Unhealthy Competition

The Academic Decathlon is a competition which is held at the city, state, and national level, with the best team in each contest moving on to the level. The teams consist of nine students per school, beginning at the start of the school year. The city competition is held in the late fall, giving about four months to study.

My junior year of high school I was a member of my school’s team.

Teams are broken down into three groups of three students separated by their grade point average. My closest friend at the time, Sung, who was on the previous year’s national winning team, was in the honors group, which consisted of students with high A averages.

Mike, a friend and classmate of mine, who was slightly less scholastically lazy than I, and with whom I had once cheated on the California Test of Basic Skills simply because we could, was a member of the scholastic group, or those with B averages.

I myself was a very lazy student, but my ability to take tests and excellent memory made me a member of the varsity group, underachievers with C averages.

There were six others to round out the team.

John, one of the four Armenians that had invaded that year’s team, and Debbie, who was mousy, quiet, and possibly evil, were the other honors group members.

The other scholastic members were Daniel, a devout Korean Christian whom we referred to as “Godboy,” and Sergey, a Soviet Russo-Armenian immigrant with dreams of becoming the head of the Federal Reserve.

Leslyn was a late arrival to the team, who replaced Natalie, a team member who had accepted the spot, asked to start late, then quit, and James, the last of the Armenians and one other returning member of the previous years team.

For three months, we studied intensively. Well most people did. I lacked the work ethic of my peers, and would venture off to empty classrooms to study on my own and take naps. I rarely wrote the required essays, never took my speeches seriously, and was just plain terrible at mathematics. To some on the team, it seemed I was treating the competition as a joke.

Sung, my good friend, who had been the one to encourage me to try out, took the most offense to my work ethic. Our friendship became strained as he berated my study habits and talked down to me. His assumption, like so many, was that I lacked a competitive edge.

We stopped talking, he took John and Sergey under his wing, making boisterous claims that under his tutelage each of them would outscore me. Our coach, Chase, who seemed to have more confidence in my performance than Sung, made a bet with him that Mike’s and my combined score would be higher than those of John and Sergey.

The fight, which was already personal, became oppressive.

Frustration from practice tests added to the fire. Much to Sung’s surprise, I was not only able to keep pace in most subjects, but often scored as high as he himself did; not that this did anything to improve his attitude toward me.

Eventually the competition came and went. If we were fighting with one another as we studied, now we were at war with every other team in the Los Angeles Unified School District. We took our tests, gave our speeches, answered interview questions and wrote our essays, finishing with a final quiz that was televised locally.

We would wait a week to obtain the results.

Over the three months of studying, I would come home late at night, go to school on Saturdays, and was basically absent. I wanted to show my family I was capable, that I could see something through, and maybe even accomplish something impressive.

When it came time, a large number of my family came out to see the results of our effort, chief among them my mother. She walked into the Bonaventure Hotel Banquet Hall, accompanied by my brother and his girlfriend. She looked at me, a smile on her face. She started to speak.

I wanted her to be proud. I wanted to make her proud.

“Either on New Years Eve 1978 or New Years Day 1979,” she said, “You were conceived in this hotel.”

And then she walked past me and took her seat.