Contests…love ’em, hate ’em, can’t live without ’em?
The SCORE Newcomer of the Year contest wasn't even a contest when Rocki Roads became the first winner in 1996.
One of the unintended consequences of my blog this past week (“Shocking news from the SCORELAND Blog poll…or am I the only one who’s shocked?”) was a heated side conversation about comparing one girl to another. It started when Frankie said that so and so and so and so were much hotter than so and so, to which Jenna Valentine replied, “You guys shouldn’t say other girls are hotter than others. It’s not like they can’t read this and don’t have feelings.” And then Arianna Sinn chimed in with, “They can’t understand that this is not a competition between us.” And it really isn’t.
But then there’s the dicey issue of poll questions like the one we asked last week about your picks so far for 2010 Newcomer of the Year, and The Top 100 of the Decade contest that was held at SCORELAND and the annual Newcomer and Model of the Year contests in SCORE and Voluptuous. Which, at heart, are competitions between models.
The SCORE Newcomer of the Year contest started in 1997 and came about entirely by accident. The editor at the time ran a pictorial showing the top newcomers of 1996, and before he knew it, he was getting hundreds of letters with votes he had never asked for. The winner of that non-contest was Rocki Roads (who, incredibly, beat out Linsey Dawn McKenzie). Since then, the official Newcomer of the Year contest has been a mainstay of SCORE (we added Model of the Year in 2001).
Some models, like Crystal Gunns, really love the awards contests.
Judging by the thousands and thousands of votes we get (and the fact that the awards issue is always one of our best-sellers of the year), most of you like the awards contests. Most models do, too. Crystal Gunns actively campaigned for 2007 Model of the Year and was thrilled when she did win.
But there’s a flip side to this, too. Some people ask, “How come everything has to be a competition? Why do we have to compare one girl to another?”
“I hate the contests,” Cherry Brady told me the other day. Cherry had the misfortune of coming along in 2003, the greatest year ever for Voluptuous newcomers. In most other years, she might have won…and maybe she wouldn’t hate the contests so much! 🙂
There are a lot of different aspects to this thorny debate. I love the awards. Elliot James doesn’t like them. I think they’re a way to celebrate our best girls. But, of course, there can be only one winner, so how do the runners-up feel? And how about the girls who aren’t even nominated? How do they feel?
Actually, I want to know how you feel. The SCORE and Voluptuous awards: Should we keep them or do away with them?