A few years ago, I bought a Jeopardy Alumni T-shirt online. Initially, the shirts didn’t reflect the 1998-1999 season, in which I appeared. Presumably, the demand generated some of the earlier shirts.
The peculiar thing about this item is that I’ve never worn it. One doesn’t want to wear these customized things out too quickly. This year, I’m considering wearing it on November 9th, the date of my first Jeopardy appearance.
On the backside of the shirt is a list of all the people who were on season 15, listed alphabetically by first name, which I think is a hoot.
As you can see, there were 11 Celebrity Jeopardy games, including a Legends in Sports match on November 6 featuring Reggie Jackson vs. Martina Navratilova vs. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I remember Kareem winning because it was the episode before my first match aired. Also, Kareem played a character named Roger in the Airplane movie.
Connected
So, it’s oddly fun to be listed on a T-shirt with Kareem, Bob Costas, Robin Roberts, Keith Olbermann, Al Franken, Garry Marshall, Jane Seymour, Graham Nash, and Maine state representative Amy Roeder, among other notables, plus about 400 other folks I have one thing in common with.
There were also 10 five-day champions, including Juliet Wiley, a Tournament of Champions finalist; the ToC winner was Dave Abbott, who played the previous season. A part of me wishes they would go back to limiting champs to five games, excluding the ToC. But that’s not going to happen. The fanbase and the JEOPARDY staff want to have players win 10, 20, 38, or 74 games.
The clues’ values doubled in November 2001, from Friday, the 23rd, to Monday, the 26th. Occasionally, I mused how I would have fared. But I recall that early players in that period had difficulty recalibrating their wagers, so it’s just as well.