Why Denis Leary Has Trouble Keeping His Pants On During Celtics Games: Fall TV Bonus
Rescue Me star Denis Leary paid homage to Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock in our new issue‘s Fall TV Preview, but his true TV passion is the Boston Red Sox. Check out his testimonial — including his unusual Celtics ritual:
“To be dead honest with you, right now I would have to say the next month is going to be about the Red Sox and Yankees on TV — if the Red Sox stay in the race. This is what I do — I’m getting ready to start Rescue Me and I’m writing episodes right now, so I turn the computer on and I write with the sound off, and if something horrible happens to the Red Sox I get really into the scene that I’m writing, and if something great happens I stop writing and turn the sound up. It’s fucking torture.
The first time they won in 2004, my son and I had to stay in the same seating position because when they won game four against the Yankees, we were in a certain configuration. So we stayed that way for the next three games and then we had to stay that way for the World Series, you know, just because. I spent most of my life waiting for them to win, so now, I can sit wherever I want.
I can get pretty creative with my cursing during a game. I curse at a 52-year-old level but I’m like a 12 year old. I go up to the screen and give it the finger, I go up to the screen and point at the faces that I hate. In the old days there was a rule that was called the ‘dick on rule.’ Myself, Collin Quinn, Lenny Clarke and [David Letterman‘s] Eddie Brill, we are all the same age. We would watch Celtics games, Bruin games, Red Sox games, but particularly the Celtics at that time in the ’80s. But the ‘dick on rule’ was if the Celtics were playing the Detroit Pistons, whenever Bill Laimbeer’s face was shown in close-up, somebody had to run up the screen and pull their dick out and put it into his face. And by the way, this was done so often that we’d all be eating sandwiches and a guy would run up and do it and we’d just go, ‘Oh, nice job.’ And occasionally a guy’s girlfriend would be around or some outsider, and they would go ‘What are you doing?’ and we’d go, ‘Oh this is the dick on rule, you didn’t know about that?’
I try not to take my penis out of my pants nowadays because I have teenage children. I really don’t think it’s appropriate.”
More Fall TV Preview:
• Stephen Colbert on Deconstructing the News, Religion and the Colbert Nation
• Before the Report: Colbert’s Funniest Clips
• The Cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Head to Comic-Con
• Glee Cast on Their Favorite Songs From the New Season
• TV on the Cover of Rolling Stone