Note: This article was written before Mike Richards resigned entirely from Jeopardy. I still believe, however, that the concerns I raise in this article are still valid
Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of furor over who will replace Alex Trebek as the new host of Jeopardy. First, there was rage that after all the possibilities that had been floated over the last several months, the job was going to executive producer Mike Richards, who had lead much of the search and no doubt had people thinking in terms of Dick Cheney leading the search of George W. Bush’s running mate. Then in the past week, among revelations about Richards past history involving sexual harassment on previous series and comments he made on a webcast, Richards had to resign after already having taped five shows.
I have noticed that a large amount of the hostility over the last several months has been over succeeding Trebek as to who should be the new ‘face’ of Jeopardy. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve cared less about this than a lot of people because in my mind, the faces of Jeopardy have always been the contestants and more importantly the champions. I said in my last post about the show that I would be watching more to see how eighteen-game winner Matt Adadio would do then how Richards did. That is still true.
What I omitted from the conversation is something that I really believe the lion’s share of criticism about Jeopardy has clearly missed. It is something that only people like me – who have been fans of the series for years, if not decades – have noticed over time, but really don’t want to talk about. Indeed, even now, I’m reluctantly to bring it up about the show I love. But as someone who knows more than his share about history, it’s that even the things we worship are not perfect. So in this article, I’m going to lay out some basic facts about what the people who critiqued Richards as host were either ignoring or didn’t care about.
And that’s the simple fact that the lion’s share of Jeopardy champions - and Tournament of Champions winners – are men. This hasn’t exactly been a secret – people have been talking about it as far as back as I’ve been studying the series, which is the early 1990s – but what has been ignored is that more thirty years later, little has changed. There have been thirty Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, and in that time, there have been only three female winners. (There’s a larger discussion to be had about the fact that there have been even fewer minority winners of any time, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to stick with the gender divide, which is still significant.)
Now, to be clear, I am fully aware of the fact that, just like every other aspect of American society, the gender divide has no doubt affected just how many women can find the time to try out for any game show in the first place. I figure that a lot of women, be they full time workers, stay at home parents, or some combination of the two, may simply not have enough leisure time to watch Jeopardy, much less try out for it.
I’m also aware that are a lot of factors required to win a single game of Jeopardy in the first place, much less to qualify for a Tournament of Champions berth. In addition to intellect, you need reflexes, skill, and a fair amount of luck just that far. Anybody who has played Jeopardy knows that much. Hell, anybody who just watched the show knows that much.
And in all candor, given everything that I’ve seen on Jeopardy over nearly thirty years of watching it, there is only one group that truly has a poorer chance than most of winning a game in the first place – and ironically, it’s probably the last group you think needs help getting anywhere. It’s old people. Indeed, as those of us who have watched the show for a very long time know, from 1987 until 1995 Jeopardy actually had a Seniors Tournament designed specifically for contestants in their fifties or older. A lot of these tournaments would good, and a couple of the winners made it all the way to the Tournament of Champions finals. But like so many shows, the creators decided that thought they wanted seniors watching, they didn’t want them on the air and in 1996 the tournament was discontinued.
I imagine we’re also aware, to an extent, the weight that on-screen appearance may have to do with getting on Jeopardy in the first place. There’s actually a classic Golden Girls where Bea Arthur’s Dorothy passes the search and is told in no uncertain terms that people wouldn’t root for her. There was a time when I actually would have dismissed this as something of a cruel joke, but I have heard more than my share of former champions interviewed by Alex, where that may have been the determining factor of a couple of winners not making the show the first time they tested for just that reason. Indeed, on one of the special tournaments a few years back Brad Rutter, Jeopardy’s all-time money winner with nearly five million dollars in earnings, told Alex that he had tried out for the College Tournament, passed the test, and then didn’t make it because, as he put it, “I spent too much time talking about his shot-glass collection.” So there is precedent.
So given all of the x-factors to become a Jeopardy champion, and all of the other challenges that exist in society to prevent a lot of people from having the time to even go so far as to travel to LA to try out, its hardly a wonder that more people are focused on the fact as to who hosts Jeopardy then who ends up on winning on it. Besides, given all of the societal problems confronting the world today, does anyone really have the time and energy to raise a fuss about who ends up on a game show? Considering that, I’m actually stunned there are so many people upset about an African American being The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. These shows may be watched by more people, but Jeopardy’s been on longer.
