Cancer claims Jeopardy! host alex trebek
BELOVED CANADIAN-BORN JEOPARDY! HOST DIES OF PANCREATIC CANCER AT AGE 80
Alex Trebek, the beloved host of Jeopardy!, died on Sunday at his home in California. He was 80.
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson mourned him as “the patron saint of geeks.” And the New York Times called him an “arbiter of truth” in a recent profile, noting that Trebek stood for “ideals that feel endangered: the pursuit of knowledge, and the inherent value of facts.”
But in his memoir released earlier this year, Trebek decided he was “not particularly exciting.” He described himself as a man who worked the same job for 36 years, who lived in the same house for 30 years, who had a wife and children, who cursed freely and enjoyed home repair.
“I have never seen myself as anything special,” he wrote in The Answer Is ... Reflections on My Life, which he was pushed to write following a March 2019 pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
In fact, in an interview for New York magazine’s selective and impeccably researched “In Conversation” series, Trebek gave a long anecdote about his frustrated attempts to fix a broken leaf blower.
“Yesterday afternoon I got it working properly. That’s what gives me pleasure: fixing things,” he told interviewer David Marchese in 2018. “I often joke that ‘Jeopardy!’ is a serious program hosted by someone who does not take himself seriously.”
But it was that relentless assault on his own ego that Trebek credited with his success for roughly six decades as a broadcaster and game show host, starting with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1960s.
When the famed TV personality and producer Merv Griffin tapped Trebek to host a reboot of Jeopardy! in 1984, Trebek insisted that he never be introduced as the program’s star. He wanted to be called the host instead.
“The stars of the show are the contestants and the game itself,” he told New York. “And if you want to be a good host, you have to figure a way to get the contestants to — as in the old television commercial about the military — ‘ be all you can be.’ ”
Jeopardy! confirmed in a statement on Sunday that Trebek died peacefully, surrounded by family. He is survived by his wife Jean, who he married in 1990, and his children Matthew, Emily and Nicky. He was an officer of the Order of Canada — an honour he found was “a lot more emotional than I expected” — as well as a philanthropist with World Vision.
“The meaning I get from my job is that it has provided me with opportunities to explore the world geographically, socially and philanthropically,” he told New York in 2018. “Doing that has allowed me to develop as a human.”
In its statement, Jeopardy! noted that Trebek’s more than 8,200 episodes had set a record for the host of the most episodes of a single game show.
“Working beside him for the past year and a half as he heroically continued to host Jeopardy! was an incredible honour,” Mike Richards, the show’s executive producer, said. “His belief in the importance of the show and his willingness to push himself to perform at the highest level was the most inspiring demonstration of courage I have ever seen.”
Trebek’s father immigrated to Canada from Ukraine in the 1920s. He changed his surname from Terebeychuk to Trebek and worked as a chef in Toronto, then at the Nickel Range Hotel in the mining town of Sudbury, Ont., where the younger Trebek was born in 1940.
In his memoir, Trebek recalled having to scrounge around for film spools for his father, who used them as supports when he had to make a wedding cake.
While attending the University of Ottawa, where he graduated in 1961, Trebek began announcing radio and TV news with the CBC as a way to help pay off his tuition. That led to hosting CBC shows including Music Hop, Reach for the Top and Strategy.
Trebek moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and hosted a slew of other game shows, including The Wizard of Odds, Double Dare and The New Battlestars.
He took the helm of Jeopardy! as a host/producer in 1984, shooting five episodes a day, twice a week.
“There’s a certain comfort that comes from knowing a fact,” Trebek told the New York Times this summer. “The sun is up in the sky. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to change that. You can’t say, ‘ The sun’s not up there, there’s no sky.’ There is reality, and there’s nothing wrong with accepting reality. It’s when you try to distort reality, to manoeuvre it into accommodating your particular point of view, your particular bigotry, your particular whatever — that’s when you run into problems.”
Despite his claims to an ordinary and uninteresting life, Trebek was a television icon, subject to much pop culture fascination during his years on Jeopardy! Will Ferrell parodied him regularly on Saturday Night Live. In 2001, he “caused a minor uproar among his fans when he shaved his trademark moustache,” as the Canadian Encyclopedia delightfully put it.
Trebek recalled the incident during his 2018 interview with New York magazine:
“Folks, get a life,” he said. “There are more important things.”
The stars of the show are the contestants and the game itself.