April 12. Davidson College Professor Mark Sutch’s life-long dream of appearing on Jeopardy! came true, when the episode he recorded in January finally debuted on TV last night.
Sutch, a theater professor at Davidson College from Concord, and Kat Jepson, an artist originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, were challenging Robbi Ramirez, a writer from Orlando, Florida, who returned as the one-day winner with $23,800 in the bank to defend his title.
Jepson won the episode of Jeopardy! on Tuesday, April 11.
Sutch is the second Davidson professor to stare down Final Jeopardy! Hansford Epes ‘61, a professor of German and the humanities, won three straight games in 1992.
Heading into the show
Sutch told Davidson, “It’s been a life-long dream for me to be on the show. I’ve been watching pretty religiously since the late 1980s.”
From the Q&A:
How was host Ken Jennings?
He was awesome and kind and went out of his way to say nice things to me about my performance. I made a few silly mistakes, but to be fair, it’s a truly surreal environment and you can’t really control what your brain spits out.
How did you prepare?
I did play online trivia games and reviewed some commonly referenced lists, like the periodic table, but it’s kind of futile to try to learn a bunch of new stuff quickly and expect it to stick. Mostly, I just watched the show and played along.
How the game went
The final score after the Double Jeopardy round was Jepson at $23,800, Sutch at $13,600, and Ramirez at $7,400.
No one was able to answer the final question correctly, losing all the money they bet on their final responses.
Jepson did not wager away a lot of money in the round and became the new one-day winner, with total earnings of $20,399.
The final question of Jeopardy! April 11 episode was under the category “Nobel Peace Prize Winners” and the clue was, “At times they each lived on Vilakazi St. in Soweto, so it claims to be the world’s only street home to 2 Nobel Peace Prize winners.”
The correct answer was “Who are Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu?”
None of the contestants got the answer right. Sutch wagered away all of his earnings for the incorrect response of “Mandela and Gandhi.”
