Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (26 page)

  On the morning of the second day, these nine contestants play a semifinal round of three games.

  That afternoon, the three winners play a two-game, cumulative-score final.

At worst, you play once and go home. At best, you play four games and win.

Part of what makes the format intriguing is that it doesn’t actually require four wins; the only game you
must
win outright is the semifinal. With a wild card in the first round and close second-place finishes to different opponents in the two-day final, it’s conceivably possible to come in second three times out of four and remain standing at the end.

On the first day, in fact, you shouldn’t even care about winning, but focus only on finishing well. If this reminds you of the eighth and ninth steps on the Eightfold Path, you’re thinking ahead like a champ.

I was thinking ahead myself on exactly this point at about 6:00 p.m. the night before the first game. I was walking through the lobby of the Beverly Hilton, where
Jeopardy!
bunked all of the players. I was trying to stay calm and focused. I was just going for some coffee, one last jolt of caffeine, and then I would try to relax for the night.

I had everything under control.

Surrounded by the hotel’s metallic gold fixtures and weaving through the metallic gold clientele, I was thinking about how the tournament format might affect my wagering.

And then I noticed I was feeling kinda woozy.

I had studied
FAMOUS ATHLETES
. I had memorized
MAJOR BATTLES
. I had immersed myself in
THE BODY HUMAN
,
ANATOMY
, and
PSYCHOLOGY
.

One thing I had forgotten to brush up on, amid all the overwork:
HUMAN LIMITATIONS
. By bedtime my body temperature was well over 100.

I had once again gotten something in my nose.

Being sick in a posh hotel does have its advantages. If you cannot even rise to walk down the hall, for example, you can pay someone wearing a metallic vest to bring you a large shiny ice bucket.

You can then lie on your back and stare at a roomful of gloss, or look out a window at Los Angeles’s metallic gold air, and try to take your mind off the fact that you have managed to destroy any chance of winning, before you have even reached the studio.

By morning, my fever was simmering quietly. I dressed and just tried not to panic. I was moving as smoothly as a fifty-foot fiberglass Hiawatha, and feeling about as intelligent.

The green room began in the golden-trimmed lobby. The
Jeopardy!
wranglers assembled the sixteen of us (fifteen plus an alternate) and led us to a Sony-supplied van. We all piled in, wondering who would survive, and made small talk in rush-hour traffic.

There was little one-upmanship this time, however. Everyone here knew that everyone else here was good. The tone was quiet, focused, reserved, tense, and unrested. Saving it all for later.

I did the same, even more.

As we stepped onto the
Jeopardy!
soundstage and began the morning rehearsal, no one was dazzled. No one was surprised by rotating in and out. We’d all done this before. So the rehearsal was now a chance to assess the competition.

Everyone was fast. Everyone was good. Everyone in the room was in peak combat condition, muscles rippling and bulging from their sleek thumbs of steel.

Whether it was my fever disrupting my timing or the others’ equal ability, I couldn’t ring in at all. My buzzer advantage was gone.

My light just kept staying off.

Any edge I had gained from my studies also seemed to dissolve. Tournament clues are a notch harder than normal. At this level, all of my work had still only brought me up to perhaps average in this group. And I was slower of mind on this day by some margin.

I was beginning to panic. If I lost and went home, I would feel stupid for months. I was frightened of losing in public. I was frightened of facing Annika. I would lose her, possibly from my own selfishness, and very likely for nothing, in the end.

The players filed back to our seats in the green room, where the day would soon tick by. We would be led out in threes, not knowing when we would be called next. The rest would remain, waiting.

Those left in the green room could know nothing of the games under way, lest later players gain an advantage in knowing the wild card totals. Based on past years, however, the amount needed to feel certain of advancing would be about $10000.

To me, it might as well have been a million. Everybody here had played like brilliant assassins, and everyone knew it, so a collegial atmosphere floated over my enveloping dread. I shrank into a corner chair, trapped in a room with Lee Smarty Oswald, Lynette “Clicky” Fromme, Sirhan Buzzerer Sirhan, sharing professional respect for their infamous skills.

I imagined they all had concealed backup buzzers in holsters strapped to their shoulders and ankles, just in case shit went down bad.

