Dan Fouts is reminded almost weekly of his role in an all-time sports blockbuster because the checks keep arriving at his Oregon home from the Screen Actor’s Guild. He opens them, notes which far-off country they’re from and laughs at the comically small amounts he gets from streams and television re-airs—six cents, down to three after taxes—before tucking them uncashed into the giant movie poster near his desk.
Fouts spent just a few hours filming his part in The Waterboy with former broadcast partner Brent Musburger in Orlando one afternoon in 1998. Adam Sandler, the film’s star, co-writer and co-producer, had originally asked Keith Jackson and Bob Griese to call the movie’s penultimate scene—a football game called the Bourbon Bowl, won in dramatic fashion by the rag-tag South Central Louisiana State Mud Dogs—but Jackson declined.