and set about reviewing the day’s game material, a dictionary by his side while he made diacritical notations to perfect his pronunciation. On tape days, he arrived at Jeopardy!’s Culver City studio by 6 a.m.
He treated his job with a seriousness you might not expect from a game show host. Jeopardy! was just a game, yes, but all those obscure facts-to him, and by proxy to the millions of people playing from their couches every night, those things really mattered.īut there was so much more to what he was doing than just reading off clues. Numerous players have told me that the conversation during those fleeting last moments on camera was usually about the game’s finale: How did they work out that Final Jeopardy! clue? Or, worse for those who missed it: Hm, don’t you remember that in Mesopotamia. At each episode’s end, Trebek-in his tailored suits, forever the consummate gentleman scholar-would walk to the contestant lecterns to shake the hand of the new champion. In his early years as host, he insisted on taking (and acing, of course) the contestant test each year he kept a library stuffed with the classics at his home, and his and his wife Jean’s favorite vacation spot was the home of the Brontë family in England. Part of his success came from the fact that he walked the walk. For those who grew up in the blue glow of his “We hope you’ll join us tomorrow, folks,” he felt like a member of the family. He was a modern-day Walter Cronkite, as contestant Ken Jennings once put it-an emblem of knowledge and sincerity and a tradition unto himself. He was characteristically humble about his role-anyone who had been on a show as long as he had would be revered the way that he was, he insisted.įorgive me the correction, but I think the judges will agree with me: Trebek was a singular talent and a singular delight, whose decades at the helm of Jeopardy! put him in rare company. I interviewed him for the book about Jeopardy! that I have spent the last two years reporting. Trebek-patient, wise, and occasionally wry-was unambiguously its center of gravity. For many viewers, Jeopardy! is something bordering on sacred. At 80, he had spent nearly half his life-and the entire lives of many a Jeopardy! fan-delivering more than 8,000 episodes’ worth of answers and questions. On Sunday, the host who had presided over one of TV’s most cherished rituals for 36 years passed away due to complications of pancreatic cancer. It’s a long-standing joke among former Jeopardy! contestants: The first thing anyone wants to know is “What is Alex Trebek like?” How a contestant did, what they spent their winnings on, and what it was like to compete on the most beloved game show-and perhaps just show, plain and simple-on television: All of that was beside the point.
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