Kelly McKenzie
Kelly’s career with the Kentucky academic team before 1997 is somewhat difficult to recall: he himself doesn’t remember much from those days, which were mostly spent with a squad which at that time directed almost all its efforts towards play in the intrastate league, with only a few forays to out of state tournaments (usually in Michigan, of which then-coach John Kuchenbrod was an alumnus); furthermore, statistics were less well-maintained then. A story he once told Seth involves an ACF Regionals (perhaps that of 1996? No statistics have been recovered) where he and a player named Ali Veazey competed as the UK team and Kelly’s statistics were something like 33-22. This story is significant for a number of reasons. In the first place it shows his penchant for taking interrupts (he would have that for the rest of his career, albeit in numbers nowhere near as high as that); in the second, it reveals that his numbers started out in the neighborhood of 17-18 points per game - assuming Regionals played a then-standard 12-14 games- which would be in the neighborhood of what his averages would be in 1997-1998. Of course, 18 points per game is by no means unrespectable, but for a junior (as he was then) with a few years of quizbowl experience it marked him as at best an average player.
In 1997 freshman Robert Osborne and graduate student Seth Kendall joined the University of Kentucky’s team. At the urging and under the guidance of the latter, the UKAT began to venture out of the state on a regular basis and eschew the inferior-quality in-state league (it would continue to play in it for the remainder of the year, long enough for Kelly to collect a championship for Division I and Robert to collect one of his won for Division II), beginning the process by which the modern UKAT would evolve. At the 1997 Illinois Open, his first tournament with these two teammates with whom he would enjoy so much success in the future, Kelly (now a senior) averaged a solid 20 points per game, second on the team behind Seth’s 45 and just barely beating out Robert’s 19 (this was Robert’s first collegiate tournament ever, it should be noted). At that tournament the team finished fifth, respectable for the new team that the UKAT basically was. Under Seth’s direction – which manifested itself not only in his scoring leadership, but in his suppying material for practice, his insight into what things were worth learning for quizbowl, and other nuances of the game which he had picked up in his three years’ worth of experience from his undergraduate days, lessons which Kelly picked up with alacrity – the Kentucky team began to become more and more powerful, finishing third at the 1998 Regionals and winning the South Carolina Invitational. Kelly began to improve, as well, averaging 30 PPG at that year’s Regional and solidifying himself as the team’s Number Two; his 24 PPG average for the year reveals that he had become a slightly above average player, and had this been his zenith he would have been worthy of respect as a decent player but would not, ultimately, have been remembered as among the game’s greats.
Kelly always had an instinct for the game, and he began to see that the 1997-8 Kentucky team would remain a good team but nothing more if it continued as it was. Kelly would not be satisfied with playing on a good but second-rate team, nor with being a good but second-rate player, and he began to take steps to change both standings. Over the summer he began to learn things, beginning with American Literature, and in addition he began to write questions (he would ultimately use them in an in-state league tournament, which were then and have remained the best questions that league had ever seen). The results were immediate and dramatic: at the first tournament of the 1998-1999 season as part of a two-man team at UTC’s first Center of the Known Universe, Seth remained the team’s leading scorer at 56 PPG, but Kelly was right behind him with 48, enough to earn him his first all-star award. More significantly, he had doubled his PPG from the previous year’s average in only one summer. Throughout the remainder of the season, Kelly – who had been a solid second player behind Seth – began to emerge as the Seth’s equal, and by the end of the year he had actually outscored his teammate at two ACF tournaments (he had already regularly outscored Seth at NAQT touraments). The team began to improve with Kelly, as well; and while Seth was the squad’s leading scorer at Nationals that year, is was as much Kelly’s contribution as Seth’s that the UKAT would attain its fifth-place finish. All told, Kelly had gone from a 24 PPG to a 36 PPG player in one year, playing with the same teammates; he had, in other words, increased his scoring by 50 percent.
After the 1999 season Seth left Kentucky after collecting his MA, leaving Kelly and Robert to maintain the team's momentum. Unfortunately, Robert was also absent for much of the year, having encountered some difficulties with school which required much of his spare time (though he also managed to go from a 17 PPG freshman to a 31 PPG Junior by the end of that year), so the burden of carrying the team became Kelly’s. Undoubtably he received some support from his teammates, but Kelly was clearly to be the draught-horse, and he did not disappoint: over 1999-2000 he transformed himself from a 36 PPG scorer in the previous year to a 74 PPG player by the end of the season. Now, it was no longer a question of Kelly being a a good player; he was now a dominating one, raking in individual decorations at every ACF tournament that year and MVP at two of them, while his teams achieved practically the same basic level of success as the 1997-1999 teams had done. That was almost entirely due to Kelly, who was beginning to be recognised for his sudden and impressive scoring prowess. Moreover, as was clear from the above, he had done it through sheer study and hard work; while he had never been wholly unskilled, his new scoring pyrotechnics were entirely the result of self-improvement. He had become great, but that was only a shadow of what was to come.
