Po' Boys with Patrick Hope

by Tim Rich 

I recently caught up with Patrick Hope who had a full house and made TOTW in week 7 of OQL USA. Mr. Hope lives in Helena. I ordered the All That Jazz Po' Boy from Cafe Zydeco where we had our virtual interview.

Rich: How did you first get into trivia? What are your favorite subjects and least favorite subjects?

Hope: The first real trivia competition I got into was the Geography Bee, which I did from 5th-8th grade.  It also ended up being the only time I got to meet Alex Trebek, sadly.  Organized high school quiz bowl in North Dakota was, and still is, pretty much nonexistent.  We had one competition per year with some very byzantine rules like “you will be marked wrong for spelling mistakes or not underlining titles.”  I also got pulled onto our school’s team for the National Science Bowl where we won State, went to Nationals in DC, and then didn’t win a single match.  I didn’t even realize college quiz bowl was a thing until I went to the activities fair at Carleton and there was a sign-up sheet for both the intercollegiate team and for the intramural tournament that amounted to a recruiting event.  I went to a practice, stayed there for two hours, and got a grand total of two questions right.  One was on Theseus.  The other was on John Fremont.  I was ready to pack it in there, but decided to still play the intramural tournament as I’d already committed to that and pulling out of stuff two weeks into freshman year was a bad look.  Our team ended up doing MUCH better than we could have anticipated (I think we got third) and I gave it another go.  In retrospect, it was definitely one of those sliding doors moments.  If I don’t go and keep playing, there is basically a 0% chance I’m writing this answer to your question right now.

As for favorite subjects, back in my quiz bowl days, it was always literature.  I don’t really know how I decided that was going to be my wheelhouse.  It just kind of happened.  I distinctly remember missing a question on A.S. Byatt’s Possession and then reading the book so I would never miss a question on it again.  It’s really rewarding to pull some hard content you learned 20-ish years ago.  Geography is very similar where I just had to cram so much knowledge in there during my Geography Bee days that it’s cool when something I learned 25 years ago finally comes up again in a competitive setting.

Least favorite would probably be the really new internet stuff, like TikTokers or YouTubers or viral stuff-that sort of thing.  The internet has become so compartmentalized and your personal algorithm sends you deeper into content you want that it makes it really hard to be exposed to certain types of content.  Like the odds of my getting a question on a fashion or beauty YouTuber are very, very low, but I can likely knock out questions on speedrunning lore all day.  Also I am old and it is increasingly hard to keep up with the youth of today.

Rich: How did you first get into OQL? What has the experience been like and what can you say about your teammates on Trivia Team Assemble and Montana Clever Girls?

Hope: I was aware of OQL, at least USA, from pretty close to the beginning, but I wasn’t sure about time commitment and all that.  But in spring 2021, there was an announcement on the LearnedLeague message boards about a special newbie event where you’d show up and play an exhibition match to see if you liked it.  I showed up, played a match, loved it, and registered as a solo player.  That same day, Jasmine, who was my teammate for the exhibition, messaged me asking if I had a team yet and that she was moving onto a new team after her old one disbanded.  Her selling points were “most of us are in Mountain or Pacific Time and we have kids, so we get scheduling around them” and that was more than enough for me.

My experiences with both of my teams has been great.  I actually went and added up the number of times with TTA that we have used the exact same lineup since I joined and it’s 70.  So after three years and 70 times with the exact same lineup, pretty much always in the same order, either we like each other or we’re extraordinarily good at pretending.  

The Clever Girls have obviously not been together as long, nor have we played together as much just by virtue of Regions being Regions, but we always have a great time and it’s definitely a cool experience that we all live in the same place (minus one person-looking at you, Anneke).  Both of the teams have active group chats and it really adds to the esprit de corps and reinforces we’re a friend group as well as a team, even if I’ve never met any of them in person. 

Rich: How did you get into LearnedLeague and have you won any MiniLeagues, One Days, or your regular Rundle?

Hope: After I retired from Quiz Bowl in 2008 (I played one tournament in law school and it is not a very interesting experience without teammates), my sole trivia experience was doing Sporcle quizzes on such important topics as Wrestlers by Finishing Move or Video Games by Characters and taking the Jeopardy test until 2016, when my trivia bestie Emily Kawaler said she’d gotten an invite through a Facebook group for this online trivia league called LearnedLeague and she liked it and asked if I wanted a referral.  I said sure and thus began the second act of my trivia life, which has been going on ever since.

Since doing LL, I’ve made the LLRC every year except 2019, which was the last year you had to win your rundle to qualify.  I kept finishing second to either one of your previous interviewees, Mykal Duffy, or to some guy who was putting up 140+ TCA every season and then, when it came time for the LLRC, didn’t even show up for a live session.  So take from that what you will.  I’ve considered myself really lucky to have made it to the show more or less every year, particularly those first couple when you needed to win an A Rundle to qualify and I just squeaked in back in 2017-the last year under the funky old system where you had a group stage and then a 1DS-style final.

I’ve won two MLs in my time-LGBT 3, which was an absolute surprise that came down to total luck on the final, and the World Wars, which wasn’t as big a surprise, as my dad is one of those hardcore World War history dads.  He sat me down to read The Guns of August when I was something like 12.  

As for 1DSes, I’ve won a few-I had to go to my profile to check.  The wildest was a Midseason Classic where Yellowstone (the show) was an optimal money as it hadn’t blown up in popularity yet but everyone here in Montana knew about it from filming.  The most fun ones were probably Montana (for obvious reasons), The Brontes (my daughter is indirectly named for Charlotte Bronte), the Minnesota Vikings (SKOL), and Accounting (my wife teaches accounting and around that time I had just finished helping her transcribe hundreds of hours of lectures that she’d recorded).

Rich: Have you ever appeared on a game show or plan to be on one?

Hope: Aside from the Geography Bee in eighth grade where I got to sit at a podium on stage while Alex Trebek asked me questions, I have not been on any game shows.  I’ve taken the Jeopardy test for the past ten years and made it to the Zoom test once, but never any farther, so my luck has to turn at some point there.  And I tried out for the Chase a couple years back and made it to the second round of auditions.  Obviously it would be super cool to get on someday, but I also know there are a lot of very qualified folks out there, so whatever happens happens.

Rich: What are your other hobbies and interests?

Hope: With two kids 5 and under, my biggest hobby is really “wrangling kids.”  As a family, we want to visit everything the National Park Service runs once both kids are old enough to have fun on road trips.  But it’s absolutely a thing that’s in the long-term Hope Family pipeline.  

I like running, even if I’m not even the running-est person on my OQL team and did a half-marathon last year.  I really want to do a full marathon sometime, but that time commitment is a lot with a baby.  I started doing it back when I lost a significant amount of weight a decade ago and have tried to stick with it.  

I also play video games, or at least used to, quite a bit.  Like with so many other folks, Animal Crossing kept me going during the pandemic.  With kids, my gaming interests are much more on the collecting side.  My proudest collecting accomplishment is having complete boxed copies of every N64 game released in the United States.  It took about five years of really deliberate hunting to track all those down and I consider myself very lucky I finished before the pandemic caused absolutely massive price spikes across the whole hobby.

Rich: What is the trivia scene like in Helena? Is there a place where you regularly play?

Hope: There are a surprising number of places that do trivia here.  Again, before my son was born, I used to play at one of the breweries here regularly with some folks from work.  Once he’s sleeping through the night and taking pressure off my wife, I’m going to try getting back into that.  

Rich: What is the restaurant scene like in Helena? What are your favorite places and what is your favorite cuisine and beverage?

Hope: Far and away the most surprising really good restaurant in Helena is Cafe Zydeco, an award-winning Cajun restaurant.  In Montana.  When we first moved here, we were as surprised as anyone.  Aside from that, we have your usual array of greasy spoon diner establishments.  Steve’s Cafe with its breakfast menu is definitely the best of those.  As for beverages, we have a lot of breweries in town.  I’m not a big drinker, but the breweries around here are very well-regarded.

