Exclusive: Jeff Kent talks about 'Survivor: Philippines' (Part 2)

Jeff Kent was eliminated from Survivor: Philippines' newly-merged Dangrayne tribe during Wednesday night's eighth episode of the CBS reality series' 25th edition.
 
Jeff, a 44-year-old retired baseball player from Austin, TX, was blindsided and voted out of his tribe at the season's eighth Tribal Council, which was also the second elimination vote for Dangrayne.
 
In an exclusive interview on Thursday, Jeff talked to Reality TV World about his Survivor: Philippines experience.


Below is the concluding portion of Jeff's interview. Click here to read the first half.

Reality TV World: Everyone seems to have a pretty low opinion of Abi-Maria Gomes, but do you think she might be a little smarter than people are giving her credit for and that's why she revealed she had a hidden Immunity Idol at Tribal Council -- because she thought it might throw in some chaos in which people might worry she'd give it to "Pete" Peter Yurkowski and shakeup the vote results, as seemed to happen?

Jeff Kent: No. (Laughs) Her and [Lisa Whelchel] got educated on how to play the game as we went along -- kind of [Michael Skupin] too. I mean, he didn't get the nickname "Stupin" for nothing. So the reason I think we were -- Abi-Maria, just, her personality was very rough around the edges.

And I think, who knows where that's coming from. But she didn't really know how to play the game. She was playing it, and sometimes people who don't play the game very well survive the longest. So you can call that strategy or not, but it's not a thought-out strategy. It's just a strategy.


Reality TV World: Yes, speaking about strategy, you kind of made a move last week that a lot of people were pretty critical of when you kind of seemed to pass on the chance to be a core part of a six-person alliance that would control the game to flip to become the fifth or sixth member of another alliance instead. It basically seemed like you were obsessed with voting Jonathan Penner out so he'd go home before you. Can you explain that move a little bit and why you thought it made sense to you? Were you really as focused on Penner as it seemed and do you think it blinded you from winning the game?

Jeff Kent: Two things. I'll speak to Penner first. Penner and I had an alliance together that was fairly tight and I was feeding Penner a lot of information, especially about the fact that they were coming after Penner so he better use the idol. So I was helping Penner stay in the game, and I knew that if I could deflect all my attention away from me and put it on Penner amongst everybody else, that people would not talk about me so much.

And I was trying to push everything off Penner. "Look at Penner, look how good he is. He's going to win this game. He's played this game before. Look at Penner. Look at Penner. Look at Penner." So I was trying to deflect everything away from me, and it worked for a long time.

And the second thing is, I had so much respect for Penner's game, I thought he was the best player out there -- that if I were to say, "I want to be one step ahead of the best player out there," then I would have the best chance for me to win a million bucks. And that's where my obsession came from.

But the obsession stopped, and it really wasn't an obsession -- even though I played on that -- because I had tried to create an alliance with [Denise Stapley]. I said, "Look, let's use Penner and Skupin. Let's get going here on a vote that keeps these guys in and let's start picking off the Tandang tribe."


And Denise did not want to do it. I couldn't convince her to do it. She wanted to vote with [Malcolm Freberg]. She wanted to stay with Malcolm because now that we know Malcolm had the idol, she recreated that alliance and she wanted to play with Malcolm.

I couldn't convince her to do it, and I'm mad at myself that I didn't go to Malcolm and try to convince Malcolm to do that. So I wanted to use those two guys. It wasn't a big deal. To follow up with that, when the Kalabaw tribe came in and everybody thinks that we could've gotten six votes and we could've turned the tables and start picking everybody off, Denise wouldn't vote with us.

She would not vote even though she was on the Kalabaw tribe and coming over, and now we think -- Denise was not Kalabaw. She was loyal to Malcolm, and we did not have the vote. Denise and Malcolm would not move.

And if we didn't have Denise's vote, even though we had ["RC" Roberta Saint-Amour]'s vote and Skupin's vote, if we did not have Denise's vote, it was worthless. We didn't have the vote so I couldn't. So [Carter Williams] and I cut another deal. We cut a deal with Pete, and it ended up backfiring on us.

Reality TV World: How were you cast on Survivor: Philippines? How did you end up on the show?


Jeff Kent: I think the show went well. I'm happy with the way everything's played out on TV and there's so much information that people don't get, that I hope they search out CBS.com and find some more information out. And as the show goes on, I think they'll understand it more too. It's been pretty cool.

Above is the concluding portion of Jeff's interview. Click here to read the first half.






About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski