by Tim Rich
Mr. Grant DeYoung made TOTW in OQLUSA S12 WK 3 the same time he appeared on TV on Jeopardy! After my jaunt to Canada, I flew down to Prescott, AZ and met up for pizza with the four time recent champ.
Rich: How did you first get into trivia?
DeYoung: I’ve never not been into trivia. Some of my earliest memories revolve around it, mostly through the lens of game shows.
I remember watching Jeopardy! very young and being excited when the background of the set changed from blue to red before the second round. I’ve seen home movies of me using a Sit-n-Spin toy to host mock Wheel of Fortune games (Big Money! Big Money Pat - peeeeeeeeooooooooowww [Bankrupt Wedge noise]).
We would spend summers with my grandparents when I was young, and they would put the Regis Philbin-lead Who Wants to be a Millionaire? on in the living room and its knockoff rival Greed on the bedroom TV, and watch with great delight as five-year-old me raced down the long hallway separating those rooms to check on the Greed team’s progress before returning to watch the Millionaire contestant until the next commercial. Through middle school, anytime I was able to watch The Price is Right, I would take detailed notes and write up game recaps.
This all was helped by owning plenty of board and video games of those shows. We had the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? boardgame, where various family members would tolerate being the “Phone a Friend” on some ancient device called a landline. We also had Wheel and Millionaire on the PC, and (shoutout to fellow Talking Trivia and Shop interviewee Aaron Wegner) Millionaire on the Game Boy Color with its 8-bit version of the show’s “heartbeat” background music.
All that to say - I never really had a choice in the matter. It’s just who I’ve always been.
Rich: When did you first get into OQL? How was your team formed?
DeYoung: I got into OQL all the way back in season 1, where I saw a YouTube video announcing it with a demo game. That first season, I used it to reunite my bar trivia team from a few years back, who had somewhat drifted apart between graduations, moving, and the events of 2020. Unfortunately, it turns out there’s a considerable skill gap between, “be the loudest and most obnoxious team at the local college pizza joint who occasionally win a pitcher of Blue Moon with extra orange slices please, or $25 to split in garlic knots and wings next game”, and OQL-USA, and I think I’m the only one who had any fun with the deeper-cut material in this league. Straight Outta Golden persevered through that first season, where I think we had one very narrow win and ten losses.
I was on the fence about coming back for season 2, but the league reached out about captaining a scratch team to get an even number of teams, and I said sure - and thus, Nothing Golden Can Stay was formed. They set me up with that core team of scratch players -Troy Harris, John Lance, David Moore, Pamela Murray Winters, and returning Straight Outta Golden-ite Joshua Hoffman, and the rest is history. It’s been a constant fixture in my life since then, a great chance to review some facts, and a nice hour-long vacation from whatever else is going on, and I’m happy to be able to contribute towards that for others too in my own small way.
Rich: You made TOTW the same week you were featured on Jeopardy! . What do you remember about that set ? How many TOTWs have you made in OQL-USA?
DeYoung: I should really just retire from quizzing now, right? There’s no way I ever top the past two weeks! I was certainly shocked that 11(4) made it for a joint TOTW nod for my division alongside Nathaniel Tan - perhaps the seat played a bit harder than intended.
I didn’t remember a lot about last week’s set per se - I really try to approach any quiz one question at a time and forget what’s been asked already. This can be really helpful after a tough miss (I was especially proud of how in my second Jeopardy! game, I was able to rebound after losing $4,000 on a True Daily Double and come back to make it a lock game, without letting the lost points trip me up). But this can also be a curse in something like OQL where it can be helpful to remember what was asked half an hour ago, and I’ve already tried to put it out of my mind, good or bad.
Looking back over the packet, though, I was rather proud to get Metamour and Iga Swiatek (both of which, I believe, were covered in Lynn Yu’s excellent Yu Oughta Know newsletter).
I haven’t kept track of how many TOTWs I’ve made in the league, but I would guess this is probably my sixth or seventh such time in its twelve seasons. I don’t normally get enough 2-pointers to make a serious run at TOTW, and for most questions, one of my teammates knows more than me about most topics that aren’t math, science, or 2000-2010 Survivor-adjacent history and geography (a surprisingly large field - Frank Bainimarama, Ali Bongo, the locations and capitals of various island countries), so I don’t tend to accumulate a lot of 1-pointers either.
Rich: What other online leagues do you play besides OQL?
Currently, I’m only involved with Learned League, where I’ve recently managed to pull two ties from the jaws of victory with some poor defense. But I’ve dabbled in Pop Solos, UK PCC, ICC, and Mimir’s Well all before, as well as the now-defunct and especially fun QB League.
It’s not really an online league (though it had been held over Zoom for a few years since 2020), but I do also plan on taking the World Quizzing Championships in person at the Phoenix venue this year on June 1. Anyone reading this who hasn’t already taken WQC might consider doing so if there’s a venue near them. It’s a very humbling experience (nowhere else do I start reading so many questions and so quickly think “nope, on to the next one!”), but also a great way to make connections and learn some tough international material.
Rich: What are your other hobbies besides trivia?
DeYoung: Though they’ve taken a backseat to cramming for Jeopardy! in recent weeks, I do try to read when I can, I play some video games to unwind a bit, and recently my wife and I have been actively doing some thrifting and (very light) furniture renovation, which makes for both an excellent date day/evening and a good way to spruce up an apartment while waiting for game show winnings to be deposited.