As for my favorite cuisine, I can’t go wrong with the andouille po’boy and hush puppies with a root beer from Cafe Zydeco.

Rich: Do you follow any pro sports? What are your five favorite moments as a fan?

Hope: Growing up in North Dakota, I ended up as a fan of most of the Minnesota sports teams, so Vikings, Twins, and Timberwolves, along with Kansas basketball thanks to North Dakota product Jeff Boschee.  My family are also Arsenal fans as during the London Olympics, my dad saw a bunch of ads for the EPL on NBC and we needed a team, but not Man City because they had just won and that would be being frontrunners and not Man U because “that would be like cheering for the Yankees.”  I also support the Buffalo Sabres in hockey because, after committing to the preceding teams, I have shown a very poor sense of pattern recognition.

You might notice there aren’t a ton of championships among that group.  We’re not the Chiefs out here.  So in no particular order as a fan: 

1. Kirby Puckett’s home run in game 6 of the 1991 World Series.  Minnesota’s last championship, or even championship appearance, that does not involve the Lynx.  I was 6 and allowed to stay up late with the Homer Hanky a family friend had sent from the Twin Cities.  It’s still the best World Series ever and “and we’ll see you tomorrow night” is the best call.

2. The Minneapolis Miracle.  Being a Vikings fan has not been a barrel of laughs.  The Jon Bois History of the Minnesota Vikings series on YouTube captured that a lot more eloquently than I ever could.  The two best Vikings seasons in my lifetime ended with a kicker missing his only kick of the year at the most important moment and all our players getting hurt because the Saints cheated, respectively.  For my money, the Minneapolis Miracle is the greatest play ever.  I was watching with some friends via Skype and at least one’s feed was about a second ahead of mine and she went “Oh my God, go!” and then I saw it unfold.  It was like the universe had finally switched for the Vikings.  But then the next week happened and it was, in fact, the same old Vikings.

3. Mario Chalmers sends the 2008 National Championship Game to overtime.  I was 2 when the Danny and the Miracles team happened.  I was alive, but like the 1987 World Series, it’s much more one of those situations where I’m aware of its existence than its having any emotional impact for me.  After narrowly losing the title to the Carmelo Syracuse team in 2003, Roy Williams left for UNC and Kansas kind of spun its wheels.  It’s tough to imagine now with a lifetime contract and two national titles, but at the time there were whispers about how Bill Self was never going to get over the hump to a Final Four, much less a title.  That Derrick Rose Memphis team was really good, but had one massive Achilles’ heel: they couldn’t shoot free throws.  In one of the few instances where “keep fouling them to stop the clock and hope they miss their free throws” worked, Kansas got the ball back with a few seconds left down 3 and Chalmers takes that shot with 2.1 seconds.  I was watching on my crappy TV in my dorm room and said “it’s good” as soon as it left his hand.  The game went to OT, Memphis ran out of gas, and the Kansas narrative totally changed.  

4. Wrestlemania 28. It’s still real to me, damn it!  This is the Wrestlemania I attended, so it’s always going to be special regardless. But it had Rock vs. Cena, which still blows my mind that it actually happened, and the Taker vs HHH in the Cell match. People were losing their minds at the near falls and thought the Streak was over multiple times. 

5. Carlos Silva’s 74-pitch complete game. Another game I was at live and one that will go completely unnoticed by the history books, but I was there with some friends and we were in awe of how quickly a pitcher who didn’t strike anyone out and whose main claim to fame was the amount of home runs he gave up threw a whole game averaging 8 pitches per inning. He had one three-pitch inning and was a single strike away from an immaculate inning. 

Rich: What type of music are you into? Did you watch the Grammys and did you think those that won deserved to win for 2023?

