What Is Jeopardy!'?

"Well, I got on and won enough to buy the car and the dishwasher. I won so much that I qualified for the Tournament of Champions. For 14 months I crammed. I brainwashed myself to begin every sentence. What is...? When is...? Where is...? I bought seven different trivia board games. I took the cards with me everywhere and flipped through them every spare moment. I had stacks of trivia books, almanacs, media guides. I watched a couple of hundred movies; you've got be up on actors and their roles. I memorized the hundred highest mountains, the muscles of the human body, the moons of all the planets. I even carried around a copy of the Constitution. Want to know who signed?

"Reflexes are everything. The most terrifying part is knowing the answer and buzzing in and not being able to be recognized. Your buzz doesn't register until Alex has finished the last syllable of the question. You have to hone in on the rhythm of his voice while racing through every fact you know. I spent hours on my eye-to-hand reaction time. I looked all over until I found a Mickey Mouse pen with just the right clicker to simulate the buzzer. I'd stand in front of the TV just clicking and clicking. I used my forefinger, not my thumb; it's faster, you know. After a little practice it was like I'd invented a new technology, like I was on the cutting edge.

"I wanted to be ready for any possible question. What's the color on top of a stoplight? Red? Green? Have you ever stopped to look at what the eight juices are in V8 juice? I have. What about the nine muses? Is knowing the nine muses gonna pay off anywhere in life? No, except in Jeopardy! It's very important.

"In the semifinals I was asked to name the two gemstones that end in nyx. Not such a tough question. After all, I'd memorized all the gemstones the other day in my hotel room. But I froze up. Gemstones for a thousand and I'm paralyzed. I remembered onyx but not sardonyx. And the thing was, I knew it the day before. I knew it.

"I made it to the finals, where I faced my toughest opponent, a New York actor named Bob Verini. He knew the term for the upside-down e that represents a phonetically in the word about. [What is a schwa?] I didn't. Bob had his own cheering section—just two or three guys really, but very vocal ones. They didn't unnerve me, though. Final Jeopardy did. The category was 19th-century Democrats: 'He said, "I am the last president of the United States." ' It was the first time I'd been mystified by a question. I just gazed at the board for about half of the allotted 30 seconds, really panicking. It was as if I were being led to the scaffold for my execution and someone asked, "What's the capital of Venezuela?' I thought. Which Democrat's term ended near the start of the Civil War? It had to be James Buchanan. I looked at Bob, who was keeping an inscrutable poker face. For a few fleeting moments I thought he missed it. In fact he had. But he'd bet just enough so that even if he lost, he'd be a dollar ahead of me. I lost by a lousy buck. I suppose it's better to lose that way than to get wiped out completely.

"Two years have passed since my tournament appearance, and people still stop me to ask if I'm the guy from Jeopardy!" says Traini, now a 38-year-old high school administrator in Franklinville, N.J. "I keep thinking, When's the last time anybody will remember? For now, I'm still famous. And for what? It's not like I won the Nobel Prize, but people have started looking at me as a smart sort of person."

COMPULSIVE-OBSESSIVES FOR $400: "How did I prepare for the Tournament of Champions?" says Steve Rogitz, who played Jeopardy! in 1985. "I'll tell you how I prepared: I had my suit pressed. I figured either I knew the answers or I didn't."

Rogitz is a big man, bluff and burly. His hair is red and untamed, his face broad and open, his eyes quizzical. He is possessed of the ease that goes with being very good at a job you like very much.

Until four years ago, that job was delivering mail in the Los Angeles area, where he still lives and where he now drives a truck. He had never been much of a student—in fact, he had never been anything of a student. As a senior at South High in Torrance, he finished 629th in his class. Out of 641. "I knew I screwed up a lot, but I hadn't realized it was that bad," he says. "At least there were 12 people dumber than me."

He joined the Air Force, took a brief stab at college, then got a job with the Post Office. But he always had a head for trivia. "I read lots of magazines on my route," Rogitz says. "I can talk superficially on a lot of subjects but well on none."