I love Leonard Cooper, the Jeopardy teen tournament champ

22 February 2013

My husband and I watch Jeopardy! every night, but we’re a little behind in watching our recordings. Wednesday night, we watched the finale of the teen tournament. We were rooting for Leonard Cooper, the cool, smart kid from Arkansas with the awesome Afro.

(I love that his name is like an amalgam of Leonard Hofstadter and Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory.)

The teen tournament has a two-part final with the scores from both episodes combined to determine the first, second and third place winners. The winner receives $75,000. Leonard did poorly in Final Jeopardy on the first night, so he had only $3,000 coming into the second night. By contrast, the leader had $19,000 and the second-place contestant, $17,600. So the odds were stacked against Leonard.

In among the boldest and most impressive playing this Jeopardy fan has ever seen, Leonard had an amazing come-from-behind win. He may be my favorite contestant ever.

Watch this little montage to see what I mean.

Here’s a great interview with him. He’s going to be a great doctor.

I’ll get back to writing about organizing next week.

Tagged with: jeopardy, leonard cooper