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Hamilton lineman Peter Dyakowski’s Jeopardy experience didn’t go according to plan

andrew bucholtz

"A challenging quiz show that puts contestants under intense pressure." "What is Jeopardy!, Alex?" After talking about it during Grey Cup Week, Hamilton Tiger-Cats' guard Peter Dyakowski appeared on the famed show Tuesday night (in reality, his appearance was taped back in February), but it didn't go particularly well for him, as he finished last. Dyakowski told Scott Radley of The Hamilton Spectator he did well in the practice round, but nerves kicked in when it was for real:

Truth is, until he heard Johnny Gilbert belt out This … Is … Jeopardy, and then saw Alex Trebek — a Ticat fan, as it turns out — stroll out onto the set, Dyakowski was sure he was going to nail it. After all, when he watches at home he's a champ.

But the moment reality kicked in, the lights suddenly seemed brighter, the studio suddenly seemed warmer and the recall mechanism in his brain suddenly seemed out of service.

"Now it's for real and I couldn't even remember how to press the button," he laughs...

The secret, he says, is not worrying about losing. Thinking about what your buddies back home will say is sure death. That's what helped him in his previous game-show experience a couple of years ago. Nobody expected a self-described "big, stupid animal" to beat his academic opponents so he just relaxed and had fun. That made it easy for him and harder on the others who started thinking how they'd explain losing at brain games to a football player of all people.

Yet, as his Jeopardy foes started blasting through a few categories leaving him behind, Dyakowski couldn't take his eyes off the scoreboard. While he knew many of the answers, he couldn't get them unglued from the tip of his tongue.

"I panicked," he says. "It was like the school dance in Grade 6 all over again."

Did it ever get better?

"It got worse," he laughs.


Dyakowski didn't do too badly overall, and he certainly won't go down as one of the show's worst contestants. Still, this definitely wasn't as impressive as his triumph on Canada's Smartest Person in 2012, and he came closer to "the crushing pain of defeat and public humiliation" (from his Facebook page) than "the sweet joy of Jeopardy victory." It got him plenty of attention, though, from newspapers that focused on his college career at LSU to a Bleacher Report article focusing on a former college athlete getting a Final Jeopardy question about college mascots wrong. (In fairness, it was a question about the Ivy League, which is at the FCS level and doesn't exactly play many games against the SEC; Dyakowski also showed a sense of humour by posting the article making fun of him.)

While Dyakowski didn't triumph this time around, it's still pretty impressive to see a CFL player appear on Jeopardy! The show receives massive volumes of applicants every year, and it has a difficult audition process that includes internet testing (50 questions with 15 seconds to answer each) and regional contests. It's not something you regularly see athletes on, so Dyakowski's still helping to break down the stereotypes about football players, and finishing third doesn't exactly signify he's less intelligent than the others; the show's a test of performance under pressure and various areas of specific knowledge, not really overall smarts. He's probably in for a little more ribbing from teammates this time around, but hey, he accomplished something none of them did. And he got a photo with Alex Trebek!