Sixers Fandom Prepared Me for My Own Playoff Disappointment
AU on being reminded via 'Pop Culture Jeopardy!' of the extremely familiar emotional bargaining process that follows Sixers postseason losses.
As most Rights to Ricky Sanchez listeners probably know by now, I've been a contestant on the first season of Pop Culture Jeopardy. For those who haven't cared enough to watch -- understandable -- that's a team trivia game show hosted by Colin Jost on Amazon Prime, done single-elimination-tournament style, with 81 teams total fighting for the grand prize. As its name rather subtly suggests, it's just like the classic Jeopardy, but with all pop culture-related trivia: In other words, only questions about movies, TV, music, sports, video games and so on. I went on with two longtime friends (and NYU college bowl trivia buddies) of mine, Victor Lee and Andrew Weber, as the team Twisted Misters -- we filmed our episodes in August and they aired over these last couple months.
If you know me at all outside the Rickyverse -- hell, maybe if you only know me within this blog -- you'd probably be able to guess that the existence of this show registered as very good news for me. Pop culture trivia is the only thing I know about; it often takes me up to half a minute to remember which way "north" is when walking around NYC but I could name all 19 Mariah Carey Hot 100 No. 1 hits in chronological order or tell you at least three dudes who lost Best Actor at the 1975 Oscars no problem. Through my life, folks who know I'm a trivia person have, asked me if I've ever tried out for Jeopardy!, and I tell them with zero percent false modesty that I am in fact quite bad at classic Jeopardy!, because that show includes multiple categories a round about history, geography, science, literature and so on where I'm lucky to know a single answer -- which often I'll know only because of some pop tie-in anyway. But Pop Culture Jeopardy!... much more doable, especially with two teammates to help fill in the gaps that do exist in my pop culture knowledge (video games, theater, influencers, reality TV).
Still, I felt pretty certain going in that we weren't going to win the whole thing. That was mostly just a numbers thing; we were one of 81 teams competing in a game where luck -- getting good categories, finding and nailing the Daily Doubles, etc. -- was going to play a high-variance role. And then there was the challenge of simply buzzing in; with nine contestants total a round, every question on Pop Culture Jeopardy! is a buzzer race between multiple people who know the answer and are just hoping to get the millisecond advantage by just yamming on that thing as fast and hard as possible. (In the weeks leading up to taping, I spent some time studying pop culture areas where I'm the weakest, but I was mostly focused on spending at least a half-hour a day clicking a pen on and off to really get my right thumb in game shape.) In a straight pop culture trivia competition I'll at least take my team's chances against pretty much anyone, but with all those complicating factors -- and a competition level that we learned pretty quickly was very strong throughout the field -- I knew we weren't gonna just breeze through the thing.
And we didn't. We won our first round but we lost our second, mostly undone by a Daily Double where our answer was one letter off -- about the Brat Pack doc apparently titled Brats not Brat. Apologies to both Andrew McCarthy and Charli XCX, and sorry for the spoiler if you hadn't watched yet and were actually planning to do so, but these episodes have rolled out so slowly and with so little notice that I'd probably have to wait months to make sure everyone who was planning on watching had actually gotten to. (TBH I don't hugely care whether or not people watched me on this show anyway -- I told very few people I was going to be on it and fewer still about when my episodes were actually airing. It's not like I could get voted back onto the show with enough fan support.)
Anyway, in the hours following our loss, I made peace with it pretty quickly. I had mostly just wanted us to win one round and not go out like complete suckers, which we had done -- we caught some luck in our first game with the team closest to us taking their own big L on a Daily Double, and ended up winning by enough that we were already safe going into Final Jeopardy. We represented pretty well in that one, and even in the game we lost, I had my strongest individual performance of all in the Double Jeopardy round, and we were at least close enough as a team to have a real chance of winning right until the very end. All three of us had clutch moments and big misses, so while we all rued the stuff we'd screwed up, we didn't really have any cause to blame one another for not coming through. The Equizabeth Moss team that beat us was very good and super nice; I had no regrets about losing to them specifically. My girlfriend, a former trivia person herself and a good friend of the other guys, flew out to watch us tape the second round, and we all went out and got drunk in Culver City that night and celebrated how cool and crazy it was that we got to do this at all. It was a great experience overall, and I went to bed that night with a smile.
But the next morning, and for at least a couple days after, the loss did begin to gnaw at me. Intellectually I had accepted it and everything that led up to it, and even emotionally I was pretty good with where I was, but there was an unnerving quality to the finality of having been eliminated that really shook me the more I thought about it. It was a good loss, I reasoned with myself. You won the one round you said going in that you really had to win, you mostly played well individually, and you were right there in the second round -- things just didn't break your way that time, no shame in that. More and more, though, I started to respond to my own reasoning: Yeah... but you LOST. You don't get another shot at it just because you were close, just because you don't have to be thoroughly humiliated about your own performance, just because you still had a nice time. You still lost. Other teams are moving on, and you're going home.
As this creeping darkness really took root in the pit of my stomach, it started to feel increasingly familiar. I couldn't quite place where that familiarity was coming from at first -- I'd never lost early on a TV game show tournament like that before, and though I'd lost plenty in College Bowl tournaments back in the day, those were never done single-elimination style; we always still got to play to the end and then found out just how badly we'd been beaten afterwards. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize what should have been incredibly obvious to me right away, and what I imagine you've long figured out by now if you're reading this: I was having pretty much the exact same conversation about my own loss that I'd had with myself each of the last seven springs about the Philadelphia 76ers.
