Coach on His Legacy, Dragon Slayer Endures

Out in Fiji, Benjamin “Coach” Wade was a popular pre-game winner pick among the press — a calmer, more introspective version of the Dragon Slayer who seemed poised for a deep run on Survivor 50. That calm didn’t last. In his exclusive exit interview with The Hollywood Reporter below, Coach explains where the game slipped away, how old instincts crept back in and why he believes he may never be meant to win Survivor.

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Before the first Tribal Council of season 50, a lot of us in the press had you pegged as a potential winner. You were my winner pick. In pregame, you were really introspective and seemed like Coach 2.0, but we saw the Dragon Slayer come back pretty quickly. What changed from that pregame zen to that traditional Dragon Slayer game that we ended up seeing?

I’ll tell you. I had amassed an enormous army of real connections with people, real conversations. You can’t name a single person out there that didn’t want to play with me. Kamilla, Charlie, Mike — who very easily could have been Final Four. I set that spot to be the nucleus of every single beach that I was on. And even when we merged, Emily came up to me and we had a really good conversation. I had one commodity coming into that game, and that’s my word. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. People misconstrue my honor and integrity. It’s not about getting through the game without lying because that’s impossible. I tried to do it in Tocantins and failed. It’s more about I’m going to vote the way I say I’m going to vote.

You can’t find a single time where I went into a vote saying, “This is what I’m going to do.” And then I did something different. That’s my commodity. When Ozzy tried to erode that commodity, I stood up for myself. But I was at the nucleus of everything and had this huge army that was systematically being picked off, unbeknownst to anybody knowing that it was the group that I was assembling. So that kind of unraveled me a little bit. What really happened was when we went to the “Blood Moon,” I made a huge mistake in forgetting that Colby didn’t have a vote. Colby and Joe asked me to throw a challenge before the merge, that last one. They said, “We got to get Colby’s vote back and we got to get out Aubrey or maybe Tiffany.” I said, “That goes against what I think as a competitor, so I can’t do that.” In hindsight, maybe we should have, but I forgot that Colby didn’t have a vote. 

So we’re up there on the pegs (of last week’s challenge) and I couldn’t go longer. Dee turns around and looks at me and says, “Coach, I got you. ” I said, “Dee, are you sure?” She was like, “Yeah, I got you, Coach.” So I stepped off. Then in the moment where Colby says, “Coach, we’re screwed.” I said, “No, we’re not, man. We still got the votes. It’s you, me and Cirie.” He was like, “Coach, I don’t have a vote.” I say the F-bomb. You can see it on TV. They bleep it out. That’s the moment I realized I made a huge mistake, so it really derailed me because I then went and played very messy with Dee and scrambled and didn’t want Colby to go home.

Then I was like, “Frick, Colby just went home. So all right, let me be calm and cool. Let me reconnect with the people.” Then we get into the Dee vote and it’s a very simple one. I said, “All right, let’s go. Let’s vote Dee.” It was just a group of us. It was not me running the show. Then we said, “Well, who’s going to go second?” I think it was me, Jonathan and Joe having a conversation. The three of us agreed we needed to have Tiffany out because she’s Dee’s best friend. So we came up with that decision and then it was like, “who’s going to vote for who? How are we going to split the votes?”

You’re talking about all returning players. You’re going to go into a vote and not split it? If you have the numbers, that’s Survivor 101. And they refused to do it. I couldn’t believe it. So I started getting agitated because again, it was based on fear. I had already made some mistakes. I saw people leaving that were in my greater alliance and I thought, I cannot go home tonight. We could have been sitting here last week and you would’ve been saying, “Well, why didn’t you fight harder to convince people to split the votes?” I would’ve said, “Nobody wanted to split the votes, so I just put my tail between my legs.” That’s not me.  

The other thing is that I am a performer. There’s this time, 10-12 days in, where I start thinking, “I have to make sure that I take this to the next level and that what I say does not end up on the cutting room floor.” So I think that there’s a little bit of that.

I’m a big believer in destiny. I’m not a religious man, but I’m deeply spiritual. I don’t think that I’m meant to win Survivor because I think that it would go so to my head. My ego would be getting so big — bigger than it already is — that it would be to the detriment of who I am as a character and the impact that I have on people. It doesn’t surprise me that you guys said that [I was a potential winner], but I’m very comfortable with what happened. I did not compromise myself. I think the farther I went in the game, maybe I would’ve had to betray people and change my votes up and compromise that part of my game.

After the challenge, you were told to lay low by Chrissy. How much did you actually buy into her advice and in hindsight — was she right?

I think there’s a middle ground. It started with Rizo the episode before. It does show that I have grown. I better have grown as a man — but in Tocantins I would’ve been like, “You’re not telling me what to do.” But I took the advice. I thought it was sound advice for the time. I know that I’ve been aggressive. I know that in order to get the vote split, I had to really throw my weight around. And then it was like, “okay, now let me be calm and let me sit here and let me let the chips fall.” I didn’t spend the whole day in the hammock, but I felt like it was sound advice and it coming from a good place, so I took it.

You were aligned with Ozzy. Did you have a sense that he hadn’t fully let that early Fight for Supplies issue go?

