JEOPARDY Archives - Page 7 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

JEOPARDY! Part 4

It was five weeks from the time I was notified that I would appear on JEOPARDY! until the taping of the show.

One week later, our office received some devastating news: the contract that all but one of the librarians was working under for the last six years was going elsewhere, meaning the very real possibility that most of us were going to be out of a job! This was VERY disappointing because, by all accounts, we had been doing very good work; we were apparently underbid. So much for relaxing.

Meanwhile, I run into a woman who works in my building. She and her sister are about to appear on Wheel of Fortune. There’s a nice story about them in the August 17 Times Union. I talked with her a few times. (If memory serves me, they won, but they got lots of prizes instead of cash and had to sell a car they got so that they could pay their taxes.)

One of the semi-cool things about the show being taped in Boston is that there are certain things JEOPARDY! will pay for that they would not otherwise. When the show is in Los Angeles, you pay to get there and back (which is why there are so many Southern California contestants), and you pay to stay there and eat there. (Tournament play, though, has different rules, I’ve been told.) In Boston, I had to get there and back on my own, but it’s easier and cheaper to get to from Albany, of course. However, JEOPARDY! was putting up the contestants for this special “thirteen colonies week” in the Boston Park Plaza Hotel for two nights, September 17 & 18 – sweet! And while dinner was on our own, the show did provide two breakfast vouchers for September 18 and 19. This is because the SHOW is “on the road.” This makes no real sense to me, but I am not complaining!

I went out with my friend Lori and bought a suit and a pair of shoes to wear on the show. (I seldom wear shoes unless theyâ€™re required, and at the time, it was Chuck Taylors of various colors that was the footwear of choice.)

I get a Federal Express package on September 4 with further instructions that include:
Wardrobe : Bring with you two changes of clothes for a total of three outfits.
Men : Dressy casual, suit, sport coat, sweater. Any of the above looks are fine. If possible, bring an additional sports coat or sweater (with tie) to see what looks best on camera…
Please no jeans or sneakers (men and women.)…no black/whiteprints, no busy prints.
WE ALSO NEED TO REMIND YOU THAT THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF AN APPEARANCE ON THE SHOW. SULLIVAN COMPLIANCES HAS THE FINAL SAY IN THIS MATTER.
All in CAPS. (Of course, most of the sheet was in caps.) But this jumped out at me- one more way I WON’T make it on the show? Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland.

Around this same time, I developed what can only be described as the worst toothache in the world. I went to the dentist three times in a week and a half. He prescribed pain medications, but I still felt lousy. Worse, I felt logy and dopey and in no condition or mood to study. Whatever last-minute cramming I might have done – I used to be good at last-minute cramming“ went out the window.

I went to work that Monday and Tuesday before the taping, but on Tuesday, I asked to take off the next day, Wednesday, September 16, so that I could pack and rest, and perhaps even study. My boss, the Hoffinator, was usually pretty good about these requests, but on this particular day, she became slightly blanched. “OK”, she said, “but you have to come in at 3 p.m.” 3 p.m.? Then I figured it out.
I came in at the appointed hour, and there was a “surprise” send-off party for me, complete with cake with wording like: A: “The next Jeopardy champion.” Q: “Who is Roger Green?” Someone made me a sheet that said “ROGER GREEN, JEOPARDY! wants YOU!”, with Alex Trebekâ€™s visage on it.

The next day, my friend Judy Doyle and her son Max picked me up. I knew Judy from college in New Paltz (c. 1977), and she briefly worked at the SBDC with me some 20 years later. She was then living in Corning with her son Max. She drove from Corning to Albany, some 210 miles, and picked me up with my requisite three suits (including the new one), five ties, two shirts, and my new shoes. After a brief respite, we traversed another 175 miles to the Massachusetts state capital. (“State capitals:” a popular JEOPARDY! category.) Even before I got in the car, I pulled out my World Almanac, hoping to read something that might come up, assuming that it would stick to my brain. For some reason, I focused on the levels of the atmosphere: stratosphere, ionosphere, and so on.

