Twelve Straight

By half-time last week the powerful Minnesota team had rolled up an overwhelming lead over plucky but outmanned Rutgers. The Gophers displayed the same superb timing and lightning attack that had already humbled such foes as Georgia, Northwestern, Washington and Lee, Colorado, Tulane, Illinois and Smith.

Minnesota's victories were not won in a stadium but on a radio show called College Quiz Bowl (Sat. 7:30 p.m., NBC), where four-player teams from competing schools try to beat each other to the punch in answering such questions as: 1) Who was the head of state that the Roundheads beheaded? 2) What 17th century philosopher can be associated with a whale? 3) In ancient Greece, who could call Xanthippus "Dad" and Zeno "Teacher"? 4) Nellie Bly was the "other woman" in a famous triangle--name the couple she broke up. *

White Light. The game generates considerable campus excitement and is played by a radio hookup between the competing schools and Quizmaster Allen Ludden in Manhattan. Ludden, a 37-year-old Phi Beta Kappa from Texas, first throws out a "tossup" question; as soon as a player thinks he knows the answer he signals his referee to push the team's buzzer, which instantly lights a bulb in the Manhattan studio (white for the champion team, red for the challenger) and automatically cuts off the impulse from the other team. If the answer is right, it earns ten points and gives the winners a chance at a bonus question worth from 15 to 50 points. If a team thinks it can anticipate a tossup question, it is free to interrupt Ludden before he finishes, but if the answer is incorrect, there is a five-point penalty.This can be demoralizing: last week Rutgers incorrectly anticipated the first question and never got going afterward.

The winning school gets $500 each week (donated by Good Housekeeping magazine), and Minnesota has already amassed $6,000 this year, all used for scholarships. The losers get wristwatches. To Co-Producer John Moses the biggest surprise of the two-year history of Quiz Bowl is the continuing dominance of Minnesota ("You'd never expect a Midwestern school to keep knocking off these Eastern colleges"). Last season the Gophers won eight straight before being upset by Brown-Pembroke. This year, after tying their first match with Georgetown, and winning by a narrow margin the second time they met, the Minnesotans have won twelve in a row. Only the combined team of Brown and Pembroke came close to breaking their string.

Bigger Steak. Last year's coach, Physicist J. W. Buchta, who is now on loan to the Government for a year, thinks Minnesota is so successful because the team was chosen carefully to begin with "We didn't look only at their marks but also at their ability to think quickly and intuitively. One of last year's best team members was actually found to be on probation after he had made the team."

All of the current squad are Minnesotans; three of them seniors. Charles Mohlke is president of the student governing body and majors in English, philosophy and political science; Colleen Nelson majors in zoology and music and is a bird watcher by avocation; Joseph Shechtman is a sociology major and the team expert on everything; Eleanor Vaill is a junior majoring in drama and usually has the answers to questions on quotations from poetry. The team gets together about once a week for an hour or two of practice and, the night of the match, eats at a university training table, where, reportedly they get bigger steaks than those given the football team. But the chief gain, as ex-Coach Buchta sees it, is that "on this program we can finally show our brains instead of our muscles. What's more, the College Quiz Bowl has caused a campus revolution--it's making the bright student as popular and well known as the athlete."

* The answers: 1) Charles I of England, Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, 3) Pericles, 4) Frankie and Johnnie

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