Tom selleck was a young contestant on ‘the dating game’ — and wasn't chosen! | members only access

In the commercial, my character — excuse me, I didn’t think in those terms back then — the guy in the basketball game fakes to the right, shifts the ball to his left hand, leaves his

defender with his jockstrap on the floor, drives to the basket, and stuffs the ball with his left hand. That was easy. I was undeniably well qualified. Even after an insane number of takes,

I proudly delivered. Our basketball season had just ended, and I was in basketball shape. The company moved to the set in the locker room. I hadn’t considered that this was “the money shot”

in the commercial, but it was. In the scene, I am sitting in front of my locker, getting slapped on the back (this was before the high-five cliché) and ecstatically chugalugging a delicious

Pepsi. Honestly, I was unprepared for all the repetition. And the director didn’t bother to explain why I had to do the scene over and over. In hindsight, I’m sure he thought, _Why bother to

explain to this obviously untrained refugee from USC basketball when he won’t have a clue anyway?_ I did my best to act ecstatically each and every time, consuming a whole lot of Pepsi.

Then the director came over to me, and of course I thought I had done something wrong. He said to me that “the client” thought the color of the real Pepsi was photographing too dark, and we

would have to start over. My stomach was more than full. But hey, it wasn’t my fault, and I was getting paid. So we began again. Once they’d watered down the Pepsi, it tasted like something

that came out of the north end of a southbound cow. The truth is, I had always preferred Pepsi to Coke. Never again. For some bizarre reason, they asked me back for the nighttime edition of 

_The Dating Game_, where the winners got to go on fancier dates. And for some bizarre reason, I went back. I was still terrified, I still wasn’t funny, and I lost again. At that time of

life, some guys will do anything to impress a girl. Any girl. I know I would have. I guess going on _The Dating Game_ was a tiny prestige kind of thing, something the girls might notice.

Like my doing a commercial. I guess I liked it when someone said, “Oh, he’s an actor.” I wasn’t really an actor. It was just something that made me stand out a little, something girls might

notice. The whole thing is stunning when you think about it. A kid goes on _The Dating Game_ and, through the machinations of a clever agent, two of the biggest studios in Hollywood each

think the other is interested in him. This kid, who has no real acting experience and no real desire to become an actor, ends up bullshitting with the president of 20th Century-Fox and is

promptly invited into the studio’s New Talent program. And what seals the deal is college basketball. Go figure . . . You never know. _From You Never Know by Tom Selleck. Copyright © 2024 by

Thomas Selleck. Excerpted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts have been edited for length._