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.
No comments:
Post a Comment