Did she anticipate the hate? Probably not. It’s now the new national sport — go on social media and try to tear down everyone who is successful or having a moment of glory. By all appearances she seems like a very nice person. And she’s only a kid (to me 23 is still a kid). Here’s her statement after losing on Friday night”
(the experience) “feels still like a dream. I really came down here hoping to maybe win one game and so I still can't believe it. It's strange, obviously I didn't come through in the last one, but I still feel so happy and so lucky to have had this experience.”
How can you hate someone like that? But people do. She was too chatty or her hands flapped around. Matt Amoddio and Amy Schneider (two other super champions) also faced the same negative barrage for the same stupid picky reasons.
I hope that this experience and subsequent fame was a positive experience for Mattea and that the hate was not a blow to her self esteem. She went on a game show to win some money to pay off her student loans. She had no idea I’m sure that she would be thrust into becoming a national celebrity and every major newspaper in the country would treat her streak as actual news. Man, I don’t know how I would’ve handled it when I was 23. But I guarantee Mattea Roach handled it better. She is a champion indeed.
44 comments :
I haven't been reading the hate comments against her but I'd be interested to know how much of it was homophobic in nature, given she's a lesbian and that almost half the country vote for a far right party that no longer even tries to hide its venomous and, frankly, homicidal attitude towards gays. If they get their way on abortion, make no mistake. They'll be coming for all the other civil rights next. They've been keeping Jim Crow in stasis and are ready to reanimate him as soon as they can.
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Have you seen the trailer for Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic? It looks amazing, and I'm someone who's never been a fan of Luhrmann. I think Austin Butler and Tom Hanks have best actor and best supporting actor in the bag.
Well said Ken, my mother said if you don’t have something nice….well you know the rest. Love your blog!
I hope Bad Karma will visit haters like this. I will never understand why some people can't be happy for someone.
Friday question: Have you seen this article about state of showrunning - https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxeze/television-is-in-a-showrunning-crisis
Seems like there isn't even consensus among showrunners what the job entails.
Do you agree with one of main points of article that the way shows are made in this streaming era means writers aren't gaining experience needed to eventually become effective showrunners.
I found her more casual style of play refreshing. Looking at all the players with large win streaks this season, it's great to see each of them play with their own styles and making their patterns work to their great advantage. I am looking forward to the tournament this year.
I had never been a huge Jeopardy fan, but these players now make it must see TV for me. It's quite enjoyable to watch at the end of the day.
I was a contestant on Jeopardy! in 1994. I did badly in the first round, but came on strong in Double Jeopardy! to the point I was in the lead. But, I botched up the Final Jeopardy! bet and came in second. This was years before social media, so I can only imagine what the online reaction would have been. I felt bad about it for a while until I realized two things: 1) I didn't feel bad about losing as much as I felt bad knowing I'd never get to play Jeopardy! again, and 2) after my demoralizing loss, people who previously liked me still liked me and people who previously thought I was a jerk still thought I was a jerk. Pay the crowd no heed, Mattea.
The way that I see it, we should celebrate her triumphs. Halfwitted types on Twitter posting negative comments need to STFU.
Donald Trump normalized hatred . . . not only normalized, but encouraged and incited it as well, especially toward marginalized people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to judge a book by a cover (unless they're wearing a red hat, lack teeth, have pot bellies underneath stars and stripes t-shirts), but just looking at her, she looks exactly like the kind of liberal hipster feminist that people would rag on just for the sake of it, and you know how superficial their particular side is when it comes to women: women have to be beautiful , boner-inducing pieces of eye-candy for them to look at (which may or may not explain why so many Republican women like Lauren Boebert look more like they belong in the world of modeling rather than politics).
Yeah, sorry for politicizing one of your posts Ken, but this is just my theory on the matter anyway. Part of it too could be jealously . . . so many of us has been trying to stay out of poverty since Trump drove us into another recession that nobody talks about, so for people to see somebody else get all rich and everything from seemingly doing nothing, while the rest of America is slaving away over three or more jobs at the same time just to make end's meet, surely that rubs salt into their wounds.
I love her.
@Civil Rights:
You Said: "a far right party that no longer even tries to hide its venomous and, frankly, homicidal attitude towards gays."
