Thursday night, Vanya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kan. and Gokul Venkatachalam of Chesterfield, Mo., became the co-champions of the 2015 Scripps Spelling Bee held in Oxon Hills, Maryland. That’s cool and all, but the night before the stakes were even higher when NBC4 held their own Sports Spelling Bee during the final five minutes of their 6pm telecast.
Dianna Russini asked Doreen Gentzler to spell the name of Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer. Easy peasy. Then Jim Vance rifled off the name of Redskins center Kory Lichtensteiger suspiciously – almost too suspiciously – fast. Once they were done with those DC sports scrubs, Russini got to a real superstar: Evgeny Kuznetsov.
Weatherman Doug Kammerer struggled.
“E-Z-P-W-Q-Z-Y-X,” he began.
Then after a pause, Kammerer finished with a flurry. “V-Y-Z en–zov.”
Let’s go to the judges…
Aw, man. Tough break, Doug.
Kuznetsov later tweeted to the outgoing Russini with emoji and the word best which is how I prefer our Russian hockey players to communicate.
@NBCdianna the best ever 😂😂😂😂
— Evgeny Kuznetsov (@Kuzya92) May 28, 2015
Doug admitted later that yeah, maybe he didn’t try.
@Kuzya92 @NBCdianna I tried, Kind of!
— Doug Kammerer (@dougkammerer) May 28, 2015
Great bit though.
