On visits to Chicago when she was growing up, Dr. Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley watched Jeopardy! with her grandmother. Even then, she was pretty good at answering questions. “My forte was literature, pop culture, TV, and anything food-related,” she said. Sports, not so much, but as the daughter of a former minister, she knows her Bible. “There was actually a King James category on Jeopardy! the other night, and I did really well on that one.”
The receptionist at her high school had a Jeopardy! calendar that featured a trivia clue in the form of an answer from the game show on each page. The correct answer was printed on the back. “She used to play with the mailman,” said the hardcore trivia buff, “and I’d weigh in if I was in the office.” On a Royal Caribbean cruise, she teamed up with her father and sister, sweeping every category at the nightly trivia event.
“I guess I have a fairly good memory,” said McKinnon-Crowley, whose father used to call her Correcto. In high school, her nickname was the Dictionary. “They called my little sister the Pocket Dictionary,” she said with a laugh. She also reads a lot of British literature, including Agatha Christie’s Poirot series and her Miss Marple murder novels, and does The New York Times crossword puzzle every day. At the time of this interview, she was on a 2,285-day streak.
As an undergrad at the University of Indiana at Bloomington in 2009, McKinnon-Crowley tried out for College Jeopardy! and was invited to a preliminary audition. “I wasn’t able to make it to Chicago for the in-person audition though,” she said. Then in 2015, she took the Anytime Test, a 50-question qualifying quiz that serves as the entry point for becoming a Jeopardy! contestant, but she never heard back from the producers. About a year ago she decided to try again. This time around she made it to the next round of auditions, a rapid-fire online test of general knowledge. Unlike the Anytime Test, this one was recorded. “I guess they wanted to see how we’d look on camera,” said McKinnon-Crowley, who advanced to the next round of auditions.
“There were fewer of us, and we actually played Jeopardy!, which was a lot of fun,” she said. “We broke up into teams of three and met with one of the producers, who asked us a lot of questions about ourselves to see how good we were at conversation.”
Now officially part of the contestant pool, McKinnon-Crowley was told to expect a call anytime in the next two years. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wait that long. When a call came in last April, she let it go to voicemail. “I’m a millennial,” she said. “I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize, but when I read the message and realized it was from the show, I called them right back.”
Because she’s a professor, the producers booked her on the show in August so it wouldn’t interfere with the start of the school year. She also received a detailed style guide so she’d bring a few outfits that would be appropriate for television. The look they’re going for, she said, is a kind of business/professional. Patterns like stripes or polka dots are strictly verboten to avoid a distracting “moire pattern” onscreen when the image is converted into pixels. “After looking through my closet I realized that most of what I wear is patterns,” she laughed. So, after enlisting the help of a friend to narrow down her selection, she settled on a couple of blazers and a few dresses in solid colors that checked all the boxes.
McKinnon-Crowley flew to Los Angeles on her own dime and booked a hotel in Culver City near Sony Pictures Studios where the show is filmed. “They figure that you’ll make the money on the back end because even if you don’t win, second place receives $3,000 and third place receives $2,000,” she said. Typically, Jeopardy! tapes five episodes a day. “I was on after lunch.” Nevertheless, she had to be at the studio by 7:30 a.m. for hair and makeup. “There’s a wardrobe stylist with an eagle eye, who asked us what our favorite outfit was,” she said. “After examining us in it, she let us know if we had to pick something else.” McKinnon-Crowley had to change three times. Still, the black blazer she wore over a navy dress made her “feel professorial.”
So, what was it like to walk onstage for the first time? “Quite frankly, it was surreal. Time kind of stopped in the green room,” said McKinnon-Crowley, who decided to focus on having fun and just enjoying the experience. “I couldn’t control what questions were asked or beating Jeff or Paolo to the buzzer, but I could control having a good time while it lasted.”
McKinnon-Crowley, who bet aggressively in Final Jeopardy but got the answer wrong, finished in third place. “It was a locked game because Paolo was so far ahead of me and Jeff,” she explained. “Even if we’d bet all our money, neither of us could have won.”
After the show, she and the host of Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings, chatted for a bit, and he thanked her for playing. “Then I had to get unmiked, collect my things, and remember that there was an outside world,” she said wistfully.
Back on campus at Baylor, her students tried their best to get her to spill the beans and tell her how it went, but her lips were sealed. They’d just have to wait until the episode aired on September 12. “They tried to crack the code, but I wouldn’t tell them anything,” she said. “They started calling me the Vault.”
Meanwhile, she has remained friends with all of the contestants she met on set that day. “We are on a group chat and talk every day,” she said. “We are very close.”
So, inquiring minds want to know. What keeps someone from Googling answers they don’t know when they’re taking the Anytime Test? It’s online after all. “We take Jeopardy! seriously so that’s the last thing on our mind,” said McKinnon-Crowley. “Cheating is just not something that a real Jeopardy! fan would do.”
