by Bob Harris
Maybe it was sheer stubbornness, or trying to feel worthy of educational chances I hadn’t made the most of, or a lifetime of using my brain as a kind of preemptive self-defense. Maybe I was still trying to prove something to my parents, but one of them was dead, and the other would give me a warm buttered pretzel if I had just knocked over a hardware store.
Perhaps it was animal instinct. In any band of primates, males compete to display their alpha-ness for the females in the troop. Maybe this was all some elaborate reproductive ruse. If so, though, it was certainly among the least efficient in history.
I realized, finally: I didn’t even know why I was there.
As the names of the non-failures were read aloud, I knew I was going home for good. So this was the end of my Jeopardy! career.
And then the contestant coordinator, Susanne Thurber, a woman of firm countenance around nervous strangers but (I would learn) sweet and funny and eager to dish about Broadway shows when sitting backstage in the green room of Radio City Music Hall, took one more breath, nearing the end of her list…and called my name.
My journey into Trebekistan had begun.
In almost a decade since, I’ve been on Jeopardy! thirteen times.
I’ve won over $150,000 in cash and prizes and defeated two Tournament of Champions winners. The show has put me up in fancy hotels on both coasts, flown me across the country twice—once for a million-dollar “Masters” tournament—given me two sports cars, and even invited me to the ceremony where Alex got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Given how things started, I barely find this plausible myself sometimes.
Along the way, thanks to doing my Jeopardy! homework, I’ve also picked up over $200,000 on other quiz shows and even helped a friend pay off his house by answering his $250,000 question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Then again, I’ve also not won on Jeopardy! with a certain inescapable rhythm—perhaps as frequently as anyone who has ever played. Nobody I can find keeps exact data on incompetence, but I’d be one of the first names in the grid.
This is fine by me. Since tournament contestants often bond like plane-crashed rugby players in the Andes, a loose fraternity of unbelievably smart and curious people has gradually developed. Win or lose, being a small part of this group is easily as great a prize as anything the show hands out.
Besides, as a lifelong Cleveland sports fan, I’ve learned to appreciate sudden, utter doom. Failure and defeat are, after all, the largest part of human endeavor. We might as well do it with gusto. Fumbling away the ball on the last play is painful; fumbling it away as you’re crossing the goal line will one day become funny as hell.
Someday Ken Jennings’s record of seventy-four straight victories will fall. Brad Rutter has already passed him as the all-time money winner. Somebody else will break Brad’s record next. Possibly someone who reads this book.
It could even be you.
You will almost certainly not, however, screw up more frequently than I have. That’s one achievement, at least, that you and Ken and Brad will probably never touch.
In the coming pages, you’ll see me lose (and occasionally win) against some of the best players in the show’s twenty-year history. I lose in Los Angeles. I lose in New York. I lose by massive amounts. I lose by one dollar. I lose in ways I see coming. I lose in ways I never imagined.
I win sometimes, too, just to keep you guessing. (And thank goodness. This book would be a real drag otherwise.) Winning is just as much fun as you’d think. So I hope you’ll feel like you’re sharing in the wins when they happen, even if our losses might often be so much more memorable.
But even this leads to a key point about memory itself, one we’ll not only revisit often, but transform into a key tool that I use during the story, and which you can use happily ever after: we all tend to remember intense, visceral, even traumatic experiences more easily than anything else. It’s hard-wired, just a part of how human brains operate. We don’t wind up with the memories we’d choose; we wind up with the memories our brains choose. These are not at all the same thing. Understanding the difference, and taking control of it, is vital to improving your memory.
It might seem strange to think of your brain as not always wanting what you do. But then, if it were easy to choose our memories, a game like Jeopardy! wouldn’t exist.
So this is a memory book, in every sense: my memories of the show, what memories I used to win on the show, how memories work in general, what you need to remember in order to remember stuff you need to remember, and someone please shoot this sentence before it devours the rest of the book.
