‘The Challenge: USA’ Eliminated Champ on What It Will Take for Vets to Stand a Chance
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Challenge: USA Season 2 Episode 2 “Blurred Battle Lines.”]
“The way that this game was set up, I feel like had I stayed any longer, my head would’ve exploded with all the layers of this game,” The Challenge champ Jonna Mannion (Stephens) tells TV Insider after being eliminated much earlier than expected in USA Season 2.
Jonna and Ameerah Jones were the first players sent home, with their eliminations book-ending the second episode of the season. And it was the vet’s move when it came to who she voted for the rookie to face off against — Ameerah was the winning team’s vote, and the rest of the house secretly voted for who would go against her (pending if the hopper tossed out a male or female name) — that led to her being in the arena.
In The Challenge: USA Season 2 premiere, Blue Team won the daily and Ameerah ended up facing Michele Fitzgerald in Slam Dunk, an elimination that saw them dropped into a tank 15 times and trying to get as many balls out as possible. Michele won by 18 balls.
“I don’t think there’s anything that I feel bad about that I wish that I would’ve done that I didn’t do, maybe a few cold plunges,” Ameerah says. (She adds that vets Cory Wharton and Tori Deal saying they never talked to her before nominating her was just “an excuse” to throw her in.) Still, “I feel really good about the way that I performed. My goal was just not to get tired and to just keep going through the pain, just keep throwing as many balls.”
She did turn herself in the air but noted that they only had a couple seconds before they were dunked again and it was the cold water that caught her off guard. “At one point I just couldn’t breathe anymore. And so it slowed me down. My brain was freezing. So everything started going in slow motion probably by the eighth or ninth round,” she shared. And so while Paulie Calafiore did offer some advice about breathing in freezing cold water before the elimination, she was “so distracted” she couldn’t remember it.
Jonna was one of the people to vote Michele in, and while it was a secret vote, the number each person receives is revealed at elimination. Therefore, Michele was able to figure out that someone on her team picked her and narrowed it down to Jonna.
Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount
That move from Jonna is “100 percent” what led to her being sent in, the vet says. She explains that once host TJ Lavin went over the rules, her “mind immediately started just running and running” — and that was before the introduction of the hopper. (“Even if you have plans, it’s going to mess it up anyways,” she says.) “This is one of my flaws: I am smart, I am strategic, but sometimes I do get in my own head and I get too ahead of myself where I’m playing chess essentially,” Jonna shares.
And so hearing about the secret vote and not knowing what would be revealed in the arena combined with the fact that “right away when I walk into the door, the target’s so big already [as a vet] that I felt like my back was against a wall,” she voted for Michele. “I broke it down with all the relationships, all the shows, who’s connected to who. Voting in Michele was beneficial to me, and had it worked out, had Michele actually gone home, it would’ve bettered my position and some of my alliances that were already starting to form.”
“This whole game is about risk and I just knew at that moment with odds against me that I had to take some sort of risk and make some move to better myself. Otherwise, I was going into elimination every time, and it was going to be an uphill battle,” she continues. “Because you saw it: The one thing that the 18 other people from other shows had in common, before they even knew me, they’re like, ‘We got to get them out. No matter what, let’s get them out and then we’ll figure everything out down the road.’ I was already down the road trying to figure out and work backwards how to get there and how to make it easier. I knew it was going to be hard no matter what.”
It is, so far, very much everyone vs. the vets. Ameerah knew that while she did want to work with others outside of Big Brother, she was never going to work with the vets. “I don’t trust them and I know that they’re really good at this game. I don’t want to bring them to the end,” she explains.
Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount
Jonna faced off with Tori — she thinks she was used to try to take out the “Challenge legend beast” — in an elimination that saw them fighting over balls that dropped to rack up the most points. She shares that beforehand, Tori told her she didn’t want to hurt her. “I was like, ‘Tori, if you don’t go balls to the wall… Yes, I’m here fighting for my position, but so are you. Don’t go easy on me just because you’re freaked out. I’ve got some power, too,'” Jonna says. The only thing she thinks could’ve changed the outcome would have been if the others hadn’t been trying to alert her to silver balls (worth more points) because Tori heard as well.
And so now one vet is gone and five remain with targets on their back. Vet Wes Bergmann did try to talk to his team (Green) during nominations, to no avail: The rookies want the vets gone. “I was so proud of him and so happy that he actually did have my back. He was trying the best without ruining his own game to look out for me and maybe the other vets as well,” Jonna comments.
“This group of rookies, I will give it to them. Whoever’s idea — now I think it was probably Michele’s, she probably fueled it a little bit more — hats off to them because what happened in the Green Team nomination is the smartest and best thing they could have done,” she adds.
Now, going forward, the vets “either gotta get ready to go in every single time or somebody has to figure something out,” according to Jonna. “I think in Episode 2, [Johnny] Bananas [Devenanzio] set it up and said it pretty well: The only chance any of them stand is by switching teams. There’s one male, one female vet per team; in nominations, you’re going to be outnumbered six to two. The only way to switch that up is changing the numbers by changing teams. I hope they figure it out.”
Speaking of defecting, what would Ameerah and Jonna have done if they’d won their eliminations? The rookie probably would’ve stayed with Green or moved over to Blue so they couldn’t throw her in again. The vet would’ve “100 percent ” defected to Blue; she even told Tori to stick with her team before she left.
Both would return for another season of The Challenge: USA. “Still waiting on that redemption arc,” Ameerah says. As for Jonna, “I would like to play this specific game again knowing what I know now.” However, that’s only if the hopper doesn’t make a reappearance. “One thing that I will not ever be good at is random eliminations. You try to avoid elimination at all costs, so not knowing what’s going to happen if you’re going in, it’s almost like you want to be the main vote because then at least you can prepare yourself,” she tells us. “If I walk up to something and TJ pulls out that hopper, I’m going to be like, ‘Alright, guys, I’m out. Gotta go.'”
Now that she’s watching as a fan, Jonna stresses, “I just want people to remember everything that’s about to happen, I knew it was happening and so that’s why I self-imploded basically.”
After all, she doesn’t usually leave this early in a season. “I would’ve liked to stay longer because I feel like this is a game that I definitely would’ve loved to compete in longer, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know what the reason is yet.”
The Challenge: USA, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS (and Sundays, 9/8c, through August 27)
