Among its alumni of note, Riverhead High School can now boast a “Jeopardy!” champion.
Mason Maggio, Class of 2008, was a two-day champion on the popular quiz show this week. He racked up more than $44,000 in winnings.
Maggio, 30, now lives in Los Angeles, where he’s pursuing a career as a songwriter.
The Flanders native said in an interview today he’s always wanted to be a contestant on “Jeopardy!” He’s been a “huge fan” of the show since childhood. He’d compete with his older brother, Evan — also an avid fan, who “got pretty far” in auditions for the “Jeopardy!” teen tournament — and started taking the show’s online test about a decade ago. Online test-takers who do well enough on the 50-question test may get an in-person audition. And if the audition goes well, they may get called to be in the contestant pool, earning a shot at being chosen for the show.
“I got called for an audition six years ago. It was in Philadelphia,” Maggio said today. He was still living on Long Island. He asked a friend, Sylvie Krekow, if she’d go to Philadelphia with him for the audition. She agreed. Maggio’s audition earned him a spot in the contestant pool, but he never got the call to be on the show. He and Sylvie, however, have together ever since.
As it turned out, the “Jeopardy!” audition that started a long-term relationship would be a great story for Alex Trebek to tell when Maggio made it to the “Jeopardy!” stage six years later.
“It was such a great experience,” Maggio said.
He took the online test early this year. His score earned him an audition — done via Zoom due to the pandemic — and he was selected for the contestant pool. Then got the call: he’d be on the show in two weeks.
“It was surreal,” Maggio recalled. “I only had two weeks to prepare myself.”
He watched as many old episodes of “Jeopardy!” as he could find — “like four or five a day,” he said.
“I specifically studied categories I didn’t know much about. I memorized the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. I memorized all the presidents and their terms of office. I found lists of literary classics and read the basic plot summaries of those,” Maggio said,
“I didn’t even bother trying to study sports,” he said. That’s never been his thing. “I knew that would be a can of worms. There would be too many pieces of information I had no context for.”
His strategy and preparation paid off. He came away as a champion two days in a row. He took a lead on the third day into the final “Jeopardy!”round.
Final “Jeopardy!” is tough, Maggio said. “You have 30 seconds to come up with a term. It’s a mad dash in your brain to get to the word.” In the Final “Jeopardy!” round on his third day of play, the word eluded him.
“In medieval times it was a long tale of a hero like Gisli or Njall; today it means any story of epic length.”
What is a saga?
And with that, Maggio’s “Jeopardy!” saga came to an end.
But he has no regrets. In fact, he had a blast.
“It was such fun,” he said. After he got over his initial case of nerves. “At first, my legs were shaking. During the first commercial break, I said that to the woman next to me and she said ‘Me, too.’ Then I was better. It was like, OK, we’re all in this together. Once I embraced it and got into the zone, it was really, really fun.”
Though the shows aired this week, the taping was done in the beginning of August. Maggio said he didn’t tell anyone but his girlfriend and his brother about it in advance. It just would have made him more nervous, he reasoned.
It was a pressure-cooker experience, for sure. Jeopardy tapes a week’s worth of shows in a single day. It was tiring, but the adrenalin keeps you going, he said.
“It all just flew by so fast. After it was over, when I left, I couldn’t remember a single question I got right,” Maggio said.
“It all happens in the blink of an eye.”
He finished with winnings of $44,600 — “an amazing windfall for me,” Maggio said.
Earning a living as a songwriter is not necessarily easy, even in L.A., Maggio said. Even “Jeopardy!” host Trebek pointed that out on TV.
“It’s a struggle but I’m having enough intermittent success to make it worth it,” Maggio said,
He and Krekow moved to L.A. two years ago.
“I miss New York,” he said. He’s hoping to return for a visit once the COVID crisis is past — and he’s hoping to make his trip back coincide with a retirement party his two favorite teachers are planning to throw after the pandemic fades.
Lorene Custer and Doc Greenberger had a big impact on his life. Maggio said. He took Latin in Riverhead from grades 7 to 12.
“They share a huge part of the blame for why I was on ‘Jeopardy!’,” Maggio said. “They were a huge part of my life. The first experience I had with any “Jeopardy!” type of competition was the Latin Certamen at Stony Brook,” he said, referring to the county-wide competition in which Riverhead Latinists have always competed — and excelled. He was anxious about it, but, he said, “I loved Latin so much that I was willing to participate. Ms. Custer pushed me to do it — in a good way. They always pushed people in the right direction.”
Maggio would go on to study history at Stony Brook University — where he also took a couple of Latin classes. But his passion for music remained and after he earned his degree and spent a year of graduate study in medieval history, music eventually led him to the West Coast.
In addition to writing and singing, he plays “primarily guitar and bass but also a little piano and banjo.”
Which begs the question: What is multi-talented?
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