Thursday, November 21, 2024

This Is Jeopardy: A New Series About Untold Stories About Jeopardy Greats over 40 Years, Part 1

 

 

Introduction: Many years ago I began work on a long book on the history of the 100 greatest Jeopardy players of all time. There were many interesting elements of it and while I might try to publish it at some point, it was frankly very dry and rote.

However during my research along with overall love of the game I have learned many interesting stories about Jeopardy and combined with more than three decades of watching the show I’ve learned many interesting stories about the champions that the average person or the more recent fan may well be aware of.

This article will be the first in an occasional series about the many great champions (by which I usually mean players who have qualified for Tournament of Champions) over the more than four decades Jeopardy has been on the air. Some of the stories will be fun, some will be grim and some will reveal certain flaws over several players who have been on the show. Because I want to show some of the bad as well as the good, I will deal with some of them. However I’m going to start with some inspiring stories.

 

The long streaks and superb play of Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach in Season 38 have put them in the annals of the Greatest of All Time and literally Jeopardy Masters. Just as important to many was the fact that both Schneider and Roach were members of the LGBTQ+. Schneider, in addition to be trans, is also a lesbian and Roach identifies as non-binary.

When it comes to Jeopardy champions my only benchmark for grading them is their ability to play the game. Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach are inspiring to me not because of how they identify but because of how well they play the game – and in thirty years of watching the show, the two of them have set benchmarks that are among the best in not only Jeopardy but game show history. That said I am aware that their play (along with Hannah Wilson, another trans woman who won 8 games in 2023) is very important to countless others in the country in a way that, say, James Holzhauer or Cris Panullo to name just two other super-champions, isn’t.

The thing is when Amy and Mattea(along with Rowan Ward, another non-binary player who qualified for the Tournament of Champions in 2022) appeared that year, the general consensus was that there appearance was importance as a sign of how Jeopardy has changed. The truth is Jeopardy has not changed, the rest of the country has. There have no doubt been countless gay and lesbian players during the Trebek Era who no doubt won multiple games and have been great champions. But because of the bigotry that has surrounded our culture until recently (and continues to this day) I have little doubt the vast majority of them chose not to reveal it when Alex Trebek interviewed them or in their contestant information. Likely they feared that they would be the targets of homophobic attacks if they acknowledged their sexuality in a forum as public as Jeopardy. One could hardly blame them given our culture.

Nevertheless there have been members of the gay and lesbian community who have appeared on Jeopardy during that period. Some only chose to reveal their sexuality after their original appearances, and fans like myself only learned about it years later. (I will give one such example in this article.) Others may very well have been gay but chose not to do it because of the culture of their era. One such example may be one of the early success stories on Jeopardy. I’m not going to say why I suspect this in this entry because I  have only speculation and I have no intention of casting aspersions on him or his family if that were true. (I may refer to him in another column.)

That said there has been at least one player who qualified for a Tournament of Champions who would later end up being part of the transgender community at least seven years before we heard the name of Amy Schneider. And I saw this person play multiple times in my life.

Note: For the purposes of this article I intend to use the name and gender the player in question used during their original run. I do so not out of any intention to be offensive but rather to give an explanation for my behavior, which will become clear.

On September 4th 1997 Dan Melia won his fifth consecutive game. According to the rules the next day started with three new contestants. One of those contestants was player known as Fred Ramen. That day Fred tied with Sean Askew and won $12,800. Because there were no tiebreakers in 1997 both players returned the following day as co-champions.

The following day Fred won a closer game and ending up becoming a five game champion with $61,000 and as part of Jeopardy’s giving away a car for each undefeated five time player, a Corvette.

Less than three months later he appeared on the 1998 Tournament of Champions. Fred qualified for the quarterfinals as a wild-card spot. However in the semi-finals Fred came face-to-face with Dan Melia (and Claudia Perry, who I may discuss in another entry) and Dan ended up going to the finals and eventually winning the Tournament of Champions.

Fred commented on the fact that his streak had happened immediately after Dan’s and later said before they met in the semi-finals to him: “So Obi-Wan, we meet again.”

Roughly seven years later in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions Fred returned to the Jeopardy stage. Fred had one of the more dominant matches in the first round, easily trouncing Lee Lassiter and Jennifer Wu with a runaway victory and winning $34,000. (Winners got to keep the cash they won in that Tournament.)

Fred then advanced to the second round and competed against Michael Rooney and Tom Walsh, who in 2003 had become the first player in Jeopardy history to win seven games. (At the time that seemed like a lot.) What followed was an excruciating  game for all three players, mainly because the questions were very tough. Fred bet $1203 on a Daily Double in RELIGIOUS MATTERS (Alex said about it: “That makes sense but only to me) and lost it. That category was horrible for all three players to the point that by the time Fred requested the $400 clue, he actually said: “Well, at this point we have to keep going.) Fred managed to get 19 correct responses but got 4 wrong.

By the time Double Jeopardy was over, Fred was in second with $8,397 to Tom’s $9100 and Michael’s $6000.

The Final Jeopardy category was BRITISH ROYALTY: “When his tomb was opened in 1102, a fragrance filled the air and his body was perfectly preserved.”

Michael wrote down: “Who is Edward the Confessor?” which was the correct response. He added $4500 to his total, which put him at $10,500. Fred had a funny look on his face even though he had also written down Edward the Confessor. The reason was he had been conservative and bet just $706 dollars, enough to put him ahead of Tom but not Michael. That came back to bite him doubly hard because Tom had written down Edward I. As Alex pointed out: “Edward I was not Edward the Confessor, Edward I is Edward Longshanks. (Look up your British history I don’t know the difference.) As a result Michael ended up going to the quarterfinals and Fred went home with another $10,000.

