by Morgan Gmelch '05
Answer: classes with Professors Sargent and Berk.
Question: What is a great help to a Jeopardy contestant?
For Deirdre Basile '87, it was her
Union education, and her classes with two professors in particular, that were key in her preparation for competing on the TV game show.
“I could skip right over a lot of
information while I was studying for the show because I remembered it from
class,” she said. “Having taken a number of classes with Steve Sargent, my
favorite professor, I was well prepared for all the medieval history questions.
Professor [Stephen] Berk's teachings also stayed with me and I had an easy time
with those questions.”
Basile appeared on the show that
aired on June 17, a contest in which she finished second. Her father, actor
Brian Dennehy, also came in second place on Celebrity
Jeopardy in 1999.
The best part of being on the program
is hearing from people who supported her, she said. “Even my car mechanic sent
me a note congratulating me. I've heard from a couple friends from Union that I
haven't heard from in a long time, which was great. The whole experience was
fun, if a bit surreal.”
Unfortunately for Basile, she was
up against a formidable opponent in Ken Jennings, an all-time Jeopardy champion who weeks after the
show with Basile was still winning with earnings approaching $1 million.
“He is the nicest person,” Basile recalls. “He
doesn't come across that way, people always say to me 'he seems so arrogant,'
but he's not.
“He's fast on the buzzer. He gets
all the questions that everyone knows, buts he's so quick. By the time the
other contestant and I had gotten the hang of ringing in, he already had 10 or
12 grand to work with. He could play with that, and it took the pressure off
him.”
During Basile's June 17
appearance, Jennings had racked up $37,000 by the end of Double Jeopardy, an insurmountable lead. In Final Jeopardy, Basile was the only contestant to correctly “question
the answer”: Answer: “In the NATO phonetic alphabet [Alpha, Bravo, etc.], the
two that are title Shakespearean characters.” Question: “Romeo and Juliet.”
She finished with a $12,000 tally,
and walked away with a $2,000 prize for second place.
While a student at Union, Basile enjoyed
watching Jeopardy with her Tri Delta
sisters.
Years later, her daughter became a
Jeopardy fan and told her mother
about the program's contestant search. “She told me I had to do it, so I sent a
postcard in and luckily mine got picked.”
With about 100 other contestants,
Basile was asked 50 final Jeopardy-type
questions. She was one of 12 people selected for a screen test to “make sure
you aren't drooling or something.”
“Then they say, 'don't call us, we
will call you.'”
Producers called her weeks later
and told her to come to Los Angeles for the taping. But they pay airfare and
hotel costs only for returning champions.
Basile said she was surprised by
the stopping and starting during taping. “If [host Alex] Trebek misspeaks or something goes
wrong with the set, they stop and repeat things,” she said. “They will even
re-tape your answers and questions that have already been asked.”
The show is careful to not let any
information get out that could influence a contestant. “We couldn't even look
in the direction of the writers during taping,” Basile said. “You can't even
talk to anyone in the green room besides the fellow contestants. We had to just
sit and watch the other games until it was our time.”
