Veterans win 30th annual trivia contest

STEVENS POINT, Wis. (AP)  The 54-hour marathon trivia contest, billed as the world’s largest, is over, and out of the 500 participating teams, the winner is CNOF 54.

The team, made up of 30 veteran players and named after the initials of a few former teams, had the most correct answers to the trivia questions that started Friday and ended midnight Sunday.

“Things fell into place this year,” said Terry Wiegert, a member of CNOF 54 who has been participating in the contest since 1976. “It took a lot of hard work by a lot of people.”

This is the first time CNOF 54 won, said Wiegert, 39, of Wausau. The team, which usually takes third or second place, is made up of a group of family and friends from Detroit, Chicago, Kansas, Arkansas and San Francisco, Wiegert said.

The student radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, WWSP-FM, orchestrates the contest, asking eight questions each hour. Contestants must phone in answers within the next two songs played on the air.

For several years, the fifth-place Franklin Street Burnouts have played out of Mike Wiza’s aunt and uncle’s house in Stevens Point which goes up for sale soon, Wiza said.

“So, I’m buying the house rather than moving out all that trivia stuff like candy wrappers, reference books, newspapers and a lot of  TV Guides,” Wiza said.

The U.S. Trivia Association calls it the world’s largest trivia contest.

The theme for the 30th annual competition is “Trivia Like It’s 1999,” a salute to the end of the century and a new millennium.

Each question is worth 2,000 points. That number gets divided by the number of teams that answer it correctly. The minimum number of points awarded for a right answer is five points, with a maximum of 500 if fewer teams answer the question correctly.

Trophies are awarded to the top 10 teams.

“The competition is vicious, people are out of blood,” said Wiza, 33, a 23-year veteran of the contest.

But Don Chesebro, a member of the third-place Nothin’ But Network, described the contest as an entertainment.

“It’s not quite as blood thirsty for me, I come for the fun. It’s not insane or anything. It’s like our hobby. It’s like going to a fly meet for model airplanes,” said Chesebro, 39, a Stevens Point native who is now a legal assistant in Nashville, Tenn.

Jim Oliva, known as “the Oz,” has authored the contest's questions since 1979. Rather than using modern technology such as the Internet, Oliva uses books and lots of notes to research his questions.

“I am putting more and more time into the contest,” Oliva said. “I spend a lot more time sitting watching TV and movies. Typically, in the past I would wake up in the middle of the night and just watch TV, now I take notes when I watch.”

Oliva said his mission for this year’s questions was to make them fun and more easily obtainable.

But Oliva struggled to find the words to describe the contest.