I have been a sports fan for as long as I can remember. My earliest memory is of watching tennis with my grandfather in the early 1990s. I started off as the annoying kid who giggled uncontrollably at a scoring system which had “love” in it, and eventually evolved into an annoyingly curious kid who kept asking questions about the intricacies of the sport. Over the next few years, with the Atlanta Summer Olympics, the Cricket World Cup and the FIFA World Cup, I became quite the sports buff.

My quizzing in school only punctuated my otherwise ‘normal’ school life with its now-embarrassing entertainment choices, wildly varying new interests and ensuring a minimum standard of academics. Quizzing in school meant our annual attempt at a few big name quizzes which we would invariably lose (if we ever qualified). I’ve been a quizzer, really speaking, for only the last 10-odd years — and at the genesis of this was, poetically enough, sports geekery.

One day in 2006, when I was in my second year of college, a friend suggested we take part in a sports quiz and I went along. We qualified quite easily, only to lose spectacularly in the finals. We lost because the questions were of a kind I hadn’t seen before — they were long paragraphs that offered clues to work out the answers. A little voice in my head valiantly tried to trawl through that information to reach a logical conclusion, before my Bournvita Quiz Contest conditioned brain took over and invariably said, “I’ve never seen these people before, so pass”. I later realised the little voice was on the right track more often than not. Despite the last place finish, I was hooked to this ‘new’ form of quizzing — spotting clues, working out logical conclusions, taking educated guesses.

It’s hard to pinpoint what drives me to dedicate inordinate amounts of time to sports quizzing. One factor is that, at the end of the day, just as in any other quiz, the ‘kick’ I get from working out an answer correctly from a position of not having a full idea is immense.

The second factor is the special feeling of being a part of a niche section of what is already a niche sub-culture of quizzing. The strongest quiz teams in India stumble at the sports hurdle. To elaborate, some knowledge of most subjects already exists at a superficial level given that we read history, geography, science in school and college, but we don’t study sports. This takes sports knowledge into the specialist range which is hard if not impossible to gain inorganically. It leads to an extremely high lowest common denominator, as well as an entry barrier for the general public.

The third factor is how quizzing has affected the sports fan in me. While it is clear how sports geekery helps in feeding sports quizzing prowess, the reverse relationship between the two is perhaps more important to me. Sports quizzing profoundly affected the way I follow sports. One prime example is cycling — I kept seeing questions on the Tour de France, and when I finally got around to seeing a few stages out of curiosity, I was completely taken in and now I scarcely miss any cycling on TV. Quizzing also led me to take a “quizzers approach” to following sports — I consciously go one level deeper to consume more information. I hack away at the surface of the fact to understand the deeper implications outside of sports — those nuggets that transform seemingly normal sports achievements or even failures into extraordinary, inspirational stories.

And it all comes full circle when I set sports quizzes — I go into details I wouldn’t have bothered about earlier, and that leads me to further interesting discoveries and richer sport-viewing experiences.

I first tried my hand at sports quizzing because I was a sports geek, but now I can certainly say I am a better class of sports geek because of sports quizzing.

Aditya Gadre is a management consultant based in Mumbai

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