Amazing Race winners Rob Frisbee & Brennan Swain. Photo taken by Carman Knight-Frisbee
BY DEB AND TIM SMITH
For all those people who like to ask us where our story ideas come from, you’re going to absolutely love this one! While working on a local history project we decided it might be interesting to do a piece on the Most Famous Graduates by High School. As we were wending our way around Monroe County, we had an interesting hit when we arrived at Wheatland-Chili which, for the record, is one of the towns and schools for which the Sentinel is the official newspaper.
If you go to the Wheatland-Chili Wikipedia page, the first name to appear under the “Alumni” heading is Brennan Swain with three accomplishments denoted… Brennan was “The Amazing Race Season 1 winner/actor/1989 Valedictorian.” As those credentials flash onto the screen, here is the script of the conversation as it went down in our home in Mendon…
Tim: Brennan Swain is my cousin.
Deb: (Incredulously) No way.
Tim: Oh yes, absolutely.
Deb: No freakin’ way.
Tim: Let me tell you the story.
First off, we’ll dial down the deal a bit with the clarification that “second cousin” would be the actual connection. Tim’s mother and Brennan’s grandmother were sisters but Tim and Brennan had never met as adults. It seemed, however, like fate was nudging us so we decided what the hell, let’s roll the dice and reach out.
Brennan is now a high-power attorney working and living in Los Angeles. We were able to track down an email address and send a message connecting the dots on our family tree and explaining how he came up in our research. We were so excited to receive the following response which led to Brennan and his Mom, Linda being in Mendon having dinner with us at the Cottage Hotel just a week later. He wrote…
Hi Tim (and Deb),
Great to hear from you! I’ve certainly heard your name over the years. I remember your mother well and miss the old days of spending time with my Grandma Hazel, your mom and all the aunts and uncles from that generation.
That’s a funny coincidence on the research for your book. Let me know if there’s anything you need from me to help out. My friends at Wheatland-Chili often give me a hard time about being the “most famous” graduate from Wheatland. Haha!
I’ve cc’d my mom here so you have her email address as well. I’ll be back in Rochester 12/18-12/27 and we’d love to get dinner one night if you are available. We can come your way so we can stop by and see your collection.
Let us know if you’re available for dinner and thanks again for writing!
Regards,
Brennan
So let’s seize the Sentinel moment, and share the story of how someone who grew up right here in our area became one of the most important names in reality TV show history. It was in the year 2000 when the somewhat surprising smash success of the show Survivor served to jumpstart the reality show surge in TV popularity.
Right on the heels of that hit came The Amazing Race which debuted in 2001. The concept of the contest was that 11 teams, of two people each, competed in a race around the world with the winners taking home a cool $1 million dollars.
The official explanation of how the race was run reads like this… “Each season is split into legs, with each leg requiring teams to deduce clues, navigate themselves in foreign areas, interact with locals, perform physical and mental challenges, and travel by airplane, boat, taxi, and other public transportation options on a limited budget provided by the show. Teams are progressively eliminated at the end of most legs, while the first team to arrive at the end of the final leg wins the prize.”
Each pair of contestants had some type of pre-existing interpersonal relationship. Possibilities would include married couple, mother/daughter, brother/sister, etc. Brennan (who was 29 at the time) was teamed with Rob Frisbee (27) who was his best friend and fellow-lawyer. The other teams that survived to the Final Four were frat brothers Kevin O’Connor (34) & Drew Feinberg (35), a same sex couple Joe Baldassare (50) & Bill Bartek (47) and a married-but-separated couple considering reconciliation Frank (30) and Margarita Mesa (28).
Here’s a couple quick side stories for you. If you’re thinking the stresses of this type of activity may not be just what the doctor ordered to facilitate a reconciliation, you’d be right. Frank & Margarita came in second in the contest but the marriage fell by the wayside.
Also there was a concern that the show, which is still running today, would not even remain on the air that first season. The reason? The first episode had aired on September 5, 2001 and perhaps you’re connecting the dots on this one already. Before the second episode aired, the country had been decimated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“I was surprised that we stayed on the air [after] what happened on September 11,” host Phil Keoghan said. “I thought that was the end of it. I really did. Who the hell cares about a show where people are racing around the world after we’ve just been attacked and all these people died?” But the series soldiered on.
