"One thing never questioned in a pub quiz is the pub quiz itself," writes Stephen Phelan, a reporter for Scotland's Sunday Herald, in a recent article exploring the phenomenon. "Where did it come from? Who held the first one, and when? No quizmaster would ask any of the above, because the answers are unknown, unverifiable or open to debate, and therefore unwelcome..."
Some fans claim the pub quizzes started in Ireland, others in Scotland, still others in England. The only thing most quiz fanatics can agree on is that the pastime gained steam during the '50s and '60s as television quiz shows pervaded the airwaves.
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"I've personally known it to be Irish," says Paul Bailey, a United States representative to the International Quizzing Association. "But it definitely started somewhere in the U.K. I think it just goes with the pub atmosphere over there, where it's not so much a bar, but more like a living room, a gathering place for that community where people are playing music and singing. I think the quiz kind of just sprung up from the popularity of the quiz shows and people asking the questions of the day. Getting your news in quiz form, in a way."
Patrick Hines, host of a popular, long-running pub quiz at Fergie's Pub in Philadelphia, helped get the game up and running in the States. He thinks.
"I'm not sure if I was the first to start doing a quiz night," Hines says. "But I think I may have been one of the first to put on a night run by an American, for Americans. All I know is that when we started out, it was a very ethnic kind of thing. It was run in pubs in New York for the Irish community or the English community, but outside of those close-knit groups, no one was really playing it. No one saw it as a viable source of income for a bar."
But Hines, who'd lived in Ireland in the early '90s, knew how successful the game was over there, so when his brother-in-law, the owner of a bar on the Jersey Shore, was looking for a way to keep the bar-hopping crowd in his place for more than a few drinks back in 1992, Hines suggested trivia. He wrote and hosted the trivia night himself, and the concept proved wildly popular. Two years later, Hines moved to Philadelphia, where he started a night at the New Deck Tavern, then moved from there to Fergie's Pub. Philly now has a thriving pub-quiz scene where players can attend up to three games a night if they are so inclined.
"I think the game really speaks to the ex-geeks, the ex-nerds, people who weren't on the football team in high school," Hines hypothesizes. "Sure, you have your casual players, the people who come in every once in a while and have fun with it, but the people who come in every single week, the people like me, they never got any girls or anything for being smart back in the day. Now they can get free beer. It's like finally we have a sport."
In 1968, University of Colorado professor David Bowen coached a team of student geeks to an undefeated championship on the popular television quiz show GE College Bowl. After that, he decided to create a version of the show that relied on more useless knowledge than the GE Bowl, and CU kids took to it like alcohol. In its heyday the University of Colorado Trivia Bowl — which Bailey now heads — was featured in countless magazines, drew crowds of thousands and was once broadcast on ABC, with Family Feud's Richard Dawson flying in to host the festivities and kiss every woman he could.
"The Bowl flourished for over twenty-odd years before audiences dwindled in the '90s," reads the official history of the CU Program Council.
But that's when the game picked up in the bars. Alec Warner, a gravel-voiced entrepreneur who cut his teeth in the bar business, watched his brother popularize trivia at the bar he was managing in Atlanta in the early '90s.
"On slow nights, he would just get up in the DJ booth and start throwing out trivia questions," Warner remembers. "Eventually people started coming back just for that, and other bars started approaching him to do it at their place. So he had to start up a company called Team Trivia just to keep up."
After working with his brother and then slinging trivia in Dallas, Warner felt he'd learned enough to successfully start his own scene and brought his Trivia Face Off (www.triviafaceoff.com) to Denver in 1998. "We started out at Govnr's Park," Warner remembers. "I don't think people knew what to expect at first, but those first few weeks, more and more teams kept showing up, and all of a sudden it was pretty popular. My favorite line to say about what goes on is that it's unforced social interaction. You're in a bar, and all of a sudden there's trivia, and it gets people talking."
