It’s coming up on three years since the legendary Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek lost his battle with pancreatic cancer, and his family and former co-workers have been sharing their memories of the beloved host in those final weeks.
The most recent episode of the This is Jeopardy! podcast, hosted by former contestant Buzzy Cohen, took a look back at the week Trebek announced his cancer diagnosis and the difficult months that followed.
Longtime supervising producer Lisa Broffman opened up about the moment she first heard about Trebek’s diagnosis, saying she was in the office with fellow producers Rocky Schmidt and Harry Friedman.
“Alex called, and Rocky put him on speaker phone, and Alex told us that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and I remember Harry had a stack of papers on his lap, and he picked them up and threw them on the ground,” she said, holding back tears.
She continued, “And Alex, from the very beginning, said, ‘This is not going to affect anything; I plan on fighting this. Let’s get back to work.’”
Alex’s daughter, Emily Trebek, talked about her father’s desire to continue working. “There was no possibility of him not working,” she shared. “That was never an option.”
Jean Trebek, Alex’s wife, said that Jeopardy! was a form of escape from his life at home, which at the time was all about his next doctor’s appointment or what pain medications he needed to take.
However, while Alex tried to keep things going as normally as possible, his cancer treatment started to take a toll.
Schmidt recalled those challenging days on set, saying, “When [Alex] was sick and taking medication… the pain the man had… you could watch him, and it’s like, ‘He’s not going to make it to the conference room table’ [for the morning meeting].”
“He would leave and go get made up and ready for the show, and everybody would look at each other and go, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to be taping today,’” Schmidt continued. “And then, somehow, he rallied.”
But between tapings, Alex would sometimes be in extreme discomfort. Schmidt recalled entering the host’s dressing room and “finding him on the floor, crying in pain.” Schmidt said he told Alex they could cancel the tapings and go home, but he would always want to push forward.
Longtime Jeopardy! announced Johnny Gilbert recalled times when he introduced Alex and “wasn’t sure if he was going to come out on the stage.”
“But the bottom line is, he did, and when he came out on stage, he was Alex Trebek,” Gilbert added.
Alex’s make-up artist Sandy Goodman recalled how one time the host’s skin looked blueish-brown due to his chemo medication. “And I thought, ‘Oh my god, what in god’s name am I going to do?’” she said before explaining how she came up with a solution to make Alex’s face a more neutral color.
“He kept up a good face right until the very end,” Friedman explained, noting that the only time Alex would “grumble” was when he lost his hair and had to wear a wig.
Alex taped his final episode of Jeopardy! on October 29, 2020, and just a little over a week later, on November 8, 2020, he passed away surrounded by his friends and family.
“The whole family was together,” Emily said. “My brother was in town. We had a few family friends over. And we sat outside at the swing that [Alex] loved, where he would sit a lot. We were all sitting there, looking at photos of old memories, old trips we took, and just kind of reminiscing on those special memories. It was surreal but nice.”
