When most Jeopardy! contestants get the call to be on the game show, they immediately begin studying, or they typically have a prior knowledge of trivia. This wasn’t the case for current champion Jim Carpenter.
Carpenter, from Charlotte, Virginia, defeated three-day champion Brendan Liaw on Friday, May 23. Liaw made risky wagers on his Daily Doubles, resulting in him having -$1,600 by the end of the game. He couldn’t compete in Final Jeopardy. Carpenter gave the correct answer leaving him with a total of $25,601 and made him the winner. He returned to compete in his second game on Monday, May 26 and was defeated by “beast” Judith Friedman, ending his time on the show.
Now, the retired music professor is speaking out about the odd way that he prepared for the game show. In an interview with his local NBC5 station, Carpenter said, “I haven’t really done a lot of trivia. There was a fairly short time between getting the call and when I had to be out there for the taping. So at that point, I just decided I know what I know.”
However, he did grow up watching Jeopardy! with his dad. “My father was a particular devotee of the show, so we would watch together and try to beat each other to the right answers,” Carpenter told the outlet.
Despite not being a trivia whiz, the contestant shared that he had been taking the online anytime quiz for years. When he finally got the call to be on the show, he said it was “surreal.” “I actually looked at my phone, and it was a California number that I didn’t recognize, and I said, well, maybe this is spam from California. My wife said to me, ‘That might be Jeopardy! Why don’t you answer it?”
The conductor shared with the outlet that his experience in front of crowds and with students helped him on the show. “I think probably one of the things that helped the most in terms of getting through the process was decades of doing things like New York Times crossword puzzles, and just reading in a lot of different subjects, a lot of different areas,” he ended.
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