Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  I was thinking ahead myself on exactly this point at about 6:00 p.m. the night before the first game. I was walking through the lobby of the Beverly Hilton, where Jeopardy! bunked all of the players. I was trying to stay calm and focused. I was just going for some coffee, one last jolt of caffeine, and then I would try to relax for the night.

  I had everything under control.

  Surrounded by the hotel’s metallic gold fixtures and weaving through the metallic gold clientele, I was thinking about how the tournament format might affect my wagering.

  And then I noticed I was feeling kinda woozy.

  I had studied FAMOUS ATHLETES. I had memorized MAJOR BATTLES. I had immersed myself in THE BODY HUMAN, ANATOMY, and PSYCHOLOGY.

  One thing I had forgotten to brush up on, amid all the overwork: HUMAN LIMITATIONS. By bedtime my body temperature was well over 100.

  I had once again gotten something in my nose.

  Being sick in a posh hotel does have its advantages. If you cannot even rise to walk down the hall, for example, you can pay someone wearing a metallic vest to bring you a large shiny ice bucket.

  You can then lie on your back and stare at a roomful of gloss, or look out a window at Los Angeles’s metallic gold air, and try to take your mind off the fact that you have managed to destroy any chance of winning, before you have even reached the studio.

  By morning, my fever was simmering quietly. I dressed and just tried not to panic. I was moving as smoothly as a fifty-foot fiberglass Hiawatha, and feeling about as intelligent.

  The green room began in the golden-trimmed lobby. The Jeopardy! wranglers assembled the sixteen of us (fifteen plus an alternate) and led us to a Sony-supplied van. We all piled in, wondering who would survive, and made small talk in rush-hour traffic.

  There was little one-upmanship this time, however. Everyone here knew that everyone else here was good. The tone was quiet, focused, reserved, tense, and unrested. Saving it all for later.

  I did the same, even more.

  As we stepped onto the Jeopardy! soundstage and began the morning rehearsal, no one was dazzled. No one was surprised by rotating in and out. We’d all done this before. So the rehearsal was now a chance to assess the competition.

  Everyone was fast. Everyone was good. Everyone in the room was in peak combat condition, muscles rippling and bulging from their sleek thumbs of steel.

  Whether it was my fever disrupting my timing or the others’ equal ability, I couldn’t ring in at all. My buzzer advantage was gone.

  My light just kept staying off.

  Any edge I had gained from my studies also seemed to dissolve. Tournament clues are a notch harder than normal. At this level, all of my work had still only brought me up to perhaps average in this group. And I was slower of mind on this day by some margin.

  I was beginning to panic. If I lost and went home, I would feel stupid for months. I was frightened of losing in public. I was frightened of facing Annika. I would lose her, possibly from my own selfishness, and very likely for nothing, in the end.

  The players filed back to our seats in the green room, where the day would soon tick by. We would be led out in threes, not knowing when we would be called next. The rest would remain, waiting.

  Those left in the green room could know nothing of the games under way, lest later players gain an advantage in knowing the wild card totals. Based on past years, however, the amount needed to feel certain of advancing would be about $10000.

  To me, it might as well have been a million. Everybody here had played like brilliant assassins, and everyone knew it, so a collegial atmosphere floated over my enveloping dread. I shrank into a corner chair, trapped in a room with Lee Smarty Oswald, Lynette “Clicky” Fromme, Sirhan Buzzerer Sirhan, sharing professional respect for their infamous skills.

  I imagined they all had concealed backup buzzers in holsters strapped to their shoulders and ankles, just in case shit went down bad.

  Even without the genital-sniffing primate behavior of earlier green rooms, however, one player projected a high-powered Confidence Field, the same one I had projected on the day I won four games, only stronger. His relaxed smile and pressureless humor inflicted light psychic damage in every direction. He was slightly older than the rest of us, and he smelled of freshly inked manuscripts and tenure. When he spoke, his eyes inspected the listeners’ reactions as if he were grading their response on a curve.

