Nerve by Taylor Clark

Author:Taylor Clark [CLARK, TAYLOR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY000000
ISBN: 9780316126861
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2011-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Lex Luthor Meets Superman

The moment that he first set foot on Grand Slam’s disco-dance-floor stage, Ogi Ogas felt a dreadful premonition that the triumphant game show comeback he had imagined was about to flop miserably. Surrounded once again by television cameras and a buzzing audience, Ogas flashed back to the Millionaire hot seat, his amygdala triggering a cloudburst of fear. But this time around, Ogas had a few new arrows in his cognitive quiver. As the show’s producers prepared to roll, Ogas slipped his eyes shut and began repeating his mantra in his head. His heart rate slowly decelerated. He let the adrenaline vent out of his system. By the time the lights came up and the producers cued him to step forward, Ogas had settled into the posture he would maintain throughout his Grand Slam campaign: arms crossed, face blank, eyes straight ahead in a steely stare.

Ogas’s adversary in the first round of the tournament was Nancy Christy, an eighth grade English teacher and former Millionaire champion. From the opening seconds of their match, it was abundantly clear that Christy hadn’t spent nearly enough time bellowing the names of U.S. presidents in department stores; in terms of preparation, Ogas was simply on another planet. As Ogas banged out answers—most of which came straight out of his quick-access Tier One memory bank—Christy struggled to think under the ticking clock. After losing the general trivia round by sixteen seconds, Christy became flustered during the math round, missing a slew of consecutive questions like “Divide the number of maniacs in Natalie Merchant’s band by the number of guys who made up *NSYNC.”* Meanwhile, Ogas maintained the same unnervingly serene gaze. “He’s a machine,” Christy told the cameras backstage with an amused shrug. When the dust cleared at the end of the final round, Ogas had demolished Christy by 110 seconds.

His next test wouldn’t be so easy. For his quarterfinal match the following afternoon, Ogas drew an opponent whose very name could freeze the blood of lesser contestants in their veins: Brad Rutter. “Everyone there was terrified of him,” Ogas recalled. “The man’s a monster. It’s unsettling.” Let’s take a moment to review Rutter’s resume. Back in 2000, at just twenty-two years old, the lanky and amiable Rutter made his Jeopardy! debut with five consecutive wins, which was then the show’s limit before a contestant got cycled off. But over the next few years, Rutter cruised through one Jeopardy! tournament after another—including 2005’s 145-contestant “Ultimate Tournament of Champions,” in which he crushed several multichamps like Ken Jennings on his way to the $1.5 million grand prize. By the time he met Ogas on Grand Slam, Rutter had never lost a game show. Most consider him the greatest contestant in Jeopardy! history, and his $3,270,102 in winnings made him the top American game show earner ever.* In short, Brad Rutter was a trivia Superman.

But to Ogas, the most alarming challenge Rutter presented was this: he seemed to perform better under stress. “I don’t think

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