ESPN Jeopardy! Writers Share More of Their Favorite Clues
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I’m Dan Hopper. Back again with another favorite category of mine.
This was my favorite category I wrote. I have such an affinity for the “video game wild west” of the ‘90s, when companies churned out glitchy, half-baked titles to cash in on the home console boom, resulting in a litany of baffling, forgotten sports games (for good reason).
Often, as with Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl or James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing, a studio would finish a game first and bolt on a sports celebrity afterward, even if it made no sense. The Glanville game started life as “Pigskin 621 A.D.,” and featured knights and Vikings beating each other up on a medieval field. The company just slapped the grey, digitized face of Falcons coach Jerry Glanville into the title screen and threw in random sound bytes.
I worried the category might be too niche to survive to air — I tried to make every clue gettable even for people who’d never heard of these games — so I was thrilled when Joe Buck read the category, and thrilled again when Kyle Brandt picked it first and nearly ran the whole board. Turns out these lovably terrible curiosities mattered a lot to a certain generation of sports fans.
I was honored to have my clue chosen for the final Final Jeopardy! in the Final game, because I actually thought it was too hard. Our champion ultimately proved me wrong, though, pulling the correct answer as one final end-zone-spike to fittingly cap their staggering performance.
I always tried to write questions that you can answer in a number of different ways. With this clue, you can take multiple routes: One, you know it’s a small island nation, so your pool of potential answers is already limited. Two, you might remember or be able to guess which country from this past World Cup was the least populous. Or three, you could figure out which country just got its first MLB Hall of Famer — in this case, Andruw Jones — or at least think, what island nation has produced pro ballplayers but isn’t one of the most obvious ones?
All that said, I still thought it was a really tough one, and I was really excited when someone got it.
I’m Traci Mack. As someone who started my career in sports TV and worked for the worldwide leader in Bristol for many years in a previous life, I was very excited to write for ESPN Jeopardy! and flex my dormant sports trivia muscles! And, of course, get in references to all of my pet sports moments of the last 40ish years.
This category was inspired by one of my favorite moments in sports history – the time Mets manager Bobby Valentine was ejected from a game, and then returned to the dugout in a Scooby-Doo-villain-worthy disguise that included a faux ‘stache crafted from eyeblack tape:
I wrote an entire mustache category just to include this moment, and then it didn’t make the board! (The life of a Jeopardy! Writer, y’all.) But I love the category anyway. Even though baseball has its share of really great mustache history, it was wonderful to be able to give some other sports their share of the stache shine. I also enjoyed coming up with increasingly unhinged mustache synonyms as the category evolved.
I think, as sports fans, we can all agree that while sometimes an acrimonious departure can be traumatic for a team, it also provides top-tier drama. A messy breakup can fuel rivalries for years to come. So not only did I get to have a great time revisiting some of the more petty partings of years past, I got to work in an Ariana Grande reference! Some inside baseball: this started out as an “all sports” category specifically to get in Operation Shutdown, Derek Bell’s absolutely ridiculously salty (and hilarious) bargaining tactic to get out of Pittsburgh. (For the uninitiated, Bell refused to compete for a starting job after a season in which he batted .173 and basically dared the Pirates to start him in RF or get rid of him.) It became an NBA category over its iterations, which was fine as the NBA provides plenty of mess. Operation Shutdown may not live on the ESPN Jeopardy! board, but it lives on in my heart.
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