Even without the genital-sniffing primate behavior of earlier green rooms, however, one player projected a high-powered Confidence Field, the same one I had projected on the day I won four games, only stronger. His relaxed smile and pressureless humor inflicted light psychic damage in every direction. He was slightly older than the rest of us, and he smelled of freshly inked manuscripts and tenure. When he spoke, his eyes inspected the listeners’ reactions as if he were grading their response on a curve.

When Berkeley arose in conversation, it soon emerged that he was a professor there. This concerned me. I leaned forward, closer, playing ahead, looking for clues.

His necktie was adorned with a motto in Latin. It was a Harvard school tie.

An Ivy League Serial Killer was in this very room.

His name was Dan Melia.

I could feel my fever rising again.

Worse, I knew it would rise further as the day dragged along. Every minute was harder. I hoped for the earliest game. I just wanted to play first and lie down. Failing that, I would hope not to get stuck with the cold-blooded Killer, or at least that he would show mercy, and not track down my family in Ohio and defeat them all, too.

I would hope for a miracle.

One other player bears mention here, although we barely spoke on this particular day: Arthur Phillips, now a best-selling novelist, author of
Prague
and
The Egyptologist,
well known for his intense mind and quiet dry wit.

In the green room, his powers of concentration were on display. He prepared himself mentally by retreating to the northeast corner, where he sat, eyes closed, listening to music in a pair of headphones, focusing focusing focusing focusing as if trying to move test objects in some remote parapsychology lab. Except for the occasional twitch of his brow, only his heart and lungs ever moved.

The rest of us didn’t want to distract him, but if you waved a piece of notebook paper in front of his forehead, it would burst into flames.

This was hours of fun.

Finally, Susanne called three names:

Come on, come on, come on…

“Kim! Fred! Lyn!”

Crap.

My temperature throbbed up one degree.

Nearly an hour passed. Routine production cramps, contestant turnover, between-show resetting of every doojobbie, and the time-distortion field generated by my own throbbing head were all conspiring to create a series of tiny enormous delays.

Finally, Susanne called three more names:

Come on, come on, come on…

“Paul! Claudia! Josh!”

I got hotter.

An hour later, three more. And I no longer cared who I played. Even Dan.

Come on, come on, come on…I do not fear
Jeopardy!
death…

“Dan! Peter! Craig!”

I got hotter.

Then lunch. And again. Three more names. None was mine.

I would have to play last. It was almost five in the afternoon already. By now I was lying on my back on the carpet in the makeup area. I had given up on advancing, and was only trying not to make the other two remaining players sick.

They couldn’t have been kinder. Wes Ulm was a med student from Boston working on a gene therapy project. I believe one day he will find a way to deliver cures for cancer at the cellular level. Grace Veach was a librarian from Decatur and a new mom. Someday she will find a way to deliver all the information in the library into her young boy’s lucky head.

They were both also funny and genuinely sweet. Wes, true to the Hippocratic Oath, was more concerned for my health than for the game we would play. Grace got me cold water and made me laugh. I would cheer for them both. I was glad at least one would advance.

This was the first time I ever met anyone else who had studied in the weeks before the show. Wes hit the books, of course, simply by getting out of bed in medical school. Grace studied, in her own words, “too much, obsessively, every spare moment.” The three of us watched another hour tick by, punctuated only by the soft gurgle of my will to live trickling out on the floor.

Finally: “Grace! Bob! Wes!”

Dead Man Walking again.

Even with video to review, the game’s just a haze that I don’t recall very well. You can see on the tape as we walk out, however, that the three of us are rooting each other on, glancing and smiling at each other in the introductions.

This was so much better than my “don’t be nervous” bullshit. I began the game feeling like an ass for having done that in my earlier games. A sleep-deprived ass, in fact, with slow reflexes, still little real knowledge, and a cranium pounding with fever.

I just wanted to go home. Except Annika would be there.

The game begins.

Wes quickly whips out the Forrest Bounce, swerving from category to category. Against a guy whose head he knows is already spinning.

I am relieved. I feel like much less of an ass. At the podium, all oaths are off.

After months of continuous study, I know few of the responses. It feels like I’m back on Mom and Dad’s couch in the Snow Belt. In the first dozen clues, I respond exactly once on a lame $100 clue. I keep my hand off the Weapon and wait for my doom.

I glance up at the scoreboard, involuntarily curious to see the results of nearly three solid minutes of textbook futility. I have, in this moment in this game, exactly one hundred more
Jeopardy!
dollars than you do.

And I am, I discover, in the lead.