The Dead Zone, or Don’t Condemn Yourself to Repeating the Past

By Bob Herpen

(The Phanatic Magazine) - So, it’s the last two weeks of August – the real dog days. The Stanley Cup Finals and the 48-hour free-agent frenzy are sinking over the horizon in the rear-view mirror, while the start of training camp and the exhibition season are not yet visible.

Believe me, I’ve been trying desperately to shoehorn something hockey-like from my sweat-addled brain while roasting in my apartment like a turkey - to no avail.

The best thing I can offer is, don’t get your hopes up just because the venerable sure-fire Hall-of-Fame forward Mats Sundin named the Flyers as his second choice (right behind the Rangers) should he return to the NHL for the upcoming season.

Don’t get ahead of yourselves Flyers fans, because along with the excitement of that big name floated down South Broad Street, the Philadelphia cynic in you should pair that up with the abomination that was the Adam Oates era.

Since the well has temporarily run dry, I thought I’d share one of my own experiences along the road to a middling career in sports media. It’s one where I failed to heed my own advice above, and was left to deal with elevated hopes suddenly dashed.

Just about this time four years ago, a former colleague (who now works alongside former Phanatic columnist Tim McManus at the other sports talk station in the city) approached me with the idea to start a sports trivia contest at some bar in a central location in downtown Philadelphia.

It took less than a second for me to agree.

For a poor graduate student busy as hell with three jobs and classes, who didn’t get out much, it was the perfect three-for-one: College-age females, Philly bar scene, and networking opportunities.

Within days, I underwent a massive mind-dump of every Philadelphia sports-related question I could find. Hockey went first, and within 24 hours, I had close to 300. I added 300 more from baseball, football, basketball and college over the next couple days and was armed and ready to go for the first night.

Our first attempt came on a Monday night at McFadden’s on North 3^rd Street in late August.

We had myself, my friend, a guy named Will who was a connection at a local golf course and one of the talent from Comcast SportsNet. The idea was to have my friend emcee the event, calling out the questions in four rounds – 10 questions per round with a bonus question at the end. We even had prizes for first and second place as an enticement for the crowd to bring their best effort.

And boy, did it bomb.

First off, McFadden’s wanted some kind of cut from the proceedings – almost impossible for something in the trial stage. Second, the last two weeks of August were totally dead. The workers of the world still on vacation, the flood of students not yet descended on the local colleges.

We had a second event scheduled for two weeks after that, on the evening of the Eagles’ Monday Night game against Minnesota – which was cancelled without half the people involved knowing about it beforehand.

From there, it was decided that the whole enterprise needed an overhaul as well as some additional force behind it.

Will and my friend went to work behind the scenes and dug up a great stable of noted Philadelphia sports talent, past and present. They worked on each of the four major teams to get extra tickets to upcoming games and with the big sports-radio station for additional prizes and enticements each week.

We also agreed to move operations northward, to a great little place called the Keswick Tavern in Glenside, which carried with it a smaller but more loyal and steady local clientele.

The official re-launch happened the second Tuesday in October. Will brought in two more of his pals, Cary and Jack, to add a deluge of additional trivia questions, our own PA system and microphone, as well as extra presence at each event.

It wasn’t a rousing success at first. The first couple weeks we might have capped at five groups each time in a half-empty bar. Our best advertising came from word-of-mouth from those initial tries, though, from the packs of college-age locals and Arcadia students who wandered in.

By early November things began to roll along. We were able to get the bar manager behind our enterprise and got free advertising. With the steady influx of patrons, we were able to expand the prizes to first, second and third place. While the event usually started around 8:30, most nights the fun lasted past 11:30.

As with all good groundwork, promises began to turn into realities.

We had former Flyers broadcaster Gary Dornhoefer as a guest host one night. Former Eagles wideout Calvin Williams made an appearance. Merrill Reese was lined up to host in the future. Even the Phillies PR office was beginning to warm up to what we offered.

Flush with this success, along with five rabid and knowledgeable Philly sports fans, the idea was floated that we should incorporate and turn the barrage of weekly quizzes into a bigger, better entity: the first-ever Philadelphia sports trivia volume.

It wasn’t long before one of the guys was able to secure a publishing deal with the same company that produced Larry Kane’s stuff. I think it was shortly after Thanksgiving when we started thinking big thoughts about the brand and the typical marketing ideas came to the fore.

Plans were in the works for t-shirts, polo shirts and hats to be produced bearing the logo of our new unstoppable juggernaut: the Philadelphia Association of Sports Trivia.

The logo was simple but reflected our mission perfectly: Rodin’s thinker (in gray) perched atop the Liberty Bell, which was decked out in the stars and stripes and “THE PAST” in simple script overlapping.

I forget the exact wording of our official motto, but it was something along the lines of George Santayana’s famous quote about remembering the past.

With the revelation of the book deal, all of us were pressed to meet a combined quota of at least 2,000 usable and edited questions spanning local sports.

Most of those queries would already be used by the time the book was officially released (estimated to be a year away) through the weekly quizzes, but with the extra ones we each brought to the project, plus the way fans of the trivia nights came in and got nicely ripped while playing, it was safe to assume nobody would really remember by the time of the release.

The t-shirts and polos never materialized, but the hats did. Mine sits atop my book shelf, angled to the side so I can see where it reads “Founding Member.”

As calm and positive as things were on the surface, the undercurrent was just as turbulent. At some point prior to the holidays, both Cary and Jack had grown a little resentful of my friend and I and our roles in the organization. Most of the questions used in any given week were mine, and my friend virtually monopolized hosting duties.

I can’t blame them for being left out, but they never once volunteered their questions to us, while basking in the reflected glow of success. I personally wasn’t out to monopolize the questions but I had the gray matter blazing 24-7 due to graduate classes, and I just kept on cranking out the goods.

After we came back from the Christmas recess, we both noticed that both guys stopped showing up. From there, things fell apart so quickly that even I was shocked back into reality. It was like the videos of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse – sudden violent upeheavals followed by a thundering crash of mangled destruction.

At the time Will finally came to us with the news of those defections, he admitted even he’d lost his zest for the project along with the ability to produce good prizes and guest appearances. He ended up leaving mid-January, and from that point it was Jack (in absentia) in charge of editing the book and shepherding the publication, me writing questions and my friend hosting.

I think you can guess how well that worked out.

Less than a month into the year, with only two people showing up every week it was obvious to the patrons that the trivia nights had lost a ton of steam. With little prizes other than what WIP had to dig out of the back corners of its prize closet plus the odd free beer, the crowds stayed away in droves.

Three weeks afterward, I made the drive up despite fighting a nasty illness with a fever - only to find eight people in the bar by 9:30 pm. The show went on that night as best as we could muster with only three participants.

While my friend announced his intention to take over the trivia nights for himself as a way to promote the show he was producing on WIP, I told him that it wasn’t worth my driving 50 miles round-trip for diminishing gains whether in sickness or in health.

That was February, 2005. And I haven’t been back since. I heard he still goes every Tuesday night he’s available, and I wish him well with that if he’s still plugging away.

Over the next year or so, I kept in contact with Jack about the progress of the book. After the usual pleasantries, I got the standard answers each time that the release date would be pushed back indefinitely.

My last correspondence with Jack came in the Summer of 2006. There was no progress, and I assume since then the whole thing has faded away in everybody’s mind. Internet searches of PAST, Philadelphia Association of Sports Trivia, and the like all turn up empty.

Although the PAST was regrettably behind me, you can make damn sure I kept all the questions I labored over, which now have to number close to 1,000. I’m keen to keep this intellectual property.

The best chance I had to resurrect those dormant brain cells and to promote what I had brewing came in the winter of 2006, when I was regularly attending Flyers games. I talked to the founder of a local hockey magazine who was interested, but since he’d already lined up the reigning trivia guru David Sherman, there was no room for another voice.

As of today, the trivia stuff is still anchored in the back of my mind. Every once in a while I get a flash of brilliance to update older questions and add one or two extras all around.

Those seven or eight files, the hat and my memory of what went down are probably all that remains. I’m still very proud of what we all accomplished in a short time despite the sudden crash.

It’s an important lesson for anyone, not to discard what you produce just because one outlet for that creativity never comes to fruition. It’s a more valuable lesson to never get so deeply involved and committed to anything which seems to rise up out of nowhere.

It’s tougher when all those rumors and promise start certain wheels in motion, and to stop those wheels suddenly may involve your being crushed between the gears.

Just something to keep in mind for you fans who are baying for blood that R.J. Umberger is gone, Simon Gagne may not be fully healthy, and the prospect of Mats Sundin, Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg has “Stanley Cup veteran presence” dancing in your heads.