Season 6 Episode 13: I Who Have Nothing

A relative of Peg’s has died, and the arrival of an aunt and her lawyer to collect the estate forces Al into an inventory of his own holdings. The result is bleak. After twenty-five years of work, the complete list of objects in that house that actually belong to Al Bundy comes to a 45 of “Under the Boardwalk” and a Joe Nuxhall baseball card. Everything else is Peg’s, the bank’s, or scheduled to leave in the back of a lawyer’s car. Faced with that accounting, Al decides to repossess the one thing he ever owned that mattered: the football from the 1966 city championship, the game where he scored four touchdowns, which he gave away as a gesture to a cheerleader named Sandy Jorgenson and has regretted ever since. Sandy still has it. Sandy is also still extremely annoyed about having been dumped before the homecoming dance, and she is prepared to return the ball on terms. Those terms involve Al, and Al is not interested, and the episode becomes a negotiation between a man who wants a football back and a woman who has waited twenty years to extract something for it. Wendie Jo Sperber plays her, and when she first walks on, the studio audience gives her a standing ovation. Meanwhile Peg has been systematically looting the dead man’s house, and the portable televisions and silverware she keeps producing from under her coat are the only assets the family gains all episode.What makes the episode work is that the football is not a joke to Al. Everything else in the house can go, and he will make a crack about it, but the ball is the one object he wants back on its own terms.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: December 22, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 13
• Overall episode number: 118
• Written by: Katherine Green
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: December 6, 1991
• Production note: Wendie Jo Sperber received a standing ovation from the studio audience on her first entrance.
• Title note: Most likely from Ben E. King’s 1963 recording “I (Who Have Nothing).”

Guest Cast

• Wendie Jo Sperber as Sandy Jorgenson
• Karen Lynn Scott as Aunt Heather
• Paul Cira as the lawyer

The Game Ball

Of all the Polk High callbacks the series ran, this is the one with the most weight behind it, because it is about Al having given the trophy away himself. Nobody took it from him. He handed it to a girl to impress her and then broke up with her before the homecoming dance, and twenty-five years later the ball is in her house and he is the one who has to go and ask.

Wendie Jo Sperber was a familiar face in 1991 and the ovation makes sense in context. She had played Linda McFly in the Back to the Future films and Amy on Bosom Buddies, and she had just come off a starring run on the FOX sitcom Babes, which lasted a single season but generated a great deal of press. She later worked with Katey Sagal again on 8 Simple Rules.

The two dances Al and Sandy share are scored to “Blue Velvet” and then “Rock Around the Clock,” the latter being the first season theme from Happy Days, a show Ted McGinley spent several years on.

Al’s confrontation with the estate lawyer over a wristwatch is the comic high point, mostly because Al puts his hands up in a boxer’s stance to defend property that was never his, and the lawyer’s reply catalogues both the theft and an unrelated incident involving a dead man’s plumbing.

Famous Quotes

• Al, squaring up to the estate lawyer: “You want this watch?! You think you get it? Well come on and get it! C’mon lawyer boy! You want a little piece of this?!”
• The lawyer: “Don’t push it, Bundy! There’s laws in this town against stealing. Not to mention overflowing a dead man’s toilet.”
• Sandy, setting her price for the football: “Hey, did you ever regret breaking up with me before the homecoming dance? You know what I want, Al!” Al: “What, a huge McNugget?!”

Notes

• Al states specifically that he has worked for twenty-five years, which places the start of his working life in 1966. Later episodes revert to a vaguer “over twenty years.”
• The total inventory of Al’s personal property is a 45 of the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and a baseball card of Joe Nuxhall, who remains the youngest player ever to appear in a Major League game.
• Karen Lynn Scott, here as Aunt Heather, came back in season 10’s “Kiss of the Coffee Woman” as Dina.
• Sperber and Beth Broderick, who had appeared in season 5’s “And Baby Makes Money,” later co-starred together on Hearts Afire opposite John Ritter.
• A continuity goof: the portable televisions Peg sets down on the coffee table have vanished by the time she empties the stolen silverware onto it. Al also acquires a lipstick mark on his cheek between shots.