Rheum After 5: Dr. Christopher Morris, Jeopardy! Contestant

Dr. Morris hosts the Smart Bowl in 2022, a quiz show sponsored by the Southern Medical Association.

The clock was ticking.

Christopher Morris, MD, then an intern and resident in internal medicine at the University of Tennessee (UT) Medical Center, Knoxville, had just 30 seconds to think of the correct response. He already had the answer. His challenge was coming up with the question.

Final Jeopardy

In 1988, Dr. Morris, now a rheumatologist at Arthritis Associates, Kingsport, Tenn., was a contestant on Jeopardy!, the popular TV quiz show hosted by the late Alex Trebek (episode 156). By the end of the show, the three contestants were almost tied. It would come down to the Final Jeopardy answer.

The category was U.S. capitals. The answer: This is the only state that placed the statue of a king in Statuary Hall. (Note: When Congress established the National Statuary Hall in 1864, it set a display limit of two statues per state of deceased state citizens of historic renown or known for distinguished civic or military services.)

“The music started,” recalls Dr. Morris. “I’m looking down on my screen. Everyone is watching me, and I don’t know the answer. So I go state by state starting from the East Coast, head west and wrote Hawaii as my response. The statue was of King Kamehameha, the first ruler of Hawaii.”

All three contestants wrote the same correct answer. Dr. Morris lost, coming in third place. But he’s still proud of his performance.

“We were all very knowledgeable on the show,” he says, explaining that winning is also dependent on timing—hitting the response button at the right moment. “This was my chance to be on the show. I was going to do it come hell or high water.”

Dr. Morris is a trivia buff. For decades, he’s been a voracious reader and consumes information on a wide variety of subjects, particularly in the categories of science and musical theater. He spends his spare time playing trivia games online. He rarely gets stumped and says he occasionally uses his “useless and unimportant knowledge” as an ice breaker with new patients or to bond with existing ones.

Family Trait

Dr. Morris was raised in Springfield, Ill., near the Lincoln Home National Historic Site. Because his mother was part of the International Visitors Commission, Dr. Morris learned many things about President Lincoln, which may have kickstarted his trivia obsession.