TV

Two authors discuss their shared histories as 'Jeopardy' champions

By Jeff Salamon
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, May 16, 2009

Alex Trebek: The answer is, "Successful novelists who are also former 'Jeopardy' champions."

Contestant: Who are Doug Dorst and ... Arthur Phillips?

Correct!

Now that we've gotten that all-but-inevitable opening gag out of the way, let's acknowledge that if Doug Dorst or Arthur Phillips had written this piece, they surely would have come up with a better lead than that.

The 40-year-old Phillips, after all, is one of the most lauded American novelists of his generation. His four books, including the new "The Song Is You," are stuffed with sharp observations, startling metaphors and unfamiliar ways of looking at the familiar. (Watching a plane take off, Phillips sees "the first-class cabin left the ground, still weighted down by coach.")

Dorst, 39, who teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University, drew enthusiastic notices for his 2008 debut, "Alive in Necropolis," which is set in the real-life cemetery city of Colma, Calif., the resting place of 2 million people. (The paperback reissue comes out next month; a short story collection is due in the winter.)

There are plenty of highly regarded youngish novelists crowding the shelves of bookstores these days, but Dorst and Phillips may be the only ones to have won substantial sums of money on "Jeopardy." Dorst was a three-time champ in 2006; Phillips was a five-time winner in the mid-1990s.

Since Dorst lives in Austin and Phillips was in town Tuesday evening for a reading at BookPeople, we decided to bring them together to answer questions in the narrowly intersecting categories of "Game Show History" and "Contemporary American Literature."

Sitting in a booth at Opal Divine's Freehouse on Sixth Street over Woodchuck hard cider and a pint of Harp, the two men — who had never met before — immediately started chatting in a shorthand known only to those who have risked Alex Trebek's scathing wit and lived to tell the tale.

"I was glad not to get a whole lot of sports," Phillips says of the "Jeopardy" categories he faced. "I remember clearing 'Shakespeare' and 'Dogs,' both of which I feel like I should be able to clear."

"I got a hockey category that I think I cleared," recalls Dorst.

"God bless you."

"But then when I was back at the 'Tournament of Champions,' the full Double Jeopardy board were nightmare categories for me. It was, like, 'Interior Design,' 'Women's Anatomy' — it was just not in my wheelhouse. \u2026 I remember looking at the board and saying, 'I'm probably in trouble.' Oh yeah — and there were 'Obscure Latin Phrases.' "

"That's no good."

Would Dorst have done any better with non-obscure Latin phrases?

"Oh, just as poorly," he says.

"Ipso facto," concludes Phillips.

Phillips and Dorst spent much of their youth loading up on trivia. Growing up in Minneapolis, Phillips was a member of his high school's quiz bowl team (he remembers losing to a rival team that featured Steven Levitt, now better known as the co-author of "Freakonomics"). Dorst spent a lot of time on the more casual "Pub trivia bowl" circuit.

But when they were picked to be "Jeopardy" contestants, both men hunkered down.

"One of the best parts of 'Jeopardy' was in that period before I had to fly out there, when I got to do all that studying, learning stuff for stuff's sake," says Dorst. "I felt like the happiest little 9-year-old kid."

"I just thought, 'I don't want to blow this,' " says Phillips. "I mean, if I go and lose, OK, but I'm not going to mis-bet. So I contacted a friend of mine, an economist who's a game theorist, and I said, 'Are there models I should be following for this?' "

As it turns out, Phillips, who did two turns on "Jeopardy," once in regular Jeopardy and once in the 2005 "Ultimate Tournament of Champions," where he vied unsuccessfully for the right to square off against uber-champion Ken Jennings, was undone both times not by betting, but by questions about world capitals.

"I bet (a lot of money) because I knew my capitals cold," he says. "I just didn't know these.

"A guy in the audience told me afterward, 'Yeah, if you had gone to Princeton, you would have known that,' " says Phillips, who went to a none-too-shabby university that is widely regarded as the Harvard of the Northeast.

Perhaps because Phillips realized that game shows are a potential venue for pettiness and humiliation, "The Song Is You" includes a very funny set piece about a know-it-all who wins "Jeopardy" three days in a row and then, on the fourth day, commits an error that not only loses him the game, but turns him into a figure of public vilification. Phillips says the story wasn't inspired by any terror he felt as a contestant — as a former jazz musician and child actor, he was used to the stage and the bright lights — but notes that top-flight "Jeopardy" contestants drift into a form of autopilot that makes all sorts of unconscious mistakes possible.

"People who are good at it — and I mean, really good at it \u2026 they're in a playing zone where they're not going to be thinking about niceties."

"There isn't room for it," says Dorst.

"It's rare to see people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to Alex," says Phillips. "Not because they're all such rude trivia geeks, but because there's a task to be performed, and you can very easily just go in the wrong direction on anything."

Phillips remembers one time when the answer was a kind of cheese and he went on autopilot and sputtered obliviously. "I got stuck trying to pronounce 'Gouda' correctly, so I was, 'Gouda!' 'Gow-da!' 'Ghooda!' 'Ghow-da!' "

"And Alex was, like, 'Edam.' "?