MEET THE PHENOMENAL EDDIE TIMANUS

By Brandi Bard

With permission to partially re-print from USA TODAY.

Timanus is the sports minded, five-time Jeopardy champion who will seek the show’s championship for the year 2000, later this month. Any of us who ever watched the Quiz Show "Jeopardy", will never forget his performance or stop shaking our heads in utter amazement.

Eddie, who has been blind since the age of 2 due to RETINOBLASTOMA tumors, knew all the answers to the very difficult questions - - many of which he has remembered with his photographic memory ever since he was in school. Eddie who is now 31 years old, remembers many answers since he was in seventh grade. "I am often the source of minutiae," he says with a mischievous smile. Not only does he have an unbelievable super human memory, but his lightening fast reflexes beat his opponent on the signal buzzer, giving him the opportunity to answer first each time. He also can hit a 70 mph fast ball in a batting cage. "How?" you may ask, since he is completely blind. A co-worker puts him in the cage, with his feet in the right places so he can hear the ball coming out of the machine. If he's heard another batter hit five or six solid hits, he gets the timing of it.

He has won $70,000 and two cars on Jeopardy so far, and has qualified for the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions. What, you might ask, will this champion do with two cars he can't drive? Timanus will give one to his parents to replace their 10-year-old Nissan Sentra and sell the other.

He works at the USA Today Washington DC College Sports desk as a reporter. At the sports desk he works the phone, checks the statistics and schedules and cracks jokes with his buddies with his ear tuned into many ball games. But unlike those of other reporters, his screen is black and his cursor talks to him. The headset he uses for the phone is connected to the computer and a computerized voice tells Timanus whatever number, symbol or words the cursor is blinking on. "Ninety percent of the things in his life he's adapted so well that we don't recognize any adaptation," a friend and co-worker, David Sheir, said.

"Watching Timanus work is much like watching any other sports reporter on the job." When he goes on assignment, his Father Chuck, a former radio reporter, goes with him to give the play-by-play commentary. "He can remember the score, the plays and the things that happened in games that he went to when he was eight," his mother Terri says. It's just remarkable, how things fall in place in the human jigsaw puzzle of his life.