Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  A key breakthrough in physics was the Michelson-Morley experiment, meant to measure a pervasive invisible space-goo called the luminiferous ether. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because Michelson and Morley so definitively didn’t find space-goo that soon it was clear that it didn’t exist. In other words, their work so thoroughly discredited their own ideas that they radically leapfrogged our understanding of the universe. (Coincidentally, they were working in Cleveland, at what became my alma mater, in what became the department where I got a degree.) Failure, taken far enough, can be brilliant success.

  The greatest logician of the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel, pioneered entire fields of mathematical reasoning that brilliant minds take years to comprehend. However, much of what he proved with indisputable math was that many things cannot be proven. That much, you can prove. Outside of his work, he was a schizophrenic convinced he was being poisoned by unknown beings. So that’s humankind’s greatest logician.

  Mark Twain (a distant relative, it turns out, but then aren’t we all) suffered great personal tragedies, could not handle money, and slowly became depressive with age. He was rescued from ruin when he started to drink with the ruthless head of Standard Oil, Henry Rogers, a robber baron so merciless he was widely known as “Hell Hound,” a man Twain’s characters might have once held in the deepest contempt. Rogers, in turn, was humanized by the great humanist, and donated small fortunes to the education of black Southerners and numerous others in need. So Twain’s distressed kindness, returning the friendship of a man he could have judged harshly, was redeemed many times over, in the end.

  Fun to contemplate: Twain’s financial woe may well have indirectly led to the education of Helen Keller. It can be hard to know good news from bad.

  The world is far stranger than I could ever have hoped. So are all of us in it—spectacularly mixed bags, varying less by absolutes than degrees.

  Gandhi, great soul, disowned his own firstborn. Einstein’s first published paper asserted deep significance in the action of drinking straws. Arthur Miller, sensitive dramatist of family issues, pretended his youngest son didn’t even exist.

  Ancestrally speaking, the Windsors of England are more German than English. George V switched to “Windsor” (from “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”) in 1917 when England was warring with Germany. It would be hard to persuade young men to die in the trenches to prevent Germans from taking over if it seemed clear that they already had. So, Windsor it is. Carry on.

  There seem to be as many examples as there are human beings.

  How fragile and brilliant and vain and sad and vulnerable and ludicrous everything started to look. A strangely familiar world began to open. No one had ever told me this, but the whole of humanity seems to be mostly a bunch of screwups who do their best, get it right most of the time, but often don’t.

  Yes, yes, of course plans fail, leaders are corrupt, and self-proclaimed paragons get caught with their pants down. History screams: this is normal. That’s just what we humans often do. But we also learn and recover and rebuild and nurture each other in magnificent ways.

  Which is why striving to be better, every day, and with all of our energy, is so damn difficult, rare, and admirable.

  It’s why pride is a sin and humility a virtue. And so at least four words in the Concordance were now making more sense.

  Very slowly, my Jeopardy! notebooks started changing, from a list of dry information I needed to memorize to outlines of things I wanted to know more about, field guides to a world I’d barely even seen.

  When I first saw Trebekistan in the midst of a battlefield, Bull Run had been made into a park. My parents paid to get in, and some guy led us around, so it all had a special-world air to my child’s mind. It never occurred to me that the whole planet is actually like that hillside in Virginia, if you learn to start seeing with more careful eyes.

  I wanted eyes like that. I’m still trying to see to this day.

  As was becoming habit now, I checked the air dates for the Tournament games. Only the two-day $100,000 final, pitting the three remaining contestants from a field of fifteen, fell on significant dates.

  The first game would air on February 12: Abe Lincoln’s birthday. The second game would air on a Friday the 13th.

  A notebook soon filled up with everything Lincoln. Phobias took over another.

  Of course, it would be useless if I didn’t make it through the first two rounds.

  The gods of state-dependent retrieval received proper tribute.

  The bright lights and bookcase-turned-podium would remain in place for the next four months. (Even if Annika, on the other hand, might not.) My never-rest study habits would continue. If it was good enough for A Clockwork Orange, it was good enough for me. But I realized there was still more I could do.

  The effect of physical state on recall has even been proposed—with some good evidence—as extending to the foods you eat, the medicines you’ve taken, and how much sleep or caffeine you have had. Rats who are given an intravenous drip of alcohol before learning to run a maze will later repeat the maze better when drunk than sober. (They’ll also be more comfortable wearing little party hats, doing Jell-O shooters off each other’s tummies, and flashing their tiny rodent breasts while squeaking “whoo.”)

  Such is the power of physical state.

  On a taping date, I would have to be awake at 7:30 a.m., and I would play my actual games sometime between noon and 5:30 p.m. During the day at Sony, I would have access to a limited menu of food and drink, although I could surely sneak protein snack bars into the green room. So: with rare exception, every day for four months, I awakened at 7:30, studied most intensely between noon and 5:30 (often standing at the bookcase that doubled as my practice podium), and ate exactly the green room snacks and protein bars I would eat on a game day, plus a Sony-lunch-style sandwich around 3:00 p.m.