I hope you’ll be willing to free-associate and think silly things and zigzag off the path sometimes while we’re at it. After all, daydreaming and making ourselves laugh with silly ideas is how we figure out which memories we want in the first place.
It’s also how Jeopardy! itself was invented.
CHAPTER
3
THE THING THAT CAME FROM MERV’S DINING ROOM
Also, A Hiawatha Much Bigger Than Yours
In 1963, the year of my birth, entertainer Merv Griffin and his then-wife Julann were flying home to their New York City apartment from a small Michigan village called Ironwood.
What the Griffins were doing in Ironwood, I don’t really know, although what I can learn about the place reminds me a little of the small wintry suburb where I grew up. Other than “lake effect” snow (about which you will soon learn more) in excess of sixteen feet per year, Ironwood’s most notable attraction seems to be the world’s largest statue of Hiawatha, five stories tall and made from eight tons of solid fiberglass. (The town brags about it, in fact: their Hiawatha is not only bigger than yours, it can withstand 140 mph winds. I guess you take pride in whatever you’ve got.) So whether or not the Griffins were actually visiting a fifty-foot typhoon-reinforced Hiawatha buried keister-deep in a snow drift, I prefer this to all other theories.
At the time, Merv already had an impressive career. As an actor he had appeared on Broadway and in Hollywood films, and as a singer he’d scored a number one hit with “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” which sold over three million copies at a time when the U.S. population was about half what it is now. Per capita, Merv’s coconuts were more pervasive in their day than almost any record since, the “Whoomp! (There It Is)” of their era.
Merv had also become a frequent guest on TV talk and game shows. After he became the regular substitute host of The Tonight Show, his NBC contract also enabled him to create his own game shows, a format Merv had grown to love. And it’s at that point the Griffins were approaching New York from the air.
Quiz shows back then had a bad reputation, thanks to the producers’ nasty habit of giving the players the answers in advance, the players’ custom of admitting the scam, and everyone’s penchant for going to jail. This had happened on Dotto and Twenty-One at least, and producers elsewhere had already admitted other forms of tampering. Isolation booths across America were at risk of being converted into solitary confinement cells.
However, instead of letting controversy kill their ideas, Julann and Merv let it inspire them. “What about a quiz show in reverse?” Julann suggested. As a former comedienne, she was unafraid to brainstorm and play. “Why not just give them the answers to start with?”
Once Merv got over his fear of prison, he was hooked.
As Merv has told the story in several interviews, the following was the very first clue in the yet-unnamed show’s history, created by Julann on the plane:
FIVE THOUSAND, TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY
“How many feet in a mile?” Merv responded. If this were a movie, the camera would now hold on Merv’s face for an extra moment. The idea would twinkle in Merv’s eyes. The music would then crescendo, leading into a busy making-it-happen montage with plucky-sounding woodwinds in the background. The fifty-foot Hiawatha would smile knowingly in the distance.
Months of run-throughs followed, mostly at Merv’s dining r
oom table, as he worked out the details of game play using friends as contestants. Not everything worked right away; Merv’s original game board was reportedly a ten-category by ten-clue monster, too large to work on TV (although the right size for fiberglass giants).
Still, Merv kept working, and the plucky woodwind music soon gave way to a trumpet fanfare. The first run-through for NBC was held in a small theater in Radio City Music Hall. The original working title: What’s the Question?
NBC’s response was mixed: Merv’s pet project needed—and this is really what they said—“more jeopardies,” meaning greater consequences for incorrect answers. Merv, however, heard what they were saying a little more creatively.
You can pretty much see how that worked out.
The program’s original host was Art Fleming, an actor with no experience hosting game shows. (He was told by his agent simply to act like a game show host, a part he grew into for ten happy years.) The announcer was NBC’s legendary Don Pardo, whose voice has adorned almost every human activity in Rockefeller Center since nine days after the Normandy invasion, including news programs, Saturday Night Live episodes, and probably even the fire drills.
