Josh Son/Collegiate Times
Roger Craig doesn’t have to explain anything.
It’s laughable to think the nation’s latest “Jeopardy” sensation needs to justify any decisions made during his historic run. When you hold the show’s record for single-day earnings, you don’t have to clarify your logic to anyone, much less a college newspaper reporter.
Yet the 34-year-old doctoral student can’t help himself as he explained the rationale behind a notable missed answer.
“The question wasn’t this team won the Super Bowl in 2010. It was a little more subtle than that,” he said, launching into an explanation that it is at once very reasonable and very unnecessary.
It’s surreal to hear the third most successful contestant in the show’s long history discuss the error as if you are an intellectual equal. This is like Godzilla recognizing the fleeing Tokyo masses as peers.
Craig may lack airs but make no mistake: he is smarter than you. In fact, if success is the yardstick, he is smarter than all but two other players in the long history of “Jeopardy”
This is no small accomplishment.
“Jeopardy” is not a game for the mentally frail. It is the nation’s foremost gladiator arena of intellectual escapism, and — just like on the blood-soaked Coliseum sand — only the strongest contestants prevail.
Despite his success in this cutthroat environment, Craig is far from a calculating quiz show Terminator. Affable, with a surprisingly sharp sense of humor, he seems more like your intelligent coworker than an organic encyclopedia. You wait for the socially stunted spelling bee champion stereotype to emerge but it never does.
Rather, Craig is proof that supermen sometimes walk among us. Before his celebrity — and subsequent appearances on Perez Hilton’s blog and the Yahoo! front page — he was a Virginia Tech student who graduated in 1999 with degrees in biology and biochemistry.
Like current Tech students, Craig went to football games, read the Collegiate Times and ate at the dining halls. He participated on the Quiz Bowl team and hosted a WUVT radio show; he was by all accounts a regular Hokie.
There was no eureka moment where Craig transformed from mild-mannered undergraduate to quiz game extraordinaire. He regards his immense skill as the cumulative result of life experiences and lessons others have taught him.
“No man is an island,” he said.” You don’t just like pop up one day, and you’re there.”
Craig’s stay in Blacksburg is singled out as a fundamental building block of his success. He credits Quiz Bowl with developing his aptitude for trivia into competitive skill.
He stayed active in Quiz Bowl post-graduation as he began working on his advanced degree at University of Delaware. The introduction of Jeopardy’s online audition system in 2006 convinced Craig, a lifelong fan and Teen Jeopardy applicant, to pursue a spot on the show.
The online process — answering 50 questions on a given night in January — facilitated this desire. His first attempt in 2006 was a success, and he was invited to an in-person audition at a city of his choice.
The two-hour audition process consists of another written test and a mock game, complete with buzzers and a projected board. A personality test is given to screen out the stiffest contestants — Jeopardy may be about intellectual battles, but it is still televised entertainment.
Prospective contestants who meet the criteria for show appearance are put in a nationwide pool for a year-and-a-half. Craig did not hear from producers during that time and thus was allowed to restart the audition process. An attempt in 2008 yielded the same frustrating result.
For the most part, Craig took it in stride.
“Basically every time I got into the pool I figured I wasn’t going to get picked,” he said.
He estimated that the show needed about 400 contestants a year; since nearly 10 times that many audition, he knew his odds were slim at best.
Craig’s third attempt proved to be the charm, though. A successful May in-person audition was rewarded with a phone call weeks later inviting him to fly out to Los Angeles in July to appear on the show’s 27th season premiere. A lifelong aspiration was finally going to come true.
A version of this article appeared in the Oct 1 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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