We get to the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, a very nice hotel. It was oddly shaped to fit the space that was available, I gather. (The alternative is that it was already oddly-shaped and they built the streets around it!)

There are several television trucks from different stations in front of the building. Since JEOPARDY! is only on one station in this market, something else important must be happening. What the heck is going on?

Continued on Saturday, June 25.

JEOPARDY! Part 3

Continued from Saturday, June 4.

So, all that effort to get on could come to naught, even though I passed the test?

I thought to keep a journal of my JEOPARDY! experience at the time, but, as it turned out, I made only one entry. Rob Owen was the TV/radio columnist for the (Albany) Times Union:

5-22-98: Read Rob Owen’s column about the successful Boston JEOPARDY! tryout contestants. On one hand, I was pleased that the Capital District fared so well. On the other hand, I regret not having made the T-U web page list. [Apparently, the people who passed the test in Boston were listed on the Times Union web page.] Also, the greater number of contestants (50) from the area minimizes my chances of getting on. (How generous of spirit, eh?) I believe the 50 contestants who passed were out of 150, rather than 75, as listed in the original ad, but it didn’t change the math.

After I got through the DC test, I tried to keep a good thought. I called my office, and told the folks that I had passed.

That was a mistake.

Nearly every weekday in the rest of the month, someone (and there was one person in particular) asked me whether I had heard anything from JEOPARDY! I had not. The same thing went on for all of June.

Meanwhile, WTEN did a story on a couple people who tried out at Crossgates Mall, went to Boston and passed the audition. The station went to their respective places of employment and surprised one man and one woman with the news that they would be on JEOPARDY! (Unfortunately, I do not remember their names or their JEOPARDY! fates.) I get through July and I hear NOTHING.

Thursday, August 13, I’m sitting at my desk, when our secretary Jeanette buzzes my phone. “It’s JEOPARDY!” The next thing I hear is: “Roger Green? ” “Yes?” “I’m Grant Loud from JEOPARDY! This is the call!”

“This is the call.” What an interesting choice of words. It was almost like he considered it a metaphysical calling. And maybe it was.

Grant explained that this would be a special series of programs filmed in Boston. They were taking only people who resided in the original 13 colonies for this week of programs. Would I be available on September 17 and 18? Yes! Would I be available for October 2 and 3 in Los Angeles? (If I had won the Friday game, I would need to continue in LA. I had to check. I was scheduled to be in a conference in San Diego sometime around then.) “Call me back in five minutes.”
OK, the conference was on October 6. I could fly to LA and have time to get to San Diego. OK, call me back, Grant.

And I waited. OK, it was only 22 minutes, but it seemed like an eternity before he called again. Grant and I talked about the logistics, how I would need to get myself to Boston on the 18th.

OK. I’m going to be on Jeopardy! I’M GOING TO BE ON JEOPARDY! I sat my desk, wanting just to savor the moment, absorb it, perhaps wallow in it a bit. This wallowing lasted perhaps four seconds.

“Well? Well?” hollers my colleague Anne, almost before she got to my office door. Undoubtedly, Jeanette had told her about the two calls. I told her the news. Rejoicing ensued.

Soon, I got in the mail a thick contact. (I’m sure I made a copy, but I can no longer find it.) It said stuff like they can use my likeness in their promotions, I can’t market the fact that I was on the show before it aired. I gave it to my friend Janna, who is a lawyer. She said it was standard release language.

I receive tickets for the show tapings. (I think I asked for three; I could have gotten six.)

I also got the JEOPARDY! Information Sheet that asked for five items that they would use for their “chat cards”. I wrote:
1. I own 1200 LPs, 1000 CDs, a few hundred cassettes, (but zero 8-tracks.) I had a 33 1/3 birthday party.
2. I introduced Rod Serling -almost. I met Earl Warren.
3. In our office, we used the JEOPARDY! calendar for team building. [I figured they might glom onto this one. They LOVE JEOPARDY!-related stories.]
4. I need to avoid mountains – I tore out my knee on one mountain and almost got blown off another.
5. The Heimlich maneuver works.