  When Berkeley arose in conversation, it soon emerged that he was a professor there. This concerned me. I leaned forward, closer, playing ahead, looking for clues.

  His necktie was adorned with a motto in Latin. It was a Harvard school tie.

  An Ivy League Serial Killer was in this very room.

  His name was Dan Melia.

  I could feel my fever rising again.

  Worse, I knew it would rise further as the day dragged along. Every minute was harder. I hoped for the earliest game. I just wanted to play first and lie down. Failing that, I would hope not to get stuck with the cold-blooded Killer, or at least that he would show mercy, and not track down my family in Ohio and defeat them all, too.

  I would hope for a miracle.

  One other player bears mention here, although we barely spoke on this particular day: Arthur Phillips, now a best-selling novelist, author of Prague and The Egyptologist, well known for his intense mind and quiet dry wit.

  In the green room, his powers of concentration were on display. He prepared himself mentally by retreating to the northeast corner, where he sat, eyes closed, listening to music in a pair of headphones, focusing focusing focusing focusing as if trying to move test objects in some remote parapsychology lab. Except for the occasional twitch of his brow, only his heart and lungs ever moved.

  The rest of us didn’t want to distract him, but if you waved a piece of notebook paper in front of his forehead, it would burst into flames.

  This was hours of fun.

  Finally, Susanne called three names:

  Come on, come on, come on…

  “Kim! Fred! Lyn!”

  Crap.

  My temperature throbbed up one degree.

  Nearly an hour passed. Routine production cramps, contestant turnover, between-show resetting of every doojobbie, and the time-distortion field generated by my own throbbing head were all conspiring to create a series of tiny enormous delays.

  Finally, Susanne called three more names:

  Come on, come on, come on…

  “Paul! Claudia! Josh!”

  I got hotter.

  An hour later, three more. And I no longer cared who I played. Even Dan.

  Come on, come on, come on…I do not fear Jeopardy! death…

  “Dan! Peter! Craig!”

  I got hotter.

  Then lunch. And again. Three more names. None was mine.

  I would have to play last. It was almost five in the afternoon already. By now I was lying on my back on the carpet in the makeup area. I had given up on advancing, and was only trying not to make the other two remaining players sick.

  They couldn’t have been kinder. Wes Ulm was a med student from Boston working on a gene therapy project. I believe one day he will find a way to deliver cures for cancer at the cellular level. Grace Veach was a librarian from Decatur and a new mom. Someday she will find a way to deliver all the information in the library into her young boy’s lucky head.

  They were both also funny and genuinely sweet. Wes, true to the Hippocratic Oath, was more concerned for my health than for the game we would play. Grace got me cold water and made me laugh. I would cheer for them both. I was glad at least one would advance.

  This was the first time I ever met anyone else who had studied in the weeks before the show. Wes hit the books, of course, simply by getting out of bed in medical school. Grace studied, in her own words, “too much, obsessively, every spare moment.” The three of us watched another hour tick by, punctuated only by the soft gurgle of my will to live trickling out on the floor.

  Fin
ally: “Grace! Bob! Wes!”

  Dead Man Walking again.

  Even with video to review, the game’s just a haze that I don’t recall very well. You can see on the tape as we walk out, however, that the three of us are rooting each other on, glancing and smiling at each other in the introductions.

  This was so much better than my “don’t be nervous” bullshit. I began the game feeling like an ass for having done that in my earlier games. A sleep-deprived ass, in fact, with slow reflexes, still little real knowledge, and a cranium pounding with fever.

  I just wanted to go home. Except Annika would be there.

  The game begins.

  Wes quickly whips out the Forrest Bounce, swerving from category to category. Against a guy whose head he knows is already spinning.

  I am relieved. I feel like much less of an ass. At the podium, all oaths are off.

  After months of continuous study, I know few of the responses. It feels like I’m back on Mom and Dad’s couch in the Snow Belt. In the first dozen clues, I respond exactly once on a lame $100 clue. I keep my hand off the Weapon and wait for my doom.

