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You’ll see me on Jeopardy! on Tuesday, July 10. I’m publishing a series of posts in anticipation of the airing, reflecting on my experience.

In my last post, I talked about all kinds of experiences that led me to Jeopardy!. But one thing I didn’t address is, well, Jeopardy!. Have I been a fan of the show since I was a wee lad, or is it a more recent phenomenon?

Definitely the former. I don’t remember exactly when I first started watching the show, but I do know I was young — maybe five or six years old. A date I can place with more confidence is 1992 (age seven), when I received a gift of MS-DOS games for both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune and quickly became an avid player of the former. (Okay, I admit it: I played Wheel too, even though that show is painfully dumb.) There was, of course, no character in the game who looked anything like me, so I think the avatar I chose was a white dude with red hair. I sometimes played for hours on end; I can still remember the synthesized sound effect signaling that it was time to buzz in, and the way the computer players’ answers would gradually reveal on the screen as though they were being manually typed by a disembodied but relentless opponent. It wasn’t long before I’d played so much Jeopardy! that I started seeing the same questions again (a constant problem with these sorts of games).

I watched the show religiously for much of the 90s, seeing countless players demonstrate their answer-questioning and button-pressing prowess. I think every Jeopardy! contestant has a player or two whom they watched as a kid who really inspired them; for me, it was Eddie Timanus. He first appeared in October 1999 and was a five-time champion (in those days, that was the limit) who later competed in the Tournament of Champions. I once watched Eddie run an entire category on UN secretaries-general (how many of us can even name five different people who have held that office?). And to top it all off, Eddie is completely blind and has been since he was a toddler. Incredibly, the only real affordances they gave him were a Braille card listing the categories and a suspension of the show’s traditional practice of having contestants walk to their podiums (a practice they would later permanently eliminate). Being sightless, he couldn’t read ahead on the game board like his opponents could, and yet he still somehow beat everyone to the buzzer over and over again. I remember being enormously impressed.

For four or five years, I also had a page-a-day Jeopardy! calendar in my room. It became a routine for my mom to go out every year on the day after Christmas and pick this up for me (calendars are steeply discounted after the 25th). I dutifully saved all the pages for years, even though I never looked at them again.

And there were other random Jeopardy!-related experiences that presented themselves on occasion. In TV production class in ninth grade, we made a Celebrity Jeopardy! video (I’d never seen the SNL skits, but they were all the rage in those days) in which one of the contestants was Claude Rains, who played the title role in The Invisible Man, because our group wasn’t large enough to have three contestants plus a host plus camera plus floor director. (Yes, that was my idea, and it was I who read the part from behind the camera, in addition to playing Alex in front of it.) I remember what an achievement it was to find a good copy of the theme song and get it down to a size small enough to fit on a 3.5” floppy disk so I could bring it to school and record it onto our tape.

A less frivolous example is how Mrs. Bell used to create and run Jeopardy! games to help us review for tests. She used to pit the left half of the room against the right half in team matches to see who knew the most about Washington-Adams-Jefferson-Madison-Monroe-Quincy Adams, or the Gilded Age, or the Cold War, or some other exam topic. I could be making this up, but I vaguely remember that she let me play Trebek once, which was pretty sweet.

Truth be told, though, my viewership of the show dwindled in high school and thereafter. UPN started airing reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation every day at 7 PM, which conflicted with Jeopardy!, and I almost always chose Trek. Meanwhile, college was the first time in my life I didn’t have regular access to a television, so of course this particular habit fell away entirely, in favor of TV habits that could easily be fulfilled with an Internet connection (I never looked, but I doubt anyone bothered putting Jeopardy! on Kazaa or BitTorrent). I actually didn’t make watching the show a regular habit again until I started preparing to appear on it earlier this year — though I did have a brief period last year when I tried to use being home in time for Jeopardy! as a motivator to get out of the office at a reasonable hour. (It didn’t prove very effective, which is perhaps a sign of just how far I’d let my enthusiasm for the show get away from me.)

And for almost all of this time, I never seriously investigated trying out of the show. As a kid, I often watched the Teen Tournament or College Championship with a particular yearning to compete for the sizeable prizes given in those easier competitions, but it always seemed unreachable somehow. In those days, there was no website that clearly spelled out the exact procedure for getting on the show; I had no idea whom to ask or where to look for such guidance, and my personality was never of the type to probe on such things if the information was not readily available. In many ways, I really wish I had, particularly given that my abilities, relative to my prospective opponents, have probably never been greater than when I was sixteen. In any event, I missed my chance as a youth, and it wasn’t until 2009 that I began the process of falling into the opportunity to compete on Jeopardy!.

More on that in my next post.

P.S. So, did Trebek inspire that mustache? Sadly, no. I was just a dweeb.