John Nam

John Nam
Noted subjects	Unknown
Current college	None
Past colleges	Maryland
High school	Unknown
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

John Nam was once a quizbowl player for Maryland. He is probably best known for founding ACF along with Carol Guthrie and Ramesh Kannappan, and for playing quizbowl for a really, really long time. He was also the assistant coach of the 1990 Maryland Panasonic team.

Nam played collegiate tournaments for Maryland on-and-off from fall of 1986 through spring of 2002 and continued to participate in open trash events through at least summer 2009. It was a more-or-less open secret that Nam graduated from Maryland in 1990, spent the next three years at GWU law school, and subsequently did not meet any reasonable standard of college eligibility, despite continuing to play for Maryland for another 12 years after 1990. This was far from the only such case prior to the tightening of ACF eligibility rules in approximately 2007.

The Maryland Members and Alumni Page contains the following information about John Nam:

"One of the three founders of ACF (along with Carol Guthrie and Ramesh), John was playing quiz bowl for Maryland when this year's freshmen were still crawling. He has some unfortunate habits, among them a gambling problem and an unequalled propensity for trash talk. In fact, John boasts that it was his trash talk that led Ramesh to study and become good. Sometimes this trash talk is crude, as in this example from a euchre game at Michelle's place: "You suck a lot, Colvin. I'm going to make you my woman." Sometimes it is foolhardy, as in this example from halftime when John was up 15 points against an unnamed team at Maryland Masters: "Ha! See? We're going to treat you like the bitch-dogs that you are!" The other team proceeded to answer 9 of the last 10 tossups."