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Ventura Woman’s Reign on ‘Jeopardy!’ Lasts Only a Day

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Times Staff Writer

The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, the Lemon Pipers, the Archies and, now, Nancy Zerg.

On Wednesday, the Ventura real estate agent who toppled “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings suddenly landed in the category called One-Hit Wonders.

After beating the winningest contestant in TV history by more than $5,000 on Tuesday, Zerg was deposed after a mere 24 hours on the game-show throne. She wound up in last place with just $2.

Still, the 48-year-old former actress may have achieved a kind of show-biz immortality, according to some game-show aficionados.

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“She will always be the answer to the trivia question: ‘Who beat Ken Jennings?’ ” said Steve Beverly, a former broadcaster who founded TVgameshows.net, a website that followed Jennings moment by moment. “She will be in the record books, even though she only lasted a day.”

Interviewed Wednesday before the airing of her second and final “Jeopardy!” appearance, Zerg described the whirlwind of publicity around her victory as “surreal.”

“I threw on some clothes and suddenly I’m talking to Diane Sawyer,” she said as she prepared for yet another limousine jaunt from yet another interview to yet another promotion shoot in Midtown Manhattan. “The first thing I saw this morning was USA Today and there I was on the front. My heavens!”

In his six months as a competitor, the brainy Jennings drew an immense following, increasing “Jeopardy!” ratings by 22% as he earned himself more than $2.5 million in prize money. His passing as champ was noted on talk shows and in headlines around the country, with even ABC’s august news program “Nightline” joining in the fun.

Zerg also was besieged by reporters, friends and a legion of well-wishers. By contract with “Jeopardy!”, she had kept her victory secret since the show was taped on Sept. 7.

“The weirdest part was not being able to tell anyone,” she said. “But if the news gets out, you don’t get the money, so that was a pretty good incentive to keep quiet.”

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After besting Jennings by $5,202, Zerg was able to walk away with winnings of $14,401.

Zerg’s pals at Troop Real Estate tried to pry some information from her but failed.

“She was so silent,” said Janet McNamara, a co-worker and friend for 10 years. “All she would say about going down for the taping is that she didn’t embarrass herself.”

A lively woman who could have been born with a buzzer in her hand, Zerg ranks her feat on “Jeopardy!” as the second-most significant moment of her life. The first was adopting her daughter Maddie, 7, as an infant in China.

It was Maddie who coached her mom on state capitals for her first “Jeopardy!” star turn. The subject didn’t come up. Otherwise, Zerg did no special preparation.

“ ‘Jeopardy!’ can be about anything,” she said. “How do you study for Funny Hats?”

Like her fellow contestants, she was awed by Jennings, an affable software engineer from Salt Lake City.

“He’s a great guy,” she said. “You can’t even hate him for being so good.”

But, as she learned to her surprise, you can still take him down.

Zerg said one of the show’s contestant coordinators told her that Jennings was right only about half the time in the show’s Final Jeopardy round. By then, though, he was generally so far ahead of his competitors that a mistake wouldn’t lose him the game.

“I kept thinking, ‘If I can just stay close enough to him so I can challenge him in Final Jeopardy,’ ” Zerg said.

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And so she did, winning by correctly identifying the employer of 70,000 seasonal white-collar workers, most of whom are on the job only four months a year, as H&R; Block. Jennings guessed Fed Ex, later telling Zerg that he figured “seasonal” had something to do with Christmas.

If Zerg goes down in TV history, her 15 minutes of fame will be different from the quarter of an hour she envisioned. An aspiring actress, Zerg moved to Los Angeles from her hometown of Poway, near San Diego, after high school.

“I went off to become a famous actress, which I didn’t become,” she said.

Still, she led the familiar life of the show-business novitiate, doing an assortment of weird day jobs and landing occasional roles in local productions. She met her husband Jeff when they both appeared in a show at the Pasadena Playhouse. The production: “Romantic Comedy.”

The couple spent several years in New York, but drifted from their dreams of the theater. Eventually, Zerg headed into real estate and her husband became an independent mortgage lender.

All the while, Zerg said, she was “a ‘Jeopardy!’ freak.” She suffered “a total brain freeze” at her first tryout, but sailed through the written test and a mock “Jeopardy!” match in April.

“At the end, they said they’d call me,” she recalled. “They told me to go home, watch the show, and ... then this guy named Ken comes on, and keeps coming on. I was hoping he’d be off the show long before they’d ever call me back.”

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Times staff writer Maria Elena Fernandez contributed to this report.

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