‘The Challenge: USA’: Monte Reveals Injury & Blow-up You Didn’t See

The Challenge loves to pit friends against one another in an elimination, and that’s exactly what happened in the arena on USA in Season 2 Episode 8, “Independence Day.”

Johnny “Bananas” DeVenanzio and Tori Deal won the first daily with the players competing as individuals, they nominated couple Tyler Crispen and Alyssa Snider for elimination. Wanting to protect Alyssa, Tyler campaigned for it to be a guys’ elimination, which ultimately led to the hopper tossing out a ball for his close friend Monte Taylor. The two faced off in Too Cool for Spool: They were strapped to giant spools and had to race to a stack of balls and recreate the pyramid on top of spool. But as they moved, the spool would spin, causing the pyramid to fall over. About three hours later, Tyler won.

Here, Monte takes us inside that elimination, shares what wasn’t shown this season, and talks Big Brother vs. Survivor.

You said you didn’t feel good once you saw how far ahead Bananas was in the daily, so you were prepared to possibly go into elimination. But what did you think of the moves that led to you having seven balls in the hopper? Tyler wanted to protect Alyssa and make it a guys’ elimination, then the votes pretty much were split between you and Sebastian Noel.

Monte Taylor: Tyler and I went into our Big Brother bag and tried to politic as much as we possibly could, mainly with the vets, because we knew at that point, they were the only thing we had. When you think about the Survivor group, from our time being on the Green team and from the conflict that we had had with Chris [Underwood], then we had nominated Cassidy [Clark], there was so much damage that was done on those relationships and us possibly working together that even trying to convince them to vote one way or another would be a hard thing to do — and we tried. But mainly what we had tried to do was make sure that we could put as many balls on Sebastian so that we could decrease my chances of going in against Tyler. We thought some balls could have maybe showed up on Wes [Bergmann’s] name, but they didn’t. They all fell on me, and I think it kind of showed like, wow, this is how powerful this group can be in the game. They’re all voting in the same direction. Who’s going to be the target next? So we tried as much as we could, but I think it was a little bit too late, too little.

Yeah, it was vets versus rookies, and then it became Survivor versus Big Brother pretty quickly.

It did. I think a lot of that came from things that Tyler and I started to notice within the Survivor group. They never voted for each other, not once. Within Big Brother, there had been so much crossfire on our alliance, it wasn’t even an actual alliance. Josh [Martinez] was voting for me at the beginning. I’m pretty sure Paulie [Calafiore] was, too. So we never really had a united group. If we did, that would’ve been eight people all on the same page and that would’ve been a beautiful time in the house, but that just didn’t happen. So we started to realize that the Survivor group was pretty strong and pretty locked in with each other.

Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount

I think that’s when we said to ourselves, “Alright, well, if we continue going on in this game and not targeting them, they’re going to run the game from here on out.” And we had started to see, “Alright, there’s certain information that they’re telling us, but then there’s other information that they aren’t telling us.” And we noticed just from our time on Big Brother, when people are probably being transparent and when they’re not. That’s what weighed a lot of our decision to start attacking the Survivor group and not so much the vets.

Then it became the worst-case scenario in the elimination with you versus Tyler, going against one of your closest friends in the house. Talk about having to prepare yourself for that, especially because that elimination looked so tough and it went on so long.

Yeah, it was tough, and it did go on for a very long time. It was the most grueling thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that required so much patience and persistence.

But yeah, going into it, I had a feeling I would receive some balls. I didn’t think all seven would come, but I did know that there would be a decent amount, so I was mentally prepared for going down there against Tyler. Then when my name was picked out, it was just like, you know what? I’d had so many cycles where I thought my name would’ve been picked at any given moment. I’d had at least had four voting cycles where I’d received at least one ball. So I was just always mentally prepared for that. At some point you knew that the luck was going to run out with the hopper. It wouldn’t protect us the whole time. So going into that elimination, it just felt like, you know what, now or never, this is a chance to prove ourselves.

But even during the elimination, me and Tyler are literally egging each other on like, “Hey, come on man, you got this. Don’t give up.” We wanted one of us to win, honestly, because we just wanted to get that s**t over with. It was just such a long and grueling experience that it was hard to not root for the other guy, even though we were competing against each other.

