Tom Selleck Was a Young Contestant on ‘The Dating Game’ — and Wasn't Chosen!

I didn’t have a girlfriend. Also, somehow it didn’t seem entirely kosher to me.

I was Bachelor Number 2. As showtime neared, I sat on my stool, getting progressively more terrified. The assistant director took one look at my grim expression and suggested helpfully, “When the revolve turns around, be sure to smile.”

Be sure to smile. Got it!

I was in the dark with the other two contestants. My heart was pounding so hard I could almost hear it. Then Jim Lange’s deep baritone came booming through the studio: “It’s time to meet our three eligible bachelors . . . and heeeere they are!”

The revolve began to turn. As we came around to where I could see the audience, the lights went up. I remembered what the assistant director had told me: Smile!

By then my heart was pounding so ferociously that when I smiled, my upper lip started twitching in perfect sync with my thumping heartbeat. If you look real closely at the old video, you can actually see the twitch. It’s not like I had a mustache to cover it up.

The girl asked the risqué questions The Dating Game was famous for. I had lame answers, and I lost. I wasn’t funny. I didn’t enjoy it. I was scared to death every second I was up there.

Over my time at USC, Don would occasionally send me out on interviews for commercials. Not that I was really in danger of getting one; I had no idea what I was doing. So I gotta say, I was somewhat stunned when Don said, “You got the Pepsi commercial.”

“I did?”

I kinda knew it couldn’t possibly have been my acting ability. Much more likely, it was my basketball ability.

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.