By Steve Sailer
01/13/2024
I’ve never seen a video of my June 27, 1994 appearance on Jeopardy!, but J-Archive has all the action in summary form at:
https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=8437
Hover your cursor over the dollar amount to see the right answer (or question or whatever you call it on Jeopardy!: it’s a good show, but I always found the Answer with a Question format silly) and who got it.
As I may have mentioned before, perhaps even twice, my buzzer was shorting out and only registering every third or fourth time I buzzed, so I was cheated out of numerous times when I buzzed first (and often second as well). Thirty years ago, I was quick (probably not as fast as when I played College Bowl, but still not bad).
For example, the “1911” column was utterly within my wheelhouse. Consider: $200: I know a fair amount of Mexican history for a gringo; $400: I took a class in college on economics of antitrust with the first few weeks devoted to this case; $600: have I ever mentioned that I am interested in baseball statistics?; $800: I’ve been there and got memorably sick from food poisoning; $1000: I took a class on T.S. Eliot and wrote my term paper comparing him to this modernist composer.
But my buzzer only worked on the $1000 question.
Twice during commercial breaks, the Jeopardy! staff came up to me and told me I must be doing something wrong because I was obviously buzzing first but not getting credit for it. They were annoyed that I was making the show look bad by my cheating myself out of thousands of dollars. Why was I doing that? But their only advice they could come up with was for me to stop doing whatever it is I must be doing wrong.
If my buzzer had worked, I would have, in my estimate, won that round and the next one, running up about $20,000 in each game, but lost in the third round. (I watched the next two games from the audience. The next game’s questions were easy for me, but the third game’s questions were largely outside of my strong suits.)
I could have used the $40,000.
A couple of years later, I met up with a friend from high school I hadn’t seen for years. The first thing he said to me was: “I saw you on Jeopardy! What was wrong with your buzzer?”
Shortly after the filming of my episode, General Norman Schwarzkopf appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy! and suffered the same problem (perhaps with the same buzzer). But being a war-winning general, unlike me, he made them stop filming until they fixed his goddam buzzer.
[Comment at Unz.com]
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