Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (4 page)

Today,
Jeopardy!
has rightly assumed its place as a national touchstone, Alex Trebek has better name recognition than most U.S. senators, and Merv’s lullaby “Think Music” is played at everything from baseball stadiums to weddings. If the show were any more popular, Alex and Merv would be worshipped as gods on small tropical islands, their temples consisting of three thatch podiums and a lovely bunch of coconuts.

Incidentally, Merv has made over $70 million in royalties from the “Think Music” alone. I probably have to send him a dollar now, just for mentioning it. His production company eventually sold for about a quarter of a billion dollars.

That might seem a bit, um, huge, but give the guy his due: forty years ago, Merv recognized the value of a loopy idea and backed it with hard work, even when quiz shows were a nearly impossible sell. He spent months experimenting and daydreaming. He kept himself open to feedback—the show’s title itself came from listening to criticism—and, most of all, insisted on respecting his audience’s intelligence, even when well-paid bosses insisted otherwise.

Is it all that surprising that Merv now zips around on a yacht the size of three fiberglass Hiawathas laid end-to-end and holds an ownership stake in (roughly speaking) one-third of the earth’s crust? It would be a lot more surprising if he had
dis
respected his audience and wound up with all that.

If there’s one lesson here, I think it’s this: never underestimate the power of playfulness combined with hard work.

If there’s another: always write your own damn theme music.

We are lucky indeed for Merv and Julann and their vision of a game in which “questions” and “answers” are switched. The English language, unfortunately, has not quite caught up.

How much confusion can the reversal of two words possibly cause? I actually typed the following, I swear, the first time I tried to e-mail an overseas friend an explanation of the game:

In each question, by which I mean each clue, there is in fact a clue to the answer, by which I mean the question, which is the answer to the clue.

Even
I
can’t quite tell what that means. It’s like one of those optical-illusion forks with two and a half prongs. And I know what I meant. So for the sake of clarity, this book follows the show’s own convention of scrupulously referring to all question-like objects coming out of Alex’s mouth as “clues,” and all answer-like objects coming out of the contestants’ mouths as “responses.”

Keep in mind, however, that
within
each clue there is often a key piece of information that can lead to an educated guess. This will
not
be called a “clue,” since this might cause you to notice the faint sizzle of burning neurons, followed by the distant voice of a loved one calling 911, and then a nice quiet darkness. For your safety, any such clue-like object will be called a “hint.”

Later on, if you become confused at the meaning of the word “clue,” lose consciousness, and eventually awaken to three paramedics extracting you from the book with the Jaws of Life, I renounce all responsibility.

You have been warned.

Another thing that happened in 1963, right about the time Merv was taking the game through its first run-through at Radio City Music Hall: I was born, in a snowy small Midwestern town much like Ironwood. We didn’t have a five-story Indian built to withstand atomic-blast winds. But we had quilt shows, lots of ducks and frogs, and mosquitoes the size of lawn darts. Somehow we managed.

Granted, a lot of other stuff happened in 1963, too. Placing these two events side by side is completely arbitrary. There’s no reason to imagine they might be connected.

But eventually, as you know, they were. My own life would cross paths with Merv’s quiz show juggernaut, and I would be in over my head from the start. My only salvation would be the same playful stick-to-itude Merv had once had, back at his dining room table.

Merv, however, probably wasn’t so freaked out by the stress that he accidentally got something painful shoved way up his nose, an event that became the source for my first great insight into how to play
Jeopardy!

Like I said: you take pride in whatever you’ve got.

CHAPTER
4

CLOSE YOUR EYES, BREATHE DEEPLY, AND SCREAM

Also, I Discover More in My Head Than Just Knowledge

G
ame day.

Before each five-match afternoon begins, long before the audience enters,
Jeopardy!
trots the contestants onstage for a morning rehearsal game. This gives the players a brief chance to warm up and become familiar with the set, so we’re less likely to lose gross motor skills once the tape starts rolling. I presume it also gives the show’s own director and crew a chance to prepare as well, a pre-game ritual as much a part of their day as infield drills are to a baseball team.

One practice game is split among all fifteen contestants, who are rapidly rotated. You play just a handful of clues. My own first rehearsal was a flood-lit bright-colored blur:
I stand here and look there? And push this? Hey, neat pen! Who was Lincoln?
and it was over.

