Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [75]
We went up to Canada to shoot the movie on a golf course outside of Vancouver. It rained at least part of every day, and there I was, out there in the wet grass, wrestling with Adam. The weather was so wet that we had to shoot whenever we could. I remember thinking: “Here I am, seventy-three years old, rolling around in the wet grass with this young man, and I am bound to catch pneumonia.” But I didn’t even catch a cold. We shot the scene in about three days. I thought it was fun, a thoroughly enjoyable experience, but I had no idea it would gain cult status with a huge number of moviegoers.
Dennis Dugan, the director, said they had a stuntman who would do as much of the fighting as I thought necessary. I didn’t say so to Dennis, but I thought: “Oh, no. I’ve come all the way up here to Canada to win a fight. Not to watch a stuntman win it.” To Dennis, I said, “I know how to fight. I’ll do it myself.” Dennis said OK, but he looked genuinely surprised—after all, I was seventy-three years old.
Adam did all his fighting, too. When I knocked him into that pond, it was Adam himself who went in. The only time we used stuntmen was for the long roll down the hill, and one of the stuntmen hurt his back doing it. Frequently people, particularly young men, ask me if I could beat up Adam Sandler in real life. I say, “Are you kidding? Adam Sandler couldn’t whip Regis Philbin.” Interestingly, I’ve tried Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek in that line, but Regis always gets the biggest laugh. Why?
I also went to the premiere with Adam Sandler. We pulled up to the theater at Universal Studios in a golf cart, which was appropriate because our brawl occurred on a golf course. It was at the premiere that I got the first inkling of what the public’s reaction to our fight would be. After the screening, there was a big party at Universal, and people were pounding me on the back, congratulating me, and telling me how much they enjoyed seeing me punch out Adam.
If you saw Happy Gilmore, you will recall that at one stage in the fight, Adam clobbers me and then says, “The price is wrong, bitch.” At the end of the fight, I finish off Adam and walk away saying, “Now you’ve had enough.” Then I pause and turn to say: “Bitch.” That line became the line so far as our The Price Is Right audiences were concerned.
After the movie was released, I never taped a show that someone in the audience didn’t bring up Happy Gilmore. And, within minutes, members of the audience were asking me to do the line. Of course, I refused. I told them that line was acting of the highest order. I don’t talk that way in real life—which made the audience only more demanding. “Do the line! Do the line!” they shouted from every corner of the studio. Sometimes the entire audience would begin chanting: “Do the line.”
I would finally say, “Well, I am going to ask our associate producer Kathy Greco.” Kathy would always be sitting at a desk near the set, and I would tell them: “If she says I can say the line, then I will say it. But if she says no, then I can’t say it.”
And so they would start yelling at her, “Come on, Kathy. Come on, Kathy!”
“Now leave her alone,” I would say, but they would yell and scream and plead with her.
Finally, I would say, “Kathy, these people want me to say, ‘Now you’ve had enough…. Bitch,’ but I don’t think I should.”
And the audience would explode in laughter and screaming.
Or I would get a signal from the stage manager, who would tell me we had thirty seconds before we went on the air, and the audience would be begging me to say the phrase. I would say, “No, I am sorry, we do not have enough time. I do not have the time to say it.”
Then I would get another signal from the stage manager, ten seconds, nine seconds, and at the last moment right before we went on, I would say, “I don’t have enough time to say, ‘Now you’ve had enough…. Bitch.’ ”
And the