  Annika was usually at work. But not on weekends. So two days a week, I shared my life with someone who definitely thought I had completely lost my mind.

  This was entirely possible.

  It’s also likely that I was involuntarily responding to another type of programmed retrieval: classical conditioning.

  We all remember Pavlov’s Dog: ring a bell when you’re feeding the dog, and soon the dog starts salivating at the sound of a bell, even in the absence of food. (Pavlov himself, incidentally, was as trained as one of his dogs: he rose, ate each meal, and slept at the same time every day, vacationed each year at exactly the same place, and always left on the same day on the calendar—p-TING! indeed.)

  I had just spent weeks on end training myself to push a button and feel smarter a few seconds later. And then, on national television, I had pushed a button and gotten rewarded, pushed a button and gotten rewarded, and pushed a button and gotten rewarded, over and over and over.

  In some sense, I’m not sure the Tournament of Champions—or any external stimulus—even mattered. Of course I was still pushing the button.

  Perhaps I was Pavlov’s Contestant.

  Further on in my notebooks, you’d also find the following lists of information:

  State Flowers and Birds

  Different Shapes of Seashells

  Diacritical Marks

  Names of Foreign Parliaments

  And so on.

  Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking. Or if the word “thinking” even applies. Jeopardy! asks for STATE CAPITALS, sure, but I’ve never seen the flowers or birds without some sort of hint.

  Seashells? Wow. Was I really expecting to be asked to reel these off? What are—left to right—a chiton, a cowrie, a whelk, and a limpet?

  Diacritical marks? What the ellipsis was I thinking?

  I was certain, however, that the parliaments would be helpful. Knowing my Knesset from my Althing would matter someday.

  More important, though: I wanted to know this stuff.

  I couldn’t imagine not wanting to know everything about everything. Every day was a rush of excitement,
new knowledge and worlds and perceptions unfolding. I was an eager captive, unable and unwilling to leave.

  I was imprisoning myself in Trebekistan.

  Halloween came. On the calendar this time. The air date of my very first game.

  My phone started to ring at 4:30 p.m., just as the show was ending back east.

  Mom thought I looked nice. Connie thought I looked healthy. Old friends who knew me called just to catch up. I didn’t realize there were so many, or that it would feel like such a prize when they called.

  Surprisingly, most people commented on how very confident I looked, how calm and in control, how completely relaxed. How bizarre. I was “the funny one,” that odd Jeopardy! player who seemed comfortable onstage. Clearly, my Midwestern years of doing comedy in VFW halls, dance clubs, and other near-combat conditions were finally starting to pay.

  Other callers and e-mailers had other agendas. A cousin I didn’t know needed money for business. An old boss called me up for a loan. A girl I had dated perhaps twice in college thought I looked better than I had in school. She mentioned the exact total of money I had won in that day’s game. Twice.

  Another round of calls came around 5:00 p.m. Chicago friends now. Jeopardy! was moving across the map like a storm front.

  A series of Frequently Asked Questions was already developing. What is Alex like? (I dunno. I’ll ask him next time.) Do they give you anything to study? (No.) Really? (Really.) They don’t give you anything to study? (No.) Then how do you know all the answers? (I don’t. And I study.) Well, how do you know what to study? (Excuse me while I stab you in the lungs with my phone antenna.) Because it seems to me—(URKuhhhhhgh.)

  At 6:30 p.m., I heard from a waitress I’d known briefly in Michigan, now living in Arizona. She only mentioned the money once.

  At 7:00 p.m., our local broadcast began. I was almost as nervous watching as playing. Perhaps this time I would lose.

  Annika and I plopped on the couch for the show. She was nervous, too, almost giddy. She blurted out answers and rooted and wagered and played along eagerly. She mentioned how confident I looked on the show, and smiled proudly at last when I won.

  The buzzer-flash glint in her eyes had returned.

  The week of Thanksgiving was more of the same. Friends calling friends, and those friends calling me. The phone rang a bit more every night. Men tended to point out a response they knew that I didn’t, asserting themselves competitively. Women more often pointed out responses that no one knew, creating safety. Rarely are stereotypes so grossly confirmed.

  A few friends came over to reinforce these stereotypes over pizza and soda while my games aired four nights in a row.

  Me, I ate protein bars.

  My next-door neighbor David had a lot of pizza and soda that week. We’d met a few months after I moved to L.A., when he knocked on the door, hoping to borrow a hammer from a stranger. I invited him in for a beer, offered him any speed-reading book in the toolbox, and pretty soon I had a best buddy in town.

  You’ve seen David on TV, even if you don’t watch much TV. He’s not famous, but he’s constantly working. I’ve seen him in a lot of roles, but mostly he’s on a certain show about crime scene investigators in Las Vegas. He tends to get splattered with blood a lot.

  On the show, I mean. If he does this in private, I don’t know about it.

  David has the honor of being the first person to introduce me to someone as a Jeopardy! champion. He did this about once every three seconds, possibly in his sleep. “Hey, this is my friend Bob. He won on Jeopardy!,” David would say. And then, sometimes, just to prove the point: “Hey, Bob—what’s the capital of Namibia?”

