My Personal History With Jeopardy Super Tournaments, Part 1: It Was The Nineties

 

If you have watching ABC for the last few weeks, you will have begun to notice the slow but steady stream of promotion for the Jeopardy Masters Tournament. In the works for months, this tournament will feature six of the greatest players in recent years on Jeopardy playing in a Tournament for a grand prize of one million dollars – in the case of three of the participants, chump change – and perhaps more importantly, bragging rights.

This is the first super-tournament that Jeopardy has done since the passing of Alex Trebek in November of 2020. It is also significant that Ken Jennings, who was crowned the Greatest of all Time in January of that year – what seems like a lifetime ago – is the official host.

I plan to cover the tournament for my column to give what amounts to a play by play going forward. However, besides the obvious reasons, there is a very good chance that this tournament might be the start of a new era for Jeopardy. And in order to explain why I think it’s worth going back over the history of the show.

However, since a dry recitation of facts is frequently boring and because Jeopardy means so much to me (many of you have picked up on that) I think it is worth intercutting the history of these tournaments with my own personal history with the show. This is fitting because by coincidence, my long-term interest in Jeopardy more or less parallels the first super tournaments and the various changes on the show overall. So I’m going to start not with the beginning of Jeopardy but rather my history of watching the show.

I don’t remember precisely when I began to watch Jeopardy regularly. I know that it was sometime in late 1991 because I have no memory of watching that year’s Tournament of Champions. I was only thirteen when I began doing what so many of us do when we watch the show: play along at home. I did roughly as well as you’d expect a thirteen year old to do, if I was lucky I managed average $3000 to $4000  a game (this was before the dollar figures were doubled in 2001). Back then, the only categories I did well in had to do with movies, literature, American history and classical music. These categories are among my strengths to this day; categories like pop music remain basically foreign to me as they were thirty years ago. There’s a good argument that what I know about major subjects such as ART AND ARTISTS and AFRICAN GEOGRAPHY, I only know because of Jeopardy and even that’s a very limited amount.

I watched the show every day it was on, though when I was growing up and for quite sometime afterward Jeopardy would be broadcast on both ABC and a local affiliate an hour earlier. (I don’t know when that channel stopped broadcasting it; I think it was likely by the end of the 2000s.) I would also religiously record the series on the nights I wouldn’t be home. This wasn’t anything particularly special when it came to my viewing; I did the same with basically every TV show I was afraid of missing and continued to do so well into the age of streaming. (There were some exceptions which I’ll detail below because its pertinent.) I would also buy books about the show but again that was something I did (and still do) with almost any TV show I like. I’m not saying this to diminish how much I liked Jeopardy but that didn’t mean I ever cared about it more than, say, The X-Files or Frasier or basically any other show I was watching at the time. It was part of a routine as much as anything else.

In that sense I was basically unaware of the history of the show. I knew about the Tournament of Champions but I didn’t know any details about the previous winners or even those who had competed in them. I had no idea there had been a prime-time spinoff called Super Jeopardy that aired in the summer of 1990 that had been planned to be a regular event that was cancelled due to poor ratings. I remember watching the 1992 Tournament of Champions that November and while I recognized some of the faces from the past several months, I’m not sure I fully grasped the significance of it compared to any other show at the time.

So when the 10^th Anniversary Tournament occurred in November of 1993, I can’t say for certain if I truly recognized the significance of it. And given the way the participants were selected; one could be forgiven if that was the universal opinion of fans.

I may have written about this in an earlier article but I’ll repeat it anyway: the tenth anniversary tournament involved nine participants: a semi-finalist from each Tournament of Champions from 1985 to 1992 who was drawn randomly over four consecutive nights and the winner of the 1993 Tournament of Champions. The Tournament was held on the week of November 29, 1993, immediately following the Tournament of Champions completion.

You get the feeling that Jeopardy was still trying to work out the kinks of how to do this kind of tournament when they decided that the participants would essentially be chosen at random: none of the winners of the previous eight tournaments ended up being chosen and with one exception none of them had even made it as far as the finals of the Tournament they had participated in. (Steve Rogitz had been the third place finisher in the very first Tournament of Champions in 1985.) I imagine the casual fan of the show and perhaps some of the devoted ones might have looked at many of the players in this tournament and wondered: “Who are these people?” (Considering that the internet barely existed in 1993, there wasn’t much of a way of refreshing your memory.) The set-up the tournament was completely different from previous Jeopardy tournaments: there were three semi-final matches, followed by a two game final. And honestly none of the three semi-finals were particularly close: only one game was not locked up by one player before Final Jeopardy, and in that one, it very nearly was. And all three games were won by players who had been on the show fairly recently then their competitors: Tom Nosek, who had won the Tournament of Champions a few days earlier, Leslie Frates, who’d participated in the 1991 Tournament of Champions and Frank Spangenberg, who participated in the 1990 Tournament of Champions. Even the eventual pay-off for the winner, by the standards of every other tournament that followed was miniscule: the amount of money you won in two games plus $25,000 and as Alex Trebek put it “bragging rights.”

I’m inclined to be forgiving towards the 10^th Anniversary Tournament first, because the producers were clearly experimenting and perhaps more importantly because the three finalists were among the best in Jeopardy history to that point and would prove so repeatedly in the years and decades to come. This was in particular true for Frank Spangenberg, who eventually ended up the winner and took home $41,800.

Spangenberg is one of the greatest and most memorable Jeopardy champions in history: even though I knew nothing about the show before this, his name had already come up the previous spring. That May Jerome Vered (who I will discuss in great detail below) had broken Frank’s one day record of $30,600 and come very close to breaking Frank’s five day record of $102,597. (That record would not be broken until 2003, more than two years after the dollar figures had been doubled.) With his height and a mustache that would be not out of place on a nineteenth century policeman (Spangenberg was a member of the NYPD then and for decades to come) he was among the most distinctive looking Jeopardy champions in history as well as the most successful. His victory ended up making local news coverage and I will admit to a certain civic pride in his win in the tournament.

Now for the next couple of years I made a concentrated effort to try and keep track of players who would be eligible for the coming year’s Tournament of Champion. This is a difficult process for the devoted fan to do so in the age of the Internet and YouTube; for a teenager in the 1990s it quickly became difficult. I more or less abandoned the effort two or three years later and basically relied on memory for each successive year – which wasn’t much better. The show would help in this method for many years in the Tournaments – when contestants walked on stage they would announce how much money they had won in their original runs and would extend that to all participants.. I don’t remember when they stopped giving those reminders – around 2000, I think. I’ll admit to being slightly annoyed that they haven’t done this for a very long time; even if its on the internet, it would be good for the show to acknowledge it for those might have forgotten. It's not like in these Tournaments this necessarily strikes fear into the contestant’s heart; a, they already know who they’re facing, and b) just because you’re a big winner in a regular season doesn’t mean you will win the Tournament of Champions.

Now if you won a Tournament of Champions you do linger in my memory and would likely do so long after the fact, at least as much as the winners with long streaks or money won. This part would become very clear when Jeopardy did its first significant Tournament in May of 2002 – and in the process define who the greatest player in Jeopardy history was for nearly two decades.