Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (22 page)

You already know how your body reacts to any decent-sized freak-out. Your adrenal glands do the lambada, secreting adrenaline with every step. This opens up the main supply pipes to your liver and muscles, while narrowing your smaller blood vessels. Your heart rate and blood pressure jerk upward, and you breathe faster, flooding your tissues with oxygen. Meanwhile your adrenals also pump out steroids called
glucocorticoids,
which tell your liver to get busy with the conversion of fat and proteins into sugar to rocket-fuel your muscles and brain.

You can see where all of this is going. In the next few seconds your body will be prepared to kick ass, run like hell, or simply start screaming your lungs out.

None of which, you notice, would do much good on
Jeopardy!

Of course, all this sudden spidey-strength comes at a price. Say a brief farewell to your digestion, immune system function, assorted reproductive processes, and (here it comes, yes): higher mental abilities.

Major buzz, dude.

And this is how your body
always
responds to stress, from any source.

Ever have the feeling that your stress
itself
was what was keeping you from thinking? Maybe you’ve brain-locked during a job interview, or while taking a test you knew you should have passed. Everyone, at some point, becomes lamely tongue-tied around cute members of the desired gender.

Now you know why. These are your glucocorticoids talking.
You
just want to remember a physics equation or charm the hottie down the hall into a date. Your
body,
meanwhile, thinks you’re fighting off a pack of wild baboons. Thus the confusion.

I was starting to get more nervous than I had been in any of the previous games.

If I won: the car alone would be worth as much as the first four games combined. If I lost: I didn’t want to get this close to my goal and fail. I was afraid of my own frustration. Which I knew, of course, and trying not to think about it was frustrating in itself. Death spiral. As I felt my stress continue to climb, I was afraid I couldn’t control it.

Under the table, where no one could see, I was snapping my fingers back and forth, over and over and over and over and over and over.
Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

This was another state-dependent retrieval strategy, a highly targeted type called
anchoring.
I had read about this, too, in the previous weeks, and hoped it might help to reel me back in if I started flipping out.

You see anchoring in sports all the time, although the word is rarely used. Basketball players have careful routines before free throws, golfers may have precise sets of practice swings and waggles, and some baseball players have whole Kabuki ceremonies when stepping into the batter’s box. These routines may not seem to bear directly on the act to be performed, but they do, absolutely: consciously or not, these athletes have created physical triggers to invoke desired sequences—e.g., glove-twiddle, hip-shimmy, crotch-grab, and spit, now
go!
—which help topple the neural dominoes they need most: concentration, relaxation, confidence, etc.

As an emergency measure, I had tried to create my own ball-bouncing, hip-waggling, crotch-grabbing, get-ready-now routine, only targeted to create a desirable emotional state of not-flipping-out. (And with less crotch involved than most athletes use. It’s a family show.)

The recipe for creating an anchor is simple: just create your desired emotional state—say, “calm and in total control,” for example—by using conventional memory of previous experiences in exactly that state, until you start feeling the state returning, intensely. Then pick a physical movement to which no meaning is yet attached—the “anchor” you’ll use later—and start burning in the connection by practicing the movement while you experience the emotional state.

Since your brain is already on Record, the feeling and the physical anchor will automatically start connecting. If you’re anchoring an intense emotion, the process is pretty quick, since that’s precisely the crashing alien roller coaster that gets Homer Simpson turned on at the bullfight. (If you just opened the book and read that last sentence out of context, it cannot be explained. But trust me: the tour group knows what that means.) Later you can put the anchor to work just by throwing the process in reverse: the anchor itself will fire the neurons that invoke the emotional state.

So, about two weeks before
Jeopardy!,
I needed an inconspicuous, personally meaningless motion, one specific enough that I could always repeat it. That particular night, the film
West Side Story
was on cable, so I whimsically chose the odd left-right-left finger-snapping motion used by one of the dancing gangs. I’d never personally been in a dancing gang in New York, so the neurons controlling this movement had no existing emotional connections.

Every day, I spent a few minutes in a quiet, darkened room, closing my eyes and remembering times when I felt confident, relaxed, and in control. This wasn’t a huge list. Once I had the desired set of feelings cranked up pretty intensely, I began and repeated the
West Side Story
finger-snapping movement, intentionally ironing in a physical trigger for calmness.

Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

I felt like an idiot, incidentally.

I didn’t even tell Annika about it. I really didn’t need another eye-roll.

Sony cafeteria, a few minutes before my fifth game.