Hats off to him for playing the most strategic game he’s ever played. So congratulations, not coming in the same way that he’s always come in. Cirie, Stephenie, Joe, Jonathan — you could go over most people. They’re coming in the same way they came in last time. Ozzy has evolved strategically and good for him. But I knew that at the end of the day, he and I were not going to be sitting at the finals together. And it was really a matter of who was going to get to the other one first because I imagined him coming down to six, and then cutting him at six.

If you’re curious about my boot order, I was thinking it was going to be Stephenie, Cirie, after Ozzy, whittling it down like that. And then me, Jonathan and Chrissy at the final three. But it was inevitable. Ozzy and I have never had the luxury of starting on the same beach together. So we’re never going to have that day one alliance and that day one trust.

When Cirie came back from Exile, it looked like she shifted the vote onto you and Chrissy. Was that the turning point or were you already in trouble?

I think that was still part of the plan going into tribal, maybe not 100 percent but maybe 50/50 or 60/40 against me. Then Deven’s idol definitely tipped it 10 percent one way. But I did not think I was in trouble. I think Cirie came back and it was interesting because she and I had a talk on the hammock and she said, “Coach, I don’t know what it means for you to be an alliance, but I’ll tell you that for me to be in an alliance, it means that I will fight for you. I fought for you with the Colby vote and I will fight for you until my last dying breath out here.” That level of emotional deception is what made her dangerous in the moment. Hats off to her. 

I did send her a text message and she said, “Well, Coach, you got to know that Dee actually said to me that you were going for me for the Colby vote.” Then he said, “But Dee later came back and said that she was lying about that.” It’s like a resting snake. They’re not really dangerous and she really has done some things, but she hasn’t been the strategic mastermind in this game. And in fact, I was sitting there thinking, “Is Cirie overrated?” Then she does something like that and shifts the whole game and you think, “yeah, she is dangerous.”

You got a pretty memorable sendoff with the Tai Chi, rock formation, the haikus. You even got a song. What was it like for you watching your final episode back, even though you went home?

They’ve really honored me over the years. I have nothing but gratitude for the producers. I’ve got nothing but joyful times and memories, even the bad times. The fact that they don’t have to show any of that stuff. It’s all icing on the cake. They didn’t have to show the nicknames. Now it’s gone viral. And I’m literally having thousands of requests. I’m running this limited nicknaming ceremony on my website and we’ve almost sold out. It’s crazy. And as I said to the producer that did that episode, “You didn’t have to show that. And so thank you for giving me honor all the time in this edit.” Sometimes it’s including eye roll. Sometimes Tiffany’s finally getting airtime by slagging me off and reaming me a new one. 

A lot of people should be thanking me because attached to me, good or bad, they’re getting the airtime. I just feel humbled and blessed and honored they have continued to put me up as one of the memorable characters. Five years from now, 18 of these contestants from season 50 will not even be remembered. But they will think of 50. And whether they love me or hate me, they will remember me being attached to this season.

Coach, you’ve always approached Survivor with a sense of mythology and a personal narrative. What story do you think the season ultimately told about you?

That I can be wise, that I can be a big character, I can be eclectic. I think the biggest thing is that I can be joyful, because they really showed my happy side. I’m singing and dancing almost the whole time. I think that that’s the biggest takeaway; but that I can be stupid and that I can have holes in me because I’m older and I’m vulnerable. They can show all of the above. It’s why in the words of the great man himself, “There’s never been a Coach, there will never be another Coach.”

The joyful part really shows where I’m at in life. I have this amazing family. I’ve got a great job, a great career. My kids’ artwork is hanging up behind me. The meaning of life is not what it was 15 years ago. It’s shifted and is different. It’s to have a relationship with the creator of the universe. It’s to have a relationship with the creator of the universe. That’s first and foremost. There’s a spot inside of our soul that will not be filled up with anything other than that, whatever that looks like to you. Number two is to find your soulmate and crush life’s obstacles together and leave a generational legacy through your children. And number three is to keep the magic inside of us that we’ve been born with.

It’s joy, kindness and love. The world wants to beat it out of us, especially when we’re men. And it beat it out of me for a while, but I see it in my kids every day and I protect it in my kids every day. If we give that to everybody that we meet – joy, kindness, and love – the world’s going to change. And in my corner of the world, I do that every day and it has been changed. Whether I’m at the high school or I’m radiating light through these kids that are coming through my program and they in turn are radiating light to the student body, or where I’m conducting the symphony, where I’m coaching soccer. It’s there. It’s a ripple effect and we can all do it. We just have to let go of our ego and our pride.

To close us out, do you have a haiku, quote or a song that sums up your Survivor 50 experience?

I’ll give you a haiku and then I’ll give you a quote. So Walter Savage Landor once said that, “It’s easy to look down on others, but to look down on yourself is the true difficult task.” And I think that’s apropos. It’s easy for people to talk smack online. But when you look at yourself and your introspective and say, “This is not who I want to be, ” then that’s the difficult task and something that I think I’ve done over the survivor journey. A haiku, “Bitter at this time. My heart is downtrodden now. Resilience will come.” 

Coach, always a pleasure to talk to you. I look forward to seeing you at the finale in L.A. next month.

You too, brother. I appreciate you.

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Survivor airs new episodes on Wednesdays at 8pm on CBS and Paramount+.