PEOPLE Alex Trebek

By Meredith Corporation

In a new commemorative edition, People celebrates the life and career of beloved Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 80. The photo-filled issue chronicles his rise from modest beginnings in Sudbury, Ontario, to the loving home he built with wife Jean, to his brave and public battle with pancreatic cancer. We look back at the many other game shows he graced—you would have to be a real trivia fanatic to know them all—and offer a revealing look behind the scenes at Jeopardy! in an exclusive book excerpt. Plus: A remembrance written by Jeopardy! champ and guest host, Ken Jennings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781547856640

Book preview

firmament.

FOREWORD

The Alex Trebek That I Knew

FROM A FOURTH-GRADE FAN, TO A CHAMPION, TO A FRIEND: JEOPARDY!’S FIRST GUEST HOST SAYS THE STAR WAS, IN REAL LIFE, EXACTLY AS HE SEEMED ON THE SHOW—ONLY MORE SO

BY KEN JENNINGS

GETTING HIS GOATS Trebek chatted with James Holzhauer, Jennings and Brad Rutter during Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time, a multi-night competition held in January 2020.

For the most part I got to know Alex Trebek the same way you did: on television. When I was 7 years old, my family moved to South Korea. The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service broadcast one channel of American TV to military service members stationed there. That was how my friends and I became a captive audience for Jeopardy!, which aired every day after school. We were fascinated by the tricky clues and brainy contestants of course, but it was clear that the show’s center of gravity was its unflappable and omniscient Canadian host. (When Jeopardy! was on hiatus, the Pentagon sent us new episodes of Classic Concentration instead. In the 1980s our fighting men and women overseas never lacked for Alex Trebek!)

So I almost can’t remember a time when Alex wasn’t a part of my life—as a symbol of knowledge and authority, but also of the timeless, wholesome virtues he brought to the game he hosted: fair play, respect, good humor and a measured but genuine sympathy when things didn’t go well for one of the players. Twenty years after being a Jeopardy!-obsessed fourth grader, I made it onto the show as a contestant in 2004 and spent much of that year watching Alex do his thing up close.

Now I never had any special access to Alex. Contestants on Jeopardy! are kept far away from anyone who might know the answers and questions—and the host, of course, knew them all. Alex and I were occasional coworkers, but we didn’t meet up for brunch or hit the clubs together after the show. But I think he enjoyed having, for the first time, something like a sidekick in his solo act. Night after night he would complain, with mock exasperation, that I was siphoning too much prize money from the show. In interviews he joked that viewers might wonder if the two of

us were thinking of running away together.

One of my greatest joys of that weird summer was learning that Alex Trebek was, up close, exactly as he seemed on TV—only more so. If you thought Alex was a charmer onscreen, you should have seen him trading quips with the Jeopardy! producers and studio audience during commercial breaks. If you wondered whether or not he was still the down-to-earth kid from blue-collar Sudbury, Ont., you should have seen

him in jeans and a baseball cap, climbing into his pickup at the end of a long day

of taping.

"IF YOU THOUGHT ALEX WAS A CHARMER ON-SCREEN YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN HIM TRADING QUIPS WITH THE JEOPARDY! PRODUCERS AND STUDIO AUDIENCE"

His TV erudition was no act, either, as I learned when I ran into him at the National Geographic Bee a few years later. (He was hosting; I was researching a book about map geeks.) At the luncheon afterward, he gave an impassioned impromptu speech about his love of geography and its importance for kids. The spelling bee? We’re better than they are! he insisted. Facts and education really mattered to Alex, and not just when he was adjudicating a tough Daily Double.

I think the next time I saw Alex was in 2009 at the Game Show Network Awards. He was receiving some kind of career honor, while I’d been invited to compete in an onstage match of Charo-related trivia—against Charo herself. (I’m proud to say I pushed Charo to the final question before she defeated me.) Alex clearly found all this to be a little undignified. So, Ken, he said to me backstage in a voice of mild disapproval. I see they talked you into doing that Charo thing. It reminded me immediately of my favorite kind of Jeopardy! moment: the weary tone Alex would take when a contestant interview went off the rails.

It strikes me now that in a lot of ways I had the same relationship with Alex that America did: We didn’t actually spend a lot of face time together, but I still felt close to him. We Jeopardy! viewers welcomed Alex into our homes for decades. We watched with our grandparents and parents, then our friends, then our kids. He was part of the rhythm of our lives.

Last year, after Alex announced his cancer diagnosis, we all