In a move that has some fans from home scratching their heads, Wheel Of Fortune contestants got a puzzle incorrect when almost all the words spelling the winning phrase, “Another Feather In Your Cap,” were already shown. The contestants are being ridiculed online for getting it wrong with so few letters left and guessing the phrase with only one word off.
The group got torturously close to the right answer when one contestant guessed “Another feather in your hat,” but with just one word in that phrase being wrong they were thrown off the correct line of thinking they were on.
While a legion of internet commentators armed with the great weapon of hindsight are extremely confident they wouldn’t have folded under the pressure and guessed the idiom immediately, contestant Christopher Coleman wasn’t as fortunate. He received particular flak for losing valuable turns by spinning the wheel and guessing two letters incorrectly once the phrase was almost identified, instead of trying to guess the full phrase with “Cap” instead of “Hat.”
Coleman told TMZ that part of why he balked at the question was simply because no one really uses that phrase anymore. “I haven’t heard it in, like, over 30 years,” Coleman said. He also pointed out that it’s easier to shout out answers from your couch. He said, “You are under a lot of scrutiny and pressure when you are in production … there are people who are saying that we were not intelligent or trying to belittle our college degrees.”
One notable person who told off online trolls was the show’s host himself, Pat Sajak. He said it “pains” him to see fans condescend to contestants, and that they were simply “thrown a curve” that they couldn’t recover from. Sajak also added in a show of kindness that when people get it wrong, “all I want to do is help them get through it and convince them that those things happen even to very bright people.”
Sajak finished the thread with a plea to be reasonable with online criticisms of losing players and jokingly added, “After all, you may be there one day. And no one wants to be trending on Twitter.
