Daniel Rubin: In pursuit of trivia

We were waiting for Garbo.

This was 10:15 Monday night, the Quizzo contest had already begun, and the team to beat was doing a pretty good job of beating itself.

It had no clue about the first question: "What's the name of the high school in the TV show Glee?"

It stroked the second question, "Where did the poem 'Casey at the Bat' take place?" But asked "Which ingredient in chewing gum comes from the sapodilla tree?" it choked.

These were not just regular know-it-alls. These were travel-team geeks, a crew of Quizzo all-stars from a variety of Philadelphia pubs, handpicked to compete in Denver and represent the breadth of local knowledge about matters high and low. They'd dropped by the New Deck Tavern off Penn's campus to stretch their brain muscles a bit with undergraduates playing for beer money. And team geek was already cramping.

Where was Garbo?

Munching peanuts and filling out the answer sheet was Phil Castagna, 32, a Center City lawyer who during warm-ups had shouted out the right answer to every question and had to be told to give someone else a chance. He'd come up with the team's name for the evening - 12 Angry Men on the Field, a dig at the way the Minnesota Vikings had penalized themselves out of field-goal range at the end of Sunday's playoff game.

Across from him sat Nate DiGiorgio, 27, a computer jock at Penn whose specialities are sports and technology.

And next to Castagna was Johnny Goodtimes, 34, the man who had assembled the team with an eye for filling the holes in his knowledge, which are vast. His strengths, he said: "Good looks and drinking."

They were fielding the fourth question - "Who designed the steamboat called the Clermont?" - when in walked Garbo.

Jason "Garbo" Garbowski, 31, is a tutor for Kaplan, the testing company. He says he's a generalist. His teammates say he's Rain Man. As they were waiting for him, they recalled a recent gathering where highlights from the Masters golf tournament played on the TV. As the rest of the team watched casually, Garbo grew still. "Look," Castagna had said. "He's downloading!"

"What do we have?" asked Garbo now, taking a look at Castagna's answer sheet. He quickly filled in the missing answers, getting McKinley High, missing chicle, but nailing Robert Fulton and the rest of the questions in the round.

Still, not so great a start for a team that's used to ruling. It's a good thing two more friends would be joining them for Saturday's Geek Bowl in Denver.

As the big day approaches, Goodtimes has been talking smack on the Geeks Who Drink Web site, where he's called out all of the other contestants' cities and started a cross-country flame war. He wrote:

While the competition for First won't be very close, I really think that battle for 2nd Place could be one for the ages! So tighten up your Birkenstocks, trim your neck hair, and eat your granola, Denver. Philadelphia is coming to town . . . and we're bringing hell with us.

The Virginia-born Quizzo master has lived here eight years. He realized he was becoming a Philadelphian during the summer of 2006 when he saw a Padres-Rockies game in Denver and found himself heckling relief pitcher Trevor Hoffman. "Just like in the All-Star Game, Trev, baby," Goodtimes hollered. "Just like in the All-Star Game," which Hoffman had just blown.

"People looked at me, horrified," Goodtimes said. "I thought it was mild."

Monday night's Quizzo match lasted four rounds, and the Angry Men went on a tear, knowing Don Shula coached longer in the NFL than Tom Landry and that Euclid was the father of geometry. They identified all 10 international road signs during a visual round, and found a series of questions about Eddie Murphy easy. By midnight, they were tied for the lead.

Then they promptly missed all five playoff questions. Second place.

"This happened to us the last time we invited the media," Goodtimes observed. "This is a wake-up call. We've got four days of hard studying to do."

He turned to his teammates and handed out assignments. "Who's gonna handle video games? Who's gonna go deep into Led Zeppelin tracks?"

Clearly they're just trying to make Denver overconfident.