Andrew Savage, veteran of the spectacular Survivor: Pearl Islands and leader of the ill-fated Morgan tribe, reclines on a bed in my cabana, in Cambodia, with an oscillating fan blowing against his sweat-covered brow. This is a thing that is happening. When I ask Savage how he’s feeling, he responds with one word: “Anxious.” He’s not alone. I’m sitting across from a Survivor legend, someone that my college-aged self would never believe in a million years he would ever meet, and someone that my present self never believed would play Survivor again. And yet, here we are, on the eve of Second Chance. Anxiety indeed. It’s almost twelve years exactly since Savage first set sail on Survivor, according to the man himself. He tells me that certain aspects of the experience remain just the same now as they were back then. (“The weather,” he says. “It smells like Survivor.”) But much has changed, too. “This is different,” he tells me. “It’s a different vibe. Different people. This is really serious.” Savage and the other players are on lockdown and cannot speak with one another until the game begins, but when he looks at the cast, on body language alone, he hears two words loud and clear: “Game on.” “These 19 folks are serious, serious contestants,” he says. “We all love Survivor, and it’s not often in your life that your dream materializes before you, when it’s a real long shot. I think everyone realizes that and seizes that notion, and they’re going to deliver.” Savage speaks a lot about the game as it is now versus the game as it was then, in 2003, when he competed against Rupert the pirate and Johnny Fairplay the piss-ant in the hot heat of Panama. “Back then, you hit the beach, you make a shelter, you find a water source, and you let the game come to you,” he recalls. “You talk to some folks. You see if you have some commonalities there. You see if I like someone or don’t like someone. That’s not the deal anymore.” What’s the new deal, then? For Savage, it’s about “figuring out how to be a few steps ahead of everyone, being vigilant about whether things are going your way or not, where the blindside is coming from, and having a poker face. I am hyper aware of that. I realize that the first hour to two hours on that beach could lay the foundation for how far you go in this game.” “You have to grab the game,” he says. “You have to lasso it, wrestle it down, almost beat it into submission, and see where the cards fall.” He talks a passionate game, for a man twelve years removed from Survivor. It’s captivating, listening to his perspective on how the play style has evolved. And yet, as I look at Savage, sitting on the bed, his back against the wall, legs stretched out (seriously, at 51 years young, the man is still “very fit, mentally and physically,” by his own diagnosis and obviously mine), I see ghosts in his eyes. Somewhere in his gaze, I can see the Pearl Islands. When I ask him if he’s reflective about his first season, given his comment on how it’s almost twelve years to the day since he first began his Survivor adventure, he shakes his head. “I’ve moved on,” he insists. Moments later, we’re talking about Lillian Morris and Ryan Shoulders, and for a few minutes at least, we’ve moved back to the past. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Outwit, Outplay, Outcast

The first nine days of Survivor: Pearl Islands were not pleasant for Andrew Savage. In little more than a week, Savage, 39 at the time, wearing a weather-torn suit-and-tie, participated in five challenges — two for reward, three for immunity — and lost them all, costing his tribe three players in the process. Morgan’s first casualty: Nicole Delma. Not much drama there; she tried to stir up some trouble with outspoken Tijuana Bradley, and lost her flame for it. The next two boots? That’s where the drama kicks in: “Skinny” Ryan Shoulders and boy scout leader Lillian Morris, the two obvious outcasts on the Morgan tribe, and two people that Savage, by his own admission, ignored. “Lill was someone that, for me, and this was my bad, someone I could completely overlook,” he tells me. “Someone who is just completely under the radar, a hard-worker with a great work ethic at camp. She kept a fire going, which is unbelievably difficult in the rainy season of Pearl Islands. Other than that? Just kind of absent. It’s totally my bad to not have her on my radar.” As for Skinny Ryan, Savage recalls calling out the tall Tennessee produce clerk at their first Tribal Council. “Probst asked me, ‘Savage, did everyone carry their weight in that challenge?’ And I said, ‘No!’ I told the truth about Skinny Ryan, and he looked gassed,” he says. “I wasn’t mean to Skinny Ryan, but — and he was a nice kid — I didn’t spend a lot of time with him. I didn’t think I would see him again.” Savage was wrong. He saw both Ryan and Lill again on Day 19, when Survivor revealed one of its most controversial twists up to that point, and still one of the most controversial twists to date: The Outcasts, a tribe consisting of the six people already voted out, fighting for a second chance to return to Survivor. Two of the Outcasts won their way back into the game, and one of them was Lill, who turned her back on her former Morgans and joined forces with the Drake tribe to oust Savage from the game. Savage, dressed in his shredded suit, found himself standing just outside the jury stage, stranded on the wrong side of the gate, like the Jailbreak challenge that cost him his game. In the twelve years since his Survivor swan song, Savage says he’s learned a thing or two