Did Your Grand Prize Game Training Go To Waste?

Did your Grand Prize Game training go to waste? Are you old enough to remember? Did you train? Did you train despite not living in Chicago?

In case you don’t remember, the Grand Prize Game was a regular segment on The Bozo Show. I was watching on WGN back in the eighties, but the show ran in various forms between 1960 and 2001. The Grand Prize Game involved a kid picked to throw ping-pong balls into a sequence of progressively further distanced buckets. During the era I was watching, the end bucket won you a new Schwinn bicycle.

I admit, my sister and I trained for this game down in our basement. We lined up buckets and threw ping-pong balls inside. We wanted that new Schwinn bicycle. We did this despite the fact that The Bozo Show was broadcast out of Chicago, approximately 470 miles from where we lived, and we had more chance of getting our parents to buy us bikes outright than getting them to take us to Chicago so we’d ever have a hope of getting on the game.

Did anyone else train so fruitlessly? Did you ever have that moment of looking back and suddenly understanding that you were now too old, or the show too ended, and all that training was down the drain?

I know I’m not the only one. There are others out there who had that same moment of disappointing realization.