The Greatest Game of All: The simple genius of the Grand Prize Game
Last week, another Bozo died. Not my Bozo. My Bozo is Joey J. D’Auria, the WGN Bozo from The Bozo Show, and nominally the “real Bozo” to those of us born after the Bob Bell era (the WGN version was broadcast nationally on the network’s superstation). Kate Knibbs has more on the Bozo multiplicity over at The Ringer. There were multiple Bozos and multiple Bozo television programs, but only the WGN version had what is, to me, the greatest version of the best childhood game ever produced.
The Grand Prize Game is brilliant in its combination of simplicity and difficulty. There are six buckets lined up lengthwise. A child attempts to land a ball in each bucket in order, starting with the closest bucket. That’s the whole thing.
Most everyone I knew growing up in the Midwest played some version of this game at home, even if they were unaware of its origins. The game is so barely-a-game that it’s conceivable many children invented it on their own. Even without the titular grand prize at stake, the simple challenge of completing ever-so-slightly-more-difficult variations on…tossing a ball is one that has provided endless entertainment to children for as long as there have been balls and containers to toss them into.
The six buckets in the official Grand Prize Game (and its eventual at-home and arcade versions) each have not only their own challenge (and corresponding prize) level, but each has its own character. Maybe not character on the level of Bozo, Cooky, Wizzy, and the rest, but an existential character that held deep meaning for the boys and girls picked from the studio audience to play the game, and even moreso for the “at-home player,” which was probably the closest I came to understanding empathy at the age of five.
For every Grand Prize Game, one child was selected at random from the studio audience at WGN in Chicago, but so too was selected a counterpart child who had mailed in an envelope in hopes of being selected from a giant drum as that game’s at-home player. What still blows my mind is that the at-home player got the exact same prizes that the in-studio player won. So during every game, in addition to seeing oneself in the ball-tossing child onscreen, one could also imagine oneself the at-home player since one was usually: (1) at home, and (2) just as powerless to control the outcome as the actual at-home player.
Imagine watching Wimbledon and Venus Williams and Garbiñe Muguruza each draw the name of anyone who bothered to send in an entry envelope before the match and whoever wins gets the same $2.8 million in prize money as the tennis star. Would you not enter and tell everyone you knew to enter? Would you not feel some shared angst with whomever the random at-home player was as the match progressed? Would this not increase your interest in Wimbledon? This is the genius of the at-home player.
Of course, the prize was not $2.8 million. But in the early 90’s, it was usually $50 or sometimes $100 in cash, vulgarly placed in Bucket 6 by Bozo himself at the start of the game, along with a “Brand. New. Schwinn. Bicycle!” I don’t really have a concept of what $2.8 million would feel like to me even now, but I’m pretty sure it would be less exciting then a new bike and a c-note was to me in 1990.
Like modern sports, the Grand Prize Game had many sponsors, and like modern late-night television, every set-piece within the game was an excuse for product integration. I still think of Schwinn as the best bicycle brand (I don’t know anything about bicycles), despite the fact that I never saw anyone actually win a bike. I don’t have any knowledge of what Schwinn paid for that sponsorship, but I’m certain they didn’t pay it in the way of bikes awarded.
For me, even seeing someone get the chance to toss at Bucket 6 was a minor miracle. Here is a rough breakdown of how I felt about the buckets as a child, with the obvious benefit of present-day vocabulary:
Bucket 1: total gimme. This bucket was maybe six inches in front of the thrower. Assuming you had functioning arms (and, in the typical ableist style of the 80’s and 90’s, every contestant I ever saw did), you could simply extend your arm, maybe bend your knees if you wanted, and pretty much just place the ball in the bucket. I felt sheepish for the player and for Bozo. Do we really have to go through this? I never saw anyone miss this bucket in my years of watching the show. The only conceivable way I could imagine someone missing Bucket 1 is if they were deliberately sabotaging the at-home player which, while awesome, wasn’t really on the radar of pre-adolescents in the age before internet trolling, pwning, and the like.
Bucket 2: another freebie unless the child was unusually young. I remember this as being a success rate of maybe 90%, but it was probably closer to 80% when I consider how many four- and five-year-olds seemed to be in the typical studio audience of The Bozo Show. Watching the program now, I cannot believe a child of that age could sit through it, much less follow the directions to play the game. It should be noted here that the only real rule was to keep your toes behind the line, a rule that was blatantly broken on the regular but that would only be enforced if you stumbled or took a step over the line.
Bucket 3: this is where kids start to fall off and the prizes start to really ramp up. We’re talking Cabbage Patch Kids, Alfies, and more. Bucket 3 is still well within the range of “the minimal effort of moving closer to the receptacle outweighs the odds of me missing the receptacle and having to potentially take even more steps to place this object in the receptacle, so I’ll just toss the object into the receptacle.” But as anyone who’s ever worked at an office can attest, most humans tend to miss more often than their judgement would predict. For Bucket 3, I’d say that equated to about a 66% success rate.
Bucket 4: at this point, hand-eye coordination, fine-motor skills, and athletic acumen can be said to first come into play. As such, I’d wager that less than half of kids hit Bucket 4. Further, Bucket 4 was at such a distance that it (and Buckets 5 and 6) was subject to the dreaded bounce-out. Every once-in-awhile, a child would throw the perfect underhand toss but the nature of the arc of the ball (which, while heavier-seeming than a ping-pong ball, certainly had more bounce than, say, a bocce ball) would cause it to hit the bottom of the bucket and bounce out. I’d always imagine the at-home player hearing that sound and just knowing they were in for a bounce-out. I once told my sister this was the “Hell Bucket.”
Bucket 5: I honestly can recall only two or three times that a child landed a toss in Bucket 5. And every single time they did, I cheered more than I have for anything before or since. And every single time, I believed I was watching history and would call my mom into the room to bear witness. And every single time, I believed Bucket 6 was just a formality for this young champion of toss and the luckiest at-home player of all time. But then…
Bucket 6: nope. Various corners of the internet are filled with people claiming to have seen someone win the Grand Prize Game or, more suspiciously, claiming to have themselves won, but I promise you that I would have remembered if this had actually happened during my years of watching The Bozo Show. You could show me video of it happening, point me to records kept by WGN or the folks at Schwinn, or be my most-trusted friend and claim to have witnessed it: I still won’t believe it. Bucket 6 is mythical and I believe it is more likely that the moon landing was real and that Kubrick helped Bozo fake some Bucket 6 action on a soundstage to convince gullible children that they had a chance to win.
It was perhaps this impossibility (real or perceived) that made the Grand Prize Game so perfect. The chasm between Bucket 1 (baby-level stuff) and Bucket 6 (I didn’t think any adults I knew could even do it) encapsulated my entire experience of childhood existence. Things were either rote and easy or they were inconceivable, barely even available to try. Skill barely seemed a factor then. In the case of the at-home player, it almost wasn’t, unless you consider convincing your overworked parent to help you mail an envelope a skill. You could practice, but doing so would often remind you of the randomness of the bounce-out. One could improve at the game, but only marginally so, subject to some combination of starting place (age/height/arms) and luck. I never thought that I could win the Grand Prize Game, but I also never thought that I couldn’t. The game remains the same.