I admittedly do not listen to a lot of popular stuff these days. Most of what I listen to is actually classical music for focusing at work.  I used to listen to our local top 40 station while driving kids to and from school/daycare, but then we got a new car and I couldn’t figure out the radio and also my daughter discovered the Frozen: Forces of Nature podcast, so guess what we listen to every day?

The exception to this is K-pop, which I can say has been a part of my listening rotation for at least a decade. I was on the BTS hype train before they blew up, so I have a claim to be a K-pop hipster.  My favorite group, though, is Red Velvet, as all of them are phenomenally talented and they’ve experimented in a bunch of different styles. 

Admittedly, I did not watch the Grammys this year (see my missing the Taylor Swift question in LL), but of what did win and what I’ve listened to, it’s very much in the “yeah, this is pretty good” vein. 

Rich: What movies and TV shows did you watch in 2023? Did they deserve Oscars and Emmys?

Hope: I’m going to cheat a bit on this one and include movies that came out in 2023 but I saw in 2024 for a specific reason: for now the second year, a couple friends from law school and I do the Oscars Death Race, where you watch every single thing that gets nominated for an Oscar before the ceremony.  For 2023, that means everything from Barbenheimer down to the shorts.  I actually completed my death race last week-Past Lives was the last movie, so the last line of the entire race this year was “see you next time,” which is about as prescient as you can get. 

I gave five stars on Letterboxd to a total of three movies that got Oscar nominations: Oppenheimer, which I unsurprisingly predict will get close to a sweep this year; Godzilla Minus One, for which I’m pulling for a Visual Effects win as an old-school Godzillahead; and my big surprise this year was The Teacher’s Lounge, the German submission for Best International Feature Film, which completely blew me away in its depiction of the extremely delicate balance with teachers and students and what happens when it’s thrown into disarray. 

As for shows, I think the only things we got through all the way in 2023 were the Expanse, which I highly recommend to sci-fi fans, and Jury Duty, which I would call “unexpectedly fun.”  I haven’t seen either of the big Emmy winners of Succession or The Bear, the latter of which anyone who plays with me will know I am completely incapable of ever getting a question right about. 

Rich: If you could have dinner and play trivia with any five people in history, whom would you pick?

Hope: Jane Austen-it’s a tossup between her and Dickens for my favorite author ever and Dickens would spend the entire night trying to come up with a funny team name. She created my favorite character ever in Emma and wrote some of the easiest fancy-shmancy prose ever. 

Orson Welles-Would he be the easiest teammate?  Absolutely not, but he would also be the most entertaining if there were bad questions and he would tear them apart.  I would also love to break down movies with him and convince him the world remembers him for his final role as Unicron in the animated Transformers. 

Nellie Bly-I learned about her from the Ultima PC game Martian Dreams when I was about 10 and have been fascinated with her ever since. Anyone so dedicated to the truth to feign insanity in order to expose conditions in institutions or doing a solo trip around the world is going to be the most interesting person in the room. 

Audrey Hepburn-my favorite actress ever. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say something bad about Audrey and another person who lived an amazing life. 

Tim Duncan-As a Wolves fan, he drove me nuts, but I definitely have grown to respect his approach to the game of going hard on the fundamentals and taking what you’re given. He was the ultimate guy who would have no flashy plays and then suddenly it’s the fourth quarter and he’s dropped 35 on you. He is also the most underrated trash talker ever. Kevin Garnett (my favorite Wolf ever and the polar opposite is Duncan) did an interview where he said Duncan got under his skin like no one else because he wouldn’t get baited into making mistakes when KG would go after him and because Duncan’s trash talk was so subtle, like he’d block your shot and say “ooh, so close” in a monotone. 

Rich Do you intend to attend SporcleCon in 2024? 

Hope: Yes!  Things were obviously a bit wild last year with a baby and all, but fingers crossed I’ll be there this year to do events and meet so many of the lovely folks I’ve interacted with since becoming a part of the larger trivia community.

Rich: thank you. You have given me more hope than Ryan could ever give.