I return the form.

And now, I figure, I’ll just relax, study and wait.

But the next week, something happens quite distressing, which made relaxing nearly impossible.

Continued on Saturday, June 18.

JEOPARDY! Part 2

Continued from Saturday, May 28.

Great. I pass the mini-test for JEOPARDY!, but I can’t go on the bus to Boston because I had made previous plans. Swell.

I told the person who informed me that I had gotten an acceptable score of my problem, and she suggested that I call WTEN, the local affiliate that carries the show, the next day.

So, I called the station, and spoke with a sympathetic woman about my situation. She indicated that there would be tryouts in Boston on May 15, the day after the bus trip, but that didn’t address the issue, as I would still be away in the Midwest. She then recommended that I talk with another person, a guy, who was then in a meeting.

Later in the day, I called this second WTEN employee and retold my tale of woe. He told me that I should talk with a woman at SONY in California, and gave me her number.

Susanne Thurber is the “talent coordinator” for JEOPARDY!, in Los Angeles. I called her and told her my plight. She informed me about tests in Washington, DC the following week (May 17-21), and THAT was helpful. (Coincidentally, the son of a friend of mine was also trying out in DC that week, but I never heard the results.)

I had planned to take two weeks off from work for vacation. The first week would be traveling in the Midwest. The second week, I would stay home and take care of reading, paperwork, stuff around the house. The heck with that: the second week I’m going to our nation’s capital! Subsequently, I received a letter informing me of my test that turned out to be May 20 at 9 a.m.

I took the train out to Detroit and see some sites (more about that another time). The only JEOPARDY!-related story is this: my friend Sarah and her boyfriend and I are watching the show one night. The Final comes on, and immediately, the boyfriend comes up with an answer. Then he derides the show as too easy. He also mocks the fact that I would be trying out the following week. I didn’t know the answer to the Final, but I knew enough to know that HIS response was WRONG, and I told him, “No, I don’t think so.” Sure enough, his answer WAS wrong, and he muttered something unintelligible. I took some pleasure in that.

After Cleveland (also, more later), I went back to Albany, then went down on another train, this time to DC. My old colleague Jennifer, with whom I used to work, had been nagging me to visit for some time, so it became the perfect opportunity to go see her, and take the REAL JEOPARDY! test. The night before the test, I ate fish for dinner; “brain food,” said the mother of a friend of mine.

The next day, I went to some hotel conference room, where 45 or 50 people were seated the test. I decided to wear a suit, something I almost never do voluntarily, because it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

First, we saw a film clip of Alex Trebek. I don’t remember it much, except that I thought it was supposed to be inspirational. Then, on a blue screen, much like the individualized version of the JEOPARDY! board (and in the same font), the answers would appear for eight seconds, then disappear. We wrote the responses (no, they didn’t have to be in a form of a question) on a sheet of paper. There would be 50 questions in 50 categories.

At first, the test seemed easy, almost too easy. Then, the questions were getting tougher. Or was I just getting jittery? Even the things I knew, I didn’t know. At one point in the test I said to myself, “I don’t know ANYTHING!” One clue about a movie (question 23 or so), and I said, “Mel Gibson. Blue face. Scotland. But what’s the NAME of the film?” I had even SEEN this film at Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady, on a wide screen. I drew an asterisk and went on; at about question 35, suddenly it came to me: “Braveheart!”

One question I got wrong didn’t bother me that much. It was about a Playboy Playmate and an older man. I was actually PLEASED that I couldn’t remember Anna Nicole Smith.

The last question was in the Before and After category. After the test was over, someone asked me, on behalf of a few test takers, “What was the last one – Woodrow Wilson?” No, it was Woodrow Wilson Phillips. Had they not watched the show? Or at least Wheel of Fortune, where this category is also quite popular?

