The last two days, I have gotten a ridiculous amount of support and congratulations over my appearance on Jeopardy from my friends and family. It was a thrill of a lifetime, and crossed off maybe my biggest bucket list item.
A lot of people have a lot of questions. I have been waiting for weeks to tell this full story. Most of your questions will be answered here…
So, fellow Kossacks, please take a short break from your political programming to indulge my little tale.
Settle in, it’s longish…
The flight to L.A. from Cleveland, with a two-hour layover in Chicago, eats up most of the day, even when picking up three time zones. It went as well as could have been expected, but it was still freaking exhausting. After collecting my bag, catching two shuttle buses to my car rental site and following Waze to my host’s home, it was about 9:30 p.m. when I got to Jennie’s house.
Jennie is a wonderful woman, a good friend from my college days. Met her husband, a terrific guy named Jonathan. She offered to put me up for the trip, because I didn’t know if I was going to win, and the consolation prizes just barely cover the cost of the trip, so saving on hotels was an attractive option. She lives near Hollywood, about three miles from the studio, a positive boon in a town where everything is always 45 minutes apart. I would be staying in her son’s room, who was away at college.
They were so sweet to open their home to me, feed me, engage me in a lovely conversation before they turned in. Hardest bed I have ever laid on in my life. Jennie’s son, like her and her husband, is on the smallish side, and the kid barely dents a bed. I’m a big, Select Comfort 55 lummox, and I need some give in the mattress. I didn’t have a chance, got – maybe – an hour of sleep, the night before I was a contestant on Jeopardy.
The lack of sleep was not much of a factor though. The next day I found myself with what I call my “stage energy.” I’ve been an actor a long time, and I’ve found that I can go into a theater absolutely exhausted, go on stage, find exactly the energy and attention I need to give a performance, and go right back to exhausted when the curtain falls. I was going to be okay today. However, I couldn’t risk a second sleepless night if I won enough games to go to another day of taping – they tape five shows a day for two days – so before Jennie and Jon woke up, before sunrise, I packed, stripped down the bed, got all of my stuff into my car and silently stole away, with the intentions of staying in a hotel that night, no matter what happened during the taping.
The call time at the studio was between 7:15 and 7:45 a.m. – I saw three different times on different correspondences. I was up early, and my body was still on Eastern time, so the morning hours didn’t bother me. I found a decent bagel joint and had breakfast and a coffee, and then made my way to the studio.
The man at the studio gate found my name on his list and directed me to the garage. Parked as instructed on the third level, came down with my suitcase – you need change of clothes for 5 shows – and brought it down to the garage entrance, asked the guard where Jeopardy contestants go. He pointed me to a sullen corner of the garage with a stanchion holding a sign that read, “Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune contestants.” It was dank and gray like all parking garages, it had several cheap plastic chairs and tables and a rack to hang clothes. And any illusions you retained about the glamor of show biz fizzled like a dud firecracker. This is a place where people work to make a product, and almost everything you saw was made to be functional, not fabulous.
I was the first one there, and the other contestants came trickling in. Light chitchat and phone scrolling. Eventually a production assistant came, took a casual attendance and marched everyone to the studio.
We were brought to the studio and into the green room where we would spend most of our day. There were clothes racks and sections labeled with everyone’s names. We hung our garments up, and the PAs then started prepping us for the day. We were told what to expect and when. We would spend an hour taking turns, first with a costume mistress, who would look at what we brought, exclude what wouldn’t work on camera, and okayed the rest.
We then took turns in the makeup chair. Despite having good energy, my poor sleep the previous night left me with bags under my eyes that any airline would make me check at the gate. That makeup lady spackled me up good.
After about an hour, we were brought into the studio – this hallowed ground, the Alex Trebek Stage. We were brought up to the stage in random groups of three, and given two practice rounds to play, fifteen clues each. The clues in the practice rounds are easier than in the real game – they’re not testing our knowledge, they want us to practice with the signaling devices – the clickers – and the clues are easy so that we will click in. More on this later.
After a couple rounds of practice, we retired back to the green room. More briefing of useful instructions and advice – they really don’t want to set us up for failure, they don’t want us to be blindsided, they really want us to be as prepared as we can be for the show itself. They know how to do this, and we were well advised to trust them.
The defending champion was a zygote named Grant DeYoung, a grocery clerk less than half my age – how irresistible a story is this?? He was a two-time champion, so he hadn’t established himself as a Jennings-like juggernaut. Or maybe he was, we just don’t know, we didn’t see the games he won because they won’t be broadcast for another two months, just like our shows. He is very nice, tall, long hair, I thought looked like a young Arlo Guthrie, a reference he was a bit young to fathom.
The shows started shooting at around 11. Two challengers to the champion were chosen at random. I didn’t want to wait forever to go up, but I certainly didn’t want to go first, there’s a possible advantage in observing a few games before you go in. Two other challengers were chosen. Grant won the game fairly comfortably; he had a clear edge on clicking in. The ones who lost – I can’t call them “losers” – could hang around and watch the shows, but they chose to pack their stuff and split, and I gathered that’s the case more often than not.
