[Baltimore Sun] Baltimore ‘Jeopardy!’ winner scores slot on Tournament of Champions, airing Tuesday night
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The last time Emmett Stanton appeared on “Jeopardy!” his handwriting garnered all of the attention.
When the three-time winner and Baltimore resident appears on Tuesday night’s Tournament of Champions episode, he can’t promise his scrawl will be more legible.
“I gotta say I didn’t really practice my handwriting,” Stanton said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun on Monday. “I did spend a year and a half between when I was first on [in 2022] and the ‘Tournament of Champions’ apologizing to my elementary school teachers for embarrassing them.”
While he can’t reveal too many details about Tuesday’s game show, Stanton said he and 26 other “Jeopardy!” winners spent a week in Los Angeles in February filming the coveted trivia showdown that pits champions against one another.
Competitors included those who had won the most “Jeopardy!” games since the last Tournament of Champions aired in 2022. Also among the group were winners of the “Jeopardy! High School Reunion Tournament” and the first season of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” on ABC.
Stanton will appear Tuesday in the seventh of nine quarterfinal games. Winners will move on to three semifinals. The finals will be a best-of-seven series with the first champion to win three games claiming a $250,000 grand prize and a chance to compete in the upcoming “Jeopardy! Masters.”
In the tournament are players who have won anywhere from three to 21 games. Stanton said facing off against champions with many more wins can be daunting.
“I have a really close bond with all my fellow players who won three games. You know, we have a sort of chip on our shoulder. … We’re trying to prove that we really do belong,” Stanton said, noting that a three-game winner upset a 21-game champion last week.
Emmett Stanton, right, a freelance writer from Baltimore, is set to compete in the quarterfinals of Jeopardy!’s “Tournament of Champions” with host Ken Jennings, left. (HANDOUT)
During a week of being sequestered in the same hotel — what one “Jeopardy!” player called “nerd jury duty,” the tournament of champions participants created a WhatsApp group to stay in touch.
“It’s incredibly active,” Stanton said. “All 27 of us are on there … some days I won’t look at it for the whole day and then I’ll get back to it [and] it’s like, oh, there’s 220 messages!”
Stanton, a freelancer writer who covers the United Nations and recently returned from Ethiopia, said some of his favorite “Jeopardy!” topics include geography and movies.
“I’m a big movie buff. I would have loved a John Waters question,” he said. “[When] I actually got the phone call about being on the show the first time, I was literally on my way to a John Waters movie marathon at the Charles Theatre. So that would have been quite a good category for me.”
Stanton plans to watch Tuesday night’s show with friends who have been eager to know the outcome of the tournament.
“It’ll be a really, really great moment,” he said. “They’ve been pestering me about … how I did and all that. So I’m really excited to surprise them [Tuesday] with whatever the result may be.”
Sounds like the Final Jeopardy handwriting will soon be on the wall, legible or not.
“Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions” quarterfinals airs on Fox 45 at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Emmett Stanton, a freelance writer from Baltimore, is set to compete in Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions. (HANDOUT)
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