There were eight of us who passed the test. One of the talent people complimented me on my apparel, and chastised some of those who had come in jeans. It seems as though they treated this activity like one would treat a job interview and they were the job interviewers.

Then we played a few mock games, complete with buzzer. Someone said that I wasn’t buzzing in correctly. You don’t click once, you click repeatedly until someone’s name is called. I missed some questions, got some right. All of this is being videotaped. And at the end, we were told that there were only a few hundred slots open each year, so we may be called in a few months, or up to a year later, or we MIGHT NOT BE CALLED AT ALL.

Continued on Saturday, June 11

JEOPARDY! Part 1

I plan to do a JEOPARDY! column every Saturday, complete with cliffhangers. This may be an artifice, but so were the Saturday matinee cliffhangers. You always knew if OUR HERO were hanging off the precipice at the end of the reel, that his horse and a piece of rope would save the day in the beginning of the next scene. Didn’t you?

Every weekday at lunchtime from 1965 to 1968, while growing up in Binghamton, NY, I would go to my maternal grandmother’s house and watch JEOPARDY! with Art Fleming as the host, and Don Pardo (later of Saturday Night Live fame) as the announcer. I watched with my great-aunt Deana Yates, who lived with Grandma Williams. (About the only decent scene in the movie Airplane 2 was the Art Fleming JEOPARDY! sequence.)

The money was much less then. The clues in the first round ran from $10 to $50, with the second round double that. Watching that program, I learned that the ZIP Code for the Spiegel catalog in Chicago was 60609, and that Rice-A-Roni was “the San Francisco treat.” I probably learned some other stuff as well. But I went to high school in 1968, and didn’t come home for lunch, so I watched the program only sporadically thereafter, and by the time the show went off the air in 1975, I was off at college and hardly watching it at all.

Meanwhile, I tried out for one of those Pyramid shows, hosted by Dick Clark, when I was living in NYC in 1977. I must have done miserably; even my sister, who didn’t even watch the show, got a callback, though she was not ultimately chosen, either.

JEOPARDY! returned in 1984 as a syndicated show hosted by Alex Trebek, former host of High Rollers, a show I would watch occasionally. I was almost instantly captivated by it. The questions addressed popular culture as well as the more encyclopedic material. The set was more stylish. Also the money had increased tenfold, with the clues running from $100 to $500 in the first round, and again, twice that in the second round. As the show grew in stature in the culture, I knew I’d have to try out “sometime when I get to Los Angeles.” Meanwhile, I watched with a fervor that approached devotion.

Then I saw THE NOTICE in the Times Union, Thursday, April 9, 1998, Page: D5, 169 words. I almost missed it:

If you think you have what it takes to win at “Jeopardy!”, prove it at a pretest at Crossgates Mall April 29 and 30, 4 to 8 p.m. WTEN, Ch. 10, which airs the game show at 7:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, will sponsor the competition. About 75 Capital Region contestants who take the pretest are expected to advance to a regional contestant search in Boston May 14.

I hadn’t gone to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles had come to me!

The instructions in the paper were to call starting at 9 am to register. I called promptly at 9 and got a busy signal. I hit the redial regularly for about 20 minutes before I got through. Finally, I was able to make an appointment.

I rode up to Crossgates on my bike, not really knowing where I was going. (The tryout was at a closed department store, but since I didn’t usually frequent the mall, I didn’t know where this store – which I couldn’t name THEN, let alone NOW – was.) And I had made a 4:15 pm appointment, which I was in danger of missing.

Fortunately, I saw a WTEN truck. I followed a techie through a narrow passageway that wasn’t generally open to the public, getting there about 4:13.

