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USA Article Freddy, Kendra engaged to the end
By Gary Levin, USA TODAY
Freddy Holliday and Kendra Bentley say it was their destiny to win The Amazing Race — and its $1 million prize.
"When you go through something like this, you see the person you're with at their very best and at their very worst several times a day," Holliday says.
CBS
"Kendra and I were absolutely sure we were going to win leading up to the race until (host) Phil (Keoghan) said "go," and then it was one leg at a time," said Holliday, 34, a Miami flight instructor who, with his 25-year-old model-fianceé, won the sixth Race in Tuesday's two-hour finale. (They're set to wed this spring.)
The stress showed: In the series, Bentley dismissed Senegal as a smelly "ghetto third world" country. Holliday says he "overreacted" by threatening to hurt rivals when one dropped a gate in Budapest, hitting him in the nose.
"When you go through something like this, you see the person you're with at their very best and at their very worst several times a day," he said in an interview Tuesday.
What about Race's most notorious contestant, Jonathan Baker, who earned gasps for his verbal abuse and shoving of wife/teammate Victoria?
"We didn't really know them; we just knew he was loud," said Holliday, who predicted stress would prove their downfall.
"He wanted to play the villain," said Bentley. "But he really came out being the madman," added Holliday.
With Race 6 at the finish line, CBS is wasting no time gearing up for the seventh with a two-hour premiere March 1 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Among the 11 teams:
• Amber Brkich and Rob Mariano, the winner and cunning runner-up of Survivor: All-Stars, who will be married in April.
• Ron Young, a former POW in Iraq whose helicopter was shot down, and Kelly McCorkle, a former Miss South Carolina beauty pageant queen.
• Susan and Patrick Vaughn, the first mother/son team. She's a starchy college law professor; he's a gay writer in Hollywood who seeks her acceptance.
• Uchenna and Joyce Agu, formerly bankrupt and unemployed, casualties of corporate scandals: He lost his job at Enron; she was laid off by Worldcom.
• Married couple Meredith and Gretchen Smith, retirees who, at 69 and 66, respectively, are Race's all-time oldest team.
Bertram van Munster, the show's co-creator and executive producer, balked when CBS cast Big Brother refugee Alison Irwin and her boyfriend Donny in the fifth season. (The team ended up being eliminated in the second episode). But he relented on Survivor's sweeties. "Audiences know these people really well. And they wanted to be on the show in a big way," van Munster says, "so we went along and did it."
Keoghan says, "Having Rob and Amber in the series stirred up a new kind of emotion" in rival teams.
"This time I was feeling tense watching it, because I could feel the competitiveness of these teams. I'd be threatened too."
He counts the fifth season as his favorite, thanks to strong chemistry among the teams and breakout characters in tantrum-prone Colin and height-challenged Charla.
But he touts the new season's footage as right behind because of the diversity of the teams.
"It sounds corny," Keoghan says, "but it's gone back to the core: a celebration of human spirit and a celebration of the differences you find among people in America."
And, it seems, a departure from a somewhat homogeneous sixth-season cast that some critics knocked for its undue reliance on models who loved to bicker.
Improbably, the just-ended season is Race's most-watched yet, averaging 11.3 million viewers ahead of Tuesday's finale. Ratings were helped by growing talk about the show, a pair of consecutive Emmys and a switch to Tuesdays.
CBS today will announce plans for two more Races next season,
including an eighth installment that pits families of four. |(
