Wes Bergmann Talks His Reality TV Retirement on 'The Challenge: USA' Season 2
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The Challenge: USA season 2 is here! Every week, Parade.com will speak with the CBS reality alumni who were eliminated from the all-star competition.
Twenty seasons, with three wins. Thirty elimination wins. Over $500,000 won, and almost $10,000 for charity. That is the legacy of Wes Bergmann on The Challenge. When he started his career on the show back in 2006, he made an impression from the jump, making his way back from being a rookie outcast by winning a record number of eliminations. From then on, made MTV a part of his life for the better part of nearly 20 years. But, with a life change on the horizon, Wes decided The Challenge: USA season 2 would be his last time competing in the franchise. And, though he failed to make it to the end, he went out at the hands of someone who could carry on his legacy, a rookie outsider and elimination king in Chris Underwood.
Wes had made himself one of the franchise faces with hit wit and big-brain gameplay. One of his tried-and-true tactics: Immediately gather up the rookies, and recruit them to your side. Unfortunately for Wes, he was met in opposition to this, as the CBS alumni overruled him in the first major vote made on his green team. Then, he wound up on the rare receiving end of a blindside, when his team went around him to go after the other vet on their team in Amanda Garcia. What's more, Wes had earned the ire of the blue team from trying to vote in Cassidy Clark, who was able to immediately get revenge and send him into elimination. And though Wes was no stranger to the elimination arena, this time felt different. He expressed to close ally (and former rival) Johnny "Bananas" Devenanzio what was happening. His wife was expecting their first child, and Wes had already decided he would retire from The Challenge following this season to be there for his businesses and family full-time. All of a sudden, it was all coming to an end. And like this, of all ways.
Except it wasn't! In a shock to Wes, the challengers, and the fans, he was able to break his "knots curse" and defeat Dusty Harris in elimination. He was able to bounce back from his low in the following weeks, even if he did rub the others the wrong way with his speech pleading them to "give him a chance." As the final was quickly approaching, Wes was the most comfortable in his position he had been all season. It was the perfect setting for yet another blindside. Josh Martinez had a complicated relationship with Wes, as the ginger had him seeing red since they first crossed paths years ago. But despite the friendship that had kindled, Josh didn't want to compete against Wes in the final. So, he was one of only a few votes in the Hopper against Wes. As T.J. Lavin says, sometimes one vote is all you need, and it was enough to put Wes in elimination once again. This time, he was up against Chris, someone who had fallen even lower than Wes due to his panicked spiraling last week. But, unlike Wes's patches, the final was just out of reach for him. After Chris defeated him in elimination, he publicly announced this would be his last season, and thanked everyone in front of and behind the camera for their role in his decades-spanning TV career.
Now out of the game, Parade.com speaks with Wes about when he decided this would be his last season, his response on social media to some comments made about him in confessional, and how he feels this season served as a button to his career.
Related: Everything to Know About The Challenge: USA Season 2
So, at the point of USA season 2, you had just won All-Stars season 3 and competed in World Championship. At what point did you decide that this would be your last season? Was it something you came in thinking, or did it come while you were in Croatia?
I knew it going into it. I was scared to talk about it. And that's that's kind of the impetus of the conversation that I was having with Bananas, where I kind of broke down. That was the first time that I explained it to anybody in any public forum other than when my wife and I discussed the details. It was scary. I didn't want to tell any of my friends. I didn't want The Challenge to know, because I was scared to tell them. This was kind of my way of telling them. It had been getting closer and closer to that point every single season for the last handful of years. It's just becoming more and more irresponsible for me, given my status as an entrepreneur.
You talk about not wanting to tell the show initially. What was the reaction like with production when you first revealed this?
To a certain extent, that whole day where I won [elimination] was emotional for a lot of people. They were crying with me. We would go outside, and we would do interviews. And then, in the "tent city," where they basically set up the TV station where they look at all the footage and all that stuff was, we're going into the elimination, they're crying. I was basically telling them and just Bananas. No one else was relevant. I don't know the rest of these people, essentially. They're all kind of irrelevant, as far as a 20-year experience. So, meanwhile, there are camera operators and producers that I've been with for almost 20 years. It was a really interesting day. And I had more time saying goodbye to them than I did any of the other people that I had just met two weeks prior. So it was an emotional roller coaster.
So I want to talk about some of these people you had only met two weeks ago. Part of the Wes Bergmann playbook is to come in and recruit some rookies to your side. But this time, you weren't able to do that, as you got outvoted by your team multiple times. Did you have to change your strategy on the fly based on that?
Yes, it definitely did involve me having to kind of tweak my strategy. But I wasn't altogether unsurprised. Once you start figuring out the rules and how many of us there are and all that kind of stuff, you have a little bit of a rough draft of your options. Then you kind of have to gauge what people are saying, and then it kind of narrows down an option. The headline is this. The CBS people came in with what I would consider to be a very elementary way of looking at things. I kind of assumed, especially because we've watched such amazing smart gameplay on Big Brother and Survivor over the years, that they were far more senior when it came to their level of creativity and gameplay. And so, when we came in with less numbers, and it was immediate they wanted it to be us versus them, fine, fair. But very elementary.
Now, did that start to change over the weeks after their strategy didn't immediately just work? Not all of them bought into that strategy for the same reason. But they all bought into the strategy, and some of them changed their mind more quickly. Some of them did it for clout-chasing reasons. Some of them did it for insecurity. It was like, "Oh, you're not going to come into our house on CBS," even though it's our game, our host, our experience, our resumes. Some of them came in legitimately scared of us, as they should be.