  I would smile, pleased for his affection and proud to be called smart, but a little embarrassed at the trained-monkey moment. It was like being my parents’ child again. But not answering was never an option. Pavlov’s subject was well-trained.

  David would know this. David would love this. “Come on, Bob. What’s the capital of Namibia?”

  Windhoek, I’d say, and then would come laughter. I’m not sure how often the show-off-ee was amused, but for us the game was a fun one.

  I don’t remember who he introduced me to this way first.

  The last person he introduced me to this way was Jane.

  After millions of people had seen my five games, for a time I was recognized with surprising frequency. For a few days, it was almost every time I left the house. Each time, I reviewed the Jeopardy! FAQs once again from the top, with occasional slight variations.

  While eating a burrito, I was once asked to repeat the $500 word for meat so rotten that it glows. Bioluminescence, I replied. I never finished the burrito.

  Unfortunately, public discussions of dazzling meat, even brief ones, meant more time spent away from my studies. Leaving the house would have to become the exception. My own personal Ludovico Technique wouldn’t allow it: I had notebooks to study and straitjackets to wear and pried-open eyes to have droplets plunked into and It’s a sin! It’s a sin! to cry out.

  I told most of my friends to pretend I had left the country for a few months.

  David called a few weeks before the Tournament and asked me if I wanted to attend the movie Amistad, with Anthony Hopkins. I said no; I was too busy studying American Presidents that day.

  You may notice that this is the second time Amistad has been mentioned, and for no obvious reason. Perhaps you even sense the presence of connections unseen.

  Well. With that kind of buildup, if Amistad doesn’t pay off somehow, I suggest you get your money back.

  Annika’s appreciation for the project again cooled.

  One day, almost out of the blue, she actually said this while I was poring over a list of Famous Inventors:

  “You do realize that the other players probably have real educations, right?”

  As a matter of fact, I did. I also realized that I just couldn’t imagine Annika as the “her” for the his & hers Camaros.

  (Actually, I couldn’t imagine sharing the his & hers Camaros with anyone, including me. I was, after all, well into my thirties. Camaros are for high-school quarterbacks with easy hair. At my age, driving a Camaro projects an entirely different image. To look the part fully, I would need to start wearing aviator sunglasses, shiny shirts unbuttoned to the navel, and someone else’s head entirely.)

  When the breakup with Annika finally comes—very soon now—it will only be a couple of sentences long. You’ve been way ahead of that, anyway, since the first mention of Jane. The end of love can be as gradual as its beginning is sudden. But after a certain point, the rest of what follows is just moving furniture.

  Whatever mistakes or flaws in our relationship may have been Annika’s doing, my own were much larger. She wasn’t the one trying to study the world by scrupulously never leaving the house. She wasn’t the one transforming our apartment into a well-lit Skinner box. And I certainly wasn’t the most attractive guy at the moment.

  As the last weeks before the Tournament passed, I began playing my practice games wearing my clothes for the show. This makes perfect state-dependent sense. Theater groups do exactly the same thing. But theater groups are probably a bit more careful about doing laundry in between. The spare hour required seemed a luxury. There was so much to learn.

  My diet became even more focused on green room cuisine: danishes, muffins, cola, and protein bars mostly, plus the Sony-lunch tuna croissants. My body was well trained for a Jeopardy! day. It was also well trained for washing up on a beach, huffing for air, and being carted back to sea on a pallet by concerned marine biologists.

  I hadn’t exercised much. An extra hour of review always seemed more important than, say, maintaining my cardiovascular system or supplying oxygen to my brain. A spare hour of sleep seemed luxurious, too. When you’re trying to learn everything that ever happened anywhere to anyone, it’s hard to know when to stop.

  By the night before the first Tournament taping date, I had put on almost fifteen pounds. I was sleep-de
prived. I was constantly exhausted. I was depressed because I was losing my girlfriend.

  And all I had to do now was overcome fourteen players who knew more than I did. Then, finally, all of my problems would be solved.

  Clearly, I had everything under control.

  CHAPTER

  12

  JEOPARDY FEVER

  Also, I Am Ambushed by the Bishop of Hippo

  Jeopardy!’s standard tournament format was devised by Alex Trebek himself, when the show ended its first season with fifteen five-time champs. The format works, so it remains:

  The fifteen top players of the year are invited.

  Taping takes two five-show days, creating two weeks’ worth of games.

  The first day is a preliminary round. Nine players survive: the five winners, plus the top four remaining scorers, who advance as “wild cards.”

  On the morning of the second day, these nine contestants play a semifinal round of three games.

  That afternoon, the three winners play a two-game, cumulative-score final.

  At worst, you play once and go home. At best, you play four games and win.

  Part of what makes the format intriguing is that it doesn’t actually require four wins; the only game you must win outright is the semifinal. With a wild card in the first round and close second-place finishes to different opponents in the two-day final, it’s conceivably possible to come in second three times out of four and remain standing at the end.

  On the first day, in fact, you shouldn’t even care about winning, but focus only on finishing well. If this reminds you of the eighth and ninth steps on the Eightfold Path, you’re thinking ahead like a champ.