Game Show Host Wink Martindale Dies at 91

Wink Martindale, the genial host of such hit game shows as “Gambit” and “Tic-Tac-Dough,” who also did one of the first recorded television interviews with a young Elvis Presley, has died. He was 91.

Martindale died Tuesday at Eisenhower Health in Rancho Mirage, California, according to his publicist Brian Mayes. Martindale had been battling lymphoma for a year.

“He was doing pretty well up until a couple weeks ago,” Mayes said by phone from Nashville.

Martindale wrote in his 2000 memoir “Winking at Life”: “From the day it hit the air, ‘Gambit’ spelled winner, and it taught me a basic tenant of any truly successful game show: KISS! Keep It Simple Stupid.”

“Gambit” debuted on the same day in September 1972 as “The Price is Right” with Bob Barker and “The Joker’s Wild” with Jack Barry. The show had been beating its competition on NBC and ABC for over two years, but a new show debuted in 1975 on NBC called “Wheel of Fortune.” By December 1976, “Gambit” was off the air and “Wheel of Fortune” became an institution that is still going strong today.

Martindale bounced back in 1978 with “Tic-Tac-Dough,” the classic X’s and O’s game on CBS that ran until 1985. He presided over the 88-game winning streak of Navy Lt. Thom McKee, who earned over $300,000 in cash and prizes that included eight cars, three sailboats and 16 vacation trips.

“I love working with contestants, interacting with the audience and to a degree, watching lives change,” Martindale wrote. “Winning a lot of cash can cause that to happen.”

Martindale wrote in his memoir that the question he got asked most often was “Is Wink your real name?” The second was “How did you get into game shows?”

He got his nickname from a childhood friend. Martindale is no relation to University of Michigan defensive coordinator Don Martindale, whose college teammates nicknamed him Wink because of their shared last name.

Born Winston Conrad Martindale on Dec. 4, 1933, in Jackson, Tennessee, he loved radio since childhood and at age 6 would read aloud the contents of advertisements in Life magazine.

Martindale was in the studio, although not working on-air that night, when the first Presley record “That’s All Right” was played on WHBQ on July 8, 1954. He approached fellow DJ Dewey Phillips to ask him and Presley to do a joint interview on Martindale’s TV show “Top Ten Dance Party” in 1956.

Martindale returned to his radio roots in 2012 as host of the nationally syndicated “The 100 Greatest Christmas Hits of All Time.” In 2021, he hosted syndicated program “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”