UofL staff member wins big on ‘Jeopardy!’
January 17th, 2007
Julie Dunlevy
Julie Dunlevy not only is smart, she also is lucky.
That’s what the staff of “Jeopardy!” told her when they invited her to audition as a contestant on the long-running game show.
“They only need about 400 people per year to tape,” explained Dunlevy, who provides computer support for the Weisskopf Child Evaluation Center at the University of Louisville. So many people passed the online test “Jeopardy!” offered as a first step in qualifying for the show that the show’s staff had to randomly select people to audition in person. Dunlevy was one of about 48 called to audition in Indianapolis last May.
“In Indianapolis, I took another test, got to participate in a mock “Jeopardy!” game and had a brief interview,” she said.
Dunlevy and the others left with the promise of a phone call if they were selected to be on the show. Hers came in October. Taping was in November, and the four shows she appeared on aired Jan. 2–5.
Luck may have taken her to the audition - and maybe even to the show itself - but smarts made her a “Jeopardy!” champion. She held the title for three days, something she could not tell anyone but her immediate family until the shows aired.
Dunlevy said she was surprised to be champion for three days.
“I knew that I usually get most of the answers right when I’m playing at home, but I also knew that the other contestants probably did, too,” she said.
A reader with a “good memory for facts” who loves the arts and has a technical and military background, Dunlevey said the difficulty of the clues didn’t worry her — but a technical issue did.
“The timing on buzzing in was the thing I thought would be the biggest obstacle to winning,” she said. “I am a fast reader and always want to guess the answer before [host] Alex [Trebek] has finished reading the clue.”
Game rules require contestants to wait for Trebek to finish reading the clue before buzzing in. Not timing the buzz right results in being “locked out” for a split second — long enough for someone else to answer, she said.
Dunlevy had to curb a lifetime habit of shouting out “Jeopardy!” answers and overcome a case of nerves triggered by thinking about the size of the potential audience. (Nearly 37 million people watch Jeopardy! each week, according the show’s website.)
To hide her nervousness, especially during the first show, she said she put on a professional face she learned as an Air Force officer making presentations to everyone from small groups to big brass.
“My hand was shaking so badly, that I rested it on the podium in front of me,” she said.
And appearing calm and cool to the world, she quietly racked up money.
In her first game, she won $30,200, outdistancing her nearest rival and the then-returning champion, by $23,200. For her four appearances, all taped in one day, she answered 88 questions correctly on topics that ranged from her field of computers to World War I, and accumulated $75,800.
Game four was a tight race. Even though she had more correct answers (by one) than the money leader for the first two rounds, she trailed by $4,200 going into Final Jeopardy.
After previously pulling out Final Jeopardy answers as obscure as identifying the Christmas tree as the thing author Charles Dickens called “that pretty German toy” in an 1850 essay, and naming 19th century politician William Jennings Bryan as the speaker of the phrase “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns…,” a modern sports question stumped her at the end.
Dunlevy probably never will forget that the professional football team named after a Western hero is the Buffalo Bills, not the Dallas Cowboys.
“Yes,” she said. “I knew that Dallas Cowboys was the wrong answer, but couldn’t think of anything else.”