I had a buzzer strategy in mind, prepared long in advance, but I was rotated out before I could really try it. As I stepped off the stage, the podiums felt almost as distant as ever. I was worried I’d never ring in.

Speaking of which, let’s clarify “ringing in,” the act of moving your thumb or index finger against a small white button on a black plastic cylinder, hoping that Alex will call your name and useful noises will spill out of your mouth.

The term “ringing in” is a vestige of a long-ago period when hitting your button made an electronic noise—
boong,
to be exact. It’s not called “buzzing in” because nothing in the game goes “buzz.”

If you’ve already noticed that nothing goes
ring
or
boong
anymore either, then you are a troublemaker, and I will have to keep my eye on you. Unfortunately, there’s no verb that fits much better. Clicking, tapping, punching, zapping—nothing quite works. There’s just no common verb that sufficiently describes competitive red-hot thumb-on-button action. Clearly, the English language is a wuss.

There isn’t even a thrilling name for the cylinder-button-whackity-thingy itself. Most players call it a buzzer, although the preferred, official term seems to be (
anticlimax alert!
) the “Signaling Device.”

But “Signaling Device” isn’t a name. It’s a placeholder for where a name should go.
Anything
can be a “Signaling Device”: road flares, pheromones, a discharge of ignited fuel from a shuttlecraft, even the body of a dead guy. (This was in a
Die Hard
movie.) “Signaling Device” is so ambiguous you could rewrite a 1930s melodrama around the phrase, with complete accuracy:

You might have noticed your own active—perhaps even lurid—imagination just now. We’ll soon put it to use. Harnessed properly, it’s the single fastest way to hot-rivet new info into your skull, not to mention a lot of fun. Just realize that I had little to do with whatever your filthy little mind came up with just now. You sick (signaling device).

Hoping to improve on “Signaling Device,” I once sought the opinion of an expert in product-naming. We spent a whole afternoon kidding about it, in fact, while drinking champagne in bed and watching tapes of the show.

Jane, who will become a major character later, and in whose apartment all of my personal belongings now sit silently in boxes and bags (and have sat long enough that they are now covered in dust), received an M.A. in linguistics from Berkeley and once made her living inventing evocative trade names.

Many of the products Jane helped name are now quite famous, although there were confidentiality agreements involved, so I am forbidden to divulge details. Even now. So let’s just say this: if you’ve ever heard of a lightly carbonated alcoholic beverage whose name rhymes with “Squeema”…wink wink, nudge nudge.

This was our list of alternative names for the Signaling Device:

ClueZapper

Palm Hoopty

Thumbilical Cord

Thought Bopper

ThunderFist, now with realistic Kung Fu Grip

QuizBang

Mr. Smartyhands

Blurt-O-Matic Jr.

The Mervulator

Toyota Corolla

And the one we decided on, since it’s closest to the actual user experience:

The Jeopardy Weapon

Jane and I laughed a lot making that list. Sometimes even in the instant you’re doing something, you’re aware it’s a moment you’ll want to hang on to forever.

Moving on. I’m calling it a buzzer. Everybody does anyway.

Back in the green room, hours after rehearsal and shortly before my first game, I was having trouble breathing.

I was sitting in a makeup chair, near a live set, on a soundstage inside the Sony lot, about to go on national TV. I was just trying to control my nerves and stay focused. I had spent much of the day secretly expecting to do something idiotic, possibly dishonoring my family before millions of people.

And now, only moments before I would play, my head was on fire. For an instant, I wondered if I would stop breathing completely.

That was almost ten years ago now. I’m sitting here writing this in the same exact coffee shop you have in your neighborhood, drinking the same oversweet brownish goo, listening to the same music drowned out by high-speed blenders, and breathing the same aerosol fog of mocha, cleaning products, and sweat. (I do almost all of my writing here, so I don’t have to look at the boxes and garbage bags in the apartment.) Close your eyes, and you can imagine precisely the sensory input I’m experiencing right this second. But even here in this coffee shop, if I close
my
eyes, I can still feel one particular dab of makeup going up my left nostril almost a decade ago.