UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA COLLEGE BOWL

1962-1995

• Introduction
• 1962-63 Television Record
• 1982-95 College Bowl Regional and National Championship Tournament Records

Introduction

In December 1962 - January, 1963 a team from the University of Virginia won five consecutive games on the "G. E. College Bowl" program. They brought back $9,000 in scholarship money for the school, and a silver championship bowl. A document in Alderman Library's Special Collections shows that there was an attempt to use the nationally televised victory to gain matching funds to use that money to create an endowment of over $200,000. I've never been able to find out whether or not that total was raised, but since "G. E. College Bowl" was at the height of its popularity, a campaign to solicit funds from alumni that made advertising the victory its centerpiece may well have been successful. The silver bowl was stolen by burglars from Newcomb Hall in the early 1970's.

The evolution of the modern U. Va. Academic Competition program began in 1981. The College Bowl competition, sponsored by the Association of College Unions-International (ACU-I), was pretty much the only game around, at least that we were aware of. Beginning in the mid-1980's the rise in invitational tournaments and alternative formats began, exploding in the late 1980's and early 1990's into the rich and varied world of academic competition that exists today. This page will attempt to document the history of the University of Virginia Academic Competition Team from 1962 through the 1994-95 season. The College Bowl record will be put up first, as that's the information I have most readily accessible; as well as being the format the program was primarily built for during this period. Records from invitational and other competitions, names of team members, and notes on the highlights (and occasional lowlights - who can ever forget the amazing squalor of the Princeton Motor Lodge? Or the surreal and horrible "Campus Challenge" experience?) will follow. As publishing these records involves both locating and decompressing archived files, usually from 5 1/4" floppies, and combing through boxes of paper files, this section of my web page will be updated in an irregular and piecemeal fashion. Also, some of these records have been lost or misplaced during my various moves, and getting the record complete will take some detective work. Anyone with additional information, comments, suggestions, and even page design tips, is invited to send me an email. And keep checking back; there's lots more stuff to put up.

College Bowl Record

1962-63 Television Record

Coach: Graham Hereford, assisted by Robert Scholes and Alan Williams, among others.

Team: Mike Bennett (Captain), Richard Greer, John Mortenson, Talmadge Wyatt. Gene Blumenreich was an alternate.

From Sunday, December 9, 1962 through Sunday, January 6, 1963, the U.Va. team traveled to New York each weekend, even during the Christmas break, to sweep as undefeated champions. The team won a total of $9,000 in scholarship money and a silver bowl.

Robert Earle was in his first season as host. No kinescopes or videotapes of the shows are known to exist. Anyone with information to the contrary is urged to contact me.

After winning five times, the University of Virginia retired as an undefeated champion. Under the rules at the time, they were ineligible to play again on television for two years. The program was never revived in the television era.

In 1980, the Speakers Committee of University Union, under the leadership of Hazen Dempster, revived College Bowl as an intramural activity for the summer program. Two Newcomb Hall technicians built a home-made lockout system for the event. Carl Deaner, the Union program coordinator, tried to persuade some Union committees to keep the program going, but the effort lapsed. In the Fall of 1981 the Recruitment/Visionary Committee of University Union, co-chaired by Tom Michael and Cathy Stanton, revived the program and began sending teams to the Regional Championship Tournaments. With the demise of the Recruitment/Visionary Committee in 1983, College Bowl gradually evolved from a semi-autonomous sub-committee of the Student Activities Committee into a full committee of its own.

The first team sent was a hybrid of the top two teams coming out of a twenty-team Fall, 1981 Intramural tournament. A team from the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society had won the tournament, and their group held several practices. Three players from that team, and two from the third place team (Group of Four), eventually went to the regional championship. (The limit on the number of graduate students prevented members of the second place team, the all-Law-student The Blue Bookers, from being eligible to participate.) A second intramural tournament, held after the Regionals in the Spring of 1982, attracted 32 teams with five teams turned away for lack of space; a record for number of teams in am IM that lasted through at least 1995.

The April 8, 1982 issue of The Declaration features an article "The Bowl Runneth Over" that covers the early history. Though there are a few errors - College Bowl was never a subsidiary of Reader's Digest (RD just provided fact-checking at the time), and the idea of a full "College Bowl Committee" wasn't realized for several more years - the article accurately captures what was happening at the time.

1982-95 College Bowl Regional and National Championship Tournament Records

*Although the record is 4-2, the team played eight matches. The protest rules at the time said that in the event that the information in a question is wrong, the game officials could either a) award the match to the team that was ahead when the protest occurred, or b) replay the entire match. Replays happened twice, against Wake Forest and against Furman. The Furman match protest was successfully upheld after it was filed by a girlfriend of one of the U. Va. players noticing how "saccharin" was spelled in the ingredients list on a can of the diet soda Tab. (The Tab can rested for years in the Jefferson Society archives in the Alderman Library Special Collections room, until it was thrown out by accident in the early 1990's.) We would have had to replay a third match, except the 210 points the other team protested would not have changed the outcome of the match.

**Brigham Young University announced prior to the tournament that they would not play in any Sunday matches, and in finishing second in the round robin, declined to play in the finals. Chicago defeated Virginia in the finals 2-0. BYU received the second place individual plaques, Virginia received the runner-up trophy and third place plaques.

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© Thomas F. Michael

Last modified Tuesday, October 07, 2003 07:44:10 PM