  I glance up at the scoreboard, involuntarily curious to see the results of nearly three solid minutes of textbook futility. I have, in this moment in this game, exactly one hundred more Jeopardy! dollars than you do.

  And I am, I discover, in the lead.

  Wes and Grace still must play each other, of course. They are still under considerable pressure. So they are ringing in with bad guesses. I’m the only player with any money at all. One Who is Danny Bonaduce? later, I am practically pulling away at the first commercial break.

  Keep your finger off the button, I am thinking. Just don’t shoot yourself, and maybe Grace and Wes will nail each other in the crossfire.

  Since I know even less here than usual, maybe the way to win is by playing even less than usual. This may not seem logical. But you’d have to ask Gödel, and he’d just think you were trying to poison him.

  In the interview segment with Alex, I seem surprisingly lucid and animated on tape, talking even faster than normal. I do not remember a glimmer of this. When I look at the video, what I see are my unsteady hands, visibly shaking when I gesture.

  The game resumes. In the first minute I give two wrong responses. So much for not shooting myself. I am so discombobulated that I can’t even reply to this $100 clue in the category PETS:

  THE SMALLEST OF THE HOUNDS, THIS POPULAR PET IS ACTIVE & INQUISITIVE—YOU MIGHT EVEN SAY SNOOPY

  In my first game, against Matt, I deduced the Great Pumpkin by detecting multiple hints and making a snap analysis of the relative database sizes. Today (and your internal voice should slow for comedic effect here), I cannot remember that Charlie Brown’s dog is a beagle.

  Still, a category on celebrities plays to the only slight advantage I might have over a librarian and a med student. At the end of the Jeopardy! round, I find my timing and quickly reel off:

  Who is Bob Vila?

  Who is Erik Estrada?

  Who is Anthony Edwards?

  Take that, smart healthy people with real educations!

  My superior knowledge of WATCHING TV WHILE KILLING TIME IN MOTELS carries me back into the lead, with more points than Wes and Grace combined.

  Six minutes to go and I can lie down and sleep. Possibly right at the podium.

  The Double Jeopardy round feels much more like six hours. I respond to the first clue—What is a bake-off?—and am thereafter beaten on the buzzer to every single response for over two full minutes.

  Grace seizes the lead, and by the twelfth clue, I am a mute, distant third. My thought process is so slow that I’m not even completing some of the clues in my head. For example:

  AFTER THE BURMANS SACKED AYUTTHAYA, SIAM’S GOVERNMENT WAS MOVED TO

  Two podiums to my right, Wes buzzes in, while my eyes are just reaching

  THIS CITY

  at the end of the clue. My brain scrambles to catch up: Siam is the old name for Thailand, I think, and the capital of Thailand is Bangkok. But I hear Wes responding “What is Bangkok?” correctly.

  Wes and Grace both open fire without mercy:

  “Who is Ken Follett?”

  “Who was Frederick the Great?”

  “What’s a portcullis?”

  Yes, I say to myself. What IS a portcullis? To this day, I have not the slightest idea.

  As a piercing headache sets in, I realize that I am nowhere near winning or even reaching a wild card. So I feel compelled to guess. Several times.

  This is a transgression against all that is Enlightened Jeopardy, an unwise straying from the Eightfold Path. Punishment comes swiftly. I spiral downward, giving four wrong responses in the last eight clues, driving my score almost all the way back to zero. It is surely among the least-competent seventy-two-second periods in the history of the show.

  Alex gives the scores at the end of Double Jeopardy as follows:

  “We have Grace at $8300, Wes with $5700, and Bob—faltering slightly there, winding up with $1600.”

  Faltering slightly.

  The first question in the Jeopardy! FAQ is “What’s Alex really like?”

