Pat Sajak, Vanna Whites Wheel of Fortune run almost didnt happen -

When “Wheel of Fortune” came back from a commercial break, Pat Sajak believed he was saying goodbye to the daytime fans who made him bigger than he ever could have imagined. The former local weatherman, handpicked from obscurity to host the game show against the wishes of network executives, had already become a household name.

As Sajak was leaving to host a late-night show in early 1989, he said the hardest part would be not working as much with Vanna White, a former model who was not Sajak’s initial co-host choice but whose style and smile launched her to superstardom. To show how much he was going to miss his on-air partner, Sajak had a plan for how he wanted to spend the last 15 seconds of the program: He wanted to kiss White.

“Come here, baby,” Sajak said, leaning in as White smiled and laughed at the camera before kissing him through more laughter.

The 12-second smooch was only interrupted when Merv Griffin, the television mogul who risked his career putting the pair together, tapped Sajak on the shoulder to humorously ask, “What’s been going on here?” Sajak and White wiped their lips, and Griffin thanked Sajak for saying it was “a pretty courageous move” for the executive to fight for him after NBC initially did not want Sajak anywhere near the show.

“I had no idea you were here,” Sajak said, still surprised by the kiss and Griffin’s presence. He then joked, “I wouldn’t have said those nice things.”

Sajak eventually returned to “Wheel of Fortune” on a full-time basis after “The Pat Sajak Show” flopped and reunited with White in a run that has spanned 40 seasons, thousands of episodes and hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and prizes during its time on network television. Fans are celebrating the duo and the syndicated show after Sajak announced Monday that the upcoming 41st season of “Wheel of Fortune” would be his last.

“It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ll have more to say in the coming months,” he tweeted. “Many thanks to you all.”

Sajak was honored in 2019 by Guinness World Records as having the longest career as a game-show host for the same program. White was also honored by Guinness World Records in 2013 as “most frequent clapper” after she was estimated to have clapped roughly 3.5 million times during her run on “Wheel of Fortune” to that point.

But before Sajak and White, there were Chuck Woolery and Susan Stafford.

After “Jeopardy!,” the popular quiz show created by Griffin, saw its daytime version of the show end in early 1975, the network picked up another one of his shows, “Wheel of Fortune,” to take its place.

“Both Chuck and Susie did a fine job, and ‘Wheel’ did well enough on NBC, although it never approached the kind of ratings success that ‘Jeopardy!’ achieved in its heyday,” Griffin said in “Merv: Making the Good Life Last,” an autobiography from the 2000s co-written by David Bender.

The show, however, was about to change. A contract dispute led Woolery to leave “Wheel of Fortune” in 1981 to go make “Love Connection.” Griffin already had an idea of who he wanted in there — and all he had to do was flip to Sajak’s weather report on KNBC in Los Angeles.

Griffin recalled to The Washington Post in 1986 that he liked “Pat’s whimsical antics.”

“He had great charm. And he was always playing practical jokes,” Griffin told the New York Times Magazine in 1988. “In California, how many cold fronts from Canada can we have? I remember once he came on with a bandage over his right eye. After a break, the bandage was over the left eye. Pat never said a word, just kept doing the weather.”

But when he presented the idea of Sajak taking over the show to NBC executives, Griffin recalled in his book that he got the same answer: Find someone else.

“No problem,” Griffin recounted saying to the executives. “I’ll just stop taping ‘Wheel of Fortune’ until Pat Sajak is the host.”

NBC relented, and Sajak took over for Woolery in December 1981.

“Please do not adjust your sets at home. Chuck Woolery has not shrunk,” Sajak said in his first episode. “... I’ve been fortunate enough to wander onto the set of a very successful program.”

There was a noticeable adjustment period for Sajak, who had used his humor to his advantage in previous stops on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam and KNBC in Los Angeles. It was Sajak’s first week at “Wheel of Fortune” when a teen contestant was about to solve a puzzle that obviously spelled out “Abraham Lincoln.” So when the contestant blurted out that the puzzle was not the 16th president of the United States but “Abraham Bincoln,” Sajak explained to the studio audience that Bincoln “was the guy famous for doing the Bettysburg Address.”

“She just freaked or something. And I know she’s been in trauma care since,” Sajak told the Times. “I think I made things worse. But I was new.”

The show would see more change in 1982, when Stafford left “Wheel of Fortune” and the entertainment business to become a humanitarian worker. As Griffin returned to his desk, he saw a stack of 8-by-10 glossy photos of 200 candidates applying to take Stafford’s place to turn the letters on the board. As with Sajak, it didn’t take Griffin long to pick out whom he liked.

“I walked in and just went, ‘Her — get me some tape of her talking,’” Griffin said. “And it was Vanna.”

White was a little-known model who had competed in a Miss Georgia USA pageant in 1978 and posed for some photos that were later used in Playboy. White moved to Los Angeles in 1980 with $1,000 to her name, she told “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2020.

When White was initially picked by Griffin, she was one of three women rotating as Sajak’s co-host. Early on, Sajak did not recommend White to be his permanent co-host.

“Vanna knows this,” Sajak told CBS in 2020. “Not that she wasn’t lovely and wonderful and personable and all that. But she was the most nervous, by far, of any of them.”

Although she had watched the show for years, White recalled years later how she had a hard time speaking or walking because of her nerves.

“I was probably the most nervous because I wanted this job so badly,” she told the Television Academy Foundation. “... I thought, ‘Oh, I have blown this.’”

Those nerves went away, and audiences took to her, Griffin remembered in one of his last TV interviews, according to YouTube’s Pioneers of Television.

“[Reporters] said to me, ‘Well, why did you hire her?’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s a dumb question,’” Griffin said. “... I said, ‘She knew the whole alphabet.’”

White soon became a household name, with parents naming their daughters after her. Sajak once told The Post that “this country is going to be full of Vannas.” In her first appearance, Sajak remarked how the show had picked the best hostess possible, giving White the endorsement she did not initially receive in private.

“I am very excited and happy to be part of ‘Wheel of Fortune,’” she told Sajak.

Sajak jokingly replied, “This is a family you will soon grow to know and love — except for a couple of the uncles we won’t talk about.”

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