NBC’s market research had determined that the show was too difficult, and needed to be dumbed-down to the level of the average junior high school student. Fortunately, Merv ignored them completely, and Jeopardy! was an instant success. The show debuted in March of 1964, as did the Final Jeopardy “Think Music,” a brief lullaby Merv had originally written for his son. This was to become the most lucrative lullaby in human history.
The original game’s dollar amounts now seem microscopic: $10 through $50 in the Jeopardy round and $20 through $100 in Double Jeopardy. However, considering inflation, $10 in 1964 would be worth over $60 today. So the money hasn’t really gone up by a factor of twenty; it has in fact only tripled.
The game differed from the modern version in several additional ways. Players were seated in comfy chairs instead of standing. The game board had cardboard pull-cards instead of fancy TVs. Second- and third-place contestants kept their winnings. And players could ring in as soon as the clue was revealed, which allowed a few fast readers with sufficient knowledge to dominate their games utterly. The best example was a young navy sonar operator named Burns Cameron, who won the equivalent of over $200,000 in current dollars. Burns’s record stood throughout the show’s original run.
The people of Ironwood and thousands of other snowy small Midwestern towns loved the show, which aired at lunchtime during most of my childhood. Unfortunately, NBC made an ill-advised time-slot change, the ratings wilted, and the show finally departed in January of 1975.
Fans cheered up, however, when Art Fleming returned in a new syndicated edition in 1978. In this version, the competition ended after Double Jeopardy, and instead of Final Jeopardy, the winner was given the chance to play a five-by-five board in a Bingo-like attempt to complete a five-clue line.
Baffling? You bet. But this was the height of the disco era. Lots of things were confusing. Back in Ohio, I was reaching the age when it was time to figure out how to attract girls, precisely as ludicrous dancing in tight polyester became the height of fashion. It was a difficult period for all concerned.
This awkward, eager-to-fit-in version of Jeopardy!, which tried so hard to please everyone but only made people turn away no matter how much it smiled, retreated from the public after only about a year.
Finally, in 1984, Merv Griffin and King World Productions snapped Jeopardy! back to life for one last attempt. Market research was negative (measuring its own uselessness quite accurately yet again), but two recent developments made the show seem worth a shot: (a) Merv’s Wheel of Fortune had become a major syndicated hit, and (b) the board game Trivial Pursuit had turned into a national mania.
The show’s new announcer would be Johnny Gilbert, a courtly Virginian with an easy smile who could charm a coma ward into applauding on cue. (Coincidentally, Johnny had also replaced Don Pardo on The Price Is Right, another popular game show. One wonders if Don Pardo will leave his seat in a movie theater without looking over his shoulder for Johnny.)
And Alex Trebek, a broadcasting veteran born forty-four years earlier in Sudbury, a snowy blue-collar town at exactly the same latitude as Ironwood, was brought on as host, producer, and soon-to-be icon. During the show’s formative years, Alex personally signed off on many key elements, including the writing staff and even the clues themselves.
The format itself was updated—the cash values of the clues were increased dramatically, the winner-takes-all format created more challenging wagering, and the set was glammed out with cutting-edge mid-eighties electronics that went whoosh and p-TING! (actually two F notes an octave apart, the lower one played a split-second before the higher)—and finally, on August 14, 1984, Alex read the very first clue in modern Jeopardy! history, in the category ANIMALS for $100:
THESE RODENTS FIRST GOT TO AMERICA BY STOWING AWAY ON SHIPS
OK, so “What are rats?” was not the most glamorous start. But the show wasn’t getting the glitziest time slots, either. Many local program directors, showing a familiar disdain for their viewers, still thought Jeopardy! was too difficult for a mainstream audience. In New York, the most important syndication market in the country, it was originally broadcast at two in the morning.
