Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  Two down, three to go.

  When this game was broadcast, it was preceded by a commercial for the Anthony Hopkins film Amistad, which I never saw because I was too busy studying.

  This may seem like a stray and unnecessary fact at this point.

  On the other hand, maybe there’s no such thing as trivia; maybe there’s only knowledge we have yet to fully grasp.

  Either way, I’ve never seen Amistad. Just saying.

  Back to the green room.

  Ten pairs of eyes watching now.

  I knew that the waiting contestants would be even more curious and worried now than I had been. Matt, on my first day, had won only one game. Now I had won two games, and everyone knew it. This was an edge I could press. But any bravado would now play as insecurity, so I just smiled and laughed as before.

  Still, stuck in the green room, they had no way of knowing I had just racked up my second runaway. I would have a more commanding position if they knew. I tried simply to let a confident walk tell the story so far, and hoped that one of the departing players might share the full outcome.

  One did.

  Everyone in the green room would now think I was a dominant player. I considered this insane. But they had no way of knowing that.

  Change the shirt. Comb the hair. Put on a different sport jacket, this time a ratty green corduroy mess. Pee.

  Get ready to do it all again.

  But first, make sure the other players can see you smile on the way to the stage.

  And remind them, in the spirit of kind fairness, that they should absolutely not be nervous.

  Enlightenment, my ass. I wanted more.

  My third game of Jeopardy!

  Now batting: a jury consultant from Chicago and a grad student from Columbus.

  What is Uranus? for $400.

  What is the Sunflower State? for $500.

  What is bioluminescence? for $500.

  Before the first commercial, three of my eight correct responses came as a direct result of study. By the end of the first round, my total was as much as the two other players’ combined. It almost seemed easy.

  I came across bioluminescence, incidentally, while flipping through a dictionary, the sort of thing I had taken to doing as a rest break from Chuck-a-palooza at home. Bioluminescence, you will begin telling friends, is the phenomenon where meat becomes so rotten that it actually starts to glow.

  Wow. You barely even need a mnemonic. Glowing meat? Are you serious? Bright red, rotten meat, glowing with blue and green light? I’m less worried about remembering it than not having a camera when I see it someday.

  Halfway through the Double Jeopardy round was this clue:

  THE HUGO AWARD FOR THIS TYPE OF LITERATURE HONORS HUGO GERNSBACK, WHO COINED THE TERM

  Annika never came to a Jeopardy! taping. Other players had friends and family in the audience for support. I didn’t. It didn’t even seem strange at the time, which tells you how alienated Annika and I had become.

  What I couldn’t have known was that one day, years later, I would return to the stage with someone at my side who had actually won a Hugo award.

  What is science fiction? could describe how this felt.

  This Hugo Award winner would meet Alex, and she would be slightly starstruck, enough that when I mentioned her award, she would explain what a Hugo Award was to Alex, modestly thinking it was too small a trophy for anyone to know. Alex would know, of course, but he would smile and nod, a congenial host even when the cameras are off.

  Jane would be a lot of fun to be with that day.

  This game was my third runaway. Entering Final Jeopardy, I had three times the score of the nearest competitor.

  Center stage with Alex. The Remington Dual Microscreen Shaver! DeWitt’s Pills, the affordable back remedy trusted by millions! And (as every day now) a Honeysuckle White Turkey brought near physical climax by two lascivious hands!

  Green room. Eight pairs of eyes watching. Shirt, jacket, pee, all smiles.

  I wanted more.

  Game four.

  A management consultant from Virginia and a vice president of marketing from Pennsylvania.

  What are barrels?

  What is polo?

  What is a carpenter?

  Who are the fishmongers?

  What is a scrivener?

  I have just locked up my fourth straight game by running an entire category called LONDON CITY GUILDS, something I never once studied or thought might come up on the show.

  To this day, I am not exactly sure how this happened. Honest.

  I saw the word fishmongers in Mad magazine once. I know that for sure.

  During the third commercial break in this game, wrangler Glenn made a friendly remark about how I was doing, using Frank Spangenberg’s name as a touchstone.

  Frank, you recall, was the New York transit cop with the walrus mustache and the efficiency of a Borg-like computer, the highest-scoring five-time winner in the show’s history.

  Glenn’s remark was something like: “You’re doing well. Not quite Frank Spangenberg well. But not a bad run so far.”

  Years later, Frank’s name, like Chuck’s, is still a gold standard. In Jeopardy! terms, this is like being told as a writer, “You’re pretty decent. Not Mark Twain, but not incoherent.”

  I was glad not to face Frank Spangenberg on this day. Even as well as I was doing, I knew I would have been stomped.

  Center stage. Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup! Caltrate Pills (because it’s never too late for Caltrate)! The Libman Wonder Mop!

  Green room. Six pairs of eyes now greeting me, looking more downcast by the hour.

  I wanted more.

  But I was starting to tire. So I was starting to get nervous.

  Nervous is not what I was prepared to be.

  After the third game of each taping date, Jeopardy! breaks for lunch. This does not, however, mean that you get to relax.

