Class of 2023 Evanston Township High School graduate and former Scholastic Bowl captain Henry Barbaro took on two fierce competitors in a game of Jeopardy! on Monday, which aired locally at 3:30 p.m. on WLS-TV, ABC-7.
The current Tulane University student played against two-day champion Ashley Chan, a publicist from Lewisville, Texas, and Matt Grossman, a third-year law student at New York University.
According to a producer on the show, more than 200,000 people a year take the first level quiz to get on Jeopardy!, and only around 450 people make it to the stage.
Barbaro didn’t advance out of Monday’s game, but answered a number of questions correctly.
In a memorable and amusing Final Jeopardy! answer, Barbaro wrote down, “I had fun.”
‘Buzzer-raced’
Barbaro started the show by sharing an anecdote with host Ken Jennings about his 115-pound Great Dane, Ladybird, who tore her ACL. The game took off immediately after.
His competitors fired their answers quickly during the first round.
“I wasn’t particularly happy with my first round performance. I was a little nervous.” Barbaro said.
Despite an answer that pulled him into the negatives, he turned around his game in the Double Jeopardy! round.
“Double Jeopardy!, I think I did the best I could,” he said. “I got buzzer-raced a few times.”
Barbaro’s mother Kim said that Chan, reigning champ so far, was “super quick” on the buzzer.
“We’re hoping that she keeps winning, because she was super nice,” Kim said.
The Final Jeopardy! question stumped all three contestants.
“Jebel Musa in Morocco & Mount Hacho near Ceuta are candidates for the southern half of this pair,” the niche clue read.
“I saw geography, and I was kind of optimistic, and then I saw the clue, and I really had no idea,” Barbaro said. “I just wrote down ‘I had fun,’ because I was definitely blanking.”
The correct answer was “What are the Pillars of Hercules?”
Only 5 weeks’ notice
Barbaro applied to be on the show in August 2023, but the show ended up reusing contestants for some time during the Writers Guild of America strike.
He worried that he’d have to apply again. The application process involved multiple rounds of tests, including online questionnaires and proctored and group quizzes.
In late September, though, Barbaro got the call that he’d been selected, just five weeks before filming. He flew out to California.
Taping a week’s worth of the show takes two days, and all the contestants were randomly selected to play against each other, Barbaro and his mother explained. The two expected that he would play on Monday, but after a long day of waiting, he wasn’t called until the next day.
“Poor Henry had to wait through a whole day’s worth of games in the green room,” his mother said.
Barbaro, now home for winter break, watched Monday’s show with his family and several of his family’s friends.
ETHS grad competes on Jeopardy!: ‘A little nervous,’ but ‘I had fun’ is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.