Long Islander's team eliminated in 'Domino Masters' playoff

Ronkonkoma's Nick Greene and his two Construction Crew teammates were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs on Fox's "Domino Masters" Wednesday night. 

"Yeah, it was tough. They were just far superior talent," Greene, 43, a union carpenter, says of the three other teams that competed on this week’s "Water World” challenge, in which the domino builds and topples required an aquatic theme and had to include chain-reaction crossings over two 4-foot-long water tanks.

Construction Crew's camping-oriented "Family Alaskan Adventure" included dominoes triggering open a full-size cooking kit, launching a full-size kayak whose descent on a track would pull open a tent, and having a domino octopus release ink into one of the two tanks. But the kayak, connected to the other tank, initially did not respond.

"That thing was giving me a problem the whole time," laments Greene, speaking by phone during a break on a construction job in the Bronx. "While we were setting it up, I had a two-by-four holding the kayak back. But once it came time to set up for the topple, I had to put a little chalk in there just to hold it, and every time I started to walk away, it started to slide down a little bit. And then one of the guys [on the team] is, like, 'Use some double-sided tape.' I'm like, 'Dude, if I do that, it's gonna be too strong.' " But with time running out, "I ended up having to have to use the tape."

Ultimately, actor and math author Danica McKellar, one of the judges, declared: "Your construction was beautiful but unfortunately you didn't have as many dominoes on your platforms as the other teams to begin with, and the kayak didn't trigger the water tank, and that was [one of the] criteria."

But Greene says he’s gratified that as he was leaving the set to go home, "The producer comes over, takes me out back, takes his headset off and goes, 'I just want to tell you, there's a lot of people back here, behind the scenes that you don't even see,' " — including fellow carpenters — " 'and they're all pretty upset that you're leaving.' You never see the executive producer. For him to come out and tell me this," Greene marvels, "I thought it was a really nice gesture."