Five Times Athletes Guest-Starred on a Sitcom and Couldn’t Act to Save Their Lives
When a professional athlete is the special guest star of a sitcom, it’s almost always a strikeout/fumble/missed shot. Some sports fans might be so charmed by a player’s athletic prowess that they can overlook it, but a swole dude awkwardly waiting for his cue and then reciting a line with a delivery more wooden than a baseball bat is usually unwatchable.
You can find examples of this in almost every long-running sitcom, but these are five of the most egregious…
Bill Buckner on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
The most infamous moment of first baseman Bill Buckner’s baseball career was when a ground ball went through his legs during a pivotal moment of the 1986 World Series. That moment became the central joke in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm Buckner guest-starred in: He misses a couple of things Larry tosses to him, but at the end, he catches a baby — thereby totally redeeming himself (Larry David later revealed that Buckner actually missed the baby in an earlier version of the script).
While you have to appreciate what a good sport Buckner was to appear in an episode based around his biggest career failure, Curb Your Enthusiasm was a largely improvised show, so even experienced actors sometimes struggled to keep up (case in point: Elizabeth Banks). In Buckner’s scenes, he just stands there as brilliant improvisers like Susie Essman scream hilarious things at him, only to feebly respond with a stilted, obviously-scripted line.
Andre Iguodala on ‘Abbott Elementary’
Abbott Elementary is well-known for shoe-horning in famous faces — cough, cough, Bradley Cooper — that make no sense to show up at this random Philadelphia elementary school. In one such instance, Janine (Quinta Brunson) spots Principal Ava (Janelle James) on a date with NBA star Andre Iguodala.
Iguodala’s cameo is only a few seconds long, but when he says, “You must be Jannine,” and “You’re even shorter than Ava said” (a total of 10 words), his delivery is so stiff that you could swear he’s reading off of cue cards. Also, isn’t Ava supposed to be too cool for Janine? Why is she talking about Janine on her dates?
Keith Hernandez on ‘Seinfeld’
“The Boyfriend” is a fantastic Seinfeld episode in spite of MLB star Keith Hernandez and his cardboard acting. It’s smart, funny television about male friendships, yet in every scene with Hernandez, the typically rapid-fire show is shot with tranquilizers. The way he calls George “chucker,” the way he recounts the spitting incident with Kramer and Newman — it’s all awful. The worst scenes, though, are with just Jerry and him: two terrible actors with no one else there to save them.
Don Drysdale on ‘The Brady Bunch’
When L.A. Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale meets the Brady Bunch, Greg (Barry Williams) becomes baseball-obsessed and decides to neglect everything else in his life, even deciding he now won’t go to college. In the end, it’s Drysdale who talks some sense into Greg in a completely corny, cringy scene complete with awkward pauses and cheesy life lessons. Talk about dry(sdale)!
Evander Holyfield on ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
In a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Christmas episode, Will (Will Smith) goes so overboard with his holiday decorations that he pisses off their neighbor, who just so happens to be boxer Evander Holyfield. Annoyingly, Jeffrey the butler (Joseph Marcell) awkwardly introduces him as “Mr. Evander Holyfield, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world,” even though the entire point of a cameo like this is that the audience is supposed to know who they are already.
Things go off the rails completely when Holyfield has to pretend to know Hilary (Karyn Parsons) and asks why she wasn’t at Bruce Willis’ party and then again when he delivers a line about how tacky the Christmas decorations were. He takes such bizarre pauses during his three sentences of dialogue that you’d swear he just came out of the ring after taking a knockout blow to the head.