Would a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ loser invite 100 friends to a watch party?

Whenever Ben Hoover would tell people he was going to be on “Wheel of Fortune,” they would inevitably ask him the one question he could not answer.

So how’d you do?

For months he kept the secret, the hardest secret he’s ever had to keep.

Any slip of his lips would’ve resulted in Pat Sajak dropping from the sky and saying, “Tell him what he’s won, Vanna. Never mind, I’ll do it. You’ve won a date with our Hollywood lawyers, Ben.”

Hoover, who lives in Bluffton, doesn’t have to worry about that any longer.

On Thursday night, in front of friends, family and a million members of the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce’s young professionals group at Fat Patties in Old Town, Hoover let the television answer the question for him.

How’d he do?

He won $54,250.

That’s how he did.

I told him I knew it. I knew he had killed it.

“You wouldn’t have let this big party happen if you hadn’t,” I said.

“Well ...” he thought about it — imagining the life of a “Wheel of Fortune” loser, crying over misspent vowel money, no doubt — and then he laughed. “Yeah. You’re right.”

Throughout the fastest 30-minute episode in the history of game shows, friends tried to get Hoover to share whatever bit of insider knowledge they could squeeze out of him.

“Do you know it now?” they asked real-life Hoover about on-screen Hoover who hadn’t yet solved a puzzle.

“Just wait,” he said, smiling.

“Do you know it now?”

“Just wait.”

“Now?”

“Wait for it ...”

Some in the crowd solved a few of the puzzles before on-screen Hoover could.

“Melbourne, Australia! You suck, Ben!”

“Stop buying vowels!”

And when on-screen Hoover sat mute in front of a “Food and Drink” puzzle that was clearly “Singapore Sling,” his friends harassed real-life Hoover.

“I don’t know what that is!” he shouted to everyone.

“IT’S A DRINK!”

“Somebody get that man a Singapore Sling,” a woman yelled.

Before the episode aired, I chatted with Kate Hoover, Ben’s wife of six years who is pregnant with their first child.

“I’m actually more nervous about tonight than I was (in L.A.),” she said.

She and Ben’s friends Nick Anselm and Sharif Hamouda were audience members during filming in March and had a cameo toward the end of the show. They had watched five episodes of “Wheel of Fortune” that day.

In one episode, there was a man who was incredibly nervous.

He was sweating. His voice was shaky. He laughed and clapped at the wrong moments.

Sajak took the man aside, Kate said, and gave him a pep talk.

“I fell in love with him that day,” she said of the longtime game show host (who makes $12 million a year, according to only somewhat credible sources online!). “I was already in love with ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ but that was so nice of him. My heart was breaking for that guy.”

Her husband, on the other hand, was cool, calm and collected during his episode, even looking a little like a game show host himself at times.

Kind of like Guy Smiley, actually.

Mainly because of the hair.

“My wife is my hairstylist,” he told me earlier on the phone. “I had the world’s highest blowout (that day). My hair is a long-standing joke. (Before I met my wife) I didn’t have the mane I have now.”

Hoover was first introduced to “Wheel of Fortune” at his grandparents’ house.

“I always kind of took to it,” he said of the dinnertime ritual, when they’d watch the show and shout out answers at the screen.

Sadly, his “Wheel of Fortune” grandmother died before she could see him on-screen. And coincidentally, Hoover was at her funeral when he got word in February that he’d been selected for the show.

His other grandmother, though, made sure everyone knew how proud she was of her grandson.

“She’s hosting a watch party at her retirement home,” Hoover said. “She went door to door with fliers to invite people.”

Hoover, who is a regional broker for an insurance firm and works from home, decided to try out for “Wheel” at the urging of his wife and mother-in-law.

“What’s it going to take? I had never really thought about it,” he said of the game show process.

He started Googling, and the rest is history.

On Thursday, the support for the Hoovers was overwhelming.

The crowd booed April and Monica, Hoover’s competitors, whenever either gained an advantage.

And they cheered when April and Monica went bankrupt.

“She’s really nice, I swear,” Hoover said of April during a round of schadenfreude.

When Hoover won a vacation, one young professional got particularly excited and yelled, “HE’S GOING TO THE CAYMAN ISLANDS!”

And he is. With Kate, after the baby is born.

They’re having a boy, by the way.

But don’t ask his name.

“It’s a secret,” Hoover said.

This story was originally published May 26, 2016 at 9:19 PM with the headline "Would a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ loser invite 100 friends to a watch party?."