Broadsides

Question: Stillwater is the name of the fictional band in which Oscar-nominated film from 2000? (The answer may be found at the end of this article.)

I don’t go to church, but I do go to the Stillwater Taproom Pub Quiz on Wednesday nights.

It is mid-April, so the sun is still out as my fellow congregants arrive before the quiz starts at eight. I am here with friends Delaney and Daniel, members of a revolving group of teammates I’ve played with since 2017. My first team, Old Man Brain, consisted of my dad and two roommates. These days we play as LeVar & the Burtons.

“I have been playing Stillwater trivia on-and-off for about five years,” recalls Delaney. “[A friend] brought me and I fell in love with all of the people that are here on a regular [basis]. I fell in love with [hosts] Colin and Jeff. And just the overall energy of Stillwater trivia is different than any other trivia in the CSRA.”

Eleven other groups, mostly regulars, have made the pilgrimage tonight. Their team names include Blood, Sweat, & Beers; Music Is Our Kryptonite; Laser Dolph Lundgrens; William Shatner Face; and Staff Infection (the employees’ team).

Bartender Faith Yeomans has been working trivia night for the full ten years she has worked at Stillwater. “Oh, it’s honestly my favorite night of the week,” says Yeomans. “It’s our busiest night on top of just having a lot of good people that come in to have a good time.”

Players grab their first drinks from Faith and fellow bartender Darcy. Then they pick up their scoresheets, answer slips, and pens, while signing up their team names with Colin and Jeff. Between the hosts sits the coveted pub quiz trophy: The EinStein.

Colin Blacker, the emcee, goes over the rules (“The first rule of Fight Club is no cellphones!”) and prizes (bar tabs of $75 for first place, $50 for second, and $25 for third). He has a noticeable Irish accent, which often becomes more pronounced throughout the evening as Faith and Darcy serve him Guinness. Jeff Kennedy keeps score and isn’t heard much during the game. When I first started attending, I thought it similar to a Penn & Teller act.

The first question (as always) is about current events. I had done a routine Google search before the game, but needn’t have bothered–it’s an easy one tonight. “Who won The Masters this year?” (Answer: Rory McIlroy.) The bonus is a bit trickier: “Name the three other golfers to have won back-to-back Masters tournaments.” But I watched the coverage this year, and this was mentioned a few times near the end. (Answer: Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, and Tiger Woods.)

The next several questions are more challenging and cover a variety of subjects, including musicals (right up Delaney’s alley), biblical history, philosophy, nautical history, literature, and international currencies. I groan at this one. Colin and Jeff have been including this category for a couple months now. Repeating a specific category can be an advantage for returning players–if you remember to do some research. Luckily Daniel has a knack for this. We guess that Brazil uses the real, Poland the złoty, Korea the won, and China the yuan. We get four out of five right, only missing that Albania uses the lek (but come on, who knows that?).

The questions are tougher than at your average bar trivia, but for most regulars, that’s the allure. “I like it because it’s challenging,” says Tom Fait from team It’s All Relative. “It’s got a good mix. Sometimes the questions are easy and other times it takes some investment in partnership to figure out what the best answer is.” Says Brenda Collins of Team Mike (which conspicuously always has more players than just Mike), “It’s very varied. It could be anything from Disney to prehistoric [trivia].”

“I really do think we have the hardest trivia in Augusta,” claims Faith. “Not just the hardest, but I think it’s the best trivia.”

That was always the aim for Colin and Jeff, whose friendship and partnership was built on trivia. “I met him on February 10th, 2009,” says Jeff of Colin. “I know that because that was my 40th birthday. I knew Colin’s wife going back to high school—we were old friends. She had gotten married to Colin and moved back to Augusta after being gone for a while, and she shows up with her husband that I meet for the first time, and we just–it’s like we’re brothers, you know?” Outside of the game, Jeff does the lion’s share of the talking.

Shortly after, they started going to trivia two nights a week at Helga’s on Central Avenue. But there was a problem, says Colin: “We kept on winning, like six out of eight times a month.” Says Jeff, “We were drinking free beer and eating free food” from all of their winnings. So they were disqualified–they could keep playing, but they couldn’t win. When the Helga’s trivia host moved on, Colin and Jeff were offered the gig. Following an ownership change, Helga’s went down to one trivia night a week. Matt Flynn, co-owner of Stillwater, then offered them Wednesdays for their pub quiz in June of 2013. The rest, as they say, is quiz-tory.

But more than trivia, the pub quiz is about something else. “The community, man,” says Colin, “[it’s] the community.” This sentiment is echoed by the regulars, who recall birthdays, anniversaries, and even proposals. One regular actually popped the question as a trivia question, helped by Colin and Jeff. There was then an interlude for a couple’s dance.

During COVID, a virtual pub quiz was put together, with donations going to the Stillwater bartenders who were temporarily out of work. I remember attending a few of these with my dad, just a few months before he passed in the summer of 2020. When in-person trivia (briefly) resumed in June, my friends and I won the first game back, this time playing as “Old Man Brain Memorial”.

“I love when I’m here,” says Jeff. “I love the camaraderie. I love talking to people, making genuine friends.” Adds Colin, “I think it’s the best trivia in town, just because we respect our players so much.”

Just before the final question, Colin reads out the scores. Our team, LeVar & the Burtons, is in second place. We deliberate and decide to bet all of our points–our best chance to win. The category is “Celebrity Trivia”. The question: “How many times was Mickey Rooney married?” For some reason, I feel like I know this. Maybe my grandma told me–she knew all this kind of stuff. Delaney has the same guess: eight. We turn in our answer.

Jeff tabulates the results and Colin announces the “Winner, winner, chicken dinner”: Levar & the Burtons!

“You’ll always walk away from a Stillwater trivia night having learned something new,” says Delaney. “I think that’s one of my favorite things about it, [that] I could come here and only know one out of twenty questions and I still had the best time ever.”

Answer: Almost Famous