There was a swarm of humanity in queue for the test, some for 4:30 and 4:45 appointments. I signed in, and was seated fairly quickly. We were in a section with a bunch of desks, arranged as though it were a classroom. The test itself was 10 questions. You needed to get seven right to get to go to Boston. I remember little of the test except that there was something about Egyptology that I may have gotten wrong. I also found out later that there was another test in every other seat, so that we couldn’t cheat. The other test had a question, the answer of which was Cal Ripken, Jr. (probably something about his “Iron Man” streak of consecutive games played.) Some folks wrote Cal Ripken, which was marked as WRONG, because there was a Cal Ripken, Sr., his father, who was also associated with baseball (and specifically with the Baltimore Orioles.) I thought at the time that I had gotten at least 8 of 10 right.

About 15 minutes later, someone read a list of names of people who had passed the test. I was ON the list! I went to the designated table and got a sheet of paper informing me that I would be able to take a bus to Boston on May 14 to take the REAL test. But I COULDN’T. I had a NON-REFUNDABLE train ticket to visit Detroit and Cleveland that week. (Obviously, I had missed that part of the newspaper notice.)

What will I do?

Continued next Saturday, June 4.
***
I finally watched the last 10 games of the Ultimate Championship over two early morning viewings. All I have to say is: It’s too bad more stories didn’t say “Brad Rutter wins” (except in his section of Pennsylvania, and on the JEOPARDY! site.) Most stories read “Ken Jennings loses”, because of his now celebrity status. At least Brad will have $2 million to lick his wounds.

JEOPARDY! Part 0

I had fully intended to talk about my JEOPARDY! experience from 1998, starting today. Unfortunately, I’ve had limited computer time recently, and moreover, I have little time at home to do the research. (It was only seven years ago; you’d think I’d remember every detail as though it were yesterday. But, NO. Memory cells lie gasping on the side of the road.) SOON.

So, I thought I’d write about…JEOPARDY!
First off, I haven’t watched it since last Tuesday, May 10. So, PLEASE don’t ask me what I’ve thought about the end of the “Ultimate Championship”. In due course, I will watch these shows IN ORDER. I almost always watch the show IN ORDER. If I happen to catch that some person had won the game I’ve not seen, it diminishes the enjoyment somewhat. (I’ve also taped World Series games, and some “March Madness” basketball games”, and as long as I don’t know the outcome, it a great watching experience – better because I can zap through the commercials, and close basketball games tend to have coaches using all of their timeouts, which means a LOT of commercials, near the end.

On the other hand, during the first round of the JEOPARDY! tournament, I watched some games out of order, because it didn’t inform who won a previous match that I didn’t see. Likewise, in some of the other tournaments with 15 players, I’ll watch the first week Monday-Friday shows in any order so long as I avoid the end of Friday’s “who makes it to the next round” segment. The following week, M-W in any order, with the same caveat. The final two days IN ORDER.

The other rule is that you oughtn’t to call me between 7:30 and 8 pm, Eastern time, because I’m not likely to answer. Indeed, there were folks over at my house, and someone wanted to take a picture of Lydia, Carol and me DURING Double JEOPARDY! I was not accommodating. (In other words, I ignored him.) If he’d asked three minutes later, which was during that four minute gap between Double and Final JEOPARDY, I would have posed gladly.

Finally, I never mock players on the set for not knowing an answer. I AM surprised (and REALLY PLEASED) when I get Final when none of the constants do. I WILL, however, mock bad betting. If one’s in first place, one has to bet enough to win if the person in second place bets it all. Conversely, Second only really has to bet enough to be ahead if he/she gets it right and First gets it wrong (assuming that Third is in as distant third. If Third’s close, Second should bet similar to the way First bets in relation to Second. (Wha?)

OK, say, at the end of Double Jeopardy!, the totals are $14,000, $10,000 and $9,000. First should bet twice what Second has (2 X 10,000=20,000) less First’s score (-$14,000) + 1, or $6,001. Second will have to bet $8001 to protect against Third. BUT if Third has only $6000, Second can bet $4001, enough to win if First gets it wrong, quite possibly even if Second gets it wrong as well. Being in First is great because, if you get it right and bet enough, you can’t lose. Being in a close second is great, because you can win if it’s a really tough Final.

On the other hand, if you REALLY hate the topic, bet little and hope for the best.