What Is Jeopardy!'?

He tried to talk his wife, Pat, into letting him try out for Jeopardy! but she wasn't listening. "Pat always thought I read too much," he says. "She'd get on me for remembering stupid stuff like the date Washington crossed the Delaware, but not remembering the important stuff like taking out the garbage. I got her to calm down, though, and come with me to the studio."

It was there Rogitz realized his predicament. "At least half the contestants were more intelligent than me," he says, "and all had more education." He needed an edge. "I was up against a guy who'd won three games in a row. A smart guy but a little tentative at buzzing in. So I decided to buzz first. I got hot, real hot, and started running categories. I felt like Minnesota Fats in The Hustler—buzzing those questions, getting the rhythm down. I don't know if any kind of intelligence was required, but, man, I was fast."

Rogitz cackles and rubs his hands, all energy, glee and fierce competition. "I had the old champ shook." he says. "I just wouldn't let him in the game. During the commercial I see he's sweating. So I ease up beside him and say. 'Gee. you weren't sweating on the other shows. What's the matter?' He looked like he couldn't guess his weight."

As the new champ, Rogitz returned the following day to defend his crown. He had breakfast in the coffee shop. "It's time to leave," said Pat.

"Hey," said Rogitz. "They can't start without me."

He had a point. "All the eager beavers had shown up an hour early." he says. "They waited in the reception room. And waited. And waited. I thought I'd let them stew a little. Finally, the door opens and a hush comes over them. If there had been a piano playing, it would have stopped. 'Hello, everybody!' I say. There's fear in their eyes. They can see I'm champ. I'm struttin' a little, and they're thinking. Wow! He's cool! The champ is cool!"

Onstage, Rogitz kept his cool. Sometimes he blurted out answers he didn't even know he knew. "Shakespeare!" he fairly shouts. "I guess I knew the basics. Like Romeo and Juliet. I'd never actually read it, but I saw the movie. And I remembered Macbeth from a junior high drama class. I think there was a witch in it."

When in doubt, he relied on Holmesian deduction. "They wanted me to name the Everly Brothers song that played when Roy Scheider died in All That Jazz. Logic told me it had to be Bye Bye Love. What else could it have been? Wake Up, Little Susie?"

In all, Rogitz won five games—the maximum allowed under Jeopardy! law—and nearly $35,000. Ten months later he placed third among 15 contestants in the Tournament of Champions and raked in another $5,100. "When I got back." he says, "somebody in the Post Office showed me a U.S.A. Today piece about the tournament. Trebek was quoted as saying, 'These are 15 of the brightest people in the country.' Hey, I said, the second-place finisher was Canadian. I guess that means I'm the second-brightest guy in America."

TRIVIALISTS FOR $500: John Pankratz. a history professor at Albright College in Reading. Pa., has a theory about Jeopardy! "In 19th-century America." he says, "the aesthetic standards of domestic portraiture painting created the appreciation of the kind of representation that photography could produce. So Jeopardy!, with its emphasis on a sort of reductionist facticity, its data base of objectified information—instantly recallable—anticipated our fascination with the computer."