But either way ever, even though all their motivations were different, they all kind of agreed to be against us. And, again, I kind of thought that I was going to get more from them. If you guys are such good gamers as we thought, then how about a few people from Big Brother and a few people from Survivor, maybe one or two veterans? We can make this really cool, well-oiled machine. And eventually, that stuff did start to happen, but not until the third week. So it was it was very elementary.
Some of your main opposition this season came from the alliance of Survivor women. You and Michaela were consistently exchanging votes. Obviously, you and Cassidy were not on the best of terms. And, in the episode where you first went into elimination, I know you and your wife were both quite incensed by what some people like Desi had to say in confessional. You even posted on Twitter, "Coupled with doing nothing to anyone and still people trashing my name behind my back in interviews - I’m above this." What was your reaction to watching that episode back?
Let's just speak on Team Green for a little bit. They were so scared of the veterans taking over, again, for various reasons, that they could not just look us in the face and tell me the truth. Mathematically, I had no power. It doesn't matter what they're saying to me. So the fact is, they show they want to be these good, straightforward, "I'm not a gamer, I'm not gonna lie, I don't need to lie" type of players. It's essentially the M.O. that my team was going with.
Meanwhile, they would then say, "We're trying to build friendships. We're trying to stay strong. We're trying to stay green strong," all this kind of stuff. "But we're also simultaneously going to lead you along, and we're gonna do whatever it is that we want. And if we have to lie to you, we will, and then we'll just apologize the next day, and you'll kind of have to take us back. Because if you have any act of aggression towards us, after we've done you dirty, then you'll prove us right." And so I just repeatedly kept coming back and accepting apologies. And I kept getting lied to and all this stuff for no reason. I was just going to not vote for green. I was going to do my thing. I wanted to build a friendship with them, a working relationship with them because I wanted to, and I had no other choice. So there were a lot of reasons to do that.
So there were just certain people that I just kept getting lied to, and then kept getting apologies from. So, as far as I'm concerned, I was on thin ice by the time I left anyway. And then to watch them then go into the interviews, behind my back. And, I mean, in the world of reality television, they didn't say anything that was all that offensive, just to make that clear. They didn't say anything that crosses the line, especially given our genre. It's just I am no longer going to accept another apology and keep getting gaslit about all this. Okay, we get it. You have an elementary way of looking at it and came at me a million times. You lied to me a million times. You want to keep apologizing because you want to feel like you're a good person. But you play the game, you play the game hard. In my opinion, you played it kind of unnecessarily with an unnecessary amount of lies, and I feel like there were a lot of missteps in there. And some of it hurt my feelings a bit.
Well, you talk about betrayal. Let's get into Josh's vote for you that ended this most recent episode. We see him admit to you that he voted you in after your elimination. And it was the culmination of this odd dynamic that started back in Total Madness where you said you would never be his rival. Talk to me about your relationship, and your reaction to his vote for you.
So from a game standpoint, I go back and forth on what he did. I can't shake a stick at why he did it, because in fact, I would crush him at the end. So he's got to do what he's got to do. But so will Chris, Bananas, Fessy, Cory, and Tyler. Every single guy. So I'm wondering, "I get it, I'll beat him. But so will everybody else." So that's what was going through my head. Yes, I am, in fact, the best finalist that is there, bar none. But getting rid of me doesn't mean that he'll get first place. Getting rid of me just means he'll lose to somebody else. And, obviously, this is all just going through my head. I'm not speaking this meanly about him out loud to anybody, let alone in interviews. I am now because it doesn't matter. I'm retired. He was a dick, he lied, all this kind of stuff. This is the reality of where he sits in the finalists' contention here.
It's just very contrary to how he treats me. What they don't show is Josh, and I hang out a lot in the house. We talk on the phone in between the seasons, and we stay in touch. And I would consider him to be, not one of my best friends in the world or anything, but a friend and definitely a colleague. And he was like, "Vet strong, we're all together." We would have all these meetings. And meanwhile, he's just like, "I'm waiting for a time to cut him." It really stinks because I've literally never cast a vote in his direction ever. I have other people that I'm going after. And so I kind of thought that was apparent, but it was frustrating to watch.
We can do an entirely different interview on your journey on TV, from a mohawk and popped collar to the beard and Chiefs jersey I'm seeing you in today. How do you look back specifically on this season as a culmination of everything you've done on reality TV up to this point?
There are semblances. I'm an anomaly in the sense that I've had this unfair advantage in my life of being able to watch myself on television and be in the public eye for so long that I have gained tape on my personality and my life choices. And that accelerates one's maturity if you're open to it, and I am open to it. If you ever look at me, and you're like, "I don't like that part of his personality. I wonder why he doesn't change that?" It's because I like it. I've kept it to that. And if you don't get those jokes, you're probably not smart enough to get them. But the stuff that I didn't like is gone.
I look back on my very, very first day as an overly competitive boy who got way too into the game. And that let me make decisions that I wasn't even proud of then, and cringe over now. But at least I have the honor and the privilege of editing those things out of my life to become what I hope to be a really good dad and role model to my either son or daughter.
I mean, as all of us are when we're 19 and 20, which is essentially when I started., we're all naive and immature and careerless. And now it's the opposite of all of that. I'm married; any day now I'm going to have a child. I feel like despite the fact that the odds were stacked up against me on this season of CBS, I feel like I carried myself very well. I still gave it the old college try. And I'm very proud of where I'm at. I'm proud of the growth. I'm proud of the community that I've been able to be a part of for a long time. And so, I'm leaving on my terms, and in a very healthy capacity.
Next, check out our interview with Sebastian Noel, who was eliminated on The Challenge: USA season 2 episode 9.
