Coming Up With Questions
 

"We're watching the Super Bowl, and she's sitting there taking note, and we're like, 'why are you taking notes?' 'It's a trivia contest and they ask questions like: what song was playing when this person got injured?' " said the friend of a player.

Here's why you'd take notes on a seemingly meaningless event during the Super Bowl.

Last year, the final question for the UWSP trivia contest asked the players, in game six of the 2003 World Series: what song was playing when the play was stopped to tend to a pitcher's blister on his finger?

And guess what? Nobody got it right.

Three days of trivia, with tons of questions, and nobody's supposed to be able to find the answers anywhere, not even on the Internet, so how on earth to they come up with all of those questions? Well, let's go inside and ask them to find out.

The questions come from two men. One of them is Jim Oliva, better known at 90 FM as "The Oz."

Oliva and his partner are constantly taking notes on obscure events so they can use them as questions in the trivia contest.

"The Oz" got last year's final question while he was watching the otherwise boring treatment of a World Series pitcher's blister.

"All these people are out there looking at the blister and I hear in the background, the organ player at the stadium playing Billy Joel's "My Life," said Oliva.

And so that's how "My Life" became the final answer that no one got right in the 2004 trivia contest.

More of the same hard questions are expected this year, but The Oz says the teams are starting to improve.

Last year, Oliva says there were 450 questions. Out of the 450, the best teams got about 85 percent; 85 percent, on a college campus where a score like that wouldn't even get you an “A.”

It’s a good thing The Oz isn't writing the tests, but he is coming up with the trivia answers that are anything but easy, and he says we shouldn't expect anything less.

"Of course not! That's the way it should be, too," he says.