Magician Joe Dorenbos only made it to third place on season 11 of “America’s Got Talent” but he could well win the first season of the spin-off “AGT: The Champions.” Season 11 winner singer Grace VanderWaal took a pass on appearing but the second-place finishers, the mind-reading act The Clairvoyants, competed. They didn’t make the cut for the final. Dorenbos got here by being chosen as one of the two wild cards; 2017 “AGT” champ singing ventriloquist Daric Lynne Farmer is the other.
Watch him perform his magic trick in the video above and then vote in the poll below as to which of the 12 acts you want to win the first season of “AGT: The Champions.” And be sure to sound off with your thoughts on the show and who did (and didn’t) make the final..
In our live blog of the “AGT” finale, we had this to say about Joe’s act: “He used the judges as his assistants in a trick that anticipated the correct random selections of each judge. That was pretty cool, but the real clincher was when he used all four of those selections as callbacks to his past performances on the show where each of those judges had previously selected the same exact phrases that they randomly chose today. Simon told Jon that he blew the roof off with this trick and Howie emphasized how great of a wild card Jon turned out to be.”
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Dorenbos was still an active football player when he appeared on “AGT” in 2016. Life took a dramatic turn in 2017 when he was diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm that required immediate surgery. That meant the end of his playing days after 11 seasons.
Dorenbos has turned his childhood passion for magic into a new way of staying in the limelight. His showmanship coupled with his dexterity make him one to watch. In the trick that he performs in Monday’s episode, he turns a simple game of tic-tac-toe into an impressive delay of magicianship.
