Memoir 10: Battling Ken Jennings for the Title of Greatest American Game Show Contestant

I used autistic super-learning to match wits with the Jeopardy! host.

On game shows, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer and dryer pair.
     .Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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About a year after my half-million-dollar-winning episode of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire aired, the show’s producer gave me a call. He was putting together a new show. A tournament of the greatest American game show champions of all time.

Plus me.

Even though I hadn’t won the big prize on Millionaire, the producer apparently thought I made for good television so he wanted me for the final spot in the sixteen-person field.

The show was called Grand Slam. The format was intense. Two players competed in each match. The winner moved on. The loser was done.

Four rounds in each match: Trivia, Math, Word Games, and Miscellaneous.

You stood on stage facing your opponent, noses a couple feet apart. There were two giant clocks to the side, one for each of you. Each contestant started with sixty seconds on your clock. Whenever the host asked you a question, your clock would start running down. If you answered correctly, your clock stopped, like a chess clock. Whoever’s clock reached zero first, lost the round. Any time left on the winner’s clock would get added to their clock in the next round. That meant if you could dominate an opponent in any of the first three rounds you’d have an advantage in the final round.

Grand Slam featured the greatest variety of questions on any game show I’ve ever seen. There were anagrams. Algebra problems. Obscure history questions. Multiplying two-digit numbers together. Spelling words backwards. Tricky chemistry questions. But the bulk was the sort of trivia found on Millionaire or Jeopardy!

The tournament was winner-take-all. The winner took home $250,000. Everyone else got bupkis.

The participants were a who’s who of game show fame: the biggest winners of pre-social-media-era shows like Millionaire, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, 21, Win Ben Stein’s Money, The Weakest Link, even Tic-Tac-Dough, which I watched at my grandmother’s house when I was in elementary school. There were some trivia megastars in the tournament, but I knew there was really only one person to beat:

Ken Jennings.