UCI Whiz Kids Leave for Their Shot at the Title

David Frakt skipped dinner with a best-selling author to study trivia.

John Bowler tries to outguess “Jeopardy” contestants in his living room. Jerry Koshimizu pores over the daily newspapers. And between cramming for a midterm on Dickens’ “Bleak House,” Tom Davey memorized the latest Pulitzer Prize winners.

Is UC Irvine’s latest hope to win a national College Bowl title ready to tackle 15 heavyweight teams from MIT, the University of Chicago, Cornell and elsewhere this weekend at the University of Minnesota?

“ ‘The way to prepare for College Bowl,’ I tell ‘em, ‘is to read everything that has ever been printed and memorize it,’ ” joked Marti Barmore, coach since 1983 of UCI’s entries into the academic competition. The next best thing may be to relax, she said.

Still, they left Thursday for Minneapolis--”a day early to become acclimated to the time changes,” Barmore said.

College Bowl--once a popular weekly radio and television show--continues to pit teams of students from various colleges in a quiz game of academe each year. Sixteen teams will compete in this year’s national tournament, which begins Saturday, with the victor to emerge Sunday.

Barmore, one of the winningest coaches in the West with four regional championship teams at UCI since 1983, figures that the four seniors may be one of the best teams UCI has sent to the national championships. The school has never won the national title.

“It’s a pretty well-balanced team--we have an electrical engineering major, a biology major, a history major and an English major,” she said. “What helps our team, too, is that . . . three are older seniors--two are in their 30s--and David, the youngest at 20, is receiving the university’s award for outstanding senior.”

For another, they are experienced.

Team captain Davey, 35, was on UCI’s 1984 team, which made it more than halfway through the national competition before being eliminated. Koshimizu, 26, a biology major and Army reservist, and John Bowler, 31, an electrical engineering major who served two tours of duty on Navy ships, have competed in similar academic contests.

Twenty-year-old David Frakt is following in his father’s footsteps. Arthur N. Frakt, you may remember, was the Rutgers University student who stunned moderator, audience and teammates alike during the 1960-61 television season with his answer to a question.

The moderator asked: “What famous English novel . . . “

Buzz. “Tale of Two Cities,” answered Frakt, now the soon-to-retire dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“My dad just had a feeling that the question was ‘What famous English novel begins with the words: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times?’ He was right,” said David, a history major who will take his bachelor’s degree in June--in three years instead of the traditional four.

David Frakt takes his trivia seriously. His mother, Janna Rankin, said he turned down dinner this week with William White, author of the best-seller “The Organization Man,” saying: “Mom, I’ve got a trivia book to read.”

It was such a book that earned him the questionable reputation for expertise in Russian history last month at the regional championships in San Luis Obispo.

“I just happened to read about Peter the Great of Russia and his famous last words. The next day, they asked the question: ‘What famous person said these last words--”When I came to Russia, it was a rivulet . . . .” ’ “

Frakt hit the buzzer, cutting off the moderator. “Everyone in the room was totally flabbergasted,” he recalled with delight. “So I guess I’d say my knowledge of Russian history is highly selective.”

Davey, the English major and classically trained pianist, brings both experience and a mental warehouse of detail on music, theater, arts, politics and just plain trivia that he isn’t sure how he acquired.

At the regionals, the moderator tossed the question card over his head in mock frustration when Davey buzzed early with the answer to a question about French composer Claude Debussy’s labors to create an opera from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House Usher.”

“The moderator said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t I just save some breath and you read my mind?’ Those are the most satisfying moments,” said Davey, who dropped out of UCI in 1985 to take a job as vice president of his brother’s roofing firm, then decided to return last April to finish work for his degree.

Davey insists that he and his teammates are not “eggheads or nerds,” but are just “regular Joes” who have “that sticky kind of brain that collects facts irrespective of their importance. We’re all addicts full of factual junk,” he said.

He also is a firm believer that preparations for the College Bowl competition are futile. All the teams competing at the national level are so good that it takes speed and a bit of psychology to win, Davey said.

“My theory is that what you’re actually competing with . . . is a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and no amount of last-minute cramming is going to enlarge that store much at all. If you add a tenth of a percent, its hardly worth the effort, especially when you’re carrying 20 units and trying to graduate!”

More important is having a primed buzzer finger, so their team is first to grab the “toss-up question,” he said. If the answer is correct, the team wins points plus the chance to answer a bonus question.

Bowler suggests that one way to “psych out” UCI’s opponents is “to go to Minneapolis in flip-flops and cut-offs, like: ‘Hey dudes, where’s the beach?’