That was far more true in the Reagan era than now. What makes you think this is a new problem? As an older gay man (and an old-fashioned leftist), I find myself more welcome in conservative circles than 30 or 40 years ago. Not that it's my crowd, but I'm not that much threatened by them anymore.
It's a shame she got so much hate...I thought she was a joy to watch, and scary smart for her age! Also, I got a kick how she used her hands when she spoke!
In 1991 I won $116K on Pyramid, pre-social media. Many years later the clips were on YouTube, but have since been taken down for copyright. When a friend told me they'd watched it on YouTube, I checked it out and read the comments. The one that still sticks in my mind, from a total stranger, was "Now she can use the money to get a nose job." Nah, I used it to buy a house.
David Riche
The Reagan era was indeed homophobic, and I wasn't a supporter, but I'm looking at the overall picture. Reagan didn't incite an insurrection, he didn't have members of Congress openly talking about shooting political opponents or espousing deranged conspiracy theories, and he and his administration didn't say they'd reject an election result if they lost.
I'm happy for you that you know a few conservatives who don't want to erase you, but policies such as banning schools from even mentioning the existence of gay people or the history of racism are now the mainstream in the party.
👍 she is teriffic. I hope she doesn't waste time online reading any of the negativity. I heard she's going to law school next. Lots of luck to her, whatever she does, tho she doesn't need much help!
Jeopardy! is hard, and it must be even harder if you're gay or trans, knowing what social media has in store for you. It's like a poison pen letter where everyone on earth has your address. After she pays her student loans I hope Mattea has the vacation of a lifetime and maybe enough left over for a new car.
I found her annoying from the start and while I love when a contestant has a great run, I was fine seeing her finally lose. I didn't realize she was getting hate on social media, I kept my comments to myself (until now, I guess), but you know there are some personalities that just don't click with people. She didn't click with me.
I think it is just the fact that people are sick and tired of the long winning streaks. Heck, Ken Jennings' winning streak actually got tiring after 30 or so shows and now we see multiple winning streaks of 20 or more games in a season. They are killing Jeopardy at this point.
The solution is to pull the plug for now and then get the ghost of Betty White to host a revival in a few short years. (Version of a joke where Alex Trebek told the audience attending a taping that Betty White would be his successor.)
Seriously, Jeopardy needs to go back to the five and done rule and get rid of the current hosts.
Maybe this is naive but I don't think hating on something is all bad. It means people care. It's when they don't care that it's a problem.
I am glad to see this post today--it comes at just the right moment. I am a college professor, and our chair in our last meeting of the year commented that she was deluged with students making unfounded and unfair complaints against us--practically the entire my department. And someone close to me is going through an even more unfair and unfounded set of confrontations, even threatening his career of decades. This venom seems a product of the social, political, economic, and health turmoil we have been going through, polarization, excessive sensitivities (I'm all for BLM and other movements, but I've been disturbed by excesses in cancel culture--and that goes for right wing canceling as well over players taking knees, etc.), and maybe most of all social media, where hate metastasizes through groupthink--or just plain piling on. I think there's been a lot of amorphous rage, but it get focused and channeled onto a single person for reasons that often have little to do with the reality. Well, I hope she enjoys her winnings and gives no thought to the raging zeitgeist.
I seem to remember an episode of NewsRadio where Dave describes his family growing up in, I think, Kansas and how hard they hid the fact that they were Canadian.
So 23 year old pierced and tatted lesbian from Toronto comes on Jeopardy! and knows more about American history and politics and pop culture than pretty much any American and she's resented? Quelle surprise!
Her two great advantages, I think, were that she's 23 (five days of taping, four of which would have been back to back, is more exhausting than we more mortals can imagine--it's no surprise she seemed to lose some momentum her last two episodes), and that she had an insouciant attitude. In a number of her episodes, other contestants raced out to huge leads and she caught them after commercial breaks with long, uninterrupted runs. You need, as Ken might put it, the ability of a relief pitcher to forget that last home run they gave up in order to do that.
The Tournament of Champions will be interesting. Amy and Mattea each pretty much played with standard Jeopardy! strategy from before the James Holzhauer era. Matt Amodio played with a very disruptive style. Although they're by no means guaranteed a final against one another, if it happens, it would be interesting to see how the games progressed.
A person has to have a completely useless, empty life, devoid of meaning or purpose, to go anywhere on social media and criticize someone who played a game of Jeopardy on freaking television.
