Game Seven Recap... Alan Bailey
When Friday's game went so well, I thought I had put the horror of the buzzer behind me. After playing this game, I told my girlfriend I wish I'd waved the buzzer in the air the way I used to --- at least people would see I knew all that stuff. As it was, I was back there behind the podium changing positions, changing grips, even changing hands. By the time the game was over, my right hand and arm were cramped and throbbing all the way up to the elbow. Too unathletic to play Jeopardy, indeed.
Before I get into the game itself, let me tell you what I did this morning to
help ease the blow of seeing tonight's show. I went out and bought a 20-gigabyte MP3 player for my Chevy Tahoe --- an utterly extravagant gesture akin to a friend of mine who used to buy himself a bottle of champagne whenever he would get oh-so-close to an especially lucrative acting job. I thought I should buy just one frivolous fun thing with my Jeopardy money, and besides, we're leaving on a cross-country driving trip this weekend and I want to take along the 10,000 songs I have on my hard drive. (Napster got shut down two years ago right at the time I started studying, so I was able to handily exchange one obsession for another.)
And now, the game ...
I knew I was in trouble when they called Mark and Jill. As a result of my
interrogation of Mark in the hotel a couple of nights before ("Honestly, Mark, I'm interested in you as a PERSON, not as a Jeopardy competitor"), I knew he had been preparing long and hard, and I suspected he had some tricky strategic moves up his sleeve. And Jill was just about the most impressive contestant in that morning's practice --- that woman is a barracuda. I must admit that it was fairly funny the way she trudged out to the podiums exhausted by her pregnancy and jet lag, but she was a completely different person when the game started. And let's face it --- I was as tongue-tied around Jill as I am during celeb-sightings in L.A --- I mean, here I was, playing against the most celebrated and talked-about player of the season!
It was only when I watched the show tonight that I realized it wasn't a
bloodbath. I was ahead several times! In both the first and second rounds! If you had asked me right after the show --- or during all these weeks afterward --- I would have said I was covered with a sheen of flop sweat and was only able to ring in about five times in the whole game.
Still, I must confess to a certain peace of mind in the last commercial before
FJ. I thought, if this is a triple-stumper, I've won the game. I had thought
many times that it could be advantageous to go into FJ in second place in the Semifinal game --- the only game in the Tournament that you MUST win. Too bad I wound up being the only person not to know the Final Jeopardy. And how could I have not studied World City rankings, you ask? Well, the lists vary so much ---Seoul can wind up anywhere in the Top Ten, I've found --- so I made a choice not to know that Sao Paolo is larger than New York City. Great, just great.
I was in a huge funk after this game. I must confess to a sort of Stockholm
Syndrome with Mark in the weeks following the Tournament. We'd been friends since the last ToC, and we had e-mailed each other occasionally to bolster one another in our preparations. Once we were back home after the taping, I asked him to tell me about his strategy and preparations and to give me his impressions of our game. We e-mailed several times a day. We talked about his buzzer technique and his confidence, and somehow it was helpful to hear all that stuff. It helped my wounded pride to hear him say I had him on the run several times in our game. Mark is a terrific competitor, a deserving champion, and a great friend.
When the Tournament was over, and the goodbyes and good wishes were behind me, I went home and shut myself in a dark room for a week. I lay in bed and thought about two years of studying and what we could have done with the money and how much I had wanted my name on the list of Tournament of Champions winners. I lay there and stared at the ceiling and indulged in some world-class moping --- even though we still had family in town! (Well, we did go to the museum one day, and to the LaBrea Tar Pits --- oh, and there was that day at the beach --- but, honestly I TRIED to mope as much as possible.)
When I decided to rejoin the world, I thought I'd start by working on our
long-neglected yard --- gardening would be a perfect way to think about what project I would pursue next, and besides the neighbors would rejoice. My first chore was putting in a new flowerbed at the curb. As I dug and hoed and raked and fertilized, I felt the sun on my face and the pleasant burn in my muscles. I happened to look at my watch, and it hit me. A week ago, at this very moment, I was losing the Tournament of Champions. And now I'm lugging around a big sack of manure. It was just so karmically correct.
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