“Saturday Night Live,” which is celebrating its 50th season this year, has had hundreds of hosts. There are the famous actors, the musicians and the comedians, of course. And then there are the professional athletes who are used to performing on fields, tracks and courts, not on a stage at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Dwayne Johnson, the wrestler turned movie star known as the Rock, has hosted five times, the most of any athlete. Tom Brady, the seven-time Super Bowl champion, stiffly sang and danced in a sport coat and jeans in 2005. Chris Evert, the winner of 18 Grand Slam tennis titles, hosted shortly after retiring in 1989, becoming the first of three female athletes to do so. (Nancy Kerrigan and Ronda Rousey are the others.)
There is no guarantee an athlete’s monologue will be successful or the sketches funny. But this participation trophy is an exclusive one — only about three dozen have received an invite to flex their coordination and teamwork.
A few years ago, Heidi Gardner, an “S.N.L.” cast member and Kansas City Chiefs fan, started a campaign to convince the show’s leadership that the star tight end Travis Kelce had the charisma to succeed as a host. Lorne Michaels eventually agreed, she said, with a catch: The Chiefs had to win the Super Bowl again.
One month after they did in 2023, Kelce was making fun of his own monosyllabic motivational speeches and overlooked reality dating show.
Lindsay Shookus, who worked on “S.N.L.” for more than two decades, said the show often tries to book athletes after high-profile events, such as the Super Bowl or the Olympics, when they are top of mind for a general audience.
“I think the world loves to see people taken out of what they do and put them into a different situation,” Shookus said. “Sometimes it’s a train wreck, and sometimes it’s the most incredible surprise that they’re great.”
In a news conference last month, Kelce said the process of preparing for “S.N.L.” was surprisingly similar to crafting a game plan through film study and on-field practices.
“It’s really a family atmosphere once you get up there and know everybody’s role,” Kelce said. “It’s kind of like coming into the building in K.C. in terms of how everybody bounces things off each other and wants to work together.”
In interviews with The New York Times, a few athletes who have hosted “Saturday Night Live” discussed their experiences.
J.J. Watt
For years there was mutual interest between “S.N.L.” and Watt, who was one of the National Football League’s most feared and most recognizable players — his left arm wrapped in a robotic-like brace — during his 12-season career.
But their schedules never quite aligned. Shookus said Watt declined one year because although he was injured and not playing football, he did not want to abandon his team.
Watt’s schedule finally opened when the Houston Texans were ousted from the playoffs in 2020. To prepare for his role, Watt said he watched episodes helmed by other athletes, including the 2007 episode with the quarterback Peyton Manning, who was part of a well-received sketch about the United Way charity in which he chucked footballs — and verbal abuse — at children.
Gardner said that most hosts kept a binder of sketch scripts in their dressing rooms, but that Watt would carry his around during rehearsals.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like his playbook,’” Gardner said. “It felt like being in the game with him.”
Watt, who hosted the day before the Super Bowl, joked during his monologue about not being on a team that was playing for the championship. But he said that the experiences on set was somewhat comparable to game days.
“It’s as similar to a field as you can get, where if I make a play, the crowd cheers, and if I make a good joke on ‘S.N.L.,’ the crowd cheers and they laugh,” Watt said. “That’s an unbelievable dynamic that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Jeff Gordon
Gordon, a face of NASCAR for two decades, ignored the first invitation he received to host “S.N.L.” He was a casual fan of the show growing up, and was not initially interested in the opportunity when it arrived in 2001.
“I didn’t take it serous or think I could pull it off,” said Gordon, who won four NASCAR Cup Series championships in his racing career and is now a team executive. “I thought, ‘That’s for actors, that’s not for me.’”
But NBC, a broadcast partner for the sport, was persistent, asking him again about a year later at a banquet in New York. While holding the formal printed invitation at dinner, Gordon told friends he was still unsure about hosting, but he soon accepted.
Because Gordon’s car was plastered with a collage of sponsorship logos, such as Pepsi, Shookus said the “S.N.L.” cast was careful to not include jokes or other material that could affect his business relationships. But Gordon’s monologue did poke fun at NASCAR stereotypes — two cast members sitting in the audience wore race uniforms and spoke in Southern accents.
“I felt a huge obligation not just do it well, but to not mess it up,” said Gordon, still the only NASCAR driver to host “S.N.L.”
Deion Sanders
Sanders was a two-sport star — the only athlete to play in both a Super Bowl and a World Series — when he hosted “S.N.L.” But even he reached newfound fame in the weeks between his first Super Bowl win and his hosting gig.
Neighbors would stop him to suggest topics for sketches after he was announced as the host, he said.
“I remember thinking that everybody was really down for me and liked me for me,” said Sanders, who is now the football coach at the University of Colorado. “And I had to understand, ‘They don’t like me, they’re just pitching me ideas for these skits.”
Many of the sketches during Sanders’s 1995 appearance were about sports, including a parody of the O.J. Simpson murder trial — Simpson, the first N.F.L. player to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, hosted “S.N.L.” in 1978 — and a fake meeting about the 1994 labor dispute between Major League Baseball players and team owners.
Although Bon Jovi was the booked musical guest, Sanders, who also dabbled in music, performed songs from his debut album in a hot pink suit. It was more train wreck than incredible surprise.
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