After most of those seven Sixers playoff runs -- five of which also ended in the second round, natch -- I'd performed basically the same emotional negotiation with myself: Well sure, I would've rather they won, but hey they were right there, and didn't some of the guys have some nice moments, and man they caught some tough breaks and it's really nothing to feel too bad about, really. That usually gets me through the first day or two -- and then inevitably, the longer the summer stretches on, the conversation turns to Yeah... but they LOST. Again. There's no Game 8 just because Joel Embiid played hard, just because Tyrese Maxey looks ready for the moment, just because Ben Simmons was outed as a late-game saboteur, just because Kawhi Leonard won Game 7 on one of the dumbest buzzer-beaters in NBA history. They still lost. Other teams are moving on, and they're going home.
In some ways, the feeling was tougher for me to shake with my own loss than it usually is with the Sixers. Partly that was because it was, of course, actually ME who would've gone on to the glory and grand prizes of victory had we won out, and not just a group of strangers wearing similar shirts who I'd inexplicably elected to be responsible for my personal happiness and mental well-being for seven out of every 12 months of the year. But mostly it was because for the Twisted Misters, there would be no next season. Part of my bargaining process post-Sixers elimination was always about convincing myself that next year would (or at least could) really be The Year, and that the year they'd just fumbled was always more of a prelude to that anyway. But I have no idea if there even will be a season two of Pop Culture Jeopardy!, and if there is, I have no reason to think we'll be invited back for it, or for any other season for that matter. Part of me had definitely hoped we'd get far enough on the show to at least establish ourselves as fixtures with viewers and producers and potentially get ourselves in the mix for any kind of future Tournament of Champions-type series that might get assembled down the line. But there's no Tournament of Second-Round Losers. In all likelihood, this was it for us on Pop Culture Jeopardy!
That part of it really did hurt. Still does, a little. We might not have known it, but we'd basically spent our entire lives prepping for this show. To get a chance to compete for the world pop culture trivia title on it and lose well short of the final goal -- and then to most likely never get the chance to try again -- is indeed a jagged little pill to swallow. There's no retooling for next year, there's no tanking for a better long-term future, there's not even any going overseas and seeing if there's another slightly less-prestigious pop culture trivia team tournament that will take us instead. There's just living with the loss forever. It's almost like if, immediately following the Sixers' 2019 loss to the Raptors, the sport of professional team basketball had simply disappeared across the globe. The Kawhi quadruple-doink would just be bouncing around our brains for the rest of eternity.
I say "almost," though, because there is one pretty big difference between the Twisted Misters and the Process-era Sixers here: We already do have one championship banner to our names. Not for Pop Culture Jeopardy! of course, but for undoubtedly the closest thing to it that had ever existed previously -- the World Series of Pop Culture, another three-person-team pop culture trivia tournament show that aired on VH1 in the late '00s. Victor, Weber and I had won the second season of that show back in 2007, taking home $250,000 for our troubles and a promise at defending our title on the third season (which never happened, as the show got quietly canceled in the offseason). There's barely any record of the show or our win on the internet by this point (except for things I myself have written about it over the years), and precious few people even remember it existing -- though a disproportionate number of those people were, perhaps unsurprisingly, present at Pop Culture Jeopardy!, including at least one or two members of the Equizabeth Moss team who beat us, as well as show producer Michael Davies (who'd also originally devised the WSOPC). But at the time, it felt like we'd spent our entire lives prepping for that show too, and to win on it was exceptionally validating -- not to mention lucrative, especially for a trio of dudes in their early-mid 20s.
To win that, and then to win this one too... it felt like a lot to ask for. I certainly wouldn't have turned it down, but it did feel right on some level for us to lose this time. We're all in a more financially and professionally stable place at this point (for now anyway), and personally at least I'm not in such desperate need any more for something to set myself apart or make me look cool (well not cool but you know) at NYU parties or whatever. I felt much better about myself as a person at this tournament, where we were not so explicitly hated by the other teams and where I greatly enjoyed meeting and commiserating with the other contestants backstage. Plus, when we'd won the WSOPC 17 years ago, we were fortunate to get that in basically just before Twitter really became a thing, so the only people who really hated on us were folks on easily ignored webboards (and the other teams at the competition -- they had their reasons). If this season of PCJ actually became a thing and all of a sudden a lot of people were watching us in the finals or whatever... it might not have gone so great. We're not a particularly likeable team, especially in a trivia context where you get to see us at our loudest and most obnoxious. I'm fine with taking a pass on finding out exactly what social media would've thought of us.
More emotional bargaining? More excuses? Yeah, well, what can I say. I never claimed to be cut out for winning. The Eagles just won the Super Bowl and I spent more of their championship week focused on how the fuck the Sixers could've lost that game to Toronto on Tuesday. If I wasn't born a loser and coward, I have certainly become one over the course of the Process era. Sixers fandom didn't necessarily make this loss any easier to stomach, but at least it provided me with a road map of how to come to terms with it, how to reframe it as something potentially positive, and then how to bury it deep down inside where hopefully it won't hurt me anymore. And the upside of us likely never going back on the show is that at least we won't have to go through this part again each of the next six years, too -- until eventually we're so beaten down and dead inside that we can't get it together enough to even qualify for the tournament. There's no next year for us on Pop Culture Jeopardy!, but at least there's a certain freedom in that -- one I can't imagine I'll ever be fortunate enough to know with the Philadelphia 76ers.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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A great read (as always) AU.