And I could understand why so many people would be willing to write that all off. I might be willing to as well…if I didn’t know Jeopardy. And the fact as, after watching the show and particularly after following nearly thirty years of tournaments, there are certain things that are a lot harder to dismiss.
As those of us who have spent decades watching Jeopardy are well aware, every five years or so, usually in conjunction with a milestone in the series history, they will host was amounts to a super-tournament bringing back champions from many years and in many cases, decades past. There have been seven such tournaments in the past thirty years. I intend to focus on three in particular that have had a $1 million or greater payday to illustrate where I believe a problem may lie with the show’s history:
The 2002 Million Dollar Masters Invitational: Fifteen former champions were asked back to compete at Radio City Music Hall for a $1 million cash prize.
The 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions: Held shortly after Ken Jennings completed his exceptional run on Jeopardy, 144 former champions, including winners of the Teen and College Tournaments were asked back to compete in what amounted to a March Madness style tournament that eventually would end with two finalists competing against Ken for $2 million.
The 2014 Battle of the Decades: To commemorate the series thirty years on the air, fifteen players each from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s were asked back to compete in a series of matches to eventually compete for $1 million.
Now, I’m not going to deal with the results of these tournaments: Brad Rutter ended up winning all three. What I’d like to focus on instead is the male-female ratio for each tournament, the problems that were apparent in certain aspects with it, and why I think there might have been some fundamental flaw that might be critical to Jeopardy’s tournament match-up in the first place.
The Million Dollar Masters had as close to gender parity as any of the tournaments they’ve held in the series entire history. Ironically, at the time, I actually thought the show was being too loose with who they invited back for that tournament as there were at least three women whose presence I considered questionable. (This was not, for the record, limited by gender, there were at least two men whose presence I considered questionable as well.) Since then, having done a fair amount of research on the contestants at the time, I have to admit all fifteen choices were good ones. I also realize that had the series done the obvious thing and invited all the previous Tournament of Champions winners, the gender disparity would have been impossible to ignore.
The Ultimate Tournament of Champions probably did more to lay bare just how many previous winners were men than any other tournament. Not counting Ken Jennings, the ratio of male competitors to female ones was roughly four to one. Because the tournament was played out over a period of nearly four months, this was not something that may have been apparent to even the viewers like me who watched every game. It only starts to become glaringly obvious in hindsight. Indeed, at one point I actually considered writing an article about five female champions who hadn’t been included in this tournament even though they were still alive. I was unaware until much later that there were certain levels of qualifications that the producers had set prior to the tournament as to who competed. (I’ll get to them a little later in this article, as they are relevant to my larger point.) I do understand the reasoning (if they’d invited every single champion the tournament would’ve basically taken up an entire year) but there did seem to be a certain arbitrariness as to who got chosen.
In my opinion, the Battle of the Decades may have come to have a more or less reasonable level of balance. The ratio of male to female was exactly two to one and more specifically the people who were selected to represent each decade were pretty close to the ones that most fans, myself included, would have wanted to see. With the exception of the first Tournament of Champion winner (who had passed away just a few months after his episode had aired in 1985) and Bob Blake, the 1990 winner who was out of the country declined, every Tournament of Champion winner was. And considering the array of vast talent that was available in the 1980s and 1990s, I’d have to say that most of the other winners invited were among the very best. It gets a lot harder to determine that after 2004 (when the five-day limit was lifted and champions could play until they were defeated) but all things considered most of the choices were good ones. (Indeed, the most obvious absentee David Madden, who’d won nineteen games and over $400,000 in regular season winnings, chose not to participate because he believed the company he was working for put him in an ethical conflict with the show.)
Where I think Jeopardy fell down a little was how they decided the fifteenth competitor for each decade. They gave a listing of five ‘fan favorites’ for each decade and invited fans to vote on which ones they wanted to see in the tournament. Having done homework on all fifteen (especially the ones for the 1980s and 1990s) I’m not entire sure why some of them were chosen in the first place. One of them was a four day champion who’d won barely $23,000 in 1998 and didn’t make it past the first round of the Tournament of Champions. The one I find most galling is Andrew Westney, who’d won the 1991 Teen Tournament (and not particularly impressively) been eliminated in the quarterfinals of that yours Tournament of Champions and had gotten eliminated in the first round of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions. There were more qualified players from the 1980s then him, but the majority of fans apparently didn’t agree with me, as he ended up being voted the fan favorite for that decade.
