Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (49 page)

But when returning to shore, waddling up onto the beach, fairy penguins are vulnerable to predators. They’re only as tall as your forearm is long. They weigh about as much as your hand. So: safety in numbers. Every evening at dusk, hundreds of penguin parents stage a Normandy-style invasion, a sudden onrush of honking and waddling and climbing and panting and finally upchucking right into their offspring. It’s an ecstatic display of magnificent nonsense. Nature in her full psychotic glory.

I was there to take photos of this penguin invasion. I should add that the blue fairy penguin can sometimes attack. They don’t do much damage. Still, one once took a chunk from a man named Linus Torvalds, which is why Linux has a penguin for a logo. The first popular version of Linux was known as “Red Hat,” inspired by the cofounder’s large red fedora. The world is a wondrously small place.

So I was about to head off to an even smaller island off the coast of the island of Tasmania, just to watch penguins go all
Saving Private Ryan
and then upchuck en masse. I had night-vision goggles at hand for the task, amplifying the nonsense by a factor of several.

And I was thinking of
Jeopardy!,
believe it or not.

I was appreciating how interesting things had gotten. How small the world seems and how much of it now feels familiar. I had first read about fairy penguins more than eight years before, in fact, in a tiny apartment in Hollywood, preparing for a televised pop quiz, not realizing I would one day learn so much fabulous crap I can’t sit still in one life anymore.

For all that would not have happened otherwise, to
Jeopardy!
I am grateful.

Suddenly my laptop went
p-TING!
with an e-mail.

My friend Howard, the fellow I’d helped out on
Millionaire,
was asking if I was in the new tournament.

WHAT new tournament?
I wondered.

CHAPTER
24

THE ULTIMATE TOURNAMENT

Also, I Swear Off the Weapon

I
still visited the small island with the beach with the fairy penguins—wouldn’t you?—and stood shining red lights on birds to take green night-vision pictures. But my mind was already back in Los Angeles.

I can’t learn all the Vice Presidents again.

As to Jane’s response, you can say it out loud with me here, if you like. All together now:
GWEEEEP!
Jane replied right away. Jane also reassured me I
could
relearn Vice Presidents, not to mention First Ladies, Oscar Winners, Which Fork to Use with Yak Meat in Bhutan, and whatever else was in my stack of
Jeopardy!
notebooks. The books hadn’t moved, after all.

Actually, they had. I had. I was living with Jane, sort of, at last. We had decided that forever was less terrifying, at least, than paying two monthly real estate checks. So I’d given away about two-thirds of my stuff, packed the rest into boxes, and moved in.

These are the boxes and bags that you know as a familiar old pile.
I’ll get around to unpacking.
Every day, as a matter of fact. I didn’t. I often wondered if I ever could.

It takes one kind of trust to get into a strange car ten time zones from home, or to let a drenched stranger like me scramble in.

It seems to take another kind of trust entirely to climb into someone’s entire life.

So we didn’t marry, or get engaged, or even commit long-term. When you’re committed to the present, that can be hard to do.

As you realize, I have much left to learn.

In the years since the Masters,
Jeopardy!
had changed one key rule: champions would no longer be marched off after only five wins.

Instead, they could play until they lost, racking up as many wins as they could. Six wins, as Sean Ryan soon managed. Seven wins, as Tom Walsh mustered soon after.

Or, finally, seventy-four.

Ken Jennings, a sweet-faced young feller with an open-eyed smile, a generous heart, and the instincts of a pissed wolverine, took over the show for months.

Something like this was almost inevitable, or so thought most players I knew. The advantages of incumbency grow greater with time. More time to study, more studio time building state-dependent retrieval advantages, growing skills with the buzzer, increased mastery of strategy.

So
something
like this, yes, but Ken’s run was unique. No one has repeated his feat or come close. You remember my own shakiness in the first five games. Ken did five games, and five games, and five games again, day after day, over and over, more than a dozen times in a row.

And Ken did get better and better with time. He had a few struggles early on, but once Ken hit his stride, the game was transformed into a one-man Japanese monster movie. Players would scream, and one of them would point at the sky, and then Ken would breathe fire and crush them and eat them, stopping only to tithe and read from the Book of Moroni. After a few months it seemed Alex had a permanent co-host.

Even Ken’s penmanship—his freaking
penmanship
—improved. He was signing his name in meticulous light-pen calligraphy. I can barely spell “Bob” with that thing. Ken’s record may be broken someday, but his handwriting will stand forever.

Best of all, to his credit, Ken remained humble and kind. The show was lucky for his lighthearted presence. He could have turned into an attitude nightmare, the Shootah from Ootah, the Creature from the Great Salt Lake, the LDSOB. Instead, he’s just Ken. We’ve exchanged a few e-mails, and he is funny and modest beyond all expectations. I believe if he ever used the word “booty” sincerely, he’d explode.

Ken’s half-season-long run presented an unusual problem. The annual competition, if held, would be a Tournament of Champion.

The producers had a better idea.

People often wondered, when Ken Jennings was mentioned, if he was truly the best player ever. How many games would Frank Spangenberg have won? Or Chuck, or Dan, or a few dozen others, given the chance? Even
I
had four straight runaways; I might have won for weeks, given only my skills at the time. And as you know by now, there are dozens for whom that may well have been true.

So: dozens it would be,
Jeopardy!
’s producers decided. Bring ’em all back. Let’s find out.