Now I have to give a little more background. In 2013 Jeopardy announced the Battle of The Decades in conjunction with its 30th year on the air. Fourteen players from each of the three ten year-period of Jeopardy (1980s, 1990s, 2000s) were announced. But in order to add a bit of participation Jeopardy announced that the fifteenth competitor in each decade would be voted upon by the fans from a field of 5 on Facebook.

In November they announced the five fan favorites for the 1990s. I recognized three of the names from my history with the show but the two others baffled me. One of them didn’t compute because it was a Catherine Ramen.

It was not until I viewed the profiles on Jeopardy that I learned that the two were the same person and that Fred had transitioned to Catherine sometime in the intervening years. I will be honest: this did shock me a little not because I was necessarily bigoted but because I had read  the then Fred’s profile at Jeopardy archive and among the statements for his column Fred said he used his winnings to buy his wife an engagement ring.

Now I will confess that my views in 2014 may very well not have been as enlightened as they are today. I wasn’t repulsed by the idea as some will judge,  just processing. It is conceivable that my issues might have come to the surface had Catherine been voted to the tournament that year. The question ended up being moot as the choice ended up being Shane Whitlock, the winner of the College Championship in 1996 and a semi-finalist in that year’s Tournament of Championship.

Now because I don’t know the minds and hearts of the Jeopardy fan, I don’t know if bigotry was part of the reason Catherine was not chosen as the fan favorite. It was 2013 and the world was far less accepting of the transgender community than it would be by the time Amy Schneider appeared. I do know that while Catherine was a very good player so were three of the other Jeopardy champions who were contenders. (The fifth was one whose inclusion I have never understood, then or now.) Shane was a very good player (he qualified for the quarterfinals of the UTC) and two of the other choices were superb players in their own right. Brian Weikle had set the record for five games in 2003 and had been the runner-up in the 2003 Tournament of Champions; Michael Daunt had been a finalist in the 1996 Tournament of Champions and had also been a quarterfinalist in the Tournament of Champions. If Fred Ramen had been on the list of fan favorites I would have voted for any of those three over him and I probably would have voted the same either way. (For the record I never figured out how to actually vote during that process.)

What I do know is that Catherine was a very good player and I hope that she gets a chance to appear in a future Tournament down the road, such as a Jeopardy Invitational. Like all of the players I listed she was very good and I would be more than willing to see her on the show again. Perhaps someday she will tell her story; it is one that needs to be heard.

Now I should also mention that there was another significant Jeopardy champion in recent years who I was a huge admirer of in his original appearance. And because this story is happier I think will tell you that one as well.

If you read my articles on the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament earlier this year you might recall that I was particularly high on Alan Lin. Well to be fair I was on almost every player in that Tournament but Alan was a special case. I will paraphrase my own writing:

In a 2017 Tournament of Champions roster Alan’s record of 6 wins and $123,600 didn’t seem impressive – in fact he was near the bottom of both winnings and games won that year. Then he all but ran over Austin Rogers in the quarterfinal match. And we knew he would be a force.

He demonstrated it again in the semi-finals and got into the finals against Austin and Buzzy. He had a good chance of winning at the end of the first game and that held until Buzzy went all in on a Daily Double later in Double Jeopardy in game 2. With little choice Alan did the same a few clues later – and it didn’t work.

Among his many gifts as a player Alan was also a lot of fun to watch compete. When he appeared on The Jeopardy All-Star Games in 2019, he made clear that his goal was ‘to crush Buzzy Cohen’. He didn’t personally do that but the team he was on did so. And after writing his response for Final Jeopardy at the end of a critical game he had such a big grin on his face that before the think music ended, laughter broke out at the sight of it and Alex told him outright: “Alan, I’ll give you some advice. Never go to Las Vegas and play poker.”

So I was looking forward to seeing him again and while Alan didn’t win, he did have some news that was heartwarming. Apparently not long after his appearance in the 2018 Tournament of Champions, he met with several colleagues who has also appeared on Jeopardy over the years. One of them was Cliff Galiher, the winner of the 2007 College Championship. The two of them got to talking, they became friendly, and as of the airing of the 2024 Tournament, they’re engaged.

As I am the kind of person who wants good things to happen to people generally and Jeopardy champions in particular this news warmed my heart. Because in addition to everything else Alan and Cliff by their union have officially become the most successful ‘power couple’ in Jeopardy’s forty year history.

Their record would be impressive if it we were to ‘only’ consider their original Jeopardy appearance. Cliff’s winning of the 2007 College Championship ($100,000) and Alan’s original winnings over six games ($123,600) give them a total of $223,600. This puts them comparable to the most successful married couple in Jeopardy history: Justin and Kristin Sausville, who between them won 11 games and just under $230,000. (I’m actually going to deal with this in a different article, so I won’t go into full details.)

But in their Tournament of Champions record they are unmatched. To date Cliff is the last College Champion to make it as far as the Finals of the Tournament of Champions. He finished third to Doug Hicton and the eventual winner Celeste DiNucci and won $50,000. Alan finished second in the 2017 Tournament of Champions and won $100,000. Justin, by contrast, was eliminated in the semi-finals of the 2011 Tournament of Champions and Kristin was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the 2015 Tournament. (There’s more to it than that and I’ll get to it in a later article.)

Now the pedants will say that Justin and Kristin were married at the time of their appearance and Alan and Cliff only got together after each of theirs. To them I say, details, details. I urge all Jeopardy fans to come up with a power couple name for Alan and Cliff going forward. On a side note, I hope that Cliff and one or both of the Sausville’s can return in a future tournament. I remember all three very vividly and I would like to see them again.

That is the first in the saga that will follow. There will more be stories that will be less heartwarming down the road.

See you later Jeopardy fans and remember to phrase your responses in the comments section in the form of a question.

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