by Lange, Artie
It’s all still a mystery to me, but that’s Indiana for you. Here’s something that didn’t surprise me about Indiana when I found it out: in the southernmost part of the state they’re real big on the KKK; basically Southern Indiana is the motherland of the modern Klan. I wanted someone to take me to a meeting during my time at the Super Bowl and even asked for a volunteer during our live broadcast. I don’t want to be a member and I don’t agree with the Klan’s worldview, as interesting as it is, I just wanted to get a taste of what went down at a meeting. We’re all human beings, but I find the ones that are that much different from me really interesting. Don’t judge me. Here’s what happened when I solicited audience members at the Super Bowl broadcast to take me to a KKK meeting. . . .
“So if anyone out there wants to take me, I just want to see a pure white bitch who is uncorrupted,” I said. I pointed to a real white Midwestern guy in the audience. “Would you take me? They’d let you in no problem.”
“I’ve only been to two,” he said, dead serious, while everyone laughed.
“What? Why’d you stop?”
“It was just, whatever,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said, “because what I’m thinking is horrible! Were you disappointed? Did you expect lynching ropes hanging from the ceiling? Did you expect them to burn Bill Cosby alive? Were you upset with the food?”
The kid was on camera, and he started to look nervous, like he might lose his job if he kept talking, so I let it go. As much as I love busting balls, I’ve come to realize that putting your job in jeopardy to do so isn’t as cool as I used to think it was.
Anyway, the Celebrity Beach Bowl was a great time. Joe Montana was the quarterback on my team, our coach was Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, and Maria Menounos was on my team along with a few others. Nick DiPaolo was on the other team along with Snoop Dogg and David Arquette and Deion Sanders and Kate Upton. Nick and I were the first ones in the locker room that day, so he got to witness the embarrassing moment when I realized they didn’t have a shirt that could fit me. When they’d asked me for my size before the event I told them in all seriousness that I was “size Enormous” and if they had any question about what that meant they should measure the biggest jersey they had and double it because double XL wasn’t going to cut it. They must have thought I was kidding and probably figured that since I was a celebrity I must be of normal human proportions. Clearly they weren’t familiar with my body of work.
The shirt they gave me was tighter than any condom I have ever worn. I could barely breathe, let alone think about running. I could probably throw and if the ball were perfectly aimed, I could probably catch it, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. I was not going to be the go-to man in the clutch with that thing on, that’s for sure. I asked the intern handing out the shirts what size he’d given me and he told me that it was the biggest they had. I don’t give a shit what anyone says, those jerseys were tiny. In the end I gave my extra one to David Arquette, who is normal-sized (and a really nice guy), because his was too tight. If Arquette’s was tight, mine was a torture device. And I was screwed because contractually we had to wear these things, plus DirecTV had a deal with Reebok, so all of us had to wear the same bright yellow sneakers. Fueled by shame, I forced my way into my shirt, a shirt that was so tight I couldn’t lean over far enough to tie my new shoes. After a few minutes of uselessly diving at my feet, desperate as a midget trying to order a drink in a crowded bar, much to Nick’s amusement, I had to ask one of the LA publicist girls DirecTV had hired to run this thing for help.
The girl was such an LA cliché that it’s amazing she even exists in real life. “Is there something wrong with your shoes?” she asked with all the warmth of a frozen tuna. “Are they too small?”
“No, that’s not the problem,” I said. “They fit.”
“So what is it, then?”
“Well, I can’t get them on because my shirt is too tight and I can’t reach my feet, so what I need is someone to put my shoes on. Can you help me tie my shoes?”
She looked at me in abject horror, as if if I’d just gutted a kitten right in front of her. “Ohhh, okay,” she said. It seemed like she was thinking of a solution. “Yeah,” she said, staring at me through a wave of condescension. “That’s not my problem.” And then she turned and walked away. At that moment I wanted to strangle her.
By this time the rest of the participants in the Bowl had filed in, including Deion Sanders, who is just such a great guy all around, and Joe Montana, who confirmed my perception that he’s a nerdy, ultrawhite dumb dummy. I got all the proof I needed watching him interacting with the black guys, and seeing how he and Deion talked. It only took two minutes to confirm everything I already knew about Joe Montana: the guy had no idea what Deion was talking about (and he was a terrible faker). I even asked Deion about it later and he said that he never really “got” Joe Montana but somehow they knew how to relate as quarterback and receiver. There’s a thing that players talk about that they call “football IQ,” which means that a guy is dumb as a rock in real life but get him on a football field and he’s a genius. Joe Montana is one of those. Think about it: the guy is a Hall-of-Famer, he’s still alive and functioning, but why hasn’t he been a commentator anywhere on any network, ever? Want to know why? I’ll tell you—because he’s dumb.
Everybody else in the locker room was excited to see Joe except for me. This had nothing to do with his regular IQ or his football IQ, it’s much simpler than that. The guy was a graceful, incredible quarterback in his day, but I never saw it that way. He was the guy who regularly ruined my bets and made me lose. By my count, he’s cost me around $24,000 over the course of his career, so basically I hate the motherfucker. It’s not something I can hide, and just then I realized how much it sucked that he was going to be the guy ordering me to run patterns and telling me where to set up for the play. This made the fact that I still couldn’t get my fucking shoes on just that much worse.