One hundred forty-five players would compete, a tournament ten times the size of anything the show had yet tried: the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, it was dubbed.

The world’s most buzzer-skilled frat party is what it turned out to be.

Ken, since he’d earned it, was given a pass into the finals, which would take four rounds to reach. Nine other great players were given a bye in the first round. Why nine? To make the brackets work out, I suspect.

The Nifty Nine (as they were called, alliteration trumping all sense of gravitas), included six of the Masters: Brad, who had won, plus Bob Verini and Eric, the other two finalists. Robin Carroll, who’d won both a ToC and an International title. And of course Chuck and Frank. The others were Sean with his six wins, Tom with his seven, and Brian Weikle, who had won the most money in a single game until Ken came along.

You could quibble with some of this, and people did. Fans of the show debated these choices in earnest. And so what? It’s a game, after all. Just a show. A game show, in fact. Who could be a big enough goofball to waste time on such things?

Or write 340 pages about it? Or read them, for that matter?

That cleared up now, let’s move on.

The other 135 of us were thrown into 45 games to produce 45 winners.

Those 45 would be joined by the Nifties, in a group of 54. And 18 second-round games would produce 18 winners.

After the third round, there would be 6 winners.

The fourth round would narrow the field to 2. And these 2 would play Ken in a three-day final for two million dollars.

One champion would be left standing. Before collapsing from exhaustion.

I looked at the names in the list of 135. It felt like the end of
The Wizard of Oz
: “And you were there, and you, and you…” So many faces would be welcome sights if I were lucky enough to tape on their day.

From the Masters came India and Leslie Frates and Rachael and Babu and Eddie the Jedi. From my Tournament of Champions, Fred Ramen and Grace Veach, sweet people I was eager to see. There were others I’d met, whom I hadn’t yet spent much time with, but I was sure it would be good to see them again.

There was Arthur Phillips, who you will recall had such backstage intensity that pages exploded in flame when held in front of his forehead. In the years since our first meeting, he’d become a best-selling novelist. This was hardly surprising. He seemed destined to do things to wood pulp.

There were dozens whose skills were of championship level. Michael Daunt, reigning International champ on the day I finally passed the entry exam. Tom Cubbage, who, like Eric Newhouse, had won two separate tournaments, in his case a college tournament and a ToC.

Mike Rooney, a philosophy professor I’d met at a party a year before he won his five games. He had picked my brain that night for a few details of strategy; I like to imagine it helped. Jerome Vered and Leszek Pawlowicz, whom we met at the Game Show Congress.

Dozens of others. On down the list. (If you’re one of them and not listed here, you deserve to be.) Many were names I didn’t recognize at all.

At last I saw Dan Melia. Perhaps I’d get one final crack. Either way, later on, there would be Potent Potables.

But any reunion would wait until the games were all over. As a matter of honor, not to mention contracts in Latin drafted on goatskins impressed with buzzer-finger blood oaths, all of the players broke contact, every one, suspending friendships until eliminated from play.

I said a temporary good-bye to several good friends. We knew we’d have a lot to talk about when it was over.

This was the only downside of the Ultimate Tournament.

With three single-elimination rounds against people this good just to get to the semis, I had as much chance as anyone, which is to say: not a lot.

Later on, everyone I spoke to—everyone—agreed this was much like a golf tournament. It wouldn’t likely determine who was best, just who won. It would take dozens of tournaments over several years to truly answer the question of who’s best. (I am not, incidentally, hinting to the producers right now that I think this would be an excellent idea, good for ratings, the spread of democracy, and the fate of the world’s children. Although clearly it would be all of those things.)

So fun was in order. This would be uncompetitive. An excuse to play again in the sandbox. With this lighthearted intention, I sat at Jane’s kitchen table and cracked open the notebooks.

An hour later, I realized how much I’d forgotten. Even more, I was enjoying decoding my strange old mnemonic cartoons.

A few hours after that, I was listing things I still needed to study. I was getting excited. This was familiar and fun and another excuse to make neurons leap high in the air.

Pavlov’s contestant was hearing a bell.

With forty-five first-round games to play, taping just the initial round would take more than a month. Needing to study, I hoped for the latest date possible.

Instead, I was given the very first one. First, once again, while I’m still catching my breath. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence. But it sure seems to happen a lot. I am sure I will never know why.

I hung up the phone knowing I wouldn’t be ready for the first round. It wouldn’t even be close. I wouldn’t know what I knew at the Masters.

To a sane, healthy mind, this could be more reason to relax and have fun.

But you know me better than that. For all my talk of detaching from outcome and great lessons learned, as a student of wisdom I’m still just a freshman, stuck forever in remedial lab.

Jane always insists that I sleep for eight hours each night. I agree. But that leaves sixteen hours to cram.

“Bob Harris!”

I’m as startled as you are.
I’m not ready.

Fortunately, I am still just on the roof of the Sony parking garage, on the morning of the first taping day. I am parking dear Max, my beloved rumbling old mule, in the same spot on the roof where I’ve parked for ten years. The Camaros, like most things, are now long forgotten, except sometimes when I’m hanging out with other
Jeopardy!
champs who still drive their own.

It’s a voice I don’t know. I turn, and Alan Bailey is smiling. He’s a five-timer himself. I was out of the country when he played his games, but he forgives this, and we’re friends by the time we’re walking downstairs.