should be playing in your head is Bob Dylan's "Sara" or Hall and Oates's "Sara Smile."

On Sunday, Oct. 10, 2004, Sarah Nelligan of Clinton, 25, gave birth to a daughter. She and her husband named the baby Grace. Two days later, Nelligan was back at the Old Timer to play Tuesday Night Trivia with her parents, Rob and Julie Ryll. They called their team Amazing Grace. Thanks to Massachusetts's ban on smoking in bars,

Nelligan had played throughout her pregnancy.

"My husband calls it's a cult," she said.

Nelligan is not the only one who finds the game addictive.

The power went out one Tuesday night last December. The Old Timer's taps stopped working, as did Bates's mike, but the game continued by candlelight with shouted questions and bottled beer.

The Old Timer regularly attracts one team that includes Judge William Constantino of Clinton, a former state representative, his wife, Carol, who is a Nashoba Regional High teacher, and their daughter Kate. Regular Phil Duffy, a member of the Clinton Planning Board, noted that one of the most feared teams, the Dirty Old Men, features a truck driver, a retired bartender, and a farmer. The Dirty Old Men often add a female player, and when they do, their team name is the Dirty Old Men and a Maiden. For a long time, the maiden was Boston jazz/rock singer Gabrielle Holmes.

Bates and other Nashoba teachers used to travel regularly to Boston to compete in trivia games led by Michael O'Neill, whom Bates calls "pretty much the trivia king of the Boston area." One day they persuaded Brian McNally, whose family owns the Old Timer, to go with them. McNally loved it, and when O'Neill said he couldn't host a trivia night in Clinton himself, McNally asked Bates to do it.

"I just thought it would be nice for me to play trivia every week and be five minutes from my house," Bates said. "But when Brian said, `Hey, you've done deejaying, would you be interested in hosting?' I said, `Yeah I'll give it a shot,' and three years later here we are."

Not just in Clinton, but all over Central Massachusetts and the Boston suburbs. Bates, who pays a percentage to O'Neill to use his format and some of his questions, has hired other hosts and scorekeepers for trivia nights because the games have become so popular. Some of those hosts are Nashoba teachers, and even Bates's boss, Sawyer School principal Ken Tucker, has kept score for him.

"The best teachers and coaches are part entertainer, and they tend to react quickly and intuitively to changes in their audience," Bates said. "I also think it doesn't hurt to be able to laugh at yourself."

Bates said the Old Timer is his most consistent game and attracts at least 14 teams a week. That's remarkable for a Tuesday night in a small-town pub. The teams two to five people sit at tables or in dark wood booths and quietly debate questions like "In the Cartoon Category, what song does Foghorn Leghorn most frequently sing?" The answer, of course, is "Camptown Races."

The games run from 7 to 9:30 p.m. The televisions are usually tuned to the Red Sox, Celtics, or Bruins with the sound off. Most of the players order a sandwich or appetizer off the pub menu. Many also have a pint of Guinness or two.

"Bringing trivia to the Old Timer has been the best business decision I've made in the last 10 years," McNally said. "It has taken our slowest night and turned it into our second busiest night."

Question 3 in the Television Category: How much money did "The Duffy" win on "Jeopardy"? Music? The theme from "Jeopardy," of course.

"The Duffy" is the aforementioned Phil Duffy, a 40-year-old architect from Reading who now lives with his wife and three young sons in Clinton. In 1997, despite amassing $13,595, Duffy came in second on "Jeopardy." He is the Barry Bonds of Tuesday Night Team Trivia.

"When you have led a trivial existence for as long as I have, you tend to pick things up along the way," he said.
Despite Duffy's prowess, Bates said, the beauty in team trivia remains the team.

"One of the key selling points of this game is you need to have a team to be successful, and the team needs to have a wide base of knowledge," Bates said. "It's a rarity when one or two people can be successful. . . . But The Duffy has done well."

Duffy often plays with a team that includes his wife and a vice chancellor of Worcester's UMass-Memorial Hospital. But he also has been known to swoop in for the money round, a short, $5-entry-fee, winner-take-all game that follows the main event, and snatch up the cash. His legend has grown to the point where teams have even included his name in theirs "We've got The Duffy" and "We don't Need No Stinking Duffy."

Bates figures he has asked 4,500 questions and played 6,000 songs at the Old Timer during the past three years. He got married in June and said he would soon have someone else host the Monday night game at Mary Ann's, where the crowd is almost all Boston College students. He said he had been careful to ensure his growing trivia empire does not interfere with his day gig.

"My primary responsibility is to the Nashoba Regional School District," he said. "I try to the best of my ability to keep those lives separate as much as I can. Every once in a while, I'll see one of our parents at the Old Timer, and they'll jump in a game, but that is a rare occurrence. Tuesday night is tough for parents with kids who are our students' age." The Florence Sawyer School is for children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

For the past two years, his friend Bob Griffith, a Nashoba Regional teacher, has prevailed upon Bates to run a trivia night at the high school in Bolton. Each team is made up of students and a maximum of two adults, and the money raised goes to charity.

"The high school games are a little more skewed to pop culture and are more curriculum-related," Bates said. "But the game, on a par, is as difficult as the Old Timer game."

And though Bates tries to keep his two jobs separate, his mind and hard drive are filling up with what he calls "useless knowledge."

"You do this long enough and you start thinking in terms of trivia questions," he said. "You hear a factoid or you read one in the newspaper and you think, `That might be a pretty good question.' Then the wheels start turning from there, and you start thinking of a song that might go with it."

SIDEBAR

Q'S, CLUES, AND A'S

Here are some of Joel Bates's favorite trivia questions and the musical clues that make them work:

Movies: What Oscar-nominated actress was named for the town of her birth and is the goddaughter of Timothy Leary? (Musical clue: "Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction.)
Answer: Winona Ryder

Inventions: The Grumman Albatross, Hughes Hercules, and the Martin Marlin are all examples of what type of transportation? (Musical clue: "Jamaica Mistaka" by Jimmy Buffet.)
Answer: Flying boats

Sports: In which city did Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points in a single NBA game? (Musical clue: "Steal My Kisses" by Ben Harper.)
Answer: Hershey, Pa.

Music: Which band took its name from a lawn ornament store in New Jersey? (Musical clue: "Danke Shoen" by Wayne Newton.)
Answer: Fountains of Wayne

History: Former first lady Barbara Bush is a descendant of which former US president? (Musical clue: "Suicide is Painless," the theme from the TV show "M*A*S*H.")
Answer: Franklin Pierce

Sports: Who is the only major league baseball player to have played for all of the current or former teams from New York the Dodgers, Giants, Mets, and Yankees? (Musical clue: "Incense and Peppermints" by Strawberry Alarm Clock.)
Answer: Darryl Strawberry

(Originally published in the 10/16/05 Boston Globe.)