Jefferson Airplane

I grew up as a brainy kid. I was called nerd a lot. This blog is not about how much I was called a nerd as a kid. Not really. 

I was always in Quiz Bowl, or Academic Bowl, as a kid. Did a decent amount of it in middle school. It made sense for me to continue trying it in high school. What I have learned in my middle age is that you can be a hotshot at something, but if you have to move to a different location to keep doing that thing you’re going to have to prove yourself all over again. I was kind of a hotshot in middle school at quiz bowl. Moving into high school, I had to prove myself all over again. I found out there was an Academic Bowl team for the high school and joined up.

The proving myself part came when I had to “sit the bench” for the first half of the competition. If memory serves me correctly, each match between schools was 25 questions long. There were four people on the team. A coach could sub in any or all of the four team members after 12 questions, if they chose. So one of the coaches, either Mr. Powell or Mr. Dimick, decided to put the 14 year old me into my first high school academic bowl competition. Here we go.

The proffer would read a question. If at any point you felt you knew the answer you could buzz in early. If the question was read in its entirety, after 5 seconds the proffer would read the answer. The first question, read to a room full of Birmingham City School system kids, was something to the effect of: “What was the original name of the band Starship?”

I mean, in fairness, it was 1991. It’s entirely possible that people would remember the band Starship. I would say the odds of any inner city kid listening to Starship in 1991 were approximately negative zero. This was a Birmingham City competition so it is possible some other…not inner city kid might know the answer to this question. But as for the eight people sitting at the table it didn’t seem that anyone knew the answer to the question and the 5 second time frame between the end of the question and the proffer revealing the answer seemed like an eternity…

...I knew the answer to the question. Maybe I was a random trivia nerd. Maybe I remember hearing some of their music as a kid (because as a public service announcement, any black dude my age grew up listening to pop music just like everyone else until the mid-80s, anyone who pretends otherwise is fooling themselves). But I KNEW the answer.

There was a brief moment where I had a decision to make: do I answer this question and risk looking like a nerd or maybe even worse, a black guy who knew the answer to a question that might be considered something a black guy shouldn’t know? Or at least a cool black guy? (I was 14. Most of us are trying to be cool at that age, right? Well, I was.) Wouldn’t the easier thing to do just be to let 5 seconds run out and move on to the next question?

Maybe, but I did buzz in. At that point enough time had passed, it was quiet enough that the noise of the buzzer startled people. The room turned to me. I say, almost with a shrug, “Jefferson Airplane?” and a super surprised proffer says “That is correct!” and the room lets out a collective noise of what could be described as a sigh of disbelief. I never sat the bench for the rest of the time I was in high school. I became the first student in the Birmingham Public School system to make the all-city Academic Bowl team as a freshman and the first person to make the all-city team all four years of high school. You can find this feat prominently displayed absolutely nowhere in particular.

It’s entirely possible that I could have stayed quiet on that question and still went on to achieve the excellence, such as it was, I did in the Academic Bowl realm. My point here, though, is if you’re excellent at something, be excellent at it. Be humble about it. Work hard. Practice. But be humble. Help others be as great as they can be and if you find they can be better than you, help them do that and hope they are as humble as you are in their greatness. 

What’s your Jefferson Airplane moment?