By SHANNON O. WELLS
For reasons unknown to his fellow trivia buffs at Mike’s Beer Bar, Pitt’s Ron Lalonde had to miss a recent regular Wednesday night session at the pub on Pittsburgh’s North Side.
“Our folks who work here have a regular pub trivia night,” explained Lalonde, of the Department of Radiation Oncology, where he works as clinical associate professor. “So I didn’t tell them (why), and actually got some other friends on a false pretext to come over.”
Conspiring with the bar owner and trivia night hosts, Lalonde arranged to have the watering hole’s approximately 40 TV screens tuned to WPXI, Pittsburgh’s NBC affiliate station, during the heart of the trivia night quizzes.
That’s when a certain iconic game show, including a certain professor and chief physicist at UPMC Shadyside Hospital as a contestant, was about to begin.
“So at 7:30, 40 screens all start showing ‘Jeopardy!’ It’s showing me on the TV — and people just went crazy. I thought, ‘Hey, this is perfect!’” he said of the scheme.
Unbeknownst to his hometown trivia crew, Lalonde in the weeks and months before had applied, prepped for and made the final cut to appear on “Jeopardy!”
Hosted by Ken Jennings, the long-running, iconic trivia game show is known for its format in which contestants receive general knowledge clues in the form of answers, for which they respond in the form of a question.
In his early December appearances on the popular evening show, Lalonde won three games but lost the fourth.
“So, that’s pretty good. I won about $55,000, which is all right,” he said. “I just missed the deadline for the tournament this year, so am likely getting invited back to the season tournament, probably next November-ish.”
What is … fulfilling a dream?
Lalonde said he “really got serious” about applying around three years ago when his brother, Ray, appeared as a “Jeopardy!” contestant.
“We’d been applying off and on for about 20 years, but in the old days, you had to go to an actual live interview at a certain place,” he said. “So you only did that when they came somewhere nearby. Pittsburgh, for example. Now it’s all done online.”
When Lalonde’s brother appeared on the show, he won 13 games and close to $400,000. “So I decided at that point to seriously try to go on the show, too.”
The process starts with an online test of 50 questions. Those who do well enough are put into a collective pool and take part in a virtual Zoom-based interview. “At that point, you take another test via Zoom, and they’re watching to make sure you’re not cheating, right?” Lalonde explained.
Another Zoom interview “with a bunch of contestants” follows, where you’re quizzed on your background and “play a little mock game” with other candidates. “From that, you get into the pool for the show.”
He noted that about 100,000 people apply and around 400 get on the show each year. “The odds are not great, so that’s kind of why it takes as long as it does to get on the show.”
Lalonde made it into the contestant pool by March or April and got the word in August, while he was on vacation in Canada.
“I got the call from California. … At that point, it’s about two months before you get on, so you have a little time to prepare seriously to be on.”
‘Excited and nervous’
Lalonde arrived in Southern California the weekend before the “tapings” in Culver City began the following week.
“They (record) five shows a day, so I got there on the weekend before, just to have a little vacation, essentially, in California as part of the trip,” he said.
Beyond his knowledge from being a longtime viewer of the show, Lalonde said he had no idea what categories would be available for him and his fellow contestants to choose.
“You have to kind of watch the show to see what kinds of categories they’re going to cover and what kind of questions they ask. There’s no real guidance other than that,” he said, noting there are “good resources online” now. “There’s actually an archive of every show for the last 40 years.
“You can go through all that stuff at your leisure, of course, but there’s no other preparation. But you do know from watching the show that they ask lots of questions about, say, lakes and rivers; countries and capitals; history, especially American history, Civil War; often British royal history as well.
“So you get the idea that they do cover quite a lot,” he said.
When the time to record his first show arrived, Lalonde said he was “definitely both excited and nervous.”
“When I got there, I felt pretty confident. But in that first show … you can’t see my legs under the podium, but they were shaking pretty much half that first game until they settled down a bit,” he noted with a laugh. “It was surprising to me.”
He said he did well, as one would expect of a physician, in science-related categories, but also in some less high-minded topics such as Classic Rock. “I did quite well in that, because I was older than most of the contestants, with a background knowledge of that stuff. So that helped me, I think.”
The show recording process starts around 7 a.m., with contestants getting to the stage by around 10:30 a.m. for the first game. A lunch break follows two games, with more recording in the afternoon.
“They tape pretty much in real time. That means they’ll tape, as you see (on TV), the show break for commercials. It’s done in about half an hour.”
Before the Final Jeopardy! round, another break takes place for “do overs, you know, for some of the things (that are) flubbed. But it’s very, very few, it turns out.”
Buzzer battle
Praising the show’s “very efficient production,” Lalonde credited host Ken Jennings, who he said, “makes very few mistakes as he reads these dozens of clues during the show.”
As a contestant in 2004, Jennings, who eventually replaced long-running “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek following his death in 2020, won 74 consecutive games.
Lalonde, who felt “much more relaxed” by his second or third “Jeopardy!” game, acknowledged that, regardless of how many answers one manages to yell at the TV at home or at a bar, being on camera becomes a completely different story.
“I can tell you from experience, doing it on the couch is a lot different than being on the stage with the lights and the audience, knowing you’re on TV before millions of people. It’s a little different there,” he said. “Getting around all that with your brain is sometimes hard. Definitely, it’s pressure there.”
Furthermore, knowing the correct answer has to be phrased as a question — as in “What is …?” — is only part of the challenge.
“You got three people there who know most answers on that board, and they’re all buzzing in, trying to answer the fastest,” he explained. “Really, a big part of that is just getting that reaction, getting that buzzer down quickly, before anybody else does.”
Now back in his regular life at Pitt, Lalonde reflects fondly about his national TV experience, which allowed him to visit such iconic Los Angeles-area landmarks as Venice Beach and the Getty Museum. His “Jeopardy!” experience, however, didn’t end at the studio doors.
“There is a particular pub in Los Angeles (featuring) trivia run by ex-Jeopardy! champions,” he said, noting that he met some of his fellow contestants at the pub after the taping. “And it’s the hardest of trivia you’ll ever have, right? It’s really, really high end. But it was a lot of fun.”
Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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