Finding the Questions to Life's Persistent Answers
By Danny Gallagher

Bleary, blood shot-eyed, late-night watchers of Game Show Network could easily pick Bob Harris out of a lineup. He's appeared as a contestant on short-lived game shows such as Fox's Greed and USA's Smush, a lifeline on ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and a champion competitor on the perennial afternoon meeting of the minds, Jeopardy!

But Harris, a self-proclaimed "picaresque ne'er-do-well" writer who's done everything from stand-up comedy to stories for magazines such as Mother Jones and National Lampoon to scripts for film and television shows such as CSI, is just as humble about his quiz show career. He called himself "the Chicago Cubs of Jeopardy!"

"I've been on the show 13 times for the last 10 years," he said from his home in Los Angeles. "I was originally a five-time undefeated champion when you could only win five times and then the Sony ninjas descend from the ceiling and threw you away."

He also competed in the Tournament of Champions in 1998, the Masters Tournament in 2002 and, just when he thought he was done trying to rack the dark corners of his brains for facts about "The Complete Angler" and ambidextrous presidents, the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005.

He may not have as many kills under his belt as Ken Jennings, Jeopardy!’s bloodiest gladiator, but he said what he gained from the experience was worth more than all the money, prizes and Dimetapp he could have taken home.

He chronicles his journey down Trivia Memory Lane in his memoir, Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, which chronicles a look behind the buzzer of one of the longest running quiz shows in television history and also how it affected his very being, his relationships, and his love of life, the world and all the things he thought he knew about it.

"Originally, it was going to be just a humor book about Jeopardy! with no deep philosophical content, but I began to realize as I was writing it… I began to realize what was important about my Jeopardy! experience was not the bright, flashing lights, and I began to see what ultimately it's all about," Harris said.

"The truth is that going on Jeopardy!, and this was not in the original [book] proposal, is an intimately personal thing."

The book came to fruition after his most recent appearance on the show, a "frustrating" loss in the second round of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions on a Final Jeopardy question about a poem his father used to read to him. He said the book found its muse and publisher with the help of novelist and fellow contestant Arthur Phillips, author of Prague and The Egyptologist.

"I mumbled something about how I should write an article about it or something," Harris said. "Arthur said you've got a bunch of stories here, let me talk to my agent and about three weeks later, I had a book deal… It made Arthur laugh. It made his agent laugh. It made the publishers laugh, and then I got a book deal."

He said it is not uncommon for Jeopardy! contestants to bond after battling each other.

"Everyone you know in the world is watching or will watch it someday on tape, so you tend to bond with the other players like airline disaster victims," he said. "The game has become almost as much of a fraternity, and I try to take people on the same path I [took] from the bright lights and the lots of money and the lots of superficial things that don't matter, and by the end of the book, it's about friendships and a sense of connection to the world and being interested in things and all the things that do matter."

He said he chronicles the experience of playing the game, sharing strategies on everything from the contestant test to buzzer agility.

"For me, the best strategy is to save your best category for last," he said. "A lot of players go for their best category first to get comfortable. But saving your strongest category at the end gives you the most leverage over the game, which always struck me as obvious but never very widely done."

The book also explores his love of learning and knowledge, and how Jeopardy! rekindled a need to experience some of the things he had spent months at a crack trying to stuff into the left side of his brain.

"There was a game early on where there was a category called 'We're Malaysia Bound,'" Harris said. "Malaysia had not come up in my life at that point in my life. I grew up in Ohio. Malaysia was far down the list of things to talk about. One of the clues was asking for the name of Malaysia's national car, and I thought, 'When the hell is that going to come up in my life?'

"Six or seven years later, things changed in my life," Harris said. "I had gotten a large interest in traveling, and I was trapped [in Malaysia] in a really horrific downpour of rain in Kuala Lumpur…A car pulls over to the side of the road and the driver, who spoke no English, offered me a ride back to the city and, of course, he's driving a Proton Saga, Malaysia's national car. What I've learned is I'm not sophisticated enough to know what's important and what's not."

Thanks to his winnings and the knowledge he gained from studying for months on end (an obsession that he said would cost him a girlfriend), he was able to take an around-the-world trip to some of the places he'd studied -- such as the Hagia Sophia, a church built in the 6th century in Istanbul, Turkey that was rebuilt three times and went on to serve as a place of worship for three different religions before ultimately becoming a museum.

He said preparing for, competing as, and reflecting on his life as a Jeopardy! contestant helped him realize how small one man could seem in the scope of the Earth and the wonders it has to offer.

"It made life spectacularly more interesting," he said. "Just by looking at this building, you know that we don't know our futures. We're not wise enough to know what's coming and none of the wisest people in history ever have been. Learning this stuff makes all of these kinds of things more accessible, and you learn the whole world is so much more fascinating. After you've been to a place like that, it becomes a part of you and it's not just on a page. It's a real place."

Danny Gallagher is a freelance, writer, reporter, humorist and all-around nice guy living in Texas who could be a Jeopardy! champion too, if the show had nothing but categories about KISS songs and the collected dramatic works of Bruce Campbell.