 Posted on Mon, May. 5, 2003
She lost at ‘Jeopardy!’ and learned new respect
By Forrest Hartman
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
Kathy Cassity doesn’t make fun of “Jeopardy!” contestants anymore. Despite winning four episodes of the game show in 2001, she bombed in the first round of Tournament of Champions play.
Her episode aired Monday on KOLO Channel 8, and she has new respect for the pressure of competition.
“Before I went on the show, I was always sitting at home going, ‘Oh, they’re all dumb,’ ” Cassity said. “I don’t do that anymore. I’ve really realized that when you’re actually there it’s much, much different than watching from your couch.”
Cassity thinks she fared poorly for a number of reasons, the first being she only had three weeks to prepare for the show.
“When I got there, I got kind of a bad draw,” she said. “They put me up against the guy who had just broken every ‘Jeopardy!’ record in history. I had been called in as a wild card, so I think I kind of set myself up, and my nerves got the better of me. . . . Then I got called to play the first game of the day, which nobody wants.”
Cassity said playing regular “Jeopardy!” is tough, but she hadn’t expected the additional pressure that accompanied the Tournament of Champions.
“Everybody is a five-time or four-time winner, which means every body is good with the buzzer, which means everybody else is quick and knows a lot of things,” she said. “(My opponents) were both much quicker on the buzzer than I was. So, I started buzzing in kind of whenever I could, even when I wasn’t sure of myself. I gradually started slipping into negative territory, I think because my nerves got the better of me and I panicked and I couldn’t think. A couple things that I knew perfectly well, I just couldn’t think of in time.”
Cassity ended the game with a negative balance and wasn’t able to play Final Jeopardy! Instead, she watched as Brian Weikle, who owns the record for one-day and all-time money totals, won. Cassity received $5,000 for participating.
“I knew statistically, six of us would be quarter finalists and get $5,000,” she said. “There’s no shame in that. Everybody’s good. I wasn’t happy about going into the negative and not being able to play Final Jeopardy! I wasn’t a poor sport about losing, but I would have liked to have not lost quite so dramatically. . . . They kind of set it up so that nobody really loses. My pride was the main thing. It got smacked, but my bank account’s doing OK.”
The tournament was taped in March, but the episodes didn’t begin airing until Monday. After losing, Cassity stuck around to see who won, but she isn’t allowed to reveal the results.
“I really encourage people to watch it because there’s some real cliff-hanging, nail-biting kind of stuff,” she said. “It’s really a good tournament.”
“Jeopardy!” is on at 7 p.m. weekdays on KOLO Channel 8.
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