Monday, February 15, 1999
'Jeopardy!' victories hollow
Brother's death overshadows good fortune for local game-show winner
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[abbott]](/editions/1999/02/15/abbott_180x136.jpg)
Dave Abbott of Sharonville
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Dave Abbott would have given up all of his Jeopardy! winnings — the $68,599, the new tuba, the Chevrolet Suburban — if it would have restored his brother's health.
The Sharonville resident, a semifinalist on the Jeopardy! $100,000 Tournament of Champions, dedicated his preparation for the competition to the big brother with whom he'd watch Art Fleming's Jeopardy while growing up in Fort Thomas.
“I'd trade it all to get him back,” he said about Ronald “Doug” Abbott, 47, who died during Saturday night, had been in a coma since brain surgery in May.
For 15 years, since Alex Trebek's Jeopardy! debuted in 1984, the General Electric Co. attorney dreamed of appearing on TV's top trivia show. He finally got his chance in March 1998. He won on five consecutive nights, which made him eligible for the annual championship.
He was sworn to secrecy about the results until Jeopardy! broadcast the shows in June. So nobody knew about his success, or qualification for the Tournament of Champions, except his wife, Janet.
Not his two kids.
Not his brother, who lapsed into a coma a month before the shows started airing on June 16.
“It still haunts me that I never told him,” said Dave, his voice breaking with emotion last week, after Jeopardy! aired his first-round win.
“I talk to him, but I don't know that he can hear me or understand what I say.”
So Doug, “a killer at Trivial Pursuit,” probably never knew that his little brother made it into the second round, one of nine lucky contestants still alive for the national title. He appears again Tuesday (7:30 p.m., Channels 9, 2) in a show taped in Los Angeles in early January.
Jeopardy! rules prevent him from saying whether he advanced to the finals, which will air Thursday and Friday.
“I pretty much went out there last year to have fun and for my 15 minutes of fame,” said Dave, 42, a 1974 Highlands High School graduate. “When my brother became sick, it became a mission for me.”
As Doug laid motionless in a hospice bed, Dave told him how he had traded in the Chevy Suburban for a van.
Or how he put most of the Jeopardy! winnings into college savings for his two own children, Adrienne, 11, and Doug, 9, the son Dave named after his brother.
Or how he splurged on just one thing, a tuba to play in the Northern Kentucky Faculty Quintet.
Dave hoped music would strike a chord with Doug, who played bass with Frank Vincent, Ed Moss, Jimmy McGary and other Tristate jazz musicians. Doug's career was really starting to take off, playing lots of gigs in Chicago, when doctors found a brain tumor in 1985.
Dave had wanted to be a professional musician, too. But he couldn't “get an orchestra job” after graduating from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 1979.
He decided to become a lawyer, figuring that career would give him nights free to teach music at NKU, direct the choir at St. Henry's Catholic Church in Erlanger or act in community theater (where he met his wife in The Music Man).
Dave supervises jet engine production and sales contracts at Evendale General Electric plant, where his father, Lloyd, worked.
During his weekly visits with Doug, he explained how he listed his occupation as “musician/contract manager” when he took the written Jeopardy! test in 1997during a business trip to Los Angeles.
The year before, when he had also passed the Jeopardy! test, he had written down “lawyer” and was never called to play.
He told Doug how acting on local stages was good training for being on Jeopardy! He told Doug how it reminded him of his days on the Highlands It's Academic TV quiz team.
“As a performer, I've had to live on caffeine and Adrenalin anyway. That wasn't as bad as the fear of failure,” he said. “Hell, I'm a ham anyway.”
Dave told Doug about prepping from June to January for the big tourney. How he was reading almanacs, thumbnail biographies, and books like The Handy Science Answer Book and Civil War Blunders.
And how he ate dinner at home studying the world and U.S. maps on the kitchen place mats. How he'd watch Jeopardy! with a ballpoint pen in hand to click when he knew the answer.
And how Janet read him Trivial Pursuit cards on car trips.
“It was awesome to watch him pore over books,” Janet says. “I knew if I had read them, I could only retain one-millionth of 1 percent of the information. He has a mind like a sponge.”
Dave probably didn't tell Doug that he stopped teaching at NKU last year and tried to limit his overseas travel for GE, so he could be closer to his ailing brother.
And he didn't tell Doug that he almost canceled his Jan. 3 flight to Los Angeles for the Tournament of Champions taping, after doctors told him that Doug was failing rapidly from multiple seizures.
Both his father and wife told Dave: “I don't think this is what your brother would want. Doug would be devastated that he caused you to give up your dream.”
So he went. He won Round One.
Dave's co-workers, friends and millions of Americans, will find out Tuesday if he won Round Two.
But his brother won't know.
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TRISTATE DIGEST
![[abbott]](/editions/1999/02/15/abbott_500x378.jpg)