‘The Amazing Race’ 14: goodbye to nice guys Mike and Mel

The nicest, sweetest and most fun-filled team to grace “The Amazing Race” 14 — the father-son team of clergyman Mel White, 68, and “School of Rock” screenwriter Mike White, 38 — were eliminated last night in the seventh lap of the series.

They had problems finding a taxi at the Phuket, Thailand, airport, and then their cabbie took them to the wrong location. They never recovered from the misdirection.

On the morning after the elimination, the two talked about their experiences and how they have remained friends with the rest of the contestants.

Q: You were the sweetest, nicest couple. I was so sorry to see you go. Can you guys adopt me?

Mel: Yes, give us a couple of days to work it out! It’s surprising to see how many people watching would comment: “We are tired of the angry people and really glad for you to have fun.” I think most reality shows think the angry people are the good people, they bring in the audience. But, man, people really liked the fun times we had.

Q: You have such a warm and wonderful relationship. Have you always had a really strong bond?

Mike: It’s all for the cameras!

Mel: From the beginning, Michael was smarter than I was, so from the time he was 8 and 9, he was making movies and I was watching them. We had a lot of conversations over the years that segued into this.

Q: Did you both do a lot of training before the race?

Mike: We both did. We knew it was going to be physically strenuous, but that was fun. The truth was we were late to the party: We only knew we were going a couple of weeks before we left, so we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare but it was fun — I felt like I was “Rocky.” There was a montage of me doing push-ups and running sprints on the treadmills.

Mel: I got a trainer at the Y to work with me every day so that really helped.

Q: Did you have a favorite location?

Mike: I hadn’t been to any of the places except for Switzerland, and I must say India was so cool. It was a memorable leg for us and it was so unreal. I loved Jaipur; I would go back there in a second.

Q: You had transportation problems last night, which put you behind.

Mike: Yeah. I was hoping there would be more sort of self-driving because the legs we got to drive ourselves we did a lot better. There is always an element of luck and we had really good luck with cab drivers, but this time you live by the sword and die by the sword.

Q: Were you close with the rest of the teams?

Mike: You spend a lot of time with the teams.

Mel: We liked them all — are you going to talk about the reunion?.

Mike: We had a big viewing party about two weeks ago where all the teams flew out. I hired a company to do a race for us. It was like five hours where we raced around L.A. Steve and Linda, the couple from West Virginia, won. I teamed with former winners B.J. and Tyler, the hippies that won one of the seasons.

– Susan King, Los Angeles Times staff writer

[Photos: CBS]

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30, 2009 at 2:00 pm by Susan King and is filed under Amazing Race, Asia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.