James Barber wrote:
I never, ever thought Dan would get 7-0. I was stunned. My first thought, after, "Wow, his ass looks good in those jeans," was, "This is like my dream finale." Everyone I hated was called out. Everyone I liked was rewarded. To use a phrase that some posters like to say, the "good people" won. That was almost the running theme of this season. After a rough start, some pretty toxic players were booted one after the other, and we got a majority of people in F5 who were funny, who tried not to go the lowest road.
Dan may be a big geek who has all the same career delusions as most of the other people who leave this game, but I still think he was a player BB desperately needed. No showmances. No trashing everyone else to make himself feel like a bigger man. No sitting around bitching about the littlest thing because he has contempt for everything about BB other than mediawhore opportunities or winning money. Dan loved the game, he saw the game as a rare opportunity. He took crazy risks and most of them paid off. He didn't wait for other people to do his work for them. He never assumed other people just had to love him and if they didn't it was their problem. He pinpointed the exact people he could use in the game and those he couldn't. It was a great mix of UTR strategy and comp wins, of schmoozing and listening, of always being polite, kind, friendly, no matter how people treated him. In the end he won because he was in many ways the antithesis of the obnoxious, mindfucking player who browbeats the jury into submission but wins based on some type of fear/respect vote. The only nasty move he made in the game was the roulette, and when he explained that, he won.
When I think about the odds Dan had against him, from two of his closest friends leaving in the early weeks to the jury having some deeply unstable personalities, to nearly everyone in the house believing he was a plant or AP, to the Judas/burn in hell week, being at F5 with an HOH who loathed him, and so on, to taking an F2 partner who had pissed off fewer people in the house, I'm even more amazed he won 7-0.
I don't know what Dan is like in real life, and I'm not sure how much I care. What I do know is that I've rarely seen any player turn around so many bad odds, both in the house and with how a lot of fans felt about him pre-show. And he did a lot of that by being a nice guy. You don't have to be an asshole on reality TV. You don't have to tear people apart and then say you're just being "real". He left a blueprint for future BB players who don't want to go on national TV and act like psychos in order to have a chance in the game.
I think he did so much to drain some of the swamp that BB had become, and I thank him for that.
enjoy your posts a lot!
