Reconsidering Sandra

As of Survivor: Ghost Island, the thirty-sixth season, I have Sandra Diaz-Twine listed twenty-ninth out of all thirty-five winners.  She's, ah, the winner who won twice (Pearls Islands, Heroes vs. Villains), you'll recall.  Winning twice really ought to secure her a better slot, even on an entirely subjective list such as mine.  I mean, no one else has done that.  But I never liked her, and I never saw her as particularly earning those wins.  Even though she did it twice!

But here we are today.  I'm ready to offer a significant caveat.  It's possible that my opinion of Sandra is mostly reflective of the third layer of Survivor.  The first is the players themselves.  (Well, I suppose casting directors would be one if the results always matched what they thought they were casting.)  The second is Jeff Probst, who's always adding instant reaction as host.  The third is the infamous editing process.

Survivor lives and breathes in search of interesting personalities.  Players who have no shot at all of winning can dominate the edit for as long as they're still in the game, if for no other reason than they're compelling to watch, and thus easy calls to base episodes around.  Big personalities have existed from the start.  It just so happened that the biggest personality from the first season (Rich Hatch) also won, and that was one of the few times I personally was able to call the winner from the very first episode.  But it's not always that easy.

Sandra won, arguably, by competing in two seasons dominated by wars of attrition, not because there was any one player strong enough to bend everyone else to their will, but because a lot of good players kept getting in each other's way.  In these later seasons there've been a lot of self-styled master strategists, but I'm not really talking about those players.  I'm talking, maybe, about a lot of big personalities that just plain cancelled each other out.

Sandra was never a big personality.  She was just one of those players that was able to make the most of other people screwing themselves over, and being able to take advantage of that.  Most of the time that's good enough to get you in the finals, but it almost never gets you the win.  But it got Sandra the win.  Twice.

So what was different? 

The other day my sister actually met Sandra.  My sister's also met Rudy, by the way, not because she goes out of her way to track down Survivor players (Bob hosts his challenges not far from where I've lived in Maine, by the way, but I haven't had a chance to go watch those yet) but, I guess she's just lucky.  (Actually, don't tell Sandra, but this time it wasn't entirely luck.)

And she met an incredibly nice person.  According to my sister's account, Sandra was about as normal a person as you can possibly get, especially if you've been on two seasons of Survivor, and won them both.  She was taken aback by my sister even knowing her name without an introduction!  And she seemed completely honest about being happy to talk with my sister, and offered Facebook friendship on the spot, and even her phone number! 

So I suspect that the Sandra who competed in two winning efforts, who didn't exist in the edit, was someone who proved on a daily basis that she was just plain good to have around, normalizing in extreme circumstances, a down-to-earth type.  If she'd competed in one of these later themed seasons, she'd be on the Good People Tribe.

And that's how she won.  Twice.  So now I get it.  There's always going to be plenty left out of the edit, but it seems a terrible shame that two whole seasons of gameplay were lost in translation.  So maybe when I get around to watching her seasons again, I'll try and see if the hidden Sandra Good People Vibe was actually easier to see than I previously thought, and maybe bump her way up in my ranking.  I mean, she won twice.  Sometimes the nice ones really do win.