That first season race would traverse 44,000 miles, over four continents, in 32 days! We’ll share some highlights along the way in the rest of this piece but to immediately convey the vastness of this sojourn, we will provide an arrow-thread of the itinerary. Contestants would follow the route from New York City->South Africa->Zambia->France->Tunisia->Italy->India->Thailand->China->Alaska ->New York City. Not your typical round trip.
The production strategy was to take advantage of iconic landmarks along the route. Examples would include Victoria Falls in Zambia, the Eiffel Tower in France, the Coliseum in Rome and the Great Wall in China.
Just to sample some stunts and challenges, contestants had to order and eat five beetle larvae, one squid, and two chicken feet in China, which was also where Brennan ran into some trouble competing against a local ping pong champion. Another memorable food experience occurred in Zambia where one teammate was required to prepare an ostrich egg which both teammates were required to eat.
There was also some fun to be had with animals. Tunisia featured the camel rides, while in India it was all aboard the elephants. The greatest danger, however, had to be the challenge in Thailand where one team member had to dress like a Buddhist monk and walk through a pit of tigers in order to retrieve their next clue.
The CBS show had fans turning on their TV’s throughout the fall of 2001 debuting, as we said, on September 5th with the climatic final episode airing on December 13th. Filming occurred during March and April and the new premise was plagued by unexpected challenges such as an airport strike in Rome and a sandstorm in Tunisia. The finish line would finally be crossed on April 8, 2001 at Flushing Meadows Park, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair.
Reviews for the new show were generally positive. The Washington Post wrote, “[The Amazing Race] brings new energy and respectability to the ‘reality’ genre popularized by the same network’s Survivor – and surpasses it in spectacle and human drama. Great TV lives.” Several other of the reviews we read drew comparisons to Survivor with a general consensus that The Amazing Race, by its very premise, had more potential to accent exciting scenery because while it was literally a race around the world, the setting of any single season of Survivor is limited to the one location.
The Dallas Morning News wrote, “It all makes for a watchable feast of accidental tourists navigating various twists, turns, and blind alleys. Amazing Race seems to be well-cast with vivid characters.” The website Rotten Tomatoes wrote, “The Amazing Race elevates reality television conventions with its globetrotting scale, making for a suspenseful competition and fascinating travelogue.
When we had dinner with Brennan, one interesting aspect of the storyline he pointed out was that the intensity of the excitement over the show seemed to be greater in Rochester than it was in Los Angeles where he was living at the time. The old Ground Round restaurant in Marketplace Mall became the semi-official weekly watch party location for Rochesterians rooting on Brennan’s team.
Brennan pointed out that in L.A. people have become accustomed to having Hollywood hovering on the horizon; they’re used to it. But here at home in Rochester the idea that one of our own had even made the cut to make the cast was newsworthy. Contestants had to submit an audition tape because for this type of show to be successful, the people appearing have to be interesting and engaging enough to captivate an audience.
So there’s an initial wave of excitement when Brennan is named as a participant. But understandably, as the series progressed and other teams were one-by-one eliminated, the local excitement only intensified. And it all built to a crescendo when fans saw Brennan and Rob trotting to that finish line in Flushing Meadows Park.
After the show had ended, Brennan and Rob did a victory lap of the talk show circuit and we’ll follow up with some highlights. On the syndicated show Inside Edition, host Deborah Norville introduced her segment by saying, “And it was practically a photo finish on the television show The Amazing Race in which contestants spent a month traveling around the globe in hopes of winning a million-dollar prize. They called it The Amazing Race and guess what… they weren’t exaggerating.”
Inside Edition: In the end it came down to New Yorkers Frank and Margarita Mesa versus Rob Frisbee and Brennan Swain from Los Angles and one pair would lose by mere minutes. The last leg of this around-the-world race included snowshoes, dog sleds, a bone-chilling dive, and finally a trip from Anchorage, Alaska to New York, but at the airport who should Frank and Margarita run into but Rob and Brennan. Same plane, same change over at Seattle, same flight from there to Newark, New Jersey. Then suddenly it was all down to a pair of cabs taking different routes to the same destination in Queens, New York and from this spot they were instructed to take a subway train to the finish line.
Rob: We just kept expecting them to come through the door and get on the same train with us and then the doors closed, the train took off and we figured they were behind us
Inside Edition: They were right, but Frank and Margarita didn’t know they were running second.
Frank: She was like really happy and I was like well don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
Inside Edition: A quick train ride for Rob and Brennan and suddenly, after circling the globe, the finish line was in sight and the million-dollar prize.
Rob: The culmination of 32 days and 44,000 miles of stress and energy and emotion, and it was just… there aren’t words.
Brennan: It was an unbelievable moment.
Inside Edition: Minutes later Frank and Margarita were in the home stretch. Suddenly they realized they were just a little too late. But they took their defeat in stride.
Margarita: It was still exciting, and a wonderful ending to this great experience.
Brennan: The experience of a lifetime.
Rob: Yeah, I mean we always say that even if it hadn’t been on television, it would have been worth doing.
Next we’ll excerpt the following segments from The Rosie O’Donnell Show…
Rosie: So you guys won, I mean you didn’t even do anything I can make fun of. You were so nice to each other. You never yelled.
Brennan: That was kind of our modus operandi, as us lawyers would say…
Rob: Yeah, boring lawyers.
Brennan: But we got out there and I’m kind of the calm cool collected one and Rob’s kind of the competitive one, the hot head, so we knew our roles.
Rosie: But everybody else was screaming at each other, fighting, yelling, and you guys just sort of floated on through.
Brennan: [In terms of the editing] They had to fly us under the radar a little bit because they had to make it a surprise that we were going to win.
Rob: [Facetiously] Right, you know, our stunning personalities they had to edit out. They left it all on the cutting room floor just because we won.
(Writer’s note from Tim & Deb… We want to clarify the point Brennan and Rob are making in the previous comments, and if you think about this from a TV perspective, it does make sense. The Amazing Race producers made a conscious effort to leave some of their funniest parts on the cutting room floor because to over-highlight them might have foreshadowed them as the eventual winners.)
Rosie did a good job of characterizing the quirkiness of the three other teams in the Final Four saying that, “Bill and Joe were [over-the-top] gay, with their, ‘You know does anyone have Chardonnay?’ And then there’s [married-but-separated] Frank and Margarita [arguing] ‘You shut up. No, you shut up.’ And then there’s the two [macho-tough-guy] frat dudes, ‘Kevin, you’re such an idiot, get off the camel.’ But you guys never yelled.”
On the CBS Early Show, Rob took his turn at defining the winning relationship between the teammates. In a variation of what we quoted Brennan saying above, Rob related, “I mean that’s how our friendship works and that’s how we worked as a team. I’m a little bit competitive and a little bit angry. Brennan’s a diplomat, he’s great with people. We used those strengths and it got us where it took us.”
When co-host Jane Clayson asked them what they were going to do with the money Brennan’s answer was, “Ping pong lessons,” which was a humorously self-deprecating response alluding to his ping pong playing in China.
While it has been the focus of this piece, the Brennan Swain backstory expands well beyond the one season of The Amazing Race. At this point we’ll do a wraparound and tell you what happened in the before and after of the Brennan bio. He actually began taking the stage at an early age assembling a Wheatland-Chili drama resumé which begins with South Pacific at age 9 and would culminate with leading roles in Carnival and Bye Bye Birdie.
He was equally successful in the academic world. Brennan was the valedictorian of the Wheatland-Chili class of 1989. He would go on to earn a mechanical engineering degree at Messiah College and his law degree at Regent University.
Being active athletically in high school, he shattered varsity soccer scoring and varsity tennis records. During those years he was also involved in competitive downhill skiing and snowboarding. His list of surfing destinations includes Bali, Mexico, Brazil, Panama and Hawaii, and he has scuba dived in the Turks & Caicos Islands.
After his success on The Amazing Race, People magazine selected him as one of “Hollywood’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors.” Not a bad list for a lawyer to be on! And out of the office Brennan is an action and extreme sports enthusiast, certified race car driver, adventure racer, and musician. Check out his YouTube video of U2’s “With or Without You” which, as his introduction reveals, was recorded during the pandemic.
One question we had for Brennan, which we’re thinking some of you are probably wondering as well was, “What is your relationship like now with Rob? Are you still friends?”
“Twenty years later I’m still best of friends with Rob,” Brennan said, “and was honored with being the best man at his wedding and godfather of his son, Max.”
And while you’re on the internet, there are a plethora of possibilities for exploring the various television spots and competitions in which he appears. One line that we thought summed it up pretty well was to say, “Brennan Swain understands how to interact with others on all levels, communicating with charm, humor and intelligence.”
