Pat Sajak apparently got more attention than he anticipated for his comments in a wild interview — which you can see by clicking here. Now the “Wheel of Fortune” host is busy doing damage control, saying he exaggerated claims about being drunk while taping the show, ABC News reports.
Sajak’s comments about himself and Vanna White consuming “two or three or six” margaritas during lunch breaks from “Wheel” tapings have become a trending topic on Twitter, the story reports.
Sajak followed the controversial ESPN2 interview by backpedaling during an interview with ABC News Radio. “To be honest, and I hate to put an end to this drinking thing because we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it,” he told ABC News. But it was probably a half a dozen times we went across the street and had a margarita. But when you’re telling a story on the air, you want to make it sound more exciting than it was. In truth, you really can’t do television if you’re stumbling all over the place.”
Sajak appeared to take the incident in stride, adding: “It is funny that on a little show on a little cable network, we’re doing a fun interview, two guys joking around and making a joke about having margaritas 30 years ago and it turns into, you know, a thing for a day. But it is the nature of the echo chamber now and here we are. So let’s all enjoy it!”
If you saw the interview you can tell it’s just a lot of jabbing around and being goofy. I don’t doubt that he probably was a little over-the-limit on a few broadcasts, but you’d be hard pressed to find any broadcast stage anywhere that doesn’t have folks boozing up to get through all the mess. It was even worse 30 years ago, so yeah…he’s probably being mostly truthful but it doesn’t matter now and didn’t matter then. People want their story, glad Sajak is taking it in stride.
One of the reasons Pat has lasted so long is that he does take all of these things in stride and can laugh at himself.
Lets be honest, if you had to host a game show with a spinning wheel, encouraging participants to buy a vowel and your audience was a bunch of eighty year-old spinsters and widows getting off in their rocking chairs seeing if Pat dropped a consonant and really old geezers who were waiting to see if Vanna had a wardrobe ’malfunction’, you’d want to drink your ass off as well! Geez, how many times has Pat Sajak tried to launch his own talk show! However, it’s a living and the money isn’t bad!-)