Breaking Fairplay

What Really Happened with Micronesia’s First Boot

To be a first boot in Survivor lore is to be part of an exclusive club that is mostly anchored by shame and regret. Being the first person voted off your season is your tribe telling you that you are the least useful/fun/stable person on your cast. It’s the ultimate form of rejection in the Survivor world. Still, among that group, there are some legendary Survivor players that have come by the first-boot label; Tina Wesson, Rupert Boneham, even Francesca Hogi for having the honor of being the only first boot to be sent home first on two occasions. The anti-Sandra Diaz-Twine if you will.

In my opinion, no first boot is as legendary or iconic as Survivor: Micronesia’s biggest loser, Jon Dalton aka Jonny Fairplay, Survivor’s most memorable villain. It was already funny that Fairplay was brought back on the season billed as Fans vs Favorites when he may have been the most hated contestant of all-time. It was even funnier when he became the first boot while delivering, in my opinion, the best one-episode performance in Survivor history.

You might remember how his exit went. The Favorites were a little too confident they were going to lay the smackdown on the Fans. At the immunity challenge, the Favorites managed to lose. A favorite would become the season’s first boot.

Had things occurred naturally, it was never going to be Fairplay. Like he somehow always did in Pearl Islands, Fairplay had snaked his way into a good spot. Two alliances had formed around him. Parvati, Amanda, James and Ozzy were the showmance alliance. Penner, Yau-Man, Ami and Eliza were the outcasts. Two players were not really aligned either way: Cirie and Jonny. Both sides were lobbying these two for their votes at tribal council. Nobody considered Fairplay an option for first boot.

Nobody except for Fairplay himself. As the show told us, his girlfriend was pregnant with his daughter and he was thinking of them. He missed being around and worried that something might happen with the pregnancy while he was in the game. So as the edit goes, Fairplay told the tribe to vote him out.

Probst, who already did not like Fairplay, both because of PI and because Fairplay and Probst’s brother almost got in a fight at the Vanuatu reunion, was obviously unconvinced by Fairplay’s actions. He spent most of tribal council trying to get Fairplay or one of his tribemates, specifically Penner and Eliza, to admit that this was a quit. Probst labelled Fairplay’s exit as such long after the season, telling TV Guide before Heroes vs Villains that Fairplay would not be brought back because he was a quitter. At least Fairplay got a hug on the way out of the game in Micronesia.

So, if the edit is to be believed, Fairplay got a case of home sickness and couldn’t handle it. And that is partially true. He confirmed that his girlfriend’s pregnancy was playing on his mind during the game in an interview with IGN,

…the fact that my now fiancee, Michelle Deighton, from America’s Next Top Model, was seven months pregnant. We’d made a pact before I left that if anything bad were to happen with the pregnancy not to tell CBS, because I didn’t want to know when I got out there. And then getting out there, I kind of started second guessing myself, and maybe that wasn’t the best thing, because I kind of started thinking the worst.

Seems to fit with the narrative, right? Well, there’s another angle to this that the show didn’t decide to explore. And to really understand what happened, we must go back to before the season even began filming. We should go back to October 2, 2007, the night of the Fox Reality Really Awards.

That night, Fairplay took to the stage near the end of the show. He was booed, because he’s Fairplay and that’s what you do when he’s on stage. Ever the heel, Fairplay asked the audience why they were booing him. That’s when Danny Bonaduce appeared on stage and well… I’ll let the video speak for itself.

Because I’m not a doctor, I can only say that Fairplay got, for lack of a better word, fucked up by the power bomb. He had several teeth displaced or outright knocked out. He also bled a fair amount. The incident itself would eventually play itself out later with both parties reconciling. For us, it would impact a season of Survivor in a big way.

Remember, the incident took place on October 2, 2007. Filming for Favs vs Favorites began on October 29, 2007. Between getting power slammed into an award show stage and beginning to film Fans vs Favorites, Fairplay had to get extensive dental surgery, as he told IGN,

I was a little disheartened in the fact that the week before I left for filming, I had the whole Danny Bonaduce incident. So that week I had fifteen hours of surgery. My entire top bone plate was shattered – four root canals. Just horrific.

Fairplay also told Reality TV World that he could not medicate the pain if he would be going on the show,

Going out there, you’re not allowed your medication – even with three doctors’ notes saying that I need it. [The producers were] basically like, “Go without it or you can’t go.” I had just finished doing [CMT’s Ty Murray’s Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge], and I had beat [Dan «Nitro» Clark] from American Gladiators and [Raghib «Rocket» Ismail] from the Dallas Cowboys… you know, athletes. For me to go out and win that, I felt pretty invincible at that time. So, it was like, “This pain is horrendous, but I think I can fight through this.”

Then, in the opening segment of Fans vs Favorites, both tribes are told that there will be a one-time immunity idol hidden on their respective boats. It’s a race to who will get there first to claim it. Fairplay got to the boat first, but unintentionally grabbed the wrong tribe’s idol. Around this time, Yau Man also got to the boat. It became a race to the idol and in the process, Fairplay’s jaw ends up getting slammed into a boat, as the video here will display.

If the pain had been manageable to a point, getting his recently operated on jaw slammed into a boat did not help things. Fairplay claims that from there, the pain became excruciating. This can be kind of corroborated by the sounds he makes as his face comes into contact with the boat.

Furthermore, Fairplay then realized that while he was being denied medication, another person on his tribe wasn’t. As he stated in his Reddit AMA, James Clement, a regular smoker outside of the game, was allowed access to nicotine patches. Fairplay felt incensed that James was allowed something to ease his own issues while production was simultaneously denying Fairplay the rights to medicating his surgically repaired mouth with pain killers.

Less than a year ago, Fairplay essentially confirmed that the Bonaduce incident was the biggest spark for his departure in Micronesia. This coming from another reddit comment,

Bonaduce knocked out my front 4 teeth and completely shattered my jaw, 8 days before filming. I had 15 hours (over the course of 2 days) surgery to complete 4 root canals. As if that wasn’t enough, when Yau Man crushed my head into the side of the boat that was essentially game over for me. I didn’t want to give Bonaduce the tv time and spotlight he so badly craved at the time so I said it because of my unborn child but that was not the case. I discuss this a few times on my podcast at SurvivorNSFW.com and will go into even for detail on the patreon side at patreon.com/survivornsfw which starts a Pearl Islands commentary watchalong this week.

I can understand why the show didn’t want to address the Bonaduce incident. It occurred outside of the Survivor universe. During an evening celebrating trashy television that undoubtedly involved a lot of alcohol and, likely, harder substances. Getting Fairplay to spin a story about the pregnancy plays a lot better on TV than a “I got power bombed into the ground by a drunk Danny Partridge and it hurt my mouth” storyline.

Still, it’s yet another incident over the course of Survivor’s history that serves as a reminder: the edited product we saw on television is not reality. There will always be morsels of truth in every episode but we can never understand the full picture. The show will take a narrative like Fairplay’s and twist in a way that works for them. It’s something to always keep in mind, production isn’t about telling the right story but telling the most TV-friendly story and in that universe, there’s no room for Fairplay being thrown through some award show floor.