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My Shot

If making three-footers were as easy as winning money on game shows, I'd be a millionaire

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By Ahmad Bateman

Friends joke that I should quit golf and become a full-time TV-game-show contestant, and they may be right. After all, over the last five years I've won $370,000 in 85 Buy.com and 26 Asian tour events but $101,000 in cash and merchandise in only two appearances on game shows.

Robert Beck

I made my game-show debut on The Price Is Right in May 1996. I live in Huntington Beach, Calif., so for fun I got tickets to a taping for my wife, Shinta, who loves the show, and she dragged me along. I wasn't paying attention and didn't hear my name the first time Rod Roddy called to me, "Come on down!" but the second time I hopped out of my seat. For correctly pricing a telescope, I got to go on stage with Bob Barker and his beauties. My game was one of the dull ones, Buy or Sell, in which there are three items and you buy the things you think are underpriced and sell the things that are overpriced. You get to keep all three if you end up in the black, which I did. I went home with $9,000 in useless furniture. I sold what was billed as a $3,000 Art Deco chaise lounge for $400.

My appearance on Winning Lines last year was more profitable. The game had 49 contestants whom Dick Clark asked general-knowledge questions that had numerical answers. In the second-to-last round, with only one other contestant remaining, I advanced to the finals by correctly answering "20" to the question, "At Starbucks, how many ounces are there in a vente-sized coffee?" In the final round I answered 14 questions correctly -- answering 20 of the 49 questions would have gotten me a $1 million prize -- and went home with $92,500. However, the show had a policy of not paying a winner until his episode aired. Luckily, mine was one of the last to run, on Feb. 18, before the show was canceled.

Now I'm trying to get on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Two weeks ago I drove to Las Vegas to audition. Out of the 100 wannabes who showed up, I was one of the 33 who passed a 12-minute written test consisting of 30 brutal fastest-finger questions like "Put these food-product slogans in the order in which they were introduced." I knew that "Mmmm-Mmmm Good" came before "Finger Lickin' Good." Apparently, I didn't do well in the next audition stage, in which they asked contestants personal questions -- to "What would you do with $1 million?" I answered, "Pay off my mortgage!" -- because the producers haven't called back.

I'm not giving up, however. I can't play golf for a few months because of tendinitis in my left shoulder, so every day I'll call Millionaire's contestant line to see if I can try to qualify for another audition. Someday I would like to find out what's more intense: Being in the Hot Seat or standing over a three-footer to win a tournament.

Ahmad Bateman, 39, won the 1997 Nike Carolina Classic.

Issue date: May 21, 2001

 

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