The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. But ESPN’s Mina Kimes has unfortunately broken that golden rule, giving us some insights into the mad prep that went into her winning the coveted $1 million prize in Celebrity Jeopardy! All-Stars.
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“I didn’t study at all until I made it to the finals, because there was a two month break between the semis and the finals,” Kimes told Andy Richter on The Three Questions. “And I did a few things. One of which was I bought a buzzer to practice getting my reflexes down, and I would practice playing fake Jeopardy games with other former Jeopardy winners, who would just smoke me, by the way. Just destroy me.
“There’s a former Jeopardy winner, who’s the soccer editor at ESPN named James Tyler. He reached out to me, he said, ‘If you want us to train you, we do this thing called Fight Club, where when we find out a friend of ours is going to be on, we’ll play games with them.’ And I said, ‘I would love that.’ I’d feel like I didn’t prepare at all. I went to this blind. So, the people I was competing with were not celebrities. They were smart people and they’d kick my a–.”
Kimes would let her two-year-old son nap as she’d practice with the ‘Fight Club’ members for three hours. She lost enough times to soldier herself for the final, where her efforts were rewarded.
“They told me, ‘When you go to that stage against celebrities, it’s gonna be like taking off a weighted vest,’” Kimes continued. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know. This has been pretty bad.’ I go up there. We do the rehearsal round, I’ve got Ike [Barinholtz], Steven Weber, and I’m smoking them. And I was like they were right. This is so easy now because I’ve been getting destroyed for weeks.”
Of course, the game-winning moment was something that felt easy for Kimes. She’s a Yale alum and an English major, and the question fell right into her lap. Leading the competition with $12,500 points, she had to name an 1873 novel subtitled ‘A Tale of Today,’ set in a period of US history, which was also the basis of a TV drama that debuted in 2022.
Kimes nailed the answer: The Gilded Age.
Kimes donated her prize money to the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition of Los Angeles. The organization further thanked the ESPN analyst for her support through an Instagram post. They claimed that the funds would keep their volunteer-led activities up and help them provide food, healthcare, and housing support to the needy.
Kimes’ win confirmed that iron sharpens iron. By letting ESPN’s trivia savants humble her in their underground “Fight Club,” she transformed high-stakes television into child’s play. And with the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition of Los Angeles putting her victory to good use, she can confirm that her hard work paid off.