Sorry, but I'll take indifference any day over the gutless, anonymously-fired vitriol that exists on the Internet. Verbal bullying was bad enough when I was in school 50 years ago. I can't imagine what it must be like for vulnerable students today.
I thought Mattea was a delight from start to finish. She was such a breath of fresh air. A quirky, eccentric Canadian - what's not to like? You could tell Ken Jennings was taken with her, almost to a fault. And the streaks on the show always make me more eager to watch. I was sad to see her's end, especially because of just one dollar short.
Change of subject: Someone above mentioned Betty White. If you've never seen this brief clip of her usurping Vanna on Wheel of Fortune, it's a treat.
https://youtu.be/w-xV4TvEL3Q
It's funny how people really care about the "Jeopardy" contestants the way they never would for someone on, say, "Wheel of Fortune" (unless they make a funny mistake). I actually found Mattea charming, but I understand why people are growing annoyed by the multiple long winning streaks. She was obviously very smart and knew an enormous amount about almost every topic, but she also seemed to get more answers wrong than some of the other long-running champions. Where she really excelled was on buzzer speed -- most of the time, no one else even had a chance to answer. And the more games a contestant wins, the more practice they get on the buzzer. That gives people on a winning streak a key advantage over all the challengers -- which, to me, is the only flaw in the game.
Mattea's tics were annoying at points but overall, I liked her and liked that she seemed thrilled with the experience.
I am thrilled that Jeopardy is getting headlines for gameplay and not the changing of the hosts. Alex used to sa it was about the contestants not the host.
I was bullied online back in the early years of the internet by faceless trolls. It hurts to a point but I rejoice in the friends I have made via social media, the music I have discovered through social media and the comedic blogs I have discovered through social media.
Maturity helps steel oneself from the cyber attacks.
I would say losing on Friday was kind of Karma. After all on Thursday she was way behind. Give her credit for knowing the answer but she was way behind going into the final. I might have bet to play for a tie and take my chances on a tie breaker. I would have liked to have seen her go on though. And finally I had no clue she was a lesbian but to paraphrase Seinfeld not that there is anything wrong with that. I would also tend to disagree with the person who said Trump normalized this kind of thing. It has been going on for a while.
I got a big kick out of Mattea and was rooting for her every single time.
I write a lot of letters to the editor to the two newspapers we have in our town. For a long time the papers put a comment section at the end of their daily letters. Since I'm a progressive and our area is a Trump swamp I would get a lot of negative comments, many with very strong and vulgar language. I found a simple solution to get around this -- just don't read the comments. I said my piece in my letter. The dolts were saying their ungrammatical piece in their comments. That's what the Constitution is all about reguardless of how hard Trumpsters want to destroy it.
Even though I live in New Mexico I'm a fan of CBC Radio available on satellite radio, and caught two Ask Me Anything segments on CBC Radio One's Sunday call-in show. I no longer have television and was unaware of what was going on but was entranced during the first show I stumbled across. She's awesome, super-articulate, and seems worldly-enough beyond her years to understand how things work now and not let it bother her overmuch. Wish I were a young Canadian lesbian instead of a superannuated male Seppo after listening to her.
As Ken has said, often all contestants know the answer; success in Jeopardy is all about timing the buzz in. You have to get a feel for when the host will finish reading the question and the lockout ends (since if you buzz in before that, there is a delay before you can buzz in again). Comparing Mattea's first to buzz in percentage amongst the top five champs, Mattea's percentage was ~46%, lowest of the five (Amy: ~53%, Matt: 56%, James: ~58%, Ken: 61%).
Regarding Mattea's incorrect answer ratio: Mattea's incorrect to correct answer ratio was about 1/10. Amy's ratio was about half that. Matt's and Ken's were a little better than Mattea's, while James's was a stunning ~3/100.
(numbers from thejeopardyfan.com)
Many thanks to Mattea for a thrilling run! It's incredible that three of the top five streaks have occurred in this past year.
As a one-time J champ in the depths of history (1998), I will say I'm SO happy there were no social media to speak of then.
I did root against Mattea after she had won five games, but I rooted against EVERYONE in that category, starting with Ken Jennings. The interview portion is NOT designed for people with double-digit wins. I realized this when Alex asked Ken, and this was early on, before the summer break if there was anything he wanted to share. "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."
That said, Mattea had better stories than, e.g., Matt. No knock on him.
I thought she was a lot of fun to watch. I was amazed that she bet so little at a time, she was kind the antitheses of James Holzhauer. She was easily the most conservative player to go on a long run.
To your comment on Newsradio. As Phil Hartman's character, Bill McNeil put it, Dave's family lived in "Wi-SCON-sin. Lot's of cows up dere!"
I admire her wide range of knowledge and that she seemed genuinely humble and simply delighted to be on the Jeopardy journey.
I just wish the producers would bite the bullet and name Ken Jennings as the permanent host. It was interesting the Mattea lost on the last day of Ken's hosting duties.
I'm not saying the Mayim is bad but Monday's episode shows why she IS inferior to Ken. A contestant hit the Double in the first round and only had $800. She never told him he could be up to $1,000. In another instance, one contestant answered "Roy Crok" which was ruled incorrect. The next contestant sale "Who is Crok" and was told their answer was correct. Now, I knew why but the host should have explained it to the audience. Ken would have.
I thought she was fun.
Reply to Peter 5/09/2022 11:47 AM
1. Those in the noble profession of teaching should realize that students — especially those of the grossly-overcharged college variety — are customers, but they’re also customers so relatively powerless compared to their tenured tormentors, that one has to wonder how much the situation to which you allude has to do with venom and the much-mythologized cancel culture
2. Furthermore, I think your post may contain a “tell” —
“I’m all for BLM.... BUT I've been disturbed by excesses in cancel culture--and that goes for right wing canceling as well over players taking knees“
a.) Objecting to players— at great risk — peacefully taking knees in protest of centuries of unpunished State violence vs POC (now readily undeniable via videos)
b.) OR comparing such protests to right wing policies designed to lessen our rights seems to put your professed support for BLM in doubt
Kin Hubbard writing as “Abe Martin”—
“When a feller says: ‘It hain't th' money, but th' principle o' th' thing,’ it's th' money.”
Andrew
Thanks for sharing that Wheel of Fortune clip with Betty White. My favorite part was when Pat said that "they need to increase security."
David Letterman also did the bit when he was out in Los Angeles doing his show in 1994. Calvert de Forest delivered the Top Ten List on the final night billed as Johnny Carson. Here is the You Tube link for the rest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRjYc2JEJCg
I enjoyed watching her play, and I was very impressed at how much U.S. history and culture she knew. It's going to be an excellent Tournament this year, and I'll be sad to see any of these players lose.
I am going to miss her. I thought she was delightful.
I haven't been following this though she is from Toronto where I live. We have a housing crisis here. The average detached house is probably in the two million dollar range. I think it is weird that the half million she won wouldn't get her a 600 square foot condominium.
Of course, I salute ANYONE that so much as gets on the show, let alone has such an amazing streak of wins. All Contestants Matt...oops.
My take on the hatred is that, to some degree, it's always been there. Some parts of society have not left the "slam-book" phase of life. Call it woke, call it hatred, call it PC, call it what you will, I think the difference nowadays is the fact that social media allows the disgruntled organization. You didn't hear so much about how Rob Reiner dressed on "All in the Family", because people probably cared, but the folks getting the calls and the mail either filtered many of them out or were ignored, plus, it was impossible to see things more than one or two times.
Time is blessing and a curse. And the "kids" of the world still hate "smart girls".
Regarding social media: If I may use this forum to witness, let me quote from the prophetic book of "Twas the Night Before Christmas". Spoiler alerts ahead for those who have not seen my sermon or the source:
For those who have not seen this cartoon, the plot concerns an entire town that will be skipped by Santa Claus, due to a letter signed by "All of us", denouncing Claus as a myth.
It turns out that the letter originated from the brainy mouse (see Galatians for Paul's thoughts on sentient vermin) that lives in the town AND HIS FRIENDS believed that, not the whole town. It all works out in the end. .
To quote another sacred text, "The Incredibles", social media empowers a lot of bad or inexperienced folks. Everyone has the ear of the world. Or, as Syndrome, also called Buddy says after defeating Mr. Incredible also called Bob Parr, "...I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics anyone's ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes...when everyone's super...no one will be."
I had no idea she's a lesbian. Did she mention it on the show? We usually mute the "personal story" portion. I will say that my wife and one of my sons had a visceral dislike of her, based on her personality and mannerisms. I thought she was quirky, cute and fun.
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