![]() They exploited imperfections, and Terry, because of the way his brain works, soon found himself sitting at his kitchen table, flipping through decks of cards and learning to count them. He saw how they shopped for dealers - hunting for the hacks who used a pinch tuck instead of a palm tuck when they cut the cards, all the edge a pro needed. He saw how they worked holiday weekends, when the floors were busier. He could see them in the way they bet or which tables they chose or their body language or how they nursed a drink. They had patterns, and Terry could read them like the weather. No matter how good they were, they had routines. Over months of training, he learned how to spot the steady-handed men who were out to break the games. He pulled the night shift in a windowless room at Circus Circus and watched the floor through dozens of monitors. Terry's gift, as always, remains patterns, and after some false starts in slot machines and at a toilet-paper factory, he found his next calling: casino surveillance. She has a head for numbers, which she uses to balance 260 part-time staff and their delicately calibrated hours. Linda eventually got a job with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, overseeing staff scheduling. Was this the life they wanted? Terry quit TV, and he and Linda returned to their natural desert habitat, with all its sunshine and possibility. "Other than The Price Is Right," he says, "winning those was probably the biggest moment of my life." But he and Linda never felt about Atlanta the way they felt about Las Vegas, and they were about to be trapped there by Terry's success. There, he won two Southeast Regional Emmy Awards, back to back, in 19. First they went to Waco, Texas, and then to Springfield, Missouri, before Terry finally cracked a Top Ten market in Atlanta. That combination made him a weatherman worth pursuing, and he and Linda began jumping across the country to bigger and more lucrative stops. He was good on TV, too, had a strong, deep voice and a friendly face. He could see the rain coming even when others couldn't. But even in those storms, Terry became expert. Las Vegas has storms, sudden and violent. Although friends joked about his working in Las Vegas- I'm guessing today's going to be hot and sunny-Terry knew that Las Vegas was a tough place for him to be right. He sees patterns in things like wind lift and barometric pressure and the way Krystal used to hide behind the furniture he has a better understanding than most of causes and effects. Today, many TV weathermen don't know any more about weather than the guy doing sports. He looks like he might design bridges or maybe sell cars, but he began his career as a television meteorologist in Las Vegas. Terry is sixty years old, with silver hair and glasses. "If there's one thing I've learned through all this," Terry says, "it's that there's such a thing as being too perfect." "There's such a thing as being too perfect." And then, last, he lifts up a copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline DREW CAUGHT UP IN PRICE IS RIGHT RIGGING SCANDAL and with a story about Terry on page 9, his name misspelled ("Terry Neese") but the numbers exactly right. He turns over the back of the giant white cue card to show the meticulous notes he jotted down after the show, including his final take-actual retail price, $56,437.41-after he won both Showcases, the game's ultimate prize, with yet another perfect bid, the first in the show's thirty-eight-year-long daytime history: $23,743. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up-TERRY KNIESS-because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. Terry's shirt is simpler, and it's unsigned: "Las Vegas loves The Price Is Right." On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005-right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. "Is your pet spayed or neutered?" Host Drew Carey's signature is on the back. Hers has a photograph of their beloved departed Maltese on the front: "This is my Krystal and she was spayed," it reads. Over the back of the living-room couch, he's draped the yellow T-shirts he and his wife, Linda, wore that fateful morning on The Price Is Right. ![]()
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