The Forgotten Legend of Susan Hawk

More Than Just a Speech

With the Survivor: Borneo finale having aired 20 years ago Sunday, I have deemed this week to be Survivor: Borneo week. All articles coming out on A Tribe of One for the week of August 23, 2020 will be related to Survivor’s iconic first season to celebrate 20 years of Survivor discussion.

When people think of Sue Hawk on Survivor, they think one of two things: the rats and snakes speech or the way things went down for her on Survivor: All-Stars. She’s only remembered for those two huge moments. And that’s unfortunate because neither capture the essence of Sue Hawk, the Survivor, in an accurate way. Sue deserves to be remembered for more than an angry speech or having her well-justified quit be brutally edited by an ignorant team of producers.

Richard Hatch won Survivor: Borneo, Rudy Boesch and Colleen Haskell were the season’s breakout stars. Those are the people you remember most when you think back to the original season. All for fair reasons. With that said, the heart of Borneo lies within Sue Hawk. She’s the biggest reason that season was so successful and spoke to so many people.

Sue is a complicated character and is edited as such. Well before production fall into lazy archetypes and stereotypical characterizations, Sue was a real person. I don’t think anybody was more genuinely themselves on Survivor than Sue Hawk was on Borneo. It’s what roped people in and whether you liked Sue, you couldn’t help but watch her.

Early on, you can tell that Sue knows about survival. She’s on this show because she loves hunting and living in the wild. I can’t imagine for one second that Sue, like a Sean Kenniff, saw this show as a vaulting board for stardom. She just wanted to live out in the bush. Because of that, she’s immediately presented as the yin to Richard’s yang.

The conversation they share in the episode quickly demonstrates how both Richard and Sue see real life. Sue is all about action, they speak much louder than words to her. Richard wants to take a moment and plan things out because for him, words are where he can get an edge. In terms of life philosophies, they couldn’t be more different.

But in terms of thinking about the game, Sue is Richard’s equal. The birth of the alliance is broadly attributed to Richard because he won. Fair enough, history is written by the winners. Still, that is whitewashing Sue out of the Tagi alliance’s creating and doing a disservice to what actually went down. From very early on, Sue recognizes that alliances are necessary for success on Survivor.

We have alliances that are happening within the group and you’re gonna have that. Just because, you know everybody is thinking, ‘hey there’s money involved’.

Just in that quick quote, you can gather that Sue has thought about the game on a deeper level than most players on her season. “You’re gonna have that” speaks to her assumption that everyone would be getting in an alliance because she understands that it’s how you win the game. This isn’t some dumb person simply getting roped into an alliance, this is someone actively seeking out an alliance and creating it out of thin air.

Acting dumb and hiding the intelligence behind her accent and mannerisms was exactly Sue’s plan from the beginning.

My strategy all along has been to play the role of dumb redneck. People think rednecks are so vulnerable and dumb. They’ll talk to ’em openly. Like Rich did (laughs). You know, how he’s gonna burn everybody. Hopefully in the end, the old redneck will burn the city slicker. So, we’ll see what happens.

Without Sue, Richard’s alliance would have been dead in the water. Sue was the glue that held everyone together. Do you really think Kelly Wigglesworth would have been open to working with Rudy and Richard without Sue’s involvement? Absolutely not. Sue is the one who had connections with every single player in the Tagi alliance whereas Richard lucked into Sue bringing an extra member along to strengthen his alliance.

During the season, Sue also becomes a popular choice to do exposition in confessionals. Maybe she’s not what people remember as a strategic player, but Sue has her head in the game. And she’s very good at explaining what is going on around her in layman terms, which for the first season of the show, was a great way to introduce us to Survivor strategy. It doesn’t hurt that Sue knows how to deliver a money quote in front of the camera, but even in that aspect, she doesn’t get the same love Rudy does from the fans.

As she’s in the process of building the alliance, we also get to know Sue personally. She’s a strong woman, maybe one of the strongest women that’s ever been on Survivor. Sue doesn’t let herself be thrown into gender roles and thrives off getting the chance to beat the men whenever possible. Like when she gets the chance to throw the spear in an early challenge and relishes the opportunity to take down Joel Klug.

I’m thinking the other team is gonna have a guy throwing a spear. So, if there is, it’s a good chance that I can dog some guy on national TV.

Sure, Sue loses that challenge, but it’s the fire in her that is commendable. Not for a second does she doubt her own abilities. She’s coming in guns blazing and ready to destroy anyone in front of her and that kind of genuine excitement for competition is always a joy to watch.

Not only is Sue a tough competitor, she takes no bullshit from anybody. She also doesn’t respect people who aren’t willing to work hard. If she sees someone slacking off, she’s going to let people know about it. That’s my favorite thing about Sue Hawk, she’s a ruthless roaster to the degree that she probably should have been invited to a couple of Comedy Central roasts.

As the game goes along, Sue’s favorite punching bag turns out to be Sean. Both to his face and in confessionals, Sue relishes the chance to mock Sean for being dumb/lazy/useless or whatever adjective fits the bill in that moment. In that spirit, here are my top three Sue mocking Sean moments.

3. Sue to Sean and Dirk: During the day, you should go out in the woods and look for tapioca and nuts and fish at night. You guys wasted three days fishing in the day.

Sean: I don’t think it’s a waste.

Sue: Well, did you catch anything?

Sean: No ma’am.

Sue: Okay… (pregnant pause) it was a waste of time then.

2. Sue at tribal council: Oh Sean just… he’s neurotic. He’s just an idiot. Wow, okay so I’m next. You know. That’s the way he votes, that’s the way he votes. I just think, he doesn’t have enough balls to make a decision

1. Sue in confessional: The reason Sean is not in the alliance is because… Sean is… dumb.

Here’s a bonus quote where she takes down both Sean and his dad simultaneously,

Actually, for him to come visit the camp was cool… but he didn’t know anything! We’re like, what’s going on in the world? He didn’t know none of that. Oh! He’s just like Sean! Just lovable but… doof.

While Sean is her favorite target, Sue has words for anyone she feels deserves them. That includes some of the Pagong as the Tagi tribe awaits the merger.

There’s three of them then we need out of here. Greg, definitely. He’s just wayyy too psychotic. The other one is speed ball, Jenna. Gervase. He’s a pervert. He’s gone.

Something about Sue calling Gervase a pervert for absolutely no reason kills me every time. Especially because that quote is interspliced with a clip of Gervase weirdly swinging Jenna around in his arms. Only Sue could randomly call someone a pervert a get away with it.

As the Tagi alliance becomes more and more obvious, they start getting questioned during tribal council. The Pagongs have identified themselves as strongly anti-alliance. In their minds, it’s an unethical way to play the game. As we know, the audience would agree with that standpoint and the Tagi alliance was largely derided by the fans. Still, Sue was unperturbed and offered her reasoning for why alliances on Survivor were perfectly legitimate.

We’re all sitting here. We’re adults. This is a game, but the game also reflects a lot on real life. And you always bring up this alliance thing. Well, America is run on alliance. The minute somebody gives money to the president for his campaign as a lobbyist, that’s an alliance. Don’t tell me he doesn’t think he doesn’t think he doesn’t owe him anything. Cause he does. They help with him where he’s at. Same thing when people go during the church, and they’re not religious, but they, during the church, because they wanna make connections for, maybe they’re an insurance agent and wanna sell more insurance in town, or they’re a real estate agent and they wanna sell real estates and they wanna meet up with people. So there’s gonna be an alliance. Don’t tell me there ain’t alliances.

To me, this moment is almost as memorable as her final speech. This is Sue letting down her “dumb redneck” shield and speaking some truth. She’s being labeled as opportunistic for taking advantage of something in a game, for a million dollars, when people are being opportunistic out in the real world for far less. Sue doesn’t an alliance as playing dirty, she’s just playing to win and assumed everyone else would have been doing the same. She can’t be faulted for doing that against competition that isn’t trying to win.

There’s another moment in the end-game where Jeff asks Sue a question about alliances, corporate America and whether it’s taken over as the primary philosophy “out in the bush”. It’s another moment of Sue having a thoughtful and articulate answer that betrays the image she tries to project to her tribe mates.

The idea of money. Money makes the world go round. Money is greed. Money is what everybody strives for. I don’t care what anybody says anymore. It’s what spins us. It can make life a little bit easier you know, if you’re struggling or whatever. It helps. Big fights, divorces happen over shortages of money so, a lot to be said about money, Jeff. That’s what we’re talking about.