  I don’t know what “really” is. It’s not like we hang out up at the lush Jeopardy! Mansion, kicking back Potent Potables in a Jacuzzi with leftover groupies whom Johnny Gilbert turned down. I’ve never met Alex outside a Jeopardy!-related context, and for show security reasons, I assume I never will.

  But I have stood a few feet away from him for a total of several hours now, conducting a strangely disjointed conversation while trying to keep two other people from butting in. And I do know this much: the guy is always rooting for every contestant to do well. Always. I rarely glimpse his face during a game, with my eyes locked on the game board, but I hear the joy in his voice whenever any tough clue is conquered or a big Daily Double pays off.

  After over twenty years, he still gets excited when the games are close, and he appreciates it when people play well. He often seems to wish everyone could win.

  He’s good at the rest of the job, of course. He’s too modest to admit it, for example, but I am convinced he really does know most of the responses. But there’s a much more important aspect of Alex’s job that I’ve never heard anyone fully appreciate.

  Every day that Alex Trebek goes to work, he has to deal with five batches of three bright but nervous people competing for piles of cash that could change any of their lives. He can offer just the slightest encouragement to anyone, lest it appear he is taking sides, and he can provide only an occasional bit of gentle humor without risking throwing a player off stride.

  Since the best players work from the rhythm of his voice, his smoothness is completely essential. He often goes entire shows without blowing a syllable, sometimes with phrases from five different languages. His gig is a bit like a referee’s job in football: you only notice he’s human when something doesn’t go right. If he mispronounces even a single rata-tat word, be it in Latin or Chinese or Russian, it can disrupt the game, breaking a player’s timing. But perfection will not even be noticed.

  And at the end of all that, almost every single day, there will be a moment where Tilly from Phoenix or Walter from Yakima or Bob from Cleveland will suddenly not respond correctly. This will cost them dearly. And it is Alex’s job, then, to explain gently that, no, sorry, they will not be buying a decent car, they will not be paying the mortgage off early, they will not be sending their kids to college. I have never seen this appreciated, and it should be: Alex’s job, as much as anything else, is to be a graceful bearer of bad news to most of the people he meets. Day in, day out. And Alex has to communicate this bad news in a matter of seconds, projecting both authority and compassion, with a wink and a smile, and see you next time on Jeopardy!, so long.

  It’s not coal mining like my grandfather did. It’s not lifting stuff like my dad. But in its own way, that’s a hard job for anyone with even a decent heart, no matter how much you get paid.

 
; This is the role of the Oooh.

  You have seen the Oooh. And the Oooh is good.

  “Faltering slightly” was Alex’s way of saying, “It was a good run. Sorry it didn’t work out. Good luck to you.” This was a somewhat elaborate Oooh. And I appreciated it.

  Still, it wasn’t so bad. With Grace already nearing the coveted $10000 mark and Wes at $5700, there was a good chance they’d both advance to the next round. And they’re both cool people. So, OK. I’d worry for their safety, knowing the Ivy League Serial Killer might be lurking nearby. But I was glad for them.

  At $1600, I knew I had no shot whatsoever. So when it was time to wager before Final Jeopardy, I bet it all. There was no real risk, anyway. Besides, the Final Jeopardy category was U.S. CITIES, and my many years on the road wouldn’t hurt.

  However.

  p-TING!

  THIS HISTORIC CITY WAS NAMED FOR THE BISHOP OF HIPPO ON WHOSE FEAST DAY THE AREA WAS FIRST SIGHTED

  I had not the slightest idea. While the Think Music played, my mind wandered again. What follows is what I thought about for the first ten seconds or so, written in prose perhaps more lucid than the inarticulate panic I was feeling, given that my brain was about to ignite.

  Annika would think I was a fool. And perhaps she was right.

  Trebekistan is a fine place to visit, but not at the expense of your actual home. I had driven myself to exhaustion in what was really nothing but a massive feeding of my own ego. No wonder I was thirty-five and still so chronically single.

  My sister, back in Ohio, would see once again what I’d done with the one college education between us. I still would have done little to make her life truly better.