Adobe Stock
Bar trivia is pure and simple and wonderful.
If you pick the perfect teammates, stumble into the right watering hole, stick with the host who makes you want to get out of the house for a couple hours, there is no better place in the world.
Well, other than the golf course, maybe.
I started writing and hosting bar trivia 14 years ago next week — my first game cobbled together after old Eddy & Iggy’s in Lakewood, Ohio, rather unceremoniously fired the bartender who had been hosting their games on Tuesday nights. I had won a hot dog eating contest a few months prior and the prize was a free beer every day for the rest of the year. I lived a quarter of a mile from the bar, so I would walk down the street, sample something new, leave a tip and return home. I was there so often that I started playing trivia, then hosting it, then building what was, for a while, a little fiefdom of questions and answers.
After more than six years here at Golf Course Industry, I figured why not bring one of my outside interests to the office?
If you read our Fast & Firm email newsletter, you might have noticed Turfheads Trivia at the bottom of each of the last 11 Thursday editions. One question. A link to my email. A prize mailed out at the end of the month to one lucky reader.
The question I included today is, ehhh, we’ll say golf adjacent. But, really, most good trivia questions are adjacent to two or three or four different topics. You can read it in the newsletter. And if you don’t already subscribe to the newsletter, well, you’re in luck! Here’s the link! Want more questions and answers? Here are the first 10:
1. Back before the days of Name, Image, and Likeness — heck, back before the days of freshman eligibility — what famous golf course hosted the first two SEC men's basketball tournaments?
2. Second-generation golf professional Lighthorse Harry Cooper holds the record for most PGA Tour wins without a major championship, finishing second four times over a 12-season span. What four golfers kept him from those titles?
3. What record-setting musical instrument was once owned by the man who helped spur the creation of the PGA Tour?
4. Recapping the 1955 U.S. Open decades after the fact, what Bob Jones Award winner wrote that, in that mid-century year, “not many people east of the Sierra Nevada had heard much, if anything, about the Lake Course. Most golf fans figured that if the U.S.G.A. had selected it as the venue of the Open, it had to be a sound and demanding course.”
5. What architect designed five golf courses — one closed in 1927; one closed in 2002 and redesigned, renamed and reopened in 2005; and three still open — within 11 miles of the childhood home of a Pope?
6. Rebranded in 1994, what pro sports team is named after a famous golf prize?
7. A century ago this summer, what golfer famously called a one-stroke penalty on himself for violating Rule 18.1 after his ball moved slightly before impact from a greenside chip?
8. What did legendary golf professional Harvey Penick once describe as “the biggest alibi ever invented to explain a terrible shot”?
9. What newer (and very popular) golf course was built atop a parcel of Loess Hills land acquired for farm interests during the 1980s but never used for that purpose?
10. Since redesigned, what famous golf course was originally laid out in part by the onetime Bishop of Cuba?
And the answers! Atlanta Athletic Club … Tommy Armour (at the 1927 U.S. Open), Horton Smith (1936 Masters), Tony Manero (1936 U.S. Open) and Henry Picard (1938 Masters) … The Wanamaker Organ … Herbert Warren Wind … Tom Bendelow … The Augusta GreenJackets of the South Atlantic League … Bobby Jones … “Looking up” … Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska … and The Course at Sewanee, whose original design team included Albion W. Knight.
Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s senior editor. If you're ever in Northeast Ohio on a Tuesday night, you can probably find him at Plank Road Tavern in Lakewood. He also writes a Wednesday game for Camino Taco and Tequila Bar in downtown Cleveland and hosts a game on Zoom the last Monday of every month.