Sue knows that the million dollars is so close within her reach and at that point, she’s fighting her own moral code to see how far she’s willing to go to get it. But that’s the thing about Sue, she’s one of the most loyal players in Borneo. She makes an alliance early in the game and never considers flipping away from it. Even when the idea of a women’s alliance is flagged early in the merge, Sue squashes that thought in a confessional because she likes the group she already has. She’s ride or die for the Tagi four in ways I think only Rudy could compare.

Within that alliance, Sue gets closest to Kelly. With her, Sue feels a bond that she hasn’t felt with another woman in decades. We get a glimpse of another side of Sue when she explains how she feels about Kelly in a touching confessional.

Right now I don’t trust anybody except for Kelly. I trust Kelly 100%. 100%. And she trusts me the same. We’re like sisters. And it’ll be 20 years come this easter that I lost my best friend. So, coming across Kelly. Someone I can hang with, it’s a long… I ain’t gonna fuck her. I’m not burning her.

This is the basis for the rats and snakes speech. This needs to be understood. It’s more than an alliance member turning on her, Sue felt a kinship with Kelly and when that disappeared, Sue felt emotionally damaged. That started when Kelly started wavering away from the alliance, something Sue never would have considered. To see who she thought was her closest friend try to game the jury, Sue felt a very personal betrayal.

Me and Kelly, I thought had a real friendship going. I really did. But uh, when I turn around and see somebody starting to dig a knife into my back really pisses me off.

For Sue, she was there to win a million dollars, but she had her own idea of what she wouldn’t do for that money. At the top of her list was never wavering from Kelly as her final two. When they were close, Sue would have been willing to take Kelly and lose rather than bring Richard along and possibly win. In Sue’s mind, Kelly disassociating herself from the alliance was purely a game move and Kelly choosing the game over Sue hurt her feelings. But it also allowed Sue to draw a line in the sand and make Kelly free game.

After Gretchen, she didn’t vote any of the way the alliance voted. She’s setting herself up so that if she the last two at the end, she’s gonna make herself look really good. Cause we knew there’d be more Pagong on the jury than Tagi. What it is, is greedy. She thinks she got like five, six people’s votes. Like you can see her turn a little bit. Then I was really irritated. This has not been easy to you know, come out here on the island, get bit up by bugs, stung by stingrays. So, I told Kelly, my family is my number one goal. I think I got a better chance of winning a million dollars with arrogant Rich by my side than her by my side.

Unfortunately for Sue, Kelly goes on an immunity run in the end-game and Sue is never able to turn the betrayal back onto her. Instead, Kelly is the vote that ultimately sends Sue packing in fourth place, breaking a deadlocked tie against Richard in the revote. It’s one final act of betrayal against Sue and while she takes it well in the moment, Sue is going to remember Kelly’s swift dismissal of her when it comes time for final tribal council.

That’s the genesis of rats and snakes. It’s easy to remember it as Sue being pissed off that she lost because of Kelly and going off on her. But it’s much more complicated than that. Sue is someone who understood that Survivor was a game that would require strategy, put a plan together and executed. Within those plans, she had her own ideas of what she wouldn’t do and projected that onto others. Betraying Kelly, until Kelly wilted on the alliance, was never something Sue would have considered so for Kelly to do it to Sue, it felt like the ultimate betrayal.

It’s important to remember that Sue was loyal and that she considered Kelly a true friend. This is the first Survivor season we ever got, and it was the first Survivor season ever played. The emotions those players felt and the bonds they created were at the time, stronger than anyone could have imagined. So yes, Sue was bitter, but she was bitter for very specific reasons that had nothing to do with losing a million dollars.

I’m not even going to link to the speech or talk about it further because that speech is simply the culmination of Sue’s time on Borneo. She was a strategic, strong, emotional player who had so much heart. Sue was such a real person and she could be mean or callous, but you never doubted that she was true. Her presence in Borneo gave the show a huge boost in content and gave the franchise a great starting point. People always say that the show wouldn’t have survived without Richard, but I disagree. It wouldn’t have been nearly as culturally relevant without Susan Hawk and we all need to put some respect on her name.