Dear Jon Ossoff: An Open Letter About How I Went on Jeopardy!
Dear Mr. Ossoff,
Let me start off by saying congratulations. Even though this race didn’t go the way you wanted, it was still inspiring to see you make the Republicans run scared. You inspired my friends and I to phone-bank for you last week, where I was able to get two people to vote early — one of them from my hometown of Los Angeles, which felt great.
But this still has to hurt. I think we can both agree that if it wasn’t for the awful shooting last Friday, committed by someone who identified with (but does not represent) our party, you might have won this thing outright. You can now join company with the Atlanta Falcons, the Cleveland Indians and La La Land in the category of coming this close and then watching it end like that.
I’m writing this to you because I wanted you to know that I also experienced (or rather, re-experienced) a similar defeat this week which, going in, I knew could happen but did my best not to think about. And I know that — seriously, no pun intended — this will seem trivial in comparison to the grueling campaign schedule and debates you put yourself through, but I thought I would share it anyway: this week, I appeared on Jeopardy!
People who’ve known me a long time can tell you that I’ve always been a trivia champ. In my first week of 9th grade biology, my teacher, who began every class with trivia questions, gave me one he thought I could never answer — who was the first actor to ever play James Bond? Fortunately, I’m a Bond fanatic and I knew the answer: Barry Nelson (most famously the owner of The Overlook in The Shining), who played “Jimmy Bond” in a 1954 American TV adaptation of Casino Royale. I proceeded to get at least one question right every week of 9th and 12th grade, when I had him as my teacher a second time.
I’ve been watching Jeopardy! since I was seven years old, and it had always been a dream of mine to be on the show. When I would watch Kids Jeopardy! I’d always be jealous of the ones who got on there, and would yell at the TV when one of them got a wrong answer (the Dickens character who says he’ll keep Christmas in his heart is Scrooge, not Oliver Twist!) So, when I had the opportunity to take the online test at the beginning of 2016, to see if I qualified for a callback, I took it and then put it out of my mind as I finished grad school.
At the end of August, I got the message that I’d made the second round of auditions, an in-person cattle call in midtown Manhattan. I showed up on a Monday morning in October to find the whitest, nerdiest group of people I have ever seen — and I’ve been to the California Junior Latin Convention (twice!) The callback consists of another exam like the online one and a practice round with the buzzer. I felt good about how I did, and I knew they liked me because I was the only person they brought up to play a practice round twice, mostly because there was a theater category that stayed on the board the whole time, and they knew that I could finish it off. They’d let me know if I was going to appear on the show within 18 months, so I put it out of my mind and focused on other things until January 2017, a year after that first online test, when I got the call saying I’d be appearing on the show in March. Time to cram.
My girlfriend, a lifelong Jeopardy! fanatic like myself, became my study partner, helping me with the areas where I needed practice and watching marathons of the week’s shows every Saturday night. They tape five episodes, two times a week, at the Sony Studios in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles where I went to elementary and middle school, so we’d watch five in a row to prepare myself in case I pulled a Ken Jennings and found myself living on that set. She also agreed to accompany me to Los Angeles for that week to be in the audience for me.
When they bring you to the studio, you get about an hour to mentally prepare, because you could either be there all day winning game after game, or stay all day waiting to get on one of the five tapings (which you may not get on until the day after.) You play another practice round with the notoriously hard buzzer, and fill out one more exam, the most difficult of all three. Of the ten-plus people there, I felt I had the worst round with the buzzer, so I was scared when I was one of the first two people chosen to tape the show that day. This was good for my girlfriend and friends who came to support me, but terrifying for me.
Fortunately, the terror subsided as I spent round one controlling the board, going into the first two commercial breaks with the highest score. I can say that the structural device of Slumdog Millionaire, where the main character recalls the answers from childhood flashbacks is a real thing, since a lot of the answers I got were things I knew from growing up: for example, I knew that the author of I Am Legend was Richard Matheson, who wrote some of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, and I knew Max Schmeling fought Joe Louis due to an unproduced screenplay my Dad wrote about their rivalry.
This was the hardest game I’ve ever seen them pull on a group of contestants, and I think I know why: I and the two people I played with all have similar backgrounds in subjects like history and English literature, and I believe the show uses the data from those online tests to select categories that you aren’t as good at. It’s a way to make the game more challenging and keep one person from sweeping the board. That’s why we got categories like “Weather,” which none of us could answer, and why no one ran away with the whole thing. As we went into Final Jeopardy!, I still had the highest score, $6,400, but the returning champion was trailing behind me with $3,600. My bet on the last question would determine whether or not I won the game.
Former players will tell you that if you’re leading in a close game you want to make a bet so that, assuming you and the person in second both get it right, and that person in second bets it all, you will have one dollar more than they will at the end. My opponent, if he got the question right AND bet everything, would end the game with $7,200 so to get up to $7,201 I bet $801.00.
This is where life gets unfair. In a perfect world, the final category would be something I know inside and out, like “The Oscars” or “Broadway Musicals” or “Movies Directed by Tommy Wiseau.” Instead, it was “Airlines,” and this was the question (or, as they call it on Jeopardy!, the “answer”):
Only two people I know have been able to answer this correctly in the three months since I taped the show: “What is Delta?” Even my opponent only got it right after crossing off “What is Southwest?,” thereby raising his score to $7,198. You can see the look on my face at the end as I realize I’ve lost the game to him, with my wrong guess — “What is TWA?”
I still walked away with $2,000 for coming in second, and I had my girlfriend and three of my most supportive friends in the audience congratulating me and cheering me on afterwards, but the crushing disappointment I felt both after playing the game in real time and then again, watching it three months later, was all too real. You work for what feels like forever for something within your grasp, only to have it taken away at the last minute by the luck of the draw. A bum question and a GOP with nothing but anger to run on aren’t the same, but losing to either of them sucks hard.
The worst part of this was that, given anyone’s inability to see outside themselves, I felt I’d let down everyone who’d been rooting for me. I had unbelievable support from my girlfriend, life coaches, and other friends who helped bring me to this moment, and my fuck-up made me think that somehow or other, I’d betrayed them. I assume that Olympic athletes who lose also feel the same way, not realizing that just making it to the Olympics is an incredible feat in and of itself, just as making it on Jeopardy! is, or, as you did, withstanding a conservative attack machine in a red state only to do better than any Democrat has done in your district in years. In the 48 hours since my episode aired, nobody has said anything negative to me about it, no matter how bad I felt after taping it last March.
You’re obviously going to get a lot of people telling you what you should have done, Mr. Ossoff — many more than I will — and I hope you don’t listen to them. Right-wing assholes want to use this as a cudgel to beat up Democrats, and the alt-left brogressives want to force us all to move further leftward by beating up center-left politicians like yourself. Neither of them understand, or want to understand, how you did as well as you did, and that’s on them, not you. Don’t let any of them make you feel like a loser, because to people like me, you didn’t lose. To paraphrase Joe Louis, you did the best you could with what you had.
And look at what you had. You inspired women all throughout Georgia to knock on doors and campaign for you. You inspired me and so many out-of-state people to get you into Congress. You take the rights of women and minorities seriously, having been mentored by people like Madeline Albright and John Lewis, who have survived the worst to get to where they are now. You have an amazing fiancée whose career you’re supporting, even if means you don’t live in the district you ran in (for now.)
I may not have the option to appear on Jeopardy! again, but you have a long career ahead of you in politics, and 2018 isn’t too far away, when you can run again after Karen Handel has proven herself to be a stooge who won’t stand up for those who need it. Don’t let anyone discourage you. None of my friends think I’m a loser, and I hope that none of your friends think you are either. To all of us who watched this race closely, you look like a pretty big winner.
And now, in honor of the fact that I correctly answered “Who is Weird Al?” on my episode, here’s my parents’ favorite of his songs: “I Lost on Jeopardy!”
As a popular TV show says, don’t let the bastards get you down.
Best,
Jeremy Fassler
