On the Eighth Day of Lino: 6 wins, 1 loss, 1 tie

December 2006-February 2007: Here's a real oldie-but-goodie that only listeners from the very beginning would remember. Back in the earliest days of the show, before Lets Make A Catholic Deal, The Inquizition, or Him, Hymn or Her, there was the show's first game: Beat The Catholic Guy.

The premise: Lino would match wits with another member of the Catholic Channel crew in a trivia contest, with subjects ranging from church history to current events to TV show theme songs. Each contest was 'hosted' by Adam "The Hammer" Hamway, who is currently the producer of The Catholics Next Door with Greg and Jennifer Willits (10:00am-1:00pm ET weekdays). One interesting (and I think by far the funniest) component of the game was that the rules of the game were constantly modified as the series ran its course, primarily because some unforseen event actually happened in a game and there were no rules to deal with whatever happened. So the rules were tweaked to deal with it, only to seemingly have something else go wrong the next week.

Over the 2½ months that the game ran, Lino competed against Father Dave from The Busted Halo Show, Gus Lloyd from Seize the Day, Dave and Susan Konig from Speak Now, and Bob Dunning from Across the Nation, as well as program director Rob Astorino and general manager Joe Zwilling. (Father Paul Keenan of As You Think declined to participate, which probably was a good decision on his part.) He was a perfect 5-0 against the other hosts, and he scored a win against Rob as well. But when he was matched up against Joe Zwilling the contest ended in a tie. This prompted a rematch several weeks later (and a tiebreaker rule so that it wouldn't happen again), where Lino's unbeaten steak came to an abrupt end... as did Beat The Catholic Guy.

Shortly after his loss the show did a 20 minute retrospective of Beat The Catholic Guy, featuring many of the best clips from the various games. Lino then told us that the contest would be going on hiatus for the next few weeks, but sadly, the contest never aired again. It's a pity... while it was on the air it was hilarious fun.