Omg, I can’t believe it!!! ‘Survivor 50’: Benjamin “Coach” Wade unexpectedly speaks out after being eliminated, revealing a secret of the show. Disgusting!!!

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.