{"id":171467,"date":"2026-02-10T05:55:06","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T05:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/171467\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T05:55:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T05:55:06","slug":"long-beach-man-jim-birge-marks-25-years-of-hosting-jeopardy-tournaments-for-students-while-battling-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/171467\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Beach man Jim Birge marks 25 years of hosting ‘Jeopardy!’ tournaments for students while battling cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONG BEACH, Calif. (KABC) — Who is Jim Birge? That is the “Jeopardy!” answer to the game show’s number one fan. He has been hosting “Jeopardy!” tournaments for Long Beach middle schoolers<\/a> for 25 years, something he created when his wife was a teacher.<\/p>\n

“I just had this idea, and I took it to the principal, and we ran with it. That was back in 2001,” said Birge. “This is our 25th consecutive year.”<\/p>\n

His love for the classic game show began when he was a boy. His sister-in-law appeared on the show several times, and later, his brother-in-law played the trumpet in the signature theme song.<\/p>\n

“It made me feel dumb, and I wanted to be smarter, you know, that type of thing. Because you do watch and go, ‘How do they answer these?’ and you just try,” he said.<\/p>\n

And behind his enthusiasm is late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek’s dedication to the game despite battling pancreatic cancer. His connection to the late host grew even deeper with his own diagnosis.<\/p>\n

“I found out in October that I have pancreatic cancer. Inoperable, that type of thing. It would have been easy to just stop, but [I’m] kind of inspired by Alex,” Birge said.<\/p>\n

Despite the grueling treatments, the 78-year-old is fighting to host as many tournaments at competing schools as he can until the final round.<\/p>\n

“To get to June, our Tournament of Champions, there’s absolutely no way this would have happened… if it wasn’t for my crew and my family,” Birge said with tears in his eyes.<\/p>\n

Birge’s ultimate dream would be for the tournament to go statewide or even national. But for now, he hopes to find someone to take over the tournament in Long Beach.<\/p>\n

“I may have given it up when I found this out, but I wanted to finish a full quarter of a century,” he said.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 KABC Television, LLC. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONG BEACH, Calif. (KABC) — Who is Jim Birge? That is the “Jeopardy!” answer to the game show’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[82159,131,133,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-171467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-long-beach","8":"tag-82159","9":"tag-long-beach","10":"tag-long-beach-headlines","11":"tag-long-beach-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}