about what went wrong. “What I learned from the Outcast twist is that you have to treat everyone with respect,” he says. “You have to tap into that human element and be a better person. I’m going to do that. I’m not going to ignore the folks who are on the short list to be the first ones out.” He says he’s also learned to step away from leadership, at least in an overt capacity. “I don’t want that role again,” he tells me. “Look at the guys on this season. They’re total studs. My thought is to let them take the lead. No one’s going to come up to me on my tribe, I think, and say, ‘Savage, you’re the guy,’ like on Pearl Islands. I’m going to do what I do, which is lead by example.” Above all else, Savage says he’s learned to expect the unexpected — and in the case of Second Chance, that means preparing for the possibility of another Outcast twist. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Shame on me,” he says. “With this cast, I would throw everything out there, including the kitchen sink.” In short, even though Savage says he’s moved on from Pearl Islands, it sounds like he’s held onto some of his season’s old ghosts, like wrecked ships in a bottle, to look upon if the situation in Cambodia calls for it. What he’s not as interested in, according to what he tells me, is looking too hard at the one person who made it out of the Pearl Islands without any ghosts to speak of. ON THE NEXT PAGE: The Savage Plan

Only one person has ever won Survivor twice: Sandra Diaz-Twine, the sharp-tongued mother of two armed with an as-yet unbeatable philosophy: “As long as it ain’t me.” Not only did Diaz-Twine emerge as the winner of Savage’s first season, she also came out on top in Survivor: Heroes vs Villains, the show’s second full-fledged all-stars season, and easily one of the most competitive editions of the show. Winning once is difficult enough, but winning a second time, against a field of veterans? That’s some serious business — but it’s not business that Savage feels he can emulate, at least not with Sandra’s style. When I ask him if there’s anything from Sandra’s two wins that he can apply to his own game, Savage gets straight to the point: “No. To be completely honest, no.” “Her gameplay, that’s who Sandra is,” he says. “She’s mouthy, has good work ethic at camp, but at the end of the day, she goes to Tribal and says, ‘As long as it’s not my name on that parchment, I don’t care.’ She’s kind of under the radar. She sucks in challenges. That’s just not me.” Savage does not want to be seen as a leader this season, but he also feels that “it’s virtually impossible” to play an under-the-radar game like Sandra. “I respect her work ethic,” he continues. “She’s fiery. Don’t ever cross her. She will let you have it, and I respect that about her — but she’s a completely different person. There’s not a lot I can learn from her.” But Savage says he’s learned a lot about his upcoming opponents. He tells me that in the weeks leading up to Second Chance, he spent much of his time researching the prospective players, through a variety of means, including studying Survivor Wiki pages. He says he wants to give everyone a fair shake, but through his research, he has identified some players that worry him — like Stephen Fishbach, for one. Savage says Fishbach’s Wiki page, which describes the Tocantins runner-up as “strategic and devious,” sets off some alarms. “He can blindside people and they’ll never see it coming,” Savage says, paraphrasing what he recalls of the info on Fishbach, off the top of his head. “I read that, and I haven’t said one word to Stephen, but I’m thinking, ‘Dude, okay! If that’s the way you roll, that’s the way you roll!'” Savage has similar feelings toward Survivor: Cagayan third-place finisher Kass McQuillen, better known as Chaos Kass due to the havoc she wreaked upon her cast mates, three of whom are also on Second Chance. “We have some commonalities. She’s a lawyer, I’m a lawyer. I thought she made great television,” says Savage. “But damn, she stabbed every single alliance in the back. So I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not dumb. She has an uphill battle. Can she convince me that she can be trusted? I honestly don’t know if she can.” Savage’s assessment of Stephen and Kass plays through my mind as I watch all three of them row up to the marooning wearing Bayon buffs. This should be interesting, I’m thinking, given what Stephen and Kass have to say about Savage as well. We’ll get there. For now, the point is, while Savage does not feel he can play Sandra’s game, he does feel he can play his own game, but better this time. He admits that there could be some future Lillians and Skinny Ryans in the Second Chance cast (“That is a fear of mine”), but he’s mostly focused on finding partners who have “a streak of loyalty and honesty and is, at some stage, a good person. I want to seek them out — for the first stage of the game, at least.” The people who don’t have that streak of loyalty and honesty? Savage wants to keep them on his radar, too. “The other 19 folks, a couple of them have that Lill ability, where they’re kind of just… not there,” he says. “I have to spend time with them. I can’t discount them. I can’t ignore them. My wife told me that, too. ‘Don’t just hang with the boys you would in real life — with Joe and Terry and those guys. It’s the other folks who will come back and bite you.'” Despite his wife’s advice, Savage has already spent some hang time with Terry — and it was one of the most turbulent nights of his life. ON THE FINAL PAGE: One More Shot