For the 2000-2001 season, Seth came back to Kentucky to pursue his doctorate, but even had a year out of the game not completely dulled his own skills, there would have been no chance of Kelly going back to a secondary role behind him: he had already turned the corner and become a truly comamnding player, and now Seth assumed the number two spot behind him. Joined by Robert, whose schoolwork had relented enough to let him resume an active role with the team, Kelly led the team to a string of tournament wins culminating – in terms of importance, if not chronologically – in the team’s first Regionals victory and, later, to fourth place at ACF Nationals. Kelly himself earned several tournament All-Stars (he finished second in scoring at ACF Nationals), and had built himself into the prototype of the modern ACF strongman: fast, a master of almost all tossup leadins, and aggressive, his willingness to buzz in early and take interrupts on occasion made him even more intimidating, such that it always seemed that Kelly was controlling the pace of the game: tossups would get eight words in and Kelly would buzz, and whether he was right or wrong, it seemed he always had the initiative. This mastery was achieved in part through his prodigious studying programme (his notecards numbered in the thousands) and in part through his continuous writing of questions, the fruits of which resulted in a high school tournament and, later, in the first of three highly praised Wildcat Invitationals, all of which serving to demonstrate that Kelly not only knew how to score points on packets, but knew how to write them, as well. In recognition of his playing and writing ability, he was accorded the signal honor of being asked to edit the inaugural ACF Fall tournament (he would perform this task three times in all, each set better than the last).
In the summer before the 2001-2002 season, Kelly won his first Singles tournament (the one attached to that summer’s Chicago Open), and went on to win those following 2001’s Washington University and that following ACF Regionals 2002. He also led his teams to three tournament victories and snagged a number of tournament MVPs, and edited the first ACF Fall and wrote and directed his second Wildcat. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment in that season, though, was his leadership of the team to the finals of ACF Nationals, and while the team fell short, Kelly’s play was nothing short of inspiring.
Kelly really hit his prime in the 2001-2002 season, and would continue at the height of his powers through the next year. He proved this over the summer, where he not only won yet another Singles event, but also did something few players in the history of quizbowl have done before or since: he won a tournament playing solo (in this case, the 2002’s UTC Moc Masters). Three tournament wins and numerous MVP scoring awards (including those at ACF Regionals in Chicago and at ACF Nationals) followed during the year, which ended in a third-place Nationals placement. He reached his apogee during that summer, however, propelling his team to a win at Georgia Tech’s NATSSO, repeating his solo win at that summer's incarnation of the Moc Masters (he averaged 105 points per game at that tournament), winning another singles tournament at the Chicago Open, and - in what may have been his greatest quizbowl achievement - leading the team that captured the Chicago Open title (defeating a superteam of Andrew Yaphe and Zeke Berdechevsky to do so).
Kelly was at the top of the game going in to the 2003-2004 season, at whose first tournament he effortlessly picked up another solo tournament win (at which tournament Kelly averaged 116 points per game). By the end of the semester Kelly sadly began to lose his passion for quizbowl (Robert had graduated at the end of it, though he would be eligible for the remainder of the year’s tournaments), though he still had one last breathtaking achievement left: in the 2003 ACF Regionals, Kelly played solo and won the tournament, during which he averaged 114 points per game and managed to answer 18 tossups in one match. Nothing could be more telling as to the level of perfection Kelly had acquired, and nothing better illustrates how far he had come: in the 1996 Regionals Kelly averaged something like 17 PPG, almost 100 points per game less than his totals at this one, and he won one of the most challenging tournaments of the Academic Competition year while playing alone. It was a fitting way to leave the game, which Kelly would do – more or less – after Nationals that yeat, where he led his team to a fourth-place finish. Kelly would come back after a whole year out of practice in 2005 as part of an exhibition team at Regionals, and while he was not able to win, he did average 97 PPG; as an exhibition team his scoring was not officially recognised for awards, but it is significant that at his last tournament Kelly unofficially led the tournament in points production one final time.
It is the nature of this game that players forget about those who came before them, and that those players who are remembered are looked back upon with cynicism: they cannot, it is reasoned, have possibly been that good, an assessment too often unfairly corroborated when those past greats do occasionally pick up the buzzer again to discover that their once-mighty powers have faded from lack of practice. Those who come later cannot possibly understand just how complete Kelly’s rule over ACF was between 2000-2004. The statistics, the countless individual accolades and MVP scoring awards, the number of singles tournament victories, the number of regular tournament wins to which his leadership impelled his teams, his own four solo tournament wins, these tell a tale, but they cannot duplicate the experience of playing with him or against him, watching him dismantle even the best teams on even the hardest of questions. What is easy to see, however, is the enormous jump he made between the skilled but unremarkable player he was in 1996 to the godhead he had attained by 2003, a status he attained entirely through his own efforts. Kelly is not only one of the best players ever to play ACF (though he was also very good at NAQT, leading the UKAT to a Sectionals win in 2001), but is also perhaps the single greatest self-made player who ever lived; by practicing, studying, and writing, he became a force of nature. If any player ever wonders how high he or she can climb through hard work, look upon what Kelly has wrought with admiration, and follow his example.