Even here, I can’t exactly make a federal case out of this. The show’s producers had a lot of good champions to sort through just to come down to those five. I can’t say that either they or the fans were wrong in any of their selections, even Andrew Westney, who was competitive all the way through his match.
Why then, have I gone in all this details, if I don’t seem to have any problem with how Jeopardy made their selections for these tournaments? I have one reason, and her name is Elise Beraru.
I don’t expect even long time fans of the series to know who she is. I’ve been watching the series for more than thirty years, thought I knew every aspect of Jeopardy and I didn’t know who she was until I starting working on a separate subject. And that very fact indicates a major problem.
Elise Beraru was Jeopardy’s first five time winner. Not female five time winner. The show’s first five-time winner. She appeared from October 1st to October 5TH 1984, less than a month after the show debuted. She won $47,350 – not a huge amount of money by the standards of today or even later in the 1990s – but she won all five of her games in romps. There are very few players of any era that managed to accomplish that. She lost quickly in the show’s very first Tournament of Champions in 1985 (she was eliminated in the first ever quarterfinal match, in fact) and would only make one more appearance on the show afterward – on Super Jeopardy!, the series first (and until recently, only) prime time tournament. She lost the only match she appeared in. She has never appeared in any tournament since.
And it is that fact that her achievements are basically unknown that bothers me, particularly because Jeopardy is a show that acknowledges its great players annually. If you’re going to invite the greatest of all time back for tournaments like the ones I’ve mentioned, doesn’t it make sense to invite back the very first five-time winner?
What makes this flaw more obvious are some of the choices for each of the Tournaments I’ve mentioned. In the Million Dollar Masters, one of the champions asked back was Kate Waits, who won four games and just under $50,000 in 1987. She was a semi-finalist in the 1988 Tournament of Champions and was eliminated in the first round of Super Jeopardy. Her qualifications are practically identical to Elise…but Elise was first, and she won more games. Why was Elise asked back instead of Kate?
The Ultimate Tournament of Champions was a bit more complicated. In addition to being a five time champion, there was a monetary cap on your regular play winnings. The minimum a five-time champion one was $48,401. Elise just missed that total. There’s a certain arbitrariness to that total as it not only eliminated Elise but a huge number of Jeopardy’s winners from the series early days, going as far forward as 1999.
What makes this even more unfair, in my opinion, is that there were nine seeded players who automatically advanced to Round 2 of that tournament. Most of them were more than valid choices, but quite a few were questionable. Where it clearly becomes suspect is the fact that Sean Ryan, Jeopardy’s first six-game winner and Tom Walsh, the show’s first seven game winner, were given seeds, but somehow they couldn’t find room for the shows first five-game winner. If ever there was a case for a player to be considered worthy, it was Elise.
And all these pale to her exclusion from The Battle of the Decades: The 1980s. There were a couple of questionable choices, but in my opinion the most illogical was Richard Cordray. Cordray won five games and just over $40,000 in April of 1987 and was a semi-finalist in the 1987 Tournament of Champions. He didn’t appear in a single Tournament for the next quarter-century. Why then was he asked back for the Battle of The Decades? In 2012, President Obama named him to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The decision to name him was literally political. (Cordray didn’t accept any money for participating because he was a federal employee. Having watching him perform in his Round 1 game, he played less like a five-day champion and more like a Celebrity Jeopardy participant.) This may be one of the clearest examples of bias: given a chance to choose someone important to Jeopardy who was a woman, and someone who was more important for achievements outside of it but was a man, the show chose the latter.
Now much as I’d like to say a case like Elise Beraru is a symbol of a sort of sexism within Jeopardy’s acknowledgement of its history, the truth is there are even more egregious exclusion from the show’s past for both men and women. And some of them are even more extreme.
