‘Jeopardy’ champ ‘fastest to get the answer’
Family: Purdue professor destined to go on show
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Standing behind her podium with a screen displaying her name in elegant handwriting, 34-year-old Adriana Harmeyer has shown cool composure so far during her reign as “Jeopardy!” champion.
But Harmeyer will tell you that in those moments, she’s been anything but cool on the inside as she fights to be the first to buzz in correctly.
Harmeyer, a clinical assistant professor and archivist for University History in Purdue’s Archives and Special Collections, said no matter how much of a runaway these games become, she never feels “safe” in her lead, frequently crediting that stress to her well-matched opponents while noting that luck has been on her side.
“Every episode I have been up against really great people,” Harmeyer said.
But if you talk to Angela Maynard, Harmeyer’s mother, luck has nothing to do with her daughter’s winning streak: Harmeyer was born for this.
‘We have nothing to challenge her with’
By the age of 4, Harmeyer was already reading, Maynard said, igniting the girl’s lifelong love for books early.
“She earned many personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut ‘Book It!’ program while in elementary school,” Maynard said. “She carried a book everywhere she went. When she started carrying a purse, she made sure it was large enough to hold a book.”
When Harmeyer was in the sixth grade in West Virginia, Maynard said one of her daughter’s teachers came to her, explaining they had nothing to challenge her with. After meeting with the school’s guidance counselor, they explained to Maynard that the school wanted to “double” promote Harmeyer.
“She ended up taking some seventhgrade classes and some eighth-grade classes the same year and then going on to the ninth grade,” Maynard said. “She graduated from high school at the age of 16. I’ve always said that Adriana’s brain is like a sponge. It just absorbs everything.”
On Friday and Saturday nights, Maynard said Harmeyer spent her time at her grandparents’ house, looking through their set of 1970s World Book of Encyclopedias, which Harmeyer inherited and now has in her home.
Harmeyer’s current run isn’t her first brush with “Jeopardy!,” however, Maynard said. When Harmeyer was 14, Maynard said she drove her daughter to Nashville, Tenn., to audition for “Teen Jeopardy!”
Although Harmeyer made the cut to be on the show, Maynard said they never received a call back for her to formally compete on the special series.
Knowing all of this, Maynard couldn’t say she was surprised to finally learn her daughter had competed in “Jeopardy!” in early April.
“This has been a dream of hers for a very long time,” Maynard said. “I knew she had the ability and knowledge to do well on the show. Of course, there’s more to playing ‘Jeopardy!’ than just knowing the answers.”
A lifelong love for learning
During the introductions segment on a recent episode, Harmeyer explained to show host Ken Jennings that she had memorized all of the questions and answers as a child from a 1990s “Jeopardy!” CD-ROM game, until the game disc inevitably broke in half.
Maynard recalled her daughter’s love for the several different versions of “Jeopardy!” games in their home, along with Trivial Pursuit. While studying to earn her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan, Harmeyer and her friends would frequent area restaurants to compete in trivia nights, garnering several T-shirts, gift cards and other prizes.
While those prizes likely pale in comparison to Harmeyer’s growing total winnings from competing on “Jeopardy!,” Neal Harmeyer, Adriana’s husband and fellow Purdue archivist and clinical associate professor, said it is easy to see Adriana at her best while she’s playing trivia.
“When we team up to do trivia, we are pretty formidable, but it’s mostly because of her,” Neal said. “Word play and two- or three-step processing questions are her strengths. She is very good at taking information and synthesizing it rapidly. Any time it involves really thinking, she is the fastest to get the answer.”
When the pair were first introduced to one another in 2013, Neal said the childhood loves for “Jeopardy!” were one of the first things they found they had in common. Growing up in central Indiana, Neal said every night at 7:30 p.m., the show would be on in his family’s living room.
But besides their mutual love for the nationwide game show, they both realized they had a love for learning, and as archivists, a love for helping others learn, too.
“Adriana has an insatiable appetite for learning. If she doesn’t know the answer to something or if someone asks her something and she doesn’t know the answer, she won’t stop investigating until she finds it,” Neal said. “As long as I have known her, Adriana has always been an avid reader, a lover of trivia and she loves to think about the world in a prism of learning. She’s still the same person I originally met over a decade ago.”
While Adriana keeps the results of each game a secret until its air date, she said having her husband to confide in and debrief with has been relieving, as he traveled with her to California for the shows’ taping to sit in the audience while watching her compete.
Neal said he is very fortunate to be able to be there for his wife in that unexpected supportive way.
“If you think it is tense watching it at home, it is that much more tense watching it in person when someone you love is competing,” he said. “Adriana gets a big deal of joy from learning and from trivia. I have seen her in her element while doing trivia before, but this is the tops of it — she is completely joyous. Watching her in that way was an absolute privilege.”
But even if Adriana hadn’t made it out of that first episode on May 29, she said just the opportunity to be on the show would have been enough.
“It’s been incredible. I so greatly enjoyed going and doing (‘Jeopardy!’) and being on the show, and that was enough,” Adriana said. “If for some reason it never aired on television, that was enough for me. I love playing this game, but now that it’s airing, it’s been unexpected how strong and positive of a reaction it has all been for me and my family. I never expected that.”
Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal and Courier. She can be reached via email at jellison@gannett.com. Follow her on X at @ellison_writes.