Is there anything that you could’ve done differently for that elimination? Because it seemed like if you moved the wrong way, even one step, it would all come falling down.

Yeah. I hope Tyler has an opportunity to talk about his strategy because at first, I was throwing sand onto that platform where the spool was. I think I just overthought it because in my engineering mind, I’m like, “Alright, we want to create as much friction as we possibly can between the balls and the surface and each other. So let’s just throw some sand all over ‘em, get ’em all sanded up.” But in reality, that was the opposite of what you needed to do. You wanted to make sure there was as little sand as possible. Tyler figured that out towards the tail end of the elimination, and I think that’s what got his pyramid to stay still.

Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount

So I would’ve done that differently, knowing that I probably would’ve made sure the surface is clean, but there’s no way to prepare for this stuff. Every time I go into even a daily challenge, I hear these vets talking about, “Oh, yeah, we’ve done something like this before. We just need to skip this part.” And I don’t have that experience. I can’t back this up with any sort of tangible thing that I’ve done, but they can. So I feel like that’s going to be a huge advantage if I get the opportunity come back.

Is there anything that didn’t air that you think fans should know about?

Yeah, I dislocated my shoulder after the second daily challenge, the working the poles one. When I fell into the water, I came up and I felt something weird. I was like, “Oh, I’ve had this happen before. My shoulder’s not in place.” So they popped it back in. I got X-rays the day after, and after that, I just worked it out from there. But it was definitely compromising my swimming, just that motion. And thank God I didn’t have to do anything where I had to hold myself up from one arm or anything like that.

The daily challenge where me and Bananas went head-to-head and Tori and Michaela [Bradshaw] went head-to-head on the semi-trucks, there was a huge blow-up afterwards. We went like 10 minutes straight just screaming at each other. Nothing personal or anything like that, but it was just like a competitive fire: Oh, how dare you block me from winning my daily? That sort of thing. We went back and forth for a little bit. And even that challenge itself, I don’t think I was concerned at all with getting the disc on there. I just wanted to ram into Bananas as many times as I could, just to make him kind of regret that decision and let him know my shoulder was fine.

You talked about coming back. So you would do another season of The Challenge: USA?

Oh, for sure. It’s night and day compared to my experience on Big Brother. That is a traumatizing experience, being in that house 95 days, not having any interaction with the outside world. With The Challenge, you have a bit more freedom to just sort of be yourself. You see the production team, so you can kind of build more of a rapport, and you just feel like you’re a guy in a house as opposed to a totally different experience with Big Brother. So I would definitely do The Challenge again, I feel like I have this daredevil that’s sort of unlocked now that I’ve done all these crazy things. It’s like I want to just do some crazy stuff. My mom’s probably going to hate hearing that, but that’s just the reality.

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Do you wish it had been an individual game from the beginning?

Oh, of course. I mean, it did not help that it was a team game at all, especially for someone who didn’t come in with as many relationships. I knew Ameerah [Jones], I knew Alyssa [S], I knew Tiffany [Mitchell]. I hadn’t met Alyssa Lopez. I hadn’t met a lot of the folks within that Big Brother group like Tyler, although we got close very quickly still. It was something to really work with socially in the game where you’re really on an island with a handful of people. So yeah, I think that that dynamic of just not having as many people that you’re locked in with completely changes the way that you can play. And honestly, I got lucky making it as far as I did. The hopper, if it would’ve pulled my name earlier, I could have been out a lot earlier than I was. But thankfully the hopper was on our side.

After the elimination, you said you were happy Tyler could go back and hopefully make it to a final. But considering he just threw himself into elimination to protect Alyssa and could very well do that again, do you think Tyler can make it to a final continuing to play that way?

He’s a strategic dude. He’s a smart dude, and he’s somebody who I feel like people would probably underestimate in a lot of these eliminations, and even the daily challenges, too. Everybody has their challenge that kind of suits their strengths. So for him, I feel like there’s probably going to be something that he’s going to shine in and he is going to excel. So I think there’s always an opportunity for Tyler to make it to the end, just as much as anybody, but me knowing Tyler, he is more motivated than ever right now.

The Challenge: USA, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS