Turn out the lights

Alma and I traveled to Maryland over the weekend to play with Colby and Tyler in what was, barring something unexpected, our final quiz bowl tournament, 2007 TRASHionals. There have been ten TRASHionals tournament and I've played in seven of them - if that's not reason enough to hang it up, I don't know what is. (Of course, if that required you to retire, there would be a pretty wide open race for the title next year.)

We went out on a pretty high note. For the fourth time in seven years, we reached the top playoff bracket, placing second in our Saturday round-robin group with a 7-2 record. We went 3-3 in the playoff rounds, 3-4 total in the playoff bracket (as our loss in group play to the eventual winners, Craig, Mike, Joe and Anne, carried over), to finish in what was announced as seventh place but I think there's some debate over that, as the team that was announced as sixth evidently had a worse record than we did and we beat them head-to-head. We were initially announced as fifth in 2005 before it was revised up to fourth, so TRASH doesn't exactly have a history of nailing our placement. I'm sticking with sixth unless someone can show me otherwise.

I had one of my better TRASHionals on a personal note as well, so that was a good enough way to end things. I believe I was fourth in scoring, which is a personal best, and I snatched goods off both Craig and Greg in the yankee swap prize ceremony, so that was fun. I was fourth in scoring mostly on the strength of my playoff rounds, which were driven by an 11-tossup round against the Michigan alum B-squad (the Matt-Rob-Geoff-Steve group). My previous TRASHionals high was 8 (accomplished twice, but not since 2002); in this game I had seven in the second half alone. It would have been even cooler if that had been our final game; we had one more, against recurrent foes Tia and the TRASHmen (our first meeting with them was at 2001 Regionals, where we lost twice in the round robin before the miracle 10-30-10-30 finish in the championship match to beat them; including this year we've played them six times since, which is a pretty high amount, and won five of those), which we won handily in a balanced game for the whole team. It wasn't quite Ted Williams hitting a home run, but it was a good finish to my career, and I think Alma would agree.

And with that, the curtain draws closed. As I said to Alma over the weekend, I think we've pretty much hit our ceiling; until teams like the Keenans, O'Reillys, and that ilk break down or retire, we weren't going to go any higher than sneaking into the top five (as teams of mine did in 2003 and 2005), and it hardly seems worth waiting around for when none of the players on those teams shows any inclination to quit. My personal scoring isn't liable to get much better, especially since I refuse to bother with anything as lame as "studying," and anyway fourth place is pretty good. I'm undoubtedly as good as I've ever been, but that will probably be the case for ten or fifteen more years, and how long do I really need to do this?

What it boils down to is that I no longer get much satisfaction from drilling less experienced teams, and aside from doing that over and over I don't see what more there is for me to achieve. Any team I was a part of would probably need to really hit its packet to get past a hump like the Keenans, and while I think that's doable - even if we haven't beaten them since 2001 - we'd need to hit several of our packets in a row to beat several teams of that type in a playoff, and that doesn't seem likely. (Although I wonder now, idly, how my 11-tossup game would have been affected by the Keenans or O'Reillys, not that we weren't playing a pretty good team in that round.)

Even if I did enjoy playing exactly as much as I once did, the value of trips has gone way, way down. For one thing, I have to pay for this stuff out of pocket now, so thank God for small miracles like this year's tournament being in College Park so I could stay with my parents instead of having to pony up 90 bucks a night or whatever to stay in a hotel on top of 200 bucks for an airplane ticket. For another, I love Alma like crazy, but I'd much rather go on a vacation-style trip with her if I'm going to be shelling out, rather than something that feels like nothing so much as work. The only extracurricular thing we had any time to do while not playing TRASH was a trip to the mini golf course in Laurel, and that's only because I insisted on playing it; I'm sure the other three would just as happily have gone without. I think Colby found a little time to sightsee before his flight on Sunday, but Alma and I were so tired by that point that we couldn't have wandered around DC if we'd wanted to. The point is, you're expending an entire weekend on travel and playing TRASH and you really get very little chance to do anything else. Playing TRASH is fun, but it's not so fun for me that this feels justified.

So, like I wrote in my senior quote, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. I'll be forever grateful to TRASH, and quiz bowl in general, for helping to introduce me to the love of my life, but it's time for Alma and me to sever that tie. Not completely, of course, because there are people we know through quiz bowl whom we want to continue to know, but I think we're all past the age where quiz bowl has to provide our primary excuse to be social. It's time for me to grow up just that little bit more.

Alma, Tyler, Colby, Charlie and Ryan, all my other teammates from college and high school, everyone from other teams who was ever fun to interact with, and anyone else whose presence mattered - thanks for eleven years, guys, and good night. Be sure to tip your waitress.

The BigFlax Quiz Bowl Farewell Tour, Stop 2

As most or all of you know by now, this is the last year that Alma and I plan to play quiz bowl. It's just not that important to us anymore - I've stopped keeping my own stats, which should tell you something about my priorities. Interestingly enough, I appear to be playing some of my best Trash ever, which could just be because I'm older or could be because I'm no longer overly fixated on game scores and the like. At stop #1 of the Last Hurrah Tour, I put up 48.5 PPG at TRASH Regionals, good for third in individual scoring at the tournament and my second-best corporate TRASH showing ever (half a tossup per game behind 2003 Regionals). At stop #2, I put up 61.25 in eight round robin games at Ann B. Davis, also good for third place individually and my best-ever showing there. (Of course I'm not sure that those stats are exactly right - they rarely are - but it's probably close enough.)

As for the tournament itself, it went all right. We went 5-3 in the round robin with a couple tough losses - after starting off 2-0 by thumping one of the Pitt teams and squeezing past Eric Hillemann and Julie Stalhut's squad on the last question (with all due respect to Eric, he's got something of a Beloit Curse on Colby and myself, as his results against us in Trash are always drastically opposite to the tournament standings), we hit a tough packet for us and dropped a 220-210 heartbreaker to Illinois A. It's pretty hard to win a game when you neg four times - all we had to do was not neg and we would have won, even if Illinois had picked up the questions exactly as they did after we negged. But woulda, coulda, shoulda, after all. We rebounded with three straight routs, including collecting 16 of a possible 21 tossups against the other Pitt team in our bracket. Then we met the Michigan alum team (Traicoffs/Long/Erinjeri) and lost 280-250 on the last question, followed by our expected drubbing at the hands of the O'Reillys + Quintong (because if there's one thing the O'Reillys needed, it was adding one of the country's top ten players as a free agent), though we only lost by 130, the closest anyone got in the round robin (and one of just two games in which they didn't have at least 14 of the 21 tossups available).

At 5-3 and having lost to the three teams ahead of us, we got shunted into the middle playoff bracket, but that worked out just fine for us, as we rolled through it, including hanging more than 500 points on one of the Chicago teams in our last game, to finish seventh. Of my six trips to ABD, seventh actually is just the fifth-best finish my team has recorded, but that says more about the consistency with which my teams have done fairly well at the ABD than about this year. I thought we played about as well as possible and hit one rough packet at the wrong time - had we swapped the round in which we played Illinois A with the one directly following it, we probably would have won both, finished 6-2, and made the top bracket, and given how well we played on the playoff packets maybe we could have been top two or three. On the other hand, we could easily have lost to Hillemann's team, finished at .500, and had to cling to a top ten place. All told, I'm perfectly happy with how we played. It was, I thought, a solid question set (ABD usually delivers on this count), which is all I'll say as there is a mirror yet to come.

I used to sequester this stuff in the Quiz Bowl section, but since I'm not copying down everything for a full recap anymore, you're stuck with them here. Sorry. There'll be three more of these at most, and those'll be in March, April, and August (only the April one, TRASHionals, is guaranteed), so I think you'll live.