The beginning initially looked more like Wheel of Misfortune for Columbus native Amanda Pottorff as she spun the famous game show disc standing near host Pat Sajak on national network television.
Pottorff, a 19-year-old University of Notre Dame freshman, landed on “bankrupt” three times and also “lose a turn” in her first few chances recently on a broadcast of Wheel of Fortune’s College Week Spring Break competition. It featured university students from across the nation.
“I am not kidding that I threw my hands in the air exasperated while we were in the audience when Amanda got her third bankrupt,” said dad Tony Pottorff, seated next to wife Margaret as they watched in the TV studio.
Eventually, success finally spun her way and landed her in the bonus round, where she narrowly missed a shot at $37,000. The challenging puzzle phrase to solve, with only a few letters revealed, was “packing our bags.” Pottorff gamely took a shot as time expired with the spur-of-the-moment guess “polling our bags.”
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But the Columbus East High School graduate left the show, taped in early February in Culver City, California, near Hollywood, with $4,000 in prize money and a trip to the Caribbean paradise island of Antigua. Both the money and planning for the trip will surface in July.
Pottorff aims to save most of the cash “and have a little fun with the rest,” as she put it.
She mentioned that she had wanted to be on the show since she was a high schooler just for the sheer fun of it after watching the show almost daily since middle school. And she offered a bit of insight that merely physically spinning the wheel sometimes is a weightier concern that guessing letters or phrases.
“I’d come back up after leaning down to spin it, and my hair would be a mess,” she said with a laugh.
She watched the episode at home in Columbus with her family while the university’s in-person classes have been suspended for the rest of the semester. She carries a double major in American studies and economics, with a career focus to be decided later.
Perhaps if she were a statistics major, she could tell you what some online sites say about applicants’ chances of being selected for the show running since 1975. Apparently, people have a .0006 percent chance of making a broadcast in any given year, according to the show’s applicant figures.
And while Pottorff acknowledged only slight nerves on the set, she also acknowledged one other not-so-puzzling bit of reality perhaps as basic as buying a vowel.
“Definitely, you’re probably going to better to some degree (solving puzzles) in the comfort of your own home,” she said. “When you’re actually on the show, you’re worried about projecting your voice and other little things instead of just the actual task at hand.”
Like determinedly moving beyond bankruptcy to become a winner.
