One “Jeopardy” contestant is getting a second chance after a round of “Final Jeopardy” went awry.
Vincent Valenzuela has been invited back to the game show and will appear in another episode that will air on July 23, the Chicago Tribune reports. A rep for the show told the Tribune that the text of the clue given to Valenzuela and the other contestants was different from the way that host Alex Trebek read the clue.
Here’s the clue in question: “This slang term for an environmentalist is literally true of groups that used passive resistance vs. deforestation, as in India in 1973.”
Valenzuela wrote down “tree hugger” — the correct answer, which fellow contestants Michelle Cabral and Bryan Rucker wrote down — but changed his mind at the last moment to cross out his original answer and replace it with “Carl Sagan.”
Valenzuela, who ended up coming in third, said that the text of the clue posted on his screen read “His slang term for an environmentalist …”
“That completely changes it when you re-read it. It sounds like they’re looking for a person’s name and so I just grabbed a person who was big in the environment and who would have been a contemporary in the ’70s, and so I came up with Carl Sagan,” he told the Tribune. “It was very devastating, but they realized that a mistake had been made.”
He added that he’s a little more relaxed the second time around.
“I think I’m a little more relaxed about my preparations, and now I know what to expect. I was extremely tense going into this because it’s really been a lifelong dream. I’ve been watching ‘Jeopardy’ since I was 10, and it’s my favorite quiz show ever,” he said. “”I am definitely going to try not to curse this time and try to be more polished, but I can’t promise anything.”