Short break between shows, then two more challengers were brought in – still not me. Grant was still clicking in first, but he got a few of the answers wrong, which enabled the other guys to scoop up the clue and get double bang for the buck – a $1000 clue that Grant gets wrong and someone gets right results is a $2000 advantage for that person over Grant. But for all the clues Grant got wrong, he still had a lead going into Final Jeopardy, and he won.
We broke for lunch and were brought to the commissary, which wasn’t bad as commissaries go, and the production company picked up the tab. Had a passable chicken piccata.
Then we came back for Game 3. This time, I was up. And there were some higher stakes to this game – Grant was now a four-time winner, and if he won one more, he got an automatic bid into the Tournament of Champions. So you know he wanted this. I got up and prepared to go into the studio.
When you’re playing Jeopardy, you’re not looking at the scoreboard. Well, I’m not. I was laser-focused on that wall of monitors with the clues. What’s the category? What’s the dollar amount? Fix on that monitor. The custom now on Jeopardy is to bounce around the board and find those Daily Doubles, instead of the old way of starting a category at the easiest level and working down. So it’s easy to lose track of the category, and you can forget its specifics, forget that maybe a certain letter combination has to be in the response or whatever. So you are looking at nothing but that board.
The only times you look at the scoreboard are during Daily Doubles and between rounds. And at those moments I was surprised to look up and see that I was in the lead, or close to – I didn’t know how well I was doing, I was just focused on the monitors. So you don’t look at the scoreboard during play…
…EXCEPT…
…when I was in Double Jeopardy and there were only three $400 clues left, I glanced up at the scoreboard and saw that I was $1000 out of first place.
Okay, flashback…
During the rehearsals, my first time on stage for the practice rounds, by the luck of the draw, happened to be against Grant. I could not get a click in against Grant. I knew the answer to every clue, and I never got to answer. I couldn’t beat him. I tried to anticipate the lights, which is your cue to click in, and I would click in early. I went 0-for the entire round.
This was an eye-opener. I thought, okay, this is where my age finally catches up with me. Jeopardy is not a game of knowledge, it’s a game of clicking. And I thought, this is how I lose.
I was visibly discouraged. Grant noticed this, and as we came off the stage, he went out of his way to come up to me and encourage me. “Hey, man, don’t worry about that, you’ll get the timing. I did the exact same thing the first time I rehearsed. You’ll get the rhythm, hang in there.”
This was such a kind gesture of sportsmanship, I was certainly grateful for that. I wasn’t convinced, but it was quite comforting.
Okay, flash-forward back to Double Jeopardy…
I was down $1000, with only three easy clues left, and I instantly knew three things:
I have to sweep these clues to get a lead going into Final, Grant knows the answers to these clues, and He’s faster than me on the clicker. I just bore down, gritted my teeth and focused on the board.
And I got them all. I had a $200 lead going into Final.
A category that was reasonably good for me – Movies – hopefully not too recent.
I bet enough to more than double up Grant. It was a reasonably easy clue, we all got it right. And I won $25,000.
After each show wraps, Ken Jennings steps forward and chats with the contestants for a bit. You can see the chat during the closing credits, but during the broadcast, you only hear audience applause and theme music. That sound is added in post-production, everyone in the studio can hear these conversations.
Ken came to me first about the come-from-behind win. I immediately told the story about the rehearsal and how I could not beat Grant and about the incredibly kind words of encouragement he gave me, and just praised his sportsmanship. He got a nice round of applause from the audience for his menschness. He embraced me when we got offstage and wished me luck. Nicest kid on earth.
The second game – ah, well, what are you going to do? My fate was sealed when I had Shakespeare giving Juliet the line “How now, brown cow?”
The correction on the Biblical quote was fatal, and arguably was chopping details a bit fine. It is a little ironic that my chances of winning were crushed on a quote about being forsaken by God – I gave the answer “Why have you forsaken me?” when the judges required the King James version of “Why hast thou forsaken me?” and caused a $4000 swing that made the game a runaway for the leader, Amar. As a long-time Atheist, if an active God wanted to engage my belief, a little divine intervention at this point would have gotten a foot in the door.
But it didn’t matter in the end, even if I had gotten this AND the Shakespeare quote right. I missed Final and Amar didn’t and I wasn’t going to win it anyway.
I sit in my chair every night watching Jeopardy with a ballpoint pen in my hand, clicking in and testing myself against the players, just like millions of people do – maybe most skip the pen. Everyone dreams of running the table for a long run on that show and winning a fortune. But I have known for a while that, while I’m pretty good at the game, against the people on the show, I go 50% at best. Some nights I know I would have raked, and other nights I get waxed. While a long run would have been fun, honestly, winning a nice bundle once and missing the next was my best likely outcome. I went as expected – 50%. I’m just lucky the win came first.
After the loss, I went back to the green room and signed for my winnings – you get paid 120 days after broadcast – and then left the studio with Jennie and took her out to a first-rate restaurant to celebrate. Took her home and then went to my hotel – I found a decent hotel for a decent rate on Priceline – slept well, and spent the next day bopping around L.A., mostly down the coast – Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice Beach. Got to the airport plenty early to avoid the hellacious rush hour traffic and took a non-stop red-eye back to Cleveland. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/22/2242188/-My-Jeopardy-Experience?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=community_spotlight&pm_medium=web
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