'Jeopardy!' champ Will Weiss of Islip wins nearly $30G

This story contains spoilers.

After winning $27,600 over two days on the long-running quiz show “Jeopardy!,” Islip’s Will Weiss competed Thursday evening on WABC/7, hoping to continue his streak.

But Weiss lost in “Final Jeopardy!,” where the episode’s last clue was: “In 1824, President [James] Monroe invited him back to the adopted country of his youth, which has always cherished his ‘important services.’ ” The answer, always expressed in the form of a question, was “Who is the Marquis de Lafayette?” aka nobleman and military officer Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier (1757-1834), who was a native of France.

Weiss, who was leading up to “Final Jeopardy!” with $14,400, guessed incorrectly: “Who is Alexander Hamilton?,” the St. Kitts and Nevis-born founding father, who served as America’s first Treasury secretary. The contestant’s wager of $2,001 for the episode’s final clue caused Weiss to finish in third place, losing to new champion Mark Palmere, an energy analyst from Sacramento, California, and Bethany Korp, a Spanish interpreter from Laurence Harbor, New Jersey. Weiss’ total was deleted, and he took home $2,000 for that day’s competition.

“Yeah, it was a bad call,” he said on Thursday’s show about his attempt.

But win or lose, he told Newsday on Wednesday that he would be retaining a lesson given to him and his fellow contestants by the show’s host and all-time champion, Ken Jennings.

“So Ken came out and spoke with the contestants,” said Weiss, 46, “and took a couple of questions from us” at Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, California, where his episodes shot on May 30. “And one thing he said I took to heart. I'm paraphrasing here: ‘To the best that you can, let go of the outcome.’ And that one statement helped me clear out a lot of noise. … It was a universal message,” he said. “In my job, we're results-oriented, so to force myself out of that mindset of thinking about outcomes, it was a kick in the pants that I needed and didn't know I needed.”

Weiss' job is as a technical program manager at SiriusXM satellite radio. “I work with software engineering teams,” he said, “to help figure out what we are going to do, when we are going to do it and getting it done on time. It’s the equivalent of being the foreman on a construction site,” who doesn’t actually do the sawing or nailing “but I could if called upon.”

That career was a shift for the Memphis, Tennessee-born Weiss, who moved with his family to West Islip when he was 4 years old, and graduated from West Islip High School in 1996 before receiving a journalism degree from Ithaca College in upstate New York.

“My dream job is what Brendan Burke has,” he said, referring to the Islanders play-by-play announcer on MSG Networks. After starting out as an editor at ABC Sports Online and then at the Yankees’ YES Network, Weiss transitioned to the software side. While at the streaming-technology firm NeuLion (now Endeavor Streaming), which worked with the Islanders, lifelong fan Weiss became a public-address announcer for games at Nassau Coliseum.

“I worked somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen games over 2½ seasons,” he said, starting with the Dec. 2, 2010, match against the NHL team's archrival, the Rangers. “It's like what Alex Anthony does at UBS Arena for the Islanders — promotional reads, doing the goals, assists, penalties, stuff like that.”

The son of Bill and Regina Weiss, now of North Carolina, Will Weiss has been married 18 years to his wife, Toni, a Long Beach High School English teacher to whom he said on air after winning his first night, “Lo hicimos!,” Spanish for “We did it!” They have two children, ages 12 and 15.

Having lived as an adult in Lynbrook and North Babylon before settling into his current home in Islip, Weiss said that, “As I've gotten older, I more appreciate what it meant to grow up here. Long Island is the biggest small place I've ever seen. I hadn't intended on staying here as an adult, but now I can't see myself leaving.”