  For security reasons, Jeopardy! must quarantine the surviving contestants from all human contact. Otherwise, an audience member from an earlier game could theoretically tip off the challengers, passing along notes on the categories already played or the champion’s propensity for shoving things up his nose.

  We were therefore marched to a commissary across the Sony lot, escorted by a watchful Glenn and Grant, who set a light and airy tone, roughly ninety percent Cub Scout parade, ten percent Luftstalag. This was delightful, given the stress involved. We sat at tables carefully placed away from all other living things, and munched on our sandwiches and salads in nervous silence.

  The remaining contestants continued to scrutinize me slyly. I had to maintain the act of cool, quiet, confident reserve.

  This was more difficult with each passing minute.

  The next game was for more than just cash. After five wins, Jeopardy! awarded the retiring champion a new car and a guaranteed spot in the annual $100,000 Tournament of Champions.

  I so didn’t want to screw this up. I was starting to stress, fearing my own anger at myself if I did.

  At the same time, I was looking forward beyond the final game to come. I suddenly had over $43000. While this was modest compared with the prizes now routinely handed out, it was more money than I had ever seen in my life. Screw cool reserve: I wanted to turn cartwheels across the restaurant floor. I was out of debt again. I could pay the rent for a while, no worries. I could call Mom and Connie and tell them I done good. I wanted to dance and sing and scream in fear and run around in circles shouting boogety-boogety woop-woop-woop yah GAAAH!

  Instead, I just nodded when spoken to, and listened, and smiled, and tried not to show my nerves, fatigue, and excitement.

  Under the table, where no one could see, I was snapping my fingers back and forth, over and over and over.

  I knew that if I let the stress take over, I would lose my fifth game. While extreme stress can jump your memory into high-speed Record mode as a survival skill, it also kills your recall. Imagine your brain as a bit like a VCR, which
can’t both record and play back at the same time.

  Think back to any moment of real, genuine, I’m-gonna-die danger: a car wreck, or an earthquake, or tripping headlong down a marble staircase toward a pack of hungry weasels. Would remembering that Franklin Pierce was associated with Valentine’s Day through a hail of arrows, and was thus the fourteenth president, have been any help whatsoever? Probably not.

  Your body knows that. And so in those I’m-an-entrée! moments, while it’s busy paying close attention to everything that’s going on right this freakin’ second, it ditches your ability to remember anything that isn’t.

  This is why even the brightest and most talented people can still sometimes choke under pressure. It’s just biochemistry. Believe it or not, your body reacts to stress—virtually any stress—with almost exactly the same biochemical changes it would use to evade a horny ocelot. The differences are pretty much a matter of degree.

  You already know how your body reacts to any decent-sized freak-out. Your adrenal glands do the lambada, secreting adrenaline with every step. This opens up the main supply pipes to your liver and muscles, while narrowing your smaller blood vessels. Your heart rate and blood pressure jerk upward, and you breathe faster, flooding your tissues with oxygen. Meanwhile your adrenals also pump out steroids called glucocorticoids, which tell your liver to get busy with the conversion of fat and proteins into sugar to rocket-fuel your muscles and brain.

  You can see where all of this is going. In the next few seconds your body will be prepared to kick ass, run like hell, or simply start screaming your lungs out.

  None of which, you notice, would do much good on Jeopardy!

  Of course, all this sudden spidey-strength comes at a price. Say a brief farewell to your digestion, immune system function, assorted reproductive processes, and (here it comes, yes): higher mental abilities.

  Major buzz, dude.

  And this is how your body always responds to stress, from any source.

  Ever have the feeling that your stress itself was what was keeping you from thinking? Maybe you’ve brain-locked during a job interview, or while taking a test you knew you should have passed. Everyone, at some point, becomes lamely tongue-tied around cute members of the desired gender.

  Now you know why. These are your glucocorticoids talking. You just want to remember a physics equation or charm the hottie down the hall into a date. Your body, meanwhile, thinks you’re fighting off a pack of wild baboons. Thus the confusion.

  I was starting to get more nervous than I had been in any of the previous games.

  If I won: the car alone would be worth as much as the first four games combined. If I lost: I didn’t want to get this close to my goal and fail. I was afraid of my own frustration. Which I knew, of course, and trying not to think about it was frustrating in itself. Death spiral. As I felt my stress continue to climb, I was afraid I couldn’t control it.

  Under the table, where no one could see, I was snapping my fingers back and forth, over and over and over and over and over and over. Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

  This was another state-dependent retrieval strategy, a highly targeted type called anchoring. I had read about this, too, in the previous weeks, and hoped it might help to reel me back in if I started flipping out.

  You see anchoring in sports all the time, although the word is rarely used. Basketball players have careful routines before free throws, golfers may have precise sets of practice swings and waggles, and some baseball players have whole Kabuki ceremonies when stepping into the batter’s box. These routines may not seem to bear directly on the act to be performed, but they do, absolutely: consciously or not, these athletes have created physical triggers to invoke desired sequences—e.g., glove-twiddle, hip-shimmy, crotch-grab, and spit, now go!—which help topple the neural dominoes they need most: concentration, relaxation, confidence, etc.

