Ken Jennings Reveals Where His Love for ‘Jeopardy!’ Started & Shocking Baseball Team He Roots For

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Most Jeopardy! fans know about Ken Jennings‘ historic run on the game show, but do they know how his love for Jeopardy! started? The host of the show revealed his Jeopardy! beginnings, the shocking baseball team he roots for, growing up overseas, and more in a new podcast. Ken Jennings revealed a lot about his life growing up on The New York Times‘ podcast, The Opinions, on July 16. 

“Trivia to me is not trivial, and it bugs me that we call it trivia,” he admitted. “That’s our word for unimportant things. But if you were to watch Jeopardy! tonight, or play pub quiz in your local bar with friends, there would be questions about nontrivial things. There would be questions about the great heroes of history, about important scientific breakthroughs, about cultural masterpieces.” Jennings went on to say that the quiz show also has pop lyrics and sports statistics, but all of them are “important.”

“It’s general knowledge; it’s cultural literacy. It’s the stuff that used to bring us together as a people. And I feel like in an age of disinformation, it’s more important than ever that we have this little carved-out space where knowledge matters and where facts are facts and errors are errors,” he said.

Ken Jennings said that trivia is important because it brings people together. It lets you know someone better if you share knowledge in common. For instance, Jennings shared that he is a New York Yankees fan despite living in Seattle, Washington, for most of his life. “I’m a big Yankees fan. But whatever it is, that shared bit of knowledge creates a connection,” he said.

Jennings has attended Mariners games in his hometown of Seattle with his son, Dylan, 22, and has posted about it online.

Earlier this month, Jennings got to live out his dream of singing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” during a Chicago Cubs vs Cleveland Guardians game. He was dressed in a Cubs jersey at Wrigley Field, turning his back on his home team.

“What we now call trivia used to be the cultural literacy that everyone shared: the songs, the historical references, the symbols, the artistic and cultural masterpieces. These were the things that everybody used to know, and it bound us together as a people. There was a canon that defined what you could expect your neighbor to know, and I think that’s going away,” The Jeopardy! host said.

Jennings shared that he grew up in South Korea due to his dad’s job there. They had no English-language TV, except for armed forces television. Jennings and his friends watched the same shows at the same time every day. “And through an accident of Pentagon programming, when I got home every day after school, Jeopardy! was on,” he said.

“I was a sponge as a kid for information. I was always the kid who browsed the encyclopedia for fun, or sat in the library reading an atlas during a rainy recess. I just loved knowing stuff. But I knew that that made me weird. Even at like 7 years old, I could tell that it was against the flow of the culture to know weird stuff. But every day I would come home from school and watch Jeopardy!”

He said that former host Alex Trebek created a “safe space where people who knew things were not only successful and tolerated; they were celebrated.”

“It was really the thing that changed my life: It was watching Jeopardy!” Jennings admitted.

Jennings ended by saying Jeopardy! unites everyone. It’s not political, aside from the occasional political clue. “I honestly don’t feel like Jeopardy! is doing anything particularly special. We’re just running a quiz show. We just want to be left alone, and I think there are many other institutions that would continue to do good work if they were just left alone. But sadly, that’s not the current environment for a lot of these institutions. The fact is this isn’t value neutral,” he ended.

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