We spoke with The Challenge GOAT about returning to the MTV series and so much more.
The last time we saw Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, he ended a streak of six straight series of The Challenge in which he was eliminated before making the final, winning Total Madness.
Yes, that would be his seventh Challenge title.
But since then, he’s stayed out of the fray and watched Chris “CT” Tamburello win two seasons of his own (Double Agents and Spies, Lies & Allies), making some fans wonder: Who’s the true Challenge GOAT?
Did that factor into Bananas coming back for another season? We dove into that and more with him in a Q&A ahead of Wednesday’s premiere of The Challenge: Ride or Dies at 8 PM ET on MTV.
Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio and Wes Bergmann have spent so many seasons going at each other, double-crossing and double-double-crossing and sneaking around to form alliances to battle.
Finally, in the first episode, we found out a big twist: the two of them are actually going to work together for the first time.
So how did THAT happen? In my recent Q&A with Bananas, he revealed that it was a fateful trip to the MTV Video Music Awards that sealed what ended up going down on Wednesday.
“After War of the Worlds 2 and he went home to Bear and got blindsided, and I got screwed by Team USA, we went to the VMAs and took a car together,” Bananas told For The Win recently. “I’m like, ‘for two of the smartest guys in the game, two of the most strategic thinkers, the fact that we’re doing this season after season, all we’re doing is maker their lives easier and our lives more difficult.
‘So, for once, why don’t we look at it as in War of the Worlds 1, you got me. War of the Worlds 2, I repaid the favor. Let’s go into this season with a clean slate.'”
This move had been in the mix, Bananas said, before War of the Worlds 1 after Bergmann returned after some time off.
“I felt like I stuck to my end of the bargain on that, he didn’t,” Bananas claimed. “I ended up being sent home on account of him. Last season, I wanted to return the favor and I did.”
It’s a smart call given how powerful and smart both vets are.
“When we go into a season focused on each other and only each other, you know who benefits? Everyone else. We’re making other people’s lives easier,” he said.
“This has allowed the new kids and some of the older guys who don’t have a lot in the tank,” he continued, “to sit back and not punch in for a week or two, because they know as long as Wes and I are there, we’ll be going at each other, everyone else can sit back and relax and let the bullets whiz over their heads. So we’ve been saying it for a few seasons now.”
There was skepticism, but Bananas hints there was a point where Wes could have “turned the tides” on him and didn’t.
“It’s a pretty amazing outcome when all is said and done,” he teased further. “You could not script the way this thing all pans out.”
Like everyone else, Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio is back home as the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing continues.
In fact, between his constant appearances on The Challenge and his hosting duties for 1st Look, it’s the longest he’s been home uninterrupted in quite some time.
Although he’s not thinking about retirement from the show he’s won a record six times, he did have this to say in a conversation with For The Win ahead of Wednesday’s premiere of Total Madness on MTV: “I kind of needed this break a little bit, and I know that’s not necessarily true for everybody. But I will say after this last season of The Challenge, a break was definitely needed.”
“Every season that goes by, a little piece of me dies,” he added, “and I know I’ve only got so many of these in the tank, and I will say after this last season, I felt every day of 37 years old.”
But the hunger for that elusive seventh title hasn’t gone away. It’s just that he has to train twice as hard and in smarter ways to compete with younger castmates. And of course since The Challenge is sport, he compared himself to a veteran pitcher.
“When they lose their fastball, they have to get crafty and they have to locate their pitches better and more filthy. They have to change up their game to coincide with what their body allows them to do.”
Here’s more of our Q&A with Bananas:
How did the new rule about needing to win an elimination to make a final change the game, and how did it change for you specifically?
It didn’t change it at all for me. If anything, it leveled the playing field. I’ve been saying for a while, there are certain players — I won’t throw anyone under the bus here, but everybody who watches knows — who go in and based solely on their intimidating political game or physical game, they’ll never be voted in. They can play the middle of the field and just be wishy-washy and make it to a final. Then there are the people who have to work, i.e. me. Out of 20 seasons I’ve been on, there have been two or three where I haven’t gone in. So I know every season, I’m going to go in, maybe multiple times. It made people who get a free ride earn it. I think it’s a great twist and it really reset and reshuffle the deck from last season when you had 12 or 13 people in a final and only four had seen elimination.
MTV
Did it change the strategy for others? I imagine you have to think about whether you want to go in now or later.
Completely. Every season you do, you have to change your strategy. The one common theme, however, is stay out elimination. That’s your goal. This season, it’s like having to retrain a dog to not be aggressive. (You think) “Well, wait a minute, now I have to go in.” So what you see is instead of people fighting not to go in, is people fighting to go in.
Like you said, people were fighting early on, and then I thought, what if there’s a twist and there’s a purge or you have to go in again? Everyone had this premonition at different times about when to go in. There were so many more twists to elimination than there have ever been. … Every season coming in, I’m always wondering what they’re going to do different. They made us fight for oxygen this season because we lived in a bunker. So they had to check the oxygen levels every day to make sure it was 21 percent oxygen or we would suffocate.
I saw that! You were living in a place without windows! And was there no swimming pool as usual?
We had an above-ground pool in a silo that was probably 40 degrees at its warmest.
Can I get a quick scouting report on the rookies?
In my opinion, it was a pretty good rookie class. Fessy is a Division I college football player, guy’s an absolute monster. You have a guy from Survivor and Big Brother, Kaycee won Big Brother. So you had this new group of rookies. There’s a large Big Brother contingency — Fessy, Swaggy, Bayleigh, Kaycee — that all knew each other. Not only do you have people who play an intense mind game, but they know each other. It was an alliance that was ready-made. It was a dominant rookie class. They didn’t make things easy for us.
