A Keaau man is realizing a dream 30 years in the making when he appears today on “Jeopardy!”, the syndicated TV brain-fest billed as “America’s Favorite Quiz Show.”
Victor Saymo’s appearance airs at 4:30 p.m. on KGMB-TV, channel 7 on Time-Warner Oceanic Cable.
The 59-year-old Saymo, who describes himself as an aspiring writer and poet, has watched the show since the 1980s and first auditioned to be a contestant in 1996 in Orlando, Fla.
“I passed everything, but I never did get the call,” he said.
Back then, if a prospective contestant passed the written test — which has a 90-plus percent failure rate — plus the mock game and interview but didn’t get called within six months, the individual had to re-qualify for reconsideration.
Nowadays, things have changed, as the written test can be taken online.
“I started taking the online test in 2011, but I didn’t pass until 2015, last year,” Saymo explained. “And they invited me to an audition in Los Angeles in July, and that is when my wife (Joanne) and I went. Luckily, I got qualified, and then they called me in February and said, ‘Are you free to come to a taping in March?’ And I said yes.”
Saymo, a native of Ilocos Norte, the Philippines, has been in the U.S. since 1979 and in Hawaii for 10 years.
A former journalist, he earned an undergraduate degree in history from Excelsior College in Albany, N.Y., and a law degree from Florida State University. He was admitted to the California State Bar in 2001. According to that state bar association’s website, his license to practice law is currently on inactive status but is eligible for reactivation.
“If I were to do that, I would be able to do some federal administrative law in Hawaii, like customs and immigration, because I have some experience with that,” he said.
Saymo describes his experience on “Jeopardy!” as “awesome,” but points out, as far as quiz shows go, this is not his first rodeo.
“When I was in the Philippines, I was a quiz kid,” he said. “I won several times on the quiz shows in Manila, individually and in the team contests. … My fame as a quiz kid led to my first job as a researcher for a quiz show, and then I asked if I could write scripts for broadcast. And they said, ‘Go ahead and we’ll teach you.’”
Saymo was a regular on “Pamantayan ng Talino” — which, roughly translated from Tagalog, is “Contest of Brains” — and “IQ-VII,” the title of which is a nod to “QB VII,” the title of a Leon Uris novel.
He said the best way to prepare for “Jeopardy!” or any quiz show is “wide reading.”
“I used to read the ‘World Almanac and Book of Facts’ because in areas like geography, it’s very useful because it gives you capital cities, monetary units, current heads of state, but you have to keep up to date,” Saymo said.
Of the reference book’s current edition, he noted, “One of the first things I noticed rather early was the head of government of Canada was the wrong person. They had the prime minister before Justin Trudeau (Stephen Harper). And I found out about Justin Trudeau from the news, so I had to write it in on my copy.”
Saymo said categories he’s most comfortable with are history, literature and classical music. Asked if he was well versed in popular music, as well, he replied, “Unfortunately not.”
He described the show’s host, Alex Trebek as a “gentleman in the classic sense of the word.”
“I have watched the show since the 1980s,” Saymo said. “… The sense of humor that he displays is the refined humor of an old-world gentleman. There is nothing crude.”
Under the lights and under the gun, Saymo said, “The show goes by so fast.”
“When you watch, it’s 30 minutes. But when it’s being taped, it’s 18 minutes and the clues follow one another,” he explained. “You barely have time to reset your trigger, to use a metaphor from target shooting. … On ‘Jeopardy!’, the clues come bam, bam, bam! And that’s the thing that made it so hard.”
Saymo was prohibited from disclosing how he did on the show, but true to its spirit, he worded his answer in question form when describing the quality of his “Jeopardy!” experience.
“Was this experience worth all the years that I waited? Yeah, it was worth it. From 1985, when I first watched the show, to 2015, is what, 30 years? It has been worth every minute of it. And I wouldn’t do anything different.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
