Deciphering the “Amodio Moment of Surrender”
I’m enjoying Jeopardy ninja Matt Amodio’s run and don’t give a damn about him using “what’s” with every answer. What’s the difference? But this scribble is about something I haven’t yet seen mentioned about his play. I call it the Amodio Moment of Surrender.
Here’s how it goes down. There are games when Matt simply messes with his well-meaning, but ultimately inferior opponents. Oh, he may actually go into the red during the Jeopardy round, fall behind for a bit and seem as if he’s just another curly haired nerdy guy with a buzzer hair trigger.
Imagine the other two standing there thinking to themselves, “Holy crap, the guy is mortal. I have a shot. I HAVE A SHOT!” It’s really so sad. They don’t have a shot, or a chance in hell. You see, Matt Amodio has apparently memorized the entirety of Wikipedia along with the Bible, Torah, Quran, the complete works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Stephen Hawking and Johnny Rotten, along with every episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Sheldon Cooper’s “Fun With Flags.”
At some point Matt appears to tire of toying with these nice folks. It’s tough to tell exactly when it happens because his habit of alternately smiling and grimacing is effective camouflage. Pay more attention to his play. He’ll suddenly be first to buzz in and answer several high value clues in a row adding to the bankroll he’ll need for the coup de grace he can only deliver courtesy a Daily Double.
He finds it! Bets five-figures, fumbles so you think he majorly screwed up, then pulls out the correct answer from wherever he’d been hiding information that until this moment, was entirely useless.
Now he’s put 10, 15 grand between him and the nearest competitor who is now, no longer a competitor but rather a garden gnome filling a fallow field.
The Amodio Moment of Surrender has arrived.
Once smiling, engaged players who have waited decades for their shot on the Jeopardy stage, the Amodio Moment obliterates any shred of hope they harbored. They have the blank, defeated, thousand yard stare wishing for a power outage or other calamity forcing an early end to the taping, and therefore, their misery.
Some just give up. Their score is frozen because they no longer have the will to buzz in. Others will attempt to play knowing unless Amodio suddenly collapses from having endured six different hosts they have no shot.
At last Final Jeopardy arrives. It doesn’t matter if Matt is right or wrong. He’s so far ahead of the others all they can do is play for second because number two gets a grand more than the third place loser. In either case, they hardly break even on their costs to travel to Los Angeles to suffer a nationally televised embarassment.
My family and I have learned how to recognize the Amodio Moment and actually cheer when it arrives. We laugh a little too because we’ve enjoyed a little wine with dinner…and we’re kinda mean.
One day Amodio will lose. Another player up to the task will invoke his or her own “moment” on Matt. He will humbly submit, politely congratulate his vanquisher and when the 47th temporary host of Jeopardy asks how he feels his face hardens as he invokes Walter White, responding, “What’s….I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. I was alive.”
