road trip and a night in a Motel 6, we arrived bleary-eyed at the testing site, where I struggled to concentrate for four endless hours. When the test was at last over, I met back up with Todd. The first thing he said to me was, “What’s ‘ostentatious’ mean?” And I told him it meant, like, “showy” or “over the top.” Todd nodded subtly to himself and then, after a second, said, “Cool. I got them all then.”
And he had. Perfect score on the SAT.
* * *
It was Todd who had the idea for me to join the Academic Decathlon team, although at first blush I seemed a poor candidate. I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential,” in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t actually have that much potential. But in my poor grades, Todd sensed an opportunity.
Academic Decathlon, sometimes known as AcaDec, features ten disciplines. In 1994, there were seven “objective” events featuring multiple-choice tests: economics, fine arts, language and literature, math, science, social science, and a “Super Quiz” in “Documents of Freedom.” There were also three subjective events graded by judges—an essay, an in-person interview, and the performance of a speech.
Every school’s AcaDec team has nine players: You get three A students, with grade point averages above 3.75; three B students, with GPAs above 3; and three C students, whose GPAs are 2.99 or below. For all you non-Americans out there, that means three of each school’s players get excellent marks, three get good ones, and three must be . . . fairly bad at school. I, as it happened, was terrible at school. Todd believed that with his patient instruction and my awful grades, he could mold me into an Academic Decathlon superstar.
And so beginning in our junior year, we studied together. We read an entire economics textbook, and whenever I found part of it inscrutable, Todd would frame the topic in ways that were comprehensible to me. When we were learning about marginal utility, for example, he explained it to me in terms of Zima.
Todd would tell me, “Look, you drink one Zima and you feel good. You drink two, and you feel better, but the added benefit is smaller than between zero and one. The additional usefulness of each added Zima gets lower and lower until eventually the curve inverts around five Zimas and you throw up. That’s marginal utility.”*
So we learned economics, but we also learned art history, and chemistry, and math, and much else. Through studying for Academic Decathlon, I learned about everything from the Indus Valley Civilization to mitosis. And thanks to Todd, I became a very capable Academic Decathlete.
I don’t want to brag, but at the Alabama State Academic Decathlon of 1994, I was the Lionel Messi of C students. I won seven medals—four of them gold—out of a possible ten events. I won a bronze medal in math, even though that year I received a D in precalc. Admittedly, none of my scores would’ve gotten me into the top ten among A or B students, but I wasn’t competing against them. For the first time in my academic life, I felt like I wasn’t an idiot.
I won gold medals in topics I thought I sucked at—like literature and history—and also one in speech, which was especially surprising because I’d always been a poor public speaker. I hated my voice, the way it betrayed my omnidirectional anxiety, and I’d done terribly in debate competitions. But with AcaDec, I’d found a place where I could flourish. Our school won the state competition, which meant we’d qualified for nationals, to be held that year in a hotel ballroom in Newark, New Jersey.
Over the next few months, my growing academic confidence, combined with study skills learned from Todd, meant that my grades started to improve. I was briefly at risk of losing my coveted C-student status until I realized I could tank physics to keep my GPA below 3.
That April, the nine of us and our coaches flew up to Newark. We made friends with other nerds from around the country, including a C student from the Midwest whose name was, I think, Caroline. She had a good fake ID and managed to smuggle a twelve-pack of Zimas to us.
Todd was one of the leading A students at nationals, and our little team from Alabama ended up finishing sixth in the nation. I even won a couple