Yet twenty-plus years and over 5,000 episodes later, the show has won more than twenty-five daytime Emmy awards, including a record eleven statues for Outstanding Game Show and four more for Alex as Outstanding Host. At this writing, the show has been the highest-rated program in the genre for over 1,000 weeks, a longer-running success than over 99 percent—literally—of the shows that have debuted since.
Meanwhile, not one of the programmers who considered the show too demanding for their viewers has played himself on The X-Files, guest-announced for Wrestlemania, or been impersonated by Will Farrell. So much for market research.
The success of the Jeopardy! mothership has spawned numerous spin-off products, including at least fifty—fifty—various home games. In addition, loyal fans have created online simulations, Jeopardy!-themed websites, and at least one ongoing attempt to chronicle every clue and response in the show’s history. (There have been, incidentally, over 300,000 clues. And counting. I hope these folks occasionally get out of the house. Then again, as you’ll see, I’m hardly in a position to talk.)
Over the years, the producers have added variety with frequent special tournaments, many of them recurring events. The Tournament of Champions became an annual dogfight of returning champs, snarling and growling and reciting Shakespeare over a six-figure prize. Similar tournaments for Teen and College contestants showcase each year’s crop of intimidatingly precocious young people. The producers have also freshened the show by adding video and audio clues, many of which are read by the Clue Crew, a team of bright and engaging Alex-in-waitings who, I like to believe, all live together in a van and tour the country fighting crime.
Like any burgeoning empire, Jeopardy! has also swept across distant lands, with local versions in Canada, England, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, Israel, and Australia. This led eventually to the International Tournament of 1997, which was won by Michael Daunt, a mild-mannered accountant from Canada with a kindly demeanor and a killer instinct that emerges about once every twelve seconds. A second International Tournament in 2001 was won by Robin Carroll, a homemaker from Georgia with a sweet smile, a warm laugh, and the ability to bring grown men to their knees with her thumb.
These were soon followed by a Masters Tournament in 2002 and eventually the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005. These both included (a) seven-figure prizes; (b) yours truly, still wearing shoes bought for a funeral; and (c) a young man named Brad Rutter, who is able to swallow other contestants whole without even needing to chew.
As you probably know, the show has recently received more attention than ever. In the fall of 2003, the producers decided to eliminate the mandatory retirement of fiv
e-time champions. Before long, a soft-spoken Salt Lake City software engineer named Ken Jennings (aka the Stormin’ Mormon, the Utah Computah, or the Splatter-Day Saint) became a celebrity by winning seventy-four games in a row, frequently causing opponents’ heads to explode in eye-catching flames. The show’s ratings skyrocketed as America was gripped nightly by the sight of Ken’s opponents keeling over with fear, weeping balefully, and/or pleading with the producers for mercy. After which they would ask Ken for his autograph.
Today, Jeopardy! has rightly assumed its place as a national touchstone, Alex Trebek has better name recognition than most U.S. senators, and Merv’s lullaby “Think Music” is played at everything from baseball stadiums to weddings. If the show were any more popular, Alex and Merv would be worshipped as gods on small tropical islands, their temples consisting of three thatch podiums and a lovely bunch of coconuts.
Incidentally, Merv has made over $70 million in royalties from the “Think Music” alone. I probably have to send him a dollar now, just for mentioning it. His production company eventually sold for about a quarter of a billion dollars.
That might seem a bit, um, huge, but give the guy his due: forty years ago, Merv recognized the value of a loopy idea and backed it with hard work, even when quiz shows were a nearly impossible sell. He spent months experimenting and daydreaming. He kept himself open to feedback—the show’s title itself came from listening to criticism—and, most of all, insisted on respecting his audience’s intelligence, even when well-paid bosses insisted otherwise.
Is it all that surprising that Merv now zips around on a yacht the size of three fiberglass Hiawathas laid end-to-end and holds an ownership stake in (roughly speaking) one-third of the earth’s crust? It would be a lot more surprising if he had disrespected his audience and wound up with all that.
