Time to get those PTA and office betting pools fired up again. As was made plenty clear to a “Survivor”-whipped TV nation last night, Gervase (Peterson), the island’s resident slacker and 30-year-old basketball coach from Philadelphia, became exile No. 10 on the dog-eat-dog show.
Peterson’s banishment puts an end to a prevailing rumor plaguing the CBS castaway-reality series. You know, the one about Gervase being the $1 million jackpot winner.
It started a few weeks ago, with an alleged leak posted by a hacker on the anti-“Survivor” Web site, the onomatopoeic www.survivorsucks.com. The cyberspace cowboy said he had hacked into the official CBS “Survivor” site and discovered the million-dollar scoop.
CBS officials denied it, but the rumor prevailed, right up until the Tribal Council’s ballots were counted at the end of Wednesday night’s broadcast.
Even prominent TV pundits bought into the myth. Michael Starr, a New York Post columnist, wrote a column predicting that Gervase would be the last survivor and win the booty. The column appeared on the Post’s Web site this week and was supposed to run in the newspaper this morning.
But, according to a report on Inside.com today, Starr had to rewrite his column last night, at the last minute, switching his prediction to Rudy. His misguided column also has disappeared from the Post’s Web site.
How are fans reacting, now that the “Survivor” theory has been debunked?
“So much for www.survivorsucks.com. I almost wonder if that Web site was set up by the network to deceive us,” one netizen writes today, the chat room alt.smouldering.dog.zone.
So, what has Survivorsucks.com got to say for itself? Where did the rumor come from in the first place, and what about the furor it caused?
We tried unsuccessfully to get a response from the site’s webmasters. But someone posted the following reaction to Gervase’s shocking exit, without so much as a mention of the hacker who supposedly submitted the “scoop” way back when.
“Well thank God it’s over. If we had to watch Gervase’s lazy ass for one more week, we were going throw our television out the window.”
Not a bad idea at all, if you ask us.