I mentioned earlier in this article Super Jeopardy, the shows first big tournament. It aired on consecutive weeks in the summer of 1990. Like almost all tournaments, it was experimental in nature. There were nine quarterfinal matches, each of which contained four former champions. Score was kept in points, not dollars – and it wasn’t quite like any version before or since. The Jeopardy round had point values from 200 to 1000; the Double Jeopardy round had values from 500 to 2500. The matches were aired in a different style than future tournaments; rather than wait until all the quarterfinals were finished before moving on to the semifinal round, there would be three quarterfinals, then a semi-final, all leading up to a winner take all game for a quarter of a million dollars.
Thirty five champions from the previous six years appeared on Super Jeopardy. (There was a special one, which I’ll get to in a bit. And while many of them were five game winners, Tournament of Champions winners and Teen and College Champions, none of them ended up winning.
Bruce Seymour won almost $55,000 in four games in 1988. He was eliminated in the quarterfinals of that year’s Tournament of Champions. Two years, he was asked back to Super Jeopardy. He edged out a win in his quarterfinal match; more impressively won his semi-final and utterly demolished his opponents to win the grand prize.
I suspect that most of the people reading this article don’t know Bruce’s name or may not even be aware of Super Jeopardy’s existence. That’s because Jeopardy ever since then, has gone out of its away to pretend this first major tournament never happened.
Bruce has not been invited back for Super Tournament since then. He didn’t meet the qualifications of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions I listed earlier, but just as they ignored Elise Beraru for a bye, they did the same for Bruce. He was not invited back for either of the two tournaments I mentioned, even though he was more qualified by far than some of the other participants in either. But they’ve also subtly erased the entire tournament from other aspects.
Many of the players in Super Jeopardy have appeared in at least one of the Tournaments I have listed above. Their experiences in that tournament don’t seem to come up in any of the interviews that were given prior to that. And there’s been a very subtle erasure of Bruce’s accomplishment. Introducing Robin Carroll in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, Alex said she was the show’s all time money winner, prior to the Million Dollar Masters. Now Robin had won a lot of money, over $200,000… but that is still less than Bruce did after Super Jeopardy.
So why has Bruce Seymour been erased from Jeopardy history? Well, that’s a strong word. If you go on YouTube and type in the words Super Jeopardy, you can find quite a few matches from that tournament. So I guess the question is: why are they pretending it didn’t happen? I don’t have a ready answer for that. I know that there might have been plans for another Super Tournament the following year -Alex seemed to imply as much in his closing comments – but, for whatever reason, they never followed up. Was there some kind of corruption behind Bruce’s wins? I’ve looked at the archives of the game on j.archive.com and there doesn’t appear to be any evidence, but of course that’s just a listing of the clues, not a visual.
It just seems odd…to edit your past like that, especially considering that Jeopardy is a show that celebrates the distant past more than any other game show. Hell, there’s proof of that on Super Jeopardy. I mentioned that there were 35 former champions from the previous six years. Player 36, however, was Burns Cameron, who was the all time money winner in Jeopardy’s original incarnation in the 1960s and ‘70s. (His winnings: $11,110.) Indeed, he actually was one of Bruce’s opponents in the first match he won. You could argue that Bruce has actually a greater link to Jeopardy’s origins than any player in the series history. Which actually makes it even odder that he, and the tournament he won, don’t seem to be part of the series chronology anymore.
I imagine those of you who have stuck with me through this are wondering: Do I have a point? And I’m not sure I have a convincing one.
Except, maybe, this. Everything I have made an argument as a problem with Jeopardy has nothing to do with Alex Trebek. Whatever his role was when it came to the series, he had nothing to do with picking the contestants and very little to do with asking who came back to future tournaments. Those decisions must ultimately rest with the people behind the scenes of Jeopardy. And Mike Richards is still one of those people. There was a huge outpouring of elation over the fact that Richards will not be hosting the series. What everybody seems to have forgotten is that he’ll still be producing it.
As I have stated time and again, I watch Jeopardy for the contestants and the champions far more than whoever finally gets the job. And if there is some kind of problem with how the contestants are being chosen for the show (which to be perfectly clear, there is no evidence of at all and may be a figment of my imagination), then the people who were protesting Richards’ taking Alex’s job have been pointing their anger in the wrong direction. People may have questioned Richards’ qualifications as being the face of Jeopardy and that’s fine. But what goes on behind the scenes is ultimately more important to the series continued success than any tweets or comments by him.
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