Pretty exciting stuff on Jeopardy! the last couple of days. A dude named Roger Craig — but not the old Niners runningback — got his career off to a blazing start by breaking Ken Jennings’ single-day earnings record in his second show ever and averaging something like $40,000 in winnings over his first five efforts.
But Craig, a computer science grad student, suffered an ignominious defeat yesterday at the hands of — of all people! — an Internet sportswriter and humorist named Jelisa Castrodale.
Castrodale played the game like someone who follows sports, obviously recognizing Craig’s dominance and seizing every time she had control of the board to go fishing for Daily Doubles, instead of just pathetically starting at the top of categories like novice players often do.
She found a few and fared well on them, enough to come pretty close to Craig in time for Final Jeopardy!
The third contestant, a police officer from Arlington, Va., was obviously thrown after he correctly answered a question about a doughnut pillow and Alex Trebek made a quip about the cop knowing all about doughnuts. Really just goes to show that you can study all you want for your Jeopardy! appearance, but the big wild card you can never prepare for is Trebek saying some f@#$ed-up s@#! that gets in your head and breaks your concentration. That dude was a complete non-factor for the rest of the match.
Anyway, Castrodale trailed Craig by only a couple thousand dollars when the Final Jeopardy! category was revealed: “SPORTS & THE MEDIA”
I instantly thought of ‘Duk’s question from February, and how hilarious and awesome it must have seemed for Castrodale, a sportswriter, to be faced with the category.
The answer was, as any sports-loving Jeopardy! fan could have predicted, shockingly easy: Something along the lines of, “On Feb. 8, 2010, a major newspaper in this American city ran a headline saying, ‘Amen. After 43 years, our prayers have been answered.'”
Hmm… what major sporting event happens in early February? What team won that sporting event in 2010? And hell, if you’re looking for an extra clue, which cities’ papers would employ such overt religious language?
Yet only Castrodale wrote New Orleans. The cop said Miami and Craig said Chicago.
So score one for the sportswriters.
I will continue my efforts to get myself on Jeopardy! someday, and continue cursing fate for not putting me on the show in which there were categories on Cy Young Award Winners and sandwiches. WHY?
Oh, finally: Castrodale is on Twitter under the handle @gordonshumway, which, if you’ll recall was ALF’s real name on Melmac.
Tedquarters 
I actually understand Roger’s answer of Chicago – I actually had that answer until about 5 seconds before time.
I simply read the date wrong! I saw June instead of February, the amount of time seemed right for the Blackhawks’ championship drought, and I went with it. Just before it was too late, I realized how much of an idiot I was and changed my answer to New Orleans.
Wow, what a phenomenally easy question.
IIRC, sports questions were one thing that tripped up Jennings too.
I also watched this one, Castrodale played brilliantly, I think she’ll be around for a bit. Trebek remarked that she smiled upon seeing the final jeopardy category, thought that was funny. Sports wasn’t Craig’s specialty, you could tell early on.
It reminded me of that Cheers episode where Cliff goes on the show and finds his dream categories: Celibacy, Bar Trivia, The U.S. Postal Service, Mothers, etc. Great episode.
Great article, Ted…thanks for tweeting me. My knees pretty much buckled when I saw that category come up. I just waited for Admiral Ackbar to come out from behind the scoreboard and shout “IT’S A TRAP!”
Roger said after the show (and on CBS’s Morning Show yesterday) that he was, in fact, thinking about the Blackhawks, since they ended their Championship drought in 2010 too. He’s a great guy and will get another shot at the game in this year’s Tournament of Champions.