Fingers under the table, low enough no one can see, over and over and over and over and over.
Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

I did not, in fact, instantly experience a sensation of control and complete personal serenity.

However, I also didn’t run around the room shouting
boogety-boogety woop-woop-woop yah GAAAH!
even though I really, really felt like it.

So I think the anchor was working.

Game five.

This time I can’t turn to my fellow contestants, reminding them not to be nervous. I’m snapping my fingers, closing my eyes, trying to take my own advice.

A physician from Anchorage. A tour guide from L.A.

We march out. I stop snapping my fingers. Feeling OK, but not great. Nerves coming back.

Less than thirteen minutes and one Final to go.

Alex emerges, calm and relaxed. I envy him those feelings. “Happy Thanksgiving, ladies and gentlemen” are his first words.

Yes!
I am thinking,
yes!

Reviewing my Thanksgiving pages:
Mayflower…something. Squanto. Um. Bradford. Somebody. Shit. Shit.
My brain has begun to shut down.

On the tape I am smiling. I giggle nervously, laughing with Alex. Inside, I am fighting an oncoming flood.
Glucocorticoids, damn.
Notebooks in flames in my head.

Alex reminds me of the stakes. “If he wins today, he will qualify automatically for our $100,000 Tournament of Champions coming up later this year, and he will have his choice of some fabulous GM cars,” Alex says.

If.

Chuck! Can you hear me, Chuck? I seem to have misplaced your book! Chuck!?

The very first category:

PILGRIMS

Mayflower…um…Plymouth Rock…Squanto…Bradford somebody…Squanto. Who the hell is named Bradford, for crying out loud? Shit.

The entire category goes by. I respond once. I win on the buzzer not a single time. My timing is off. My reflexes aren’t normal. My body thinks I am being towel-snapped by a ravenous badger.

While the badger and I wrestle mightily, I don’t win on the buzzer until the eighth clue.

At the first commercial, I am in second place. It is the first time I have trailed in five games. My body mistakes the situation for a dozen more badgers, hungry, and armed with wet towels.

At the end of the
Jeopardy!
round, I’m in a distant third.

During the two-minute commercial break, I turn slightly away from the other players, facing the back of the stage.

I know damn well that I’ll have no idea of one-third of the responses to come. With my reflexes shot and memory failing, there’s a limit to how much I can expect.

It was a good run,
I tell myself.
This was a blast. The money will be a big help, and you’ll remember doing this for the rest of your life. What the hell.

This moment of surrender allows me to breathe deeply for the first time since the green room before the first game. I start enjoying the moment instead of freaking out about the future. And then I notice: I am actually relaxing.

So I fire my anchor, snapping my fingers, left-right-left-right
snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity,
a one-man dancing gang.

I am hoping to crank up my serenity.

The sheer absurdity of all this strikes. I can’t tell if it’s working, or a placebo effect, or if I’m just amused now at feeling so silly. But I can breathe while I’m laughing.
Something
is working, anyway.

This is the last round I will play today, win or lose. And whatever happens, I intend to enjoy it.

This brings us to the ninth and final step along the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy, one worth an extra exclamation point for emphasis:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

3. Put your head where you can use it later.

4. Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.

5. Admit you don’t know squat as often as possible.

6. Everything connects to everything else.

7. You can often see only what you think you’ll see.

8. Just play each moment. Let go of outcome.

9. ! Seriously. About this last part. Just get each moment right. Let go.

It may bother you that there are nine steps on the Eightfold Path. In which case you
really
need step number nine. This is one of those things you should let go.

And if that doesn’t work for you, get your own damn enlightened path.

On the other hand, if you’d like to memorize the nine steps, you already know how to invent a half-dozen different mnemonics.

If you really get stuck, try something that almost never works.

Shortly after the second round begins, I stumble into a Daily Double:

THE NAME OF THIS WESTERN WISCONSIN CITY ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER HONORS A NATIVE AMERICAN SPORT

When I lived in Chicago, I used to date a girl who played this particular game. She showed me how to play once, or tried to. After about three catches, using the odd netted stick thingies, I missed the ball and it hit me squarely between the eyes.

Oh, and how she laughed.

Also, as a comedian I once got booed off the stage by a bunch of drunks in this particular town. Since we tend to remember being chased by growling animals, I remember the place well.

What is Lacrosse?

Maybe you really
can
screw up in so many ways that eventually you get good at
Jeopardy!