(Pro tip - Goodwill can be a great place to find inexpensive dress shirts if you happen to be really tall and need about five on a few week’s notice)
Rich: Have you ever been to Geek Bowl or SporcleCon? If so what was it like?
DeYoung: I haven’t had a chance to go to either of those events, but would love to one day if I were able to make it out!
Rich: When did you get the call to be on Jeopardy!? How many days did you spend in California taping your episodes?
DeYoung: I got The Text on February 21, and as mentioned in one of my show anecdotes, was so emotional looking down and reading it that I didn’t notice I was being hit-and-ran as I sat there in the parking lot!
I taped my first two games on April 3, and the rest were on April 8. Anyone who watched the shows know that I did not use that week off to reflect on or improve my game in any way, playing just as as sloppy when I returned.
Rich: How nervous were you being on the show?
DeYoung: As you might expect, I was ridiculously nervous being on the show. I’ve had plenty of experience playing trivia in front of a crowd, but the emotional weight of being on the Alex Trebek stage, combined with knowing that countless strangers and basically anyone I’ve ever interacted with will be watching the show - it’s a lot to process, and frankly, I’m surprised I was able to walk up to my podium, let alone do some basic arithmetic and remember any facts at all.
Rich: What are your favorite sports teams and athletes?
DeYoung: It won’t surprise any OQL-ers that I closely follow the Denver Broncos, whose logo makes for a nice low-key Facebook profile photo. I moved to Colorado for school in 2013, and it was impossible not to follow the Broncos that year as their high-flying and entertaining offense, led by Peyton Manning, crushed everything in their way… only to be completely routed in Super Bowl XLVIII.
(Playing Jeopardy! has given me a new appreciation for competitors in any game who might be otherwise very good at their game of choice normally, but who happen to have one bad performance on the biggest stage).
Though the Broncos have been mostly unwatchable since their Super Bowl 50 win, there’s some hope in Broncos Country with the addition of rookie quarterback Bo Nix and his continued redemption saga. Nix’s father was an all-time great quarterback for Auburn University, a feat Bo tried to follow to middling results. He’s spoken openly about struggling to follow up on the expectations associated with his family name, and was able to reinvent himself after transferring to Oregon for a fresh start. I admire his tenacity and resiliency and hope he’ll continue to succeed!
Rich: What is the live trivia scene like in your city and do you have a regular bar that you go to every week?
DeYoung:The live trivia scene in sleepy Prescott, Arizona is… not really great. I’m glad I have OQL and Nothing Golden Can Stay to help fill in the gap!
Rich: What is the dining scene like in Prescott? What is your favorite food and drink?
DeYoung: Thankfully, the dining scene is a bit better, though certainly not equal to that of a proper big city. Bill’s Pizza has won some national awards, in part for its light and airy yet flavorful crust, and has some emotional significance to me as well. On one of our first dates there in high school (since somehow, watching an episode of Jeopardy! with me didn’t scare her away), my wife and I worked together to create a five-topping pizza that we’ve continued to get in the decade-plus since, even as it’s gotten steadily harder to finish an 18” pizza between the two of us.
(The exact toppings are our little secret, but I know the internet would hate at least one of them…)
We’re also big fans of our local Indian restaurant, the Taj Mahal, where we comfortably order our dishes Medium-Hot and not the off-menu “Indian Hot”, as well as a couple sushi places around (most notably, the Koko Grill, with its distinctive red metal roof where the sun-faded outlines of the letters “PIZZA HUT” are still faintly visible).
Rich: Who are your favorite authors and have you read any good books in 2024?
DeYoung: Since getting out of high school (I say this like it happened last year and not a decade ago), my reading hasn’t been quite where I want it to be, and with having the rush to cram for Jeopardy!, this year has been even worse than most. I’ve been working through Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way, a very good Navajo Nation-set police procedural that would upgrade itself to excellent if Hillerman took a fraction of the time spent carefully detailing the geography and culture of the Navajo people and land, and put that effort into making the women characters feel a bit less like cardboard. I’m also slowly plodding through Gary Scharnhorst’s The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years 1835-1871 and Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, two dense nonfiction works.
Rich: If you could play trivia and have dinner with any five historical people, (dead or alive) whom would you choose?
DeYoung: Veering away from just the “family and friends” angle (in particular, such a dinner with the grandparents who got me into game shows, and passed away a few years ago, would be amazing), and assuming there aren’t any language or intelligibilty issues, my choices would be…
Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther, Erik the Red, John von Neumann, and Shikibu Murasaki.
Rich: If they were making a movie of your life, what actor would you want to play you?
DeYoung: I think Timothy Dalton could really capture my strained thinking face for the Jeopardy! and quizzing scenes, as well as my boundless wit, endless charm, and dry sarcastic humor.
Rich: One more question: did you go out and buy new clothes for the show? How much did you pack when you went to tape the show?
DeYoung: I had exactly one “nice” shirt when I got The Text - an old white (bad for TV) button-down top that was a little tight (bad for me, gaining twenty pounds since getting married). So, if I looked even remotely good on TV, it’s all due to my wife helping me pick out some new dress shirts at Goodwill. We packed the recommended five changes for button-downs, and kept it pretty simple otherwise, particularly given that I thought I packed about four more outfits than necessary (and ironically, if I had won another show, I would have had to start repeating outfits).
Rich: Thank you for your time and I wish you good luck in the TOC and OQL.
"It was just like a movie
It was just like a songWhen we were young" - Adele
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