Strong as the Wall

by Chip Colandreo

The Gold family was stuck together. For days.

They could barely leave their rooms. Contact with outsiders was all but prohibited as a precaution. Going out to eat was way more trouble than it was worth. Unable to attend in person, the Golds even streamed religious services from the Congregation of Reform Judaism over the internet.

Sound familiar? It might remind you of the COVID bubble, but the Golds were doing quarantine long before it was a global phenomenon.

This was the game-show bubble in September 2018 – during Yom Kippur, in fact. Dr. Robert Gold, his wife Gail, son Dr. Peter Gold, and Gail’s parents were all holed up in a Los Angeles hotel waiting for their turn on the hit NBC game show, The Wall.

“It was actually really stressful,” Peter recalls of the preamble to his appearance on The Wall with his dad. “The rules about being on a game show in California are surprisingly strict to prevent any kind of cheating. A bunch of contestants for the show were in the hotel, but they wouldn’t tell any of us when we were actually going to be on. We just had to wait – several days, in our case – until they told us to report to the studio.”

Most game-show contestants audition on a whim and hope for the best, but producers for The Wall – a mash-up of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Deal or No Deal, and the old The Price is Right mini-game Plinko – actually reached out to Peter. They knew he had been shot in New Orleans, Louisiana, back in 2015 while trying to prevent an assault. They knew he’d survived to start (with seven of his college and med-school friends) Strong City, a nonprofit foundation determined to give at-risk kids the support they needed to avoid the path of Peter’s shooter, a life of violence and crime. And they knew he was a dynamic young man with a heck of a story to tell.

“They sent me an email, and at first I thought it was a scam,” says Peter.”

“You told your sister about it, and she reached out to me,” interjects Dr. Robert Gold, a major fan of the show and a pediatric ophthalmologist who’s been practicing in Orlando for 34 years.

The father-and-son physicians responded to the inquiry and survived a lengthy casting process to earn their spot on the elaborate stage of the high-energy show (it’s actually the same stage used for the singing-competition program The Voice).

That, as you can imagine, is where the real fun began.

The Wall presents contestants with trivia questions and then drops colored spheres on the wall itself through a series of pegs to randomly land in slots of different monetary value. Get the question right, the balls turn green, and the amounts where they land add to your total. Answer the questions wrong, however, and the balls turn a dangerous shade of red and subtract from your winnings. It’s dramatic stuff, made even more significant by the affirmations shared between each pair of contestants.

At a key moment in the show, after players exchange a poignant pep talk, one contestant (Robert, in this case) is locked away in an isolation booth while the other makes decisions about how many balls to play for each of the progressively-harder questions posed only to the sequestered partner. The player in isolation has no idea if he or she is getting the questions right or whether the balls are falling in their favor. If everything goes well, the on-stage player could rack up millions of dollars in potential winnings. If too many answers are wrong and/or luck is not on the team’s side, well...

“Being in that isolation room was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had in my life – and I operate on people’s eyes for a living!” laughs Robert. “Your mind just goes blank, and those questions were tough.”

“He aced the first round of three questions,” says Peter, but we just had such bad luck with the green balls that came down. We didn’t win much. I knew the next round of three questions was going to be tough, and we didn’t have much money in the bank.”

Sure enough, Robert’s final three questions were mercilessly difficult, and when the balls turned red, they found high-value slots that brought the Golds’ winnings down to a big, fat $0. There was still hope, though.

With no knowledge of the situation on stage, the sequestered player is given a choice. He can take a guaranteed amount of money based on the team’s performance together at the very beginning of the show – no less than $35,000 in Robert and Peter’s case. Or, the player in isolation can tear up that offer and gamble that his partner fared better – sometimes much better – on the wall.

“I’d told Peter to be aggressive, so I knew that’s what he would do,” says Robert. “We were on this show to raise awareness for Strong City and to hopefully win a lot of money for it, too, so I had to take a chance.”

Robert ripped up the $35,000 offer and was dismissed from the booth to rejoin his son on stage and learn their fate. The players once again reaffirmed their love and respect for each other. Peter and Robert shared how their bond had grown deeper and stronger after Peter’s shooting. It was a touching sentiment echoed by Gail and Peter’s grandparents in the audience.

The moment of truth finally came, though, and each of the Doctors Gold had a confession to make. Robert admitted that he’d passed on the guaranteed sum, and Peter regretfully reported that The Wall had left them with nothing to show for their efforts. Despite the disappointment, the Golds walked off the stage with their heads held high.

“If one person saw us on the show and decided to donate money to Strong City,” says Robert, “then it was all worth it.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

The Golds’ episode of The Wall didn’t air until Memorial Day weekend of 2020, an agonizing year-and-a-half after their filming during which Peter and Robert were contractually forbidden from telling anyone how they did on the show. Within hours of the airing, though, Peter reports visits to MyStrongCity.org were up and donations were rolling in. Later in May, Peter even appeared for a second time on the TODAY show to talk about his experience on The Wall and update the country about Strong City’s continuing success. Verizon Wireless even donated $10,000 to support the nonprofit’s inner-city COVID-19 initiatives.

“That’s why we did the show,” says Peter, who is finishing his residency in orthopedic surgery as the chief resident at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He’s also recently engaged to Chelsea Leader Fuller, though their August wedding plans were put on hold by the pandemic. “We wanted to tell the story of Strong City, and we did.”

They didn’t walk away with millions of dollars, but the Golds did win a few million more hearts who will help Peter and his friends at Strong City change the world, one child at a time.