  As an emergency measure, I had tried to create my own ball-bouncing, hip-waggling, crotch-grabbing, get-ready-now routine, only targeted to create a desirable emotional state of not-flipping-out. (And with less crotch involved than most athletes use. It’s a family show.)

  The recipe for creating an anchor is simple: just create your desired emotional state—say, “calm and in total control,” for example—by using conventional memory of previous experiences in exactly that state, until you start feeling the state returning, intensely. Then pick a physical movement to which no meaning is yet attached—the “anchor” you’ll use later—and start burning in the connection by practicing the movement while you experience the emotional state.

  Since your brain is already on Record, the feeling and the physical anchor will automatically start connecting. If you’re anchoring an intense emotion, the process is pretty quick, since that’s precisely the crashing alien roller coaster that gets Homer Simpson turned on at the bullfight. (If you just opened the book and read that last sentence out of context, it cannot be explained. But trust me: the tour group knows what that means.) Later you can put the anchor to work just by throwing the process in reverse: the anchor itself will fire the neurons that invoke the emotional state.

  So, about two weeks before Jeopardy!, I needed an inconspicuous, personally meaningless motion, one specific enough that I could always repeat it. That particular night, the film West Side Story was on cable, so I whimsically chose the odd left-right-left finger-snapping motion used by one of the dancing gangs. I’d never personally been in a dancing gang in New York, so the neurons controlling this movement had no existing emotional connections.

  Every day, I spent a few minutes in a quiet, darkened room, closing my eyes and remembering times when I felt confident, relaxed, and in control. This wasn’t a huge list. Once I had the desired set of feelings cranked up pretty intensely, I began and repeated the West Side Story finger-snapping movement, intentionally ironing in a physical trigger for calmness.

  Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

  I felt like an idiot, incidentally.

  I didn’t even tell Annika about it. I really didn’t need another eye-roll.

  Sony cafeteria, a few minutes before my fifth game.

  Fingers under the table, low enough no one can see, over and over and over and over and over. Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

  I did not, in fact, instantly experience a sensation of control and complete personal serenity.

  However, I also didn’t run around the room shouting boogety-boogety woop-woop-woop yah GAAAH! even though I really, really felt like it.

  So I think the anchor was working.

  Game five.

  This time I can’t turn to my fellow contestants, reminding them not to be nervous. I’m snapping my fingers, closing my eyes, trying to take my own advice.

  A physician from Anchorage. A tour guide from L.A.

  We march out. I stop snapping my fingers. Feeling OK, but not great. Nerves coming back.

  Less than thirteen minutes and one Final to go.

  Alex emerges, calm and relaxed. I envy him those feelings. “Happy Thanksgiving, ladies and gentlemen” are his first words.

  Yes! I am thinking, yes!

  Reviewing my Thanksgiving pages: Mayflower…something. Squanto. Um. Bradford. Somebody. Shit. Shit. My brain has begun to shut down.

  On the tape I am smiling. I giggle nervously, laughing with Alex. Inside, I am fighting an oncoming flood. Glucocorticoids, damn. Notebooks in flames in my head.

  Alex reminds me of the stakes. “If he wins today, he will qualify automatically for our $100,000 Tournament of Champions coming up later this year, and he will have his choice of some fabulous GM cars,” Alex says.

  If.

  Chuck! Can you hear me, Chuck? I seem to have misplaced your book! Chuck!?

  The very first category:

  PILGRIMS

  Mayflower…um…Plymouth Rock…Squanto…Bradford somebody…Squanto. Who the hell is named Bradford, for crying out loud? Shit.

  The entire category goes by. I respond once.
I win on the buzzer not a single time. My timing is off. My reflexes aren’t normal. My body thinks I am being towel-snapped by a ravenous badger.

  While the badger and I wrestle mightily, I don’t win on the buzzer until the eighth clue.

  At the first commercial, I am in second place. It is the first time I have trailed in five games. My body mistakes the situation for a dozen more badgers, hungry, and armed with wet towels.

  At the end of the Jeopardy! round, I’m in a distant third.

  During the two-minute commercial break, I turn slightly away from the other players, facing the back of the stage.

  I know damn well that I’ll have no idea of one-third of the responses to come. With my reflexes shot and memory failing, there’s a limit to how much I can expect.

  It was a good run, I tell myself. This was a blast. The money will be a big help, and you’ll remember doing this for the rest of your life. What the hell.

  This moment of surrender allows me to breathe deeply for the first time since the green room before the first game. I start enjoying the moment instead of freaking out about the future. And then I notice: I am actually relaxing.

  So I fire my anchor, snapping my fingers, left-right-left-right snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity, a one-man dancing gang.

  I am hoping to crank up my serenity.

  The sheer absurdity of all this strikes. I can’t tell if it’s working, or a placebo effect, or if I’m just amused now at feeling so silly. But I can breathe while I’m laughing. Something is working, anyway.

  This is the last round I will play today, win or lose. And whatever happens, I intend to enjoy it.

  This brings us to the ninth and final step along the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy, one worth an extra exclamation point for emphasis: