On Saturday, May 12, 2001 DCG hosted the Fourth Annual USA Memoriad (Memory Championship) in New York City. The USA Memoriad is an Olympiad for ‘thinking’ games. Tony Dottino teamed up with Tony Buzan, founder of the World Memory Championship and Mind Sports Olympiad, to bring this competition to the US in 1997. Set up as a sporting event for Mental Athletes, the USA Memoriad consists of five memory challenging tournament-style competitive events including: 99 Names and Faces, 500 Random Words, Speed Numbers, Unpublished Poem and a Shuffled Deck of Cards.
The top three winners of this year’s competition were presented with a pair of Business Class Round trip tickets to London each, courtesy of British Airways, a sponsor of the USA Memoriad since its inception. While in London, the Mental Athletes will compete in the World Memory Championship in August of this year.
Eighteen Mental Athletes from around the country came to match their skills against reigning three-time champion Tatiana Cooley. As the day unfolded, it appeared that she would be given a run for her money...the scores were so close that no one could predict the outcome until it’s arrival!
By the end of the day, there was a new US
Memory Champion, first time Mental Athlete, Scott Hagwood. Scott is a chemical
engineer from North Carolina who considers himself of “very average
intelligence”. After being diagnosed with thyroid 
cancer
several years ago, Scott was concerned about the effects of aggressive treatment
on his mental faculties. While undergoing several days of intensive radiation in
isolation, he practiced some of Tony Buzan’s memory techniques he read
about in Use Your Perfect Memory. The results speak for themselves. Scott
now holds the national title as well as 2 U.S. records by scoring 105 points in
Names and Faces and by memorizing an entire deck of shuffled cards in five
minutes. We are also happy to report that Scott has been in remission for well
over a year.
Tatiana Cooley, an executive assistant from New York City, placed second in the overall competition. Tatiana has enjoyed her reign as the US Memory Champion since 1997 when she walked into the competition exclaiming, “I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do on a Saturday in New York City than play games with my memory.” She just missed her fourth title by 13 points but did manage to set a new U.S. record of 202 points in the poetry competition. At the awards ceremony, Tatiana announced her retirement at a young age of thirty-something and graciously gave her tickets to the fourth place competitor, Mykie Pidor, a high school student from New Jersey and a three year veteran of the competition . The Bronze Medal was awarded to another new-comer, Joshua Walker, a Computer Programmer from North Carolina.
Among the Mental Athletes were nine high school students from the Bergen County Academies in New Jersey. In 1999 Tony Dottino was invited to the school to teach students some memory techniques to assist them with their studies. He told them, “Consider your brain just like any other muscle in your body...the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. And unlike other muscles, it gets better with age.” The students quickly caught on to the techniques and decided to compete. Two of them, Eric Chang and Coral Parmar were Silver and Bronze Medallists respectively in the 1999 U.S. competition and went on to place second and ninth out of thirty in the World Memory Championships that year.
For more information on the USA Memoriad, please visit the web site at www.usamemoriad.com
