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 10th
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 10th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment