Pat Sajak Wiki-Bio. Pat Sajak was born on October 26, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois, the US to Joyce Helen (Brandecka) and Leonard Anthony Sajdak. Pat Sajak started his TV career in the late 1970s in KNBC-TV. He hosted two game show pilots in 1980 ('Press Your Luck' for Ralph Edwards, and 'Puzzlers' for Mark Goodson).' Pat Sajak: Body Measurement. Sajak was born and raised in Chicago, where he broke into broadcasting as a newscaster and announcer at a small radio station. He joined the Army in 1968 and was sent to Vietnam. There, he spent a year and a half with Armed Forces Radio in Saigon — and, like Robin Williams in the feature film of the same name, he started each day by shouting.
Pat Sajak has been hosting the wildly popular game showWheel of Fortune for so long that we kinda just figured he was always there, doing that, like the thing that God said right before 'Let there be light' was, 'I'll take an L, Pat.' Actually, according to his Fandom bio (weirdly, one of many), he's been egging people on to win as much stuff they don't need as possible since 1981.
But the show was a much different game back then. In a 2012 interview on ESPN-2's Highly Questionable (posted on YouTube), Sajak recounted how the contestants didn't win actual money back in the 1980s. Instead, they won coupons with which they could 'buy cheesy prizes' that had to be hauled in and out of the studio, making the show take ridiculous amounts of time to tape. So in the hours between tapings, he and Vanna White head over to the Mexican restaurant across the street for 'two or three or six' margaritas and then wobble back to the set to finish out the show.
For some reason, the internet and the media cared about what Pat and Vanna did back in the '80s, and the comments caused a firestorm of caustic comments about the Wheel and its leading man. Pat said in a later interview that hosting the show totally sloshed wasn't a weekly occurrence, like he'd made it seem. Unfortunately, there's even more you didn't know about Pat Sajak, but it most likely won't surprise you.
Pat Sajak is not kind on Twitter
It most likely won't come as a huge revelation to find that Pat Sajak denies climate change, bashes liberals, and wallows in his own lame attempts at sarcasm about vegans as vehemently as the legions of grandparents who still faithfully tune into the Wheel each weekday afternoon. In 2014, he shot off a series of hot-air-fueled tweets, taking aim at everything that some old, rich, white men love to hate. It appears, however, that he can at least feel shame about being a terrible person (which game show hosts tend to be, for some reason), and all have since been taken down.
Luckily, Vice made sure to record them for posterity after his May 20, 2014, tweet sparked 'a humdrum category 2 Twitter s***storm.' The confused mini-rant gave the world insight into a recent epiphany of Sajak's: 'I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.' Calling climate change advocates racists was a shrewd, classically conservative move of accusing the left of what the right itself is actually guilty of (e.g.: Donald Trump's appropriation of the 'Fake news!' accusation). But that tweet was just the tip of Sajak's internet troll iceberg. He had recently tweeted several right-wing attempts at caustic comedy that took aim at Al Gore, liberals, environmentalists, and animal rights activists, all of which displayed much more arrogance and ignorance than wit and semblance to reality.
Bob Sajak
Pat Sajak's membership in the game show host right-wing boys club
But Sajak hasn't kept his incorrect ideas and pompous lack of comedic talent confined to Twitter. From 2004-2013, he transmitted the trash in his head on the conservative political website Human Events. The dozens of articles he contributed take aim at the same subjects on the left as his tweets, with titles like, 'Opposed to Obamacare? Then You Must Be a Racist,' 'Selective Freedom of Speech,' and the impressively over-alliterative 'Our Preposterous Predilection for Polling, Projecting and Prognosticating.'
Although he might make his opinions more widely known than his peers, Sajak is not a lone climate change-denying conservative among his fellow game show hosts. As Salon reported after Sajak's May 2014 tweet, other game show hosts are also staunch conservatives. It cited Alex Trebek's implicit support of the Tea Party and his hosting of a Republican fundraiser in 2010, despite describing himself as apolitical. Also on the list were Bob Barker, and his The Price Is Right successor Drew Carey, who identified himself as a libertarian to Larry King (also on YouTube) and has said that the government basically shouldn't do anything ever.
Bob Sajak Salary
Sajak's vitriol for people advocating for stuff like healthcare and clean water and air isn't surprising, when you think about it. After all, this is the guy who said in that ESPN-2 interview that his service in the Vietnam War was 'fun — if you can call a war fun.' No, Pat. No, you can't.