The Host

He had the face of everyone you've ever known who never wanted to work a cubical but ended up working a cubical anyway. I imagine him searching each morning for a clean shirt and tie, picking through his closet, past the second hand guitar he played at coffee houses in a small college town, past the boxes of notebooks filled with song lyrics and the first lines of great short stories, past a leather jacket, vintage tee shirts, a box of keepsakes from an old girlfriend. 

He brushed the vestiges of what once must have been a long careless hairstyle from his eyes and handed me an answer sheet and a pen. I said hello and he responded in kind. He thinks of me, if indeed he thinks of me at all, as a part of the furniture, nearly indiscriminate from the other beer toting psedo-hipster yuppies who frequent this bar. 

I was the first of our group to arrive. The night was cold enough for the bar to put up their heat lamps. I pulled two tables together close to one, ordered an 8th street ale and waited for reinforcements. 

A fourth of the way through my rather large beer, my teammates began to come in ones and twos. They ordered diet cokes or waters and squinted over menus they'd squinted over dozens of times before. We had a large team that night. Seven of us got comfortable and exchanged small talk as we waited for the game to begin. 

This may have been our strongest team in recent memory. And after winning two weeks in a row, I was feeling confident. 

My confidence proved to be well founded. We flew through the first half missing only two points. At halftime we held a comfortable lead. The Host was cracking jokes. Any time he asked a baseball question he quoted "Something about Mary." He pretended the question he was about to ask was impossibly obscure, "Put the following 37 French Painters in order..." They were the lines he uses every week. We laughed along, so happy we didn't even have to fake it. 

In the background ESPN was broadcasting the final table of the World Series of Poker. There were two players left. One, a tall floppy haired 23 year old in a hoody and blue jeans, had almost all the chips. He sat tall, confident enough to make the cards bend to his will, or seem to. His opponent, pudgy with amazing arm tattoos, hurled his cards. They tumbled over the side of the table. It was a study in contrasts and the difference confidence can make. 

Our own swagger continued into the second round. We answered the first three questions of the second half correctly. With only six questions remaining, we were almost home. And then it hit us. 

"The Wall" is a phenomenon that exists in endurance athletics. I've hit it on a few occasions myself. One moment you're running along an empty highway, enjoying the morning air and thinking about what you're going to eat when you get home, the next you can't breathe, every fiber in your legs is on fire, you struggle to put one foot in front of another. Every athlete fears the wall, and we had just run into it headlong. 

Our "Wall" was a series of questions we could not answer. Some we thought we knew, "what is the governmental name for a group of owls" (a parliament). Some we could only hazard a guess at, "What still living diminutive actor was born Joseph Yule, Jr. in 1922 (Mickey Rooney) or "Which nursery rhyme character asks 'what a good boy am I?'"(Jack Horner). When the dust had settled, we sat in 5th place, 13 points behind the leaders. 

Hope remained, however, and we still had the final question to consider. It was, "Put the following 4 people in order from tallest to shortest: Prince, Danny Devito, Peter Dinklage, and Michael J Fox". We thought a while, knowing that we had to bet the maximum. Finally we answered Fox, Prince, Devitto, Dinklage. We felt good about our answer, but would the teams ahead of us miss it? 

As it happened, our answer was correct. We weren't surprised. The question hinged on knowing who Peter Dinklage is (he plays Tyrion Lanister on game of thrones) and guessing that Prince is shorter than Fox. It was an easy answer to come across. And so we were disappointed but not surprised when we passed only one team in the final standings. 

The Host smiled at me as we filed past him. I wish I could ascribe some meaning to that look. Perhaps that he felt our pain, that he too knew what it was to suffer at the hands of "The Wall", that he was rooting for us and we'd do better next week. But in my heart I knew he was being congenial. There was no deeper meaning. 

As I left, I glanced back through the glass double doors. On the big tv over the back wall, the floppy haired kid celebrated his inevitable victory. His opponent stood next to him, watching, almost shrinking from the picture. As I drove off, I watched the bar lights melt into my rear view. 

Halftime Question: 

For each of these 4 quarterbacks name the NFC team they won the Super Bowl with:

1. Jeff Hostetler 

2. Bart Star

3. Doug Williams

4. Brad Johnson