This is a bit of a tangent: that article says he won the last three games of 1985 and lost the January 1 game. It's been said the infamous
clip of the player who has failed to phrase her FJ response in the form of a question and loses as a result was from January 1, 1986. There are no close-ups of the returning champ, but what we see of him looks enough like the picture accompanying that article, I'd say.
edit: newspapers.com let me see the full page as a "freeview" so I transcribed the entire article. I don't think it deserves a new post, but I think it should be saved for posterity, so here it is.
Jonathan Mann, Santa Maria Times Staff Writer wrote:
SM man pockets $36,100
For the last three evenings of 1985, America watched Dan Alves continue on what appeared to be an endless roll.
As various trivia questions were thrown his way on the TV quiz show "Jeopardy," the Santa Maria missile engineer quickly answered many of them correctly, thereby earning thousands of dollars more than other contestants.
That is, until his adrenaline ran out on the fourth show that aired Jan. 1, and the other contestants were able to answer the questions a little quicker.
"Perhaps I could have been saved by a cup of coffee," he said.
Nevertheless, he still managed to win $36,100 minus 20 percent in federal taxes, enough to pay off both his and his wife's debts plus send his parents to Hawaii for a week.
Alves said it wouldn't have happened had it not been for his wife.
"My wife hounded me into sending a letter," he said.
He soon heard from the production company which invited him to Los Angeles for an interview. He was then culled out of the approximately 30 others who had applied through an audition process.
First he had to take a written test to see how knowledgeable he was. Then he was required to audition in a mock version of the game.
At the end of the process, he was one of six contestants finally selected to actually appear on the show.
Taking two vacation days to make his appearance at the studio of KTLA, channel 5, Alves taped the shows for two days in early September.
"It cost me two days of vacation time, and I obviously made up for it," he said.
Alves attributes his success in the game to his avid and wide-range of reading which he says he has done since he was a child. He also says he has a good memory.
"Funny things seem to stick in my mind," he said.
This combination gave him much self-assurance, for while one of his fellow contestants prepared for the game by reading Trivial Pursuit cards, Alves said he began the game cold, without any preparation whatsoever. He added that his strongs [sic] subjects in the game were technical things, history and movies.
And he was particularly strong on questions that required some mathematical background, a reflection of his job at Vandenburg Air Force Base where he is chief of the flight termination systems branch.
Throughout the taping of the shows, Alves said he remained calm.
"It wasn't my money," he explained.
If he chooses to ever appear on a game show again he will have to wait a while, for he is precluded from appearing on any game show for one year and from Jeopardy for five.
The father of three children and stepfather to three others, Alves served as a reserve officer in the Air Force for 10 years until 1974 when he was discharged. He is presently a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force reserve.
Either the rules for J! eligibility were misunderstood, or they were quite different at the time. Of course, "you can come back in five years" is different when the show is only in its second year. If that was the actual rule, I wonder how long before season 6 they changed it.