Great friend that he is, Nick might have called me every week when I was on the verge of ending it all, but the shoes were a bridge too far. Why, I have no idea—probably because he thought it was funny.
“I’m not putting your shoes on. That’s gay,” he said. “Just don’t wear any. Save yourself the dishonor of having another man put your shoes on for you. It’s disgraceful.”
“Thanks, Nick.”
I wasn’t going to ask Deion Sanders, and fuck Montana, I’d rather play barefoot, but I kept thinking that there had to be someone in the locker room that would help me out and not make a scene out of it. I kept looking around for the right person and the right moment. It felt like an hour went by before I saw what might be my only hope: Neil Patrick Harris. Not only is he gay, meaning he’d be sensitive to my predicament (unlike a callous asshole like Nick), but he’s also a big Stern fan and he’d read my book.
Neil came over and gave me a big hug and told me he was glad I’d gotten myself together and was doing well. He was a class act; he continued to make small talk, and I did too, absentmindedly. That’s because I was debating whether or not to ask Neil Patrick Harris to help me tie my shoes. This was a real problem. I mean it, this was an issue. I was also concerned that Neil might tie the laces in such a way, with too much of a knot, that they would look really gay. I decided in the end that I just couldn’t risk it, so I didn’t ask him. No fault of his—it was definitely me—I was just too worried about the final product.
That’s when Snoop Dogg arrived and I realized that the coolest thing to do in this situation was ask Snoop Dogg to help me with my sneakers. I didn’t think he’d actually do it, but it would look good if anyone else happened to see. And I already knew he was good with sneakers because on Stern he’d told us on the air how he liked to use them to beat his hoes in the head to keep them in line. The guy has millions but says he still keeps hoes—and beats them with sneakers. I think that’s what they mean when they talk about “keeping it real.”
In the end I zeroed in on David Arquette because Snoop spent every free minute promoting whatever his new project was—the guy is seriously the greatest businessman I’ve ever seen. Anyway, I’d given David my extra jersey, so technically he owed me one, but that wasn’t the real reason. He’s also just such a nice guy, but you know what, he should be after all the money I would guess he got from Courteney Cox. So in the end David Arquette got my shoes on and tied them for me and God bless him for it. We had Joe Manganiello from True Blood on our team, and I don’t watch that show, so I didn’t know who he was but since he was six foot nine, really fit, good-looking, and wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers hat, I figured he was a pro player. We also had a black guy who I thought was a player, but it turned out that he was the night correspondent on ESPN or wherever. There were a couple of smoking-hot chicks on our team too: Erin Andrews, the ESPN correspondent who got videoed naked through the peephole of her hotel room door by some creep, and my good friend Maria Menounos.
Before we get to the game, I need to take a moment to tell you what happened when Neil Patrick Harris came into the locker room. He did that thing that gay guys sometimes do when they hang out with a bunch of straight guys: he tried to adjust for the occasion. It’s just the worst when gay guys do that, and I’m not being biased—it’s equally horrible when straight guys try to adjust to the gay thing. But that’s what he did. There were people handing out bags with our jerseys and sneakers in them, but they weren’t right there to meet us, so when Joe Manganiello walked in he asked, out loud to no one at all, where he had to go to get his gear. And here’s what Neil Patrick Harris said: “There’s a gaggle of people back there handing out stuff.” A gaggle. A gaggle? That word means a noisy, disorderly crowd, and as much as it’s an accurate way to describe a busy locker room, I’m pretty fucking sure that this was the first time the word “gaggle” was ever uttered in a football locker room by a player. I’d never heard a human being say the word in a sports setting until then, but who knows, maybe gaggle is trending right now in Super Bowl tweets.
Maybe Neil thought it was tough talk, or maybe he forgot where he was and thought this was an all-gay football-themed cocktail party. Maybe he was texting Beyoncé and got confused and spoke out loud. I don’t know. I do know that it turned heads. Deion Sanders looked up from his phone when he heard that and just shook his head, confused, before looking down again. It made me think of Siegfried and Roy and their white tigers. I mean white tigers are tigers, one of the toughest motherfuckers out there, and those white ones are rare, so they’ve got to be even tougher, right? They’re like the Jim Browns and Archie Bunkers of the jungle. What do you think it was like for them to go from being the king of the jungle, where they can fuck any female tiger they want, eat any antelope, or just kill the shit out of some animal for the fuck of it, to working in a circus? They’re walking around like champs, the rulers of the jungle, one day, and the next they’re captured and taken someplace where they don’t get fed until they sit on blocks like poodles. Plus they have to live with two gay guys! It’s no wonder someone got hurt. I just can’t believe it didn’t happen sooner.
Anyway, the field we played on looked like your average arena football field, about the size of a hockey rink, just enormous and filled with sand. The crowd was pretty much all people just like me—frustrated athletes, drunks, and others who wish they could play, most of them thinking that if they could play they’d do it better. Whoever they were there to see, enough of them started chanting my name as we walked out. There I was taking the field alongside Joe Montana, one of the winningest quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame, but all you could hear was a mob of drunken fools shouting, “ART-AY!” Montana looked over at me like he didn’t even know I was Artie or that they were even saying Artie (this suspicion would be confirmed a little later). I could barely breathe, my shirt was so tight, so there was no way I could start or even play much. Chris Long and the DirecTV guys told me they’d be sure I got in on defense in a little while. Fine. I sat down on the bench next to the legendary running back Jim Brown, who was eighty-two and definitely there for show, though he could have given a few of us a run for our money. Jim was great; he was waving to everyone and the fans loved him. I was more impressed by Jim than I had been before meeting him, and I was already a fanboy, not just for his athletic career but for his acting. Not many people know how great his film work was for a sports star, which is usually passable at best. If you don’t believe me, watch The Dirty Dozen, which is a classic and one of my favorite movies of all time.
The two of us were benched for most of the game. Jim’s excuse was that he was in his eighties, and mine was being too obese for my jersey. There was an upside to being benched that I wouldn’t trade for the world, and there is a generation of young men that I’m sure will agree. Since we were on the bench and since she didn’t play much, Jim Brown and I enjoyed an eye-level view of Kate Upton’s bouncing ass, mere feet in front of us, for nearly two hours. She was our teammate and was wearing bicycle pants so tight that they were literally painted on. Once I noticed that I didn’t even know the game was happening. I certainly didn’t give a fuck about the score, that’s for sure. I kept looking over at Jim because I didn’t want any warm-blooded heterosexual male within range to miss the show, but I didn’t need to worry, he was right there with me. Anyone who thinks we’re pigs can shut up because the girl was nineteen and perfect, just cheering her team on, jumping around, being free. Not appreciating that would have been a crime against humanity.
Jim and I were on the same page about this, but I couldn’t think of a way to start a conversation with him, because there was a lot I wanted to ask. I couldn’t think of a natural way to launch into asking him if Lee Marvin was as big of an asshole on set as his character was on camera in The Dirty Dozen. I was still debating my opening line when Jim waved me into a huddle and leaned in as if he intended to educate me on the finer points of the last play. When I got close enough, he acted as if we were talking then casually pointed at Kate Upton’s ass and said, “I’d like some of that, huh?” Then he gave me a high five! It was amazing. That was the only interaction we had, and frankly I don’t think it could have been any better.
By the second half of the game my team was down by seven points and that’s when Chris Crane, Chris Long, and Jim Crittenden from DirecTV came over and told me that I had to play because the whole point of them paying to have me there was to promote the Nick and Artie Show as much as possible, so obviously they wanted both Nick and Artie to play in the game. I had to get over the jersey issue just as our coach, Cam Newton, had to get over the fact that he hadn’t thought he had to play me. I can’t say for sure, but I got the feeling he took me for disabled.
“All right, Artie, we’ll get you in,” Cam said. “You’re going to go out there and you’ll hike the ball to Joe Montana, okay?”
“I don’t want to play center,” I said. “I want to play quarterback. If I’m gonna play, I’m gonna play quarterback.”
“Well, you can’t do that,” Cam said, “because Joe Montana is quarterback.”
“I know that, but I want to play quarterback. And that’s what I’m going to play.”
We were at a crucial turning point in the game; we were driving and needed to score and time wasn’t on our side. Cam didn’t get what the fuck I was thinking, which was very simple: I wanted to see just how much arrogance I could get away with.
“Listen, I don’t understand,” Cam said, turning around, looking for help, from anyone.
“The DirecTV guys told you to put me in, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re all getting paid here.”
“And they’re paying you. And I’m not playing unless I can play quarterback, which means you have a problem.”
At that point the publicist girl from the locker room came over to try to fix the situation. “Artie, we really want you to get in there—everyone does! Look at all these people rooting for you! And we know you want to play quarterbac
k, but I don’t know if that’s possible, because Joe Montana—”
I can’t tell you how much joy it gave me to be able to say the next words that came out of my mouth, because they were the same words that had pissed me off so badly earlier in the day: “Yeah, I know that. But you know what? That’s kind of not my problem.”
Payback time, bitch! Whatever. I’m sure that broad will become a show runner on Modern Family or some sitcom I’ll have my sights set on in the future and she’ll take even greater joy in turning me down than I did in getting her back.
The guys on my team all started laughing when they heard that. “You motherfucker,” one of them said, laughing.
After the girl had a brief conference with Chris and Jim from DirecTV one of them walked over to Joe Montana and told him that Artie was going to come in as quarterback for a few plays.
“Who’s Artie?” Joe asked. Then he looked at me. “This guy?” He was dumbfounded. “Can you even play? . . . Can you throw?”
I knew what he was thinking, because I looked like a Make-A-Wish guy in my too-tight jersey. “Yeah, man, I can play,” I said.