I once passed the test and qualified for “Jeopardy!”, in part because of a glob of grape jelly on a placemat.
The producers never followed up with an invitation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I can delude myself into thinking I’d have rolled along the way Grosse Pointe North High School alum Jamie Ding is doing now, and I never had to risk the colossal embarrassment of finishing in negative numbers and being banished from the set before the Final Jeopardy round.
Plus, I’m still the champion of my living room. And like the other 8.3 million people who’ve been watching regularly so far in 2026, I can gloat when I know an answer the contestants don’t.
Realistically, that’s part of the fun − occasionally being right when three certifiably smart people are either wrong or too befuddled to even hazard a guess. Triple Stumpers, the fan websites call those, and here’s one from Final Jeopardy on March 26, in a category called Celebrity Memoirs:
“In the title of a 2023 memoir, Dame Judi Dench calls him, ‘The Man Who Pays The Rent.'”
We’ll provide you with some other chances to tackle answers Ding missed − or questions, if you’re a stickler for “Jeopardy!” protocol. In this case, I thought it was simple, and let’s ignore all the times I’ve declared something obvious and been wildly incorrect.
Ding’s response was James Bond. His opponents, hopelessly behind, offered up Patrick Stewart and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Nay, quoth I astutely, it was William Shakespeare.
I preened, my wife shrugged, and in lieu of thousands of dollars, I helped myself to another brownie.
Friendly, but not flawless
I try to gloat softly, mind you, because I realize it’s a much easier game from a Barcalounger than it is beneath the hot lights of the Alex Trebek Stage − which is Stage 10 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California, just in case that ever comes up on America’s favorite 62-year-old quiz show.
First off, viewers have an extra second or two to retrieve arcane facts from the dusty attics of our brains. We don’t get penalized for being incorrect. And we don’t have to glance to our right and see someone as smilingly intimidating as Ding, 33, who had won 29 straight games and $793,602 through the episode that aired Wednesday, April 22.
Ding moved on from Grosse Pointe Shores to Princeton, and gets introduced on the show as “a bureaucrat and law student from Lawrenceville, New Jersey.” Dismissing himself as a functionary suggests both a sly sense of humor and an appreciation for the anonymous souls who quietly do useful things, in his case working as a policy and programs analyst for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency.
The Wall Street Journal described him after his 27th win as “the nicest champ ever.” It praised his buzzer speed, nerve, and range of knowledge.
More than that, the Journal said, “On a show that boasts television’s nitpickiest fans, Ding has achieved the unthinkable: Everybody loves him.”
But in a category titled The Calendar, he did not know this:
“Mark Twain wrote the quip that on this day of the year, ‘We are reminded of what we are on the other 364.’”
Putting Smucker’s on the map
Ding’s response was Labor Day. I said April Fool’s Day, and I didn’t even need help from a jelly stain.
The entrance exam these days is online. When I tried out in 2003, it was during a “Jeopardy!” contestant search in a hotel ballroom at what’s now The Henry in Dearborn.
Our kitchen table back then was equipped with four educational placemats − U.S. Presidents, the periodic table of elements, a national map and a world map. Cleaning up after my sons before I left the house, I wiped clean the capital city of a Central American country.
Less than two hours later, a question on a video screen asked for the site of a ghastly 1972 earthquake. Thank you, I thought, to whichever kid soiled Managua, Nicaragua.
There were 50 questions, posted eight seconds apart. Spend too much time on one, “Jeopardy!” staffers warned, and you might never catch up as you hand-wrote answers. One of the crew members whispered confidentially that a passing score was 35, or 70%, a low-level C.
In our group of 51, the first of several that day, four people moved on − a fairly typical percentage, I was told. I know I didn’t get all of the questions correct, and the recruiters couldn’t tell me whether anyone had; once the graders reached 35 on a test, they stopped caring and counting.
Skilled at not alienating fans, a staffer told everyone who hadn’t made the grade that they’d missed by one. The rest of us advanced to simulated games and a chat with a contestant coordinator.
Don’t get your hopes up, she told us. The show keeps unofficial limits on how many lawyers it invites, or journalists, or people from the same tryout, or bureaucrats from New Jersey.
My name was in the mix for a year. No one called it. No problem.
I’ve moved on, telling myself that I might have been a champion − unless I ran into someone like Jamie Ding.
Neal Rubin knows more stuff than he did in 2003, but also knows it takes him an instant or two longer to recall it, so he hasn’t asked the “Jeopardy!” test for a rematch. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Why Jamie Ding isn’t so smart after all (except actually, he is)
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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