All good things must come to an end. Today, another good thing ended. That being, Ken Jennings' championship reign on
Jeopardy has come to an end after 75 days and $2,529,499, thus proving that the indistructable Ken Jennings is human afterall.
Ken was the longest running and highest winning Jeopardy contestant in history.
(On 7/8/04 he broke the world record for longest consecutive run on a TV game show, previously being 26 days; Set record for most money won on a game show on 11/03/04 (previously being $2,180,000 set by Kevin Olmstead on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire; Tied the record of $52,000 in one day many times, set by Brian Weikle on 04/11/03. He finally beat it with $75,000 on 7/23/04, to set a new record). He lost to
Nancy Zerg, , a realtor from Ventura, California after getting the Final Jeopardy question wrong.
The answer was: Most of this company's 70,000 white-collar employees work only four months a year.
Ken's question: What is FedEx?
Nancy's question: What is H & R Block
After his loss, Ken commented:
“Nancy was great... her timing was just right on,” said Jennings. “It was not a fluke. She knew things I didn’t know,” he continued. “I thought, Nancy, good for you, you totally deserve this.”
Nancy followed with:
“It hasn’t sunk in. Ken is just so good!,” said new champion Zerg. “I think we both played well, but I got lucky with categories that I knew and he just happened to hit a couple of Daily Double clues that he didn’t know.” Zerg, a wife and mother, continued, “It took a good 15 minutes before I even realized that those points on the board were actually money!”
He got it wrong, she got it right. It is a sad day indeed.
Goodbye, Ken. And thank you.
H-D