Emmy-Winning Y&R Actor Eric Braeden Talks World Cup & More with Rich

Eric Braeden came in to talk about 18 daytime Emmy nominations for The Young and the Restless, one of them his own for Best Actor. He stayed to break down the World Cup final like a man who has spent his life inside the game, because he has.

Start with the origin story, because it is a good one. Braeden had just played tennis with Dabney Coleman when he mentioned he had been offered an interview for a soap.

"I said, what's a soap?" Braeden told Rich. "I don't watch daytime television."

Coleman, who had done one, told him to take the meeting. Braeden respected him as an actor, so he went to CBS, asked what any actor asks first, which is how much, and signed for three months.

That was 46 years ago.

Braeden never got to hear Coleman say I told you so. Coleman died about a month before a dinner the two of them had planned. What Braeden did offer, with perfect timing, was that Coleman at least never asked for a percentage.

Rich then asked if he had been watching the World Cup and got a look in return.

"It's an addiction," Braeden said. "I'm slowly coming down from it."

He is at peace with either result in the final because he respects both teams enormously. Part of him wants Messi to win it one more time, since it is the last time we see him in a World Cup. The rest of him has watched Spain and drawn a conclusion.

"Spain is the most disciplined team I've seen play," Braeden said, crediting the fact that most of them play for Barcelona all year long. "They attack as a team. They defend as a team. One of their players loses the ball, the others, three or four come right away."

Rich's phrase for it was that Spain looks like an organism. Braeden agreed. He also admitted he thought France would win, because of their forwards, Dembélé among them, a group he compared to the Three Tenors. But it is a team sport, he said, and the discipline matters far more.

His analysis of the Messi cross against England was the highlight. Braeden's issue was not with Messi, who he called extraordinary and who the English defense covered very well for about 85 minutes. His issue was with what happened next, when Messi drifted to the right wing and stayed there unobserved.

"You don't leave a guy like Messi alone ever," Braeden said.

His solution comes straight from his own coaching and playing days. Assign your worst player, provided he is well conditioned, to the other team's best player, and tell him to do nothing else for the entire 90 minutes.

"It drives those players nuts," he said. "The brilliant players, even Messi doesn't like it at all."

Braeden was rooting for Germany and, as he put it, big time for the United States. He has been here over 60 years, and he won the U.S. Open Cup in 1973 with a club he called the Maccabees, where he was the token German on a team of Israelis, Brazilians, Argentinians and two Ethiopian national players. He played right fullback. The trophy exists only in a photograph now, because everything burned down in the Palisades fire.

He also thinks the American exit had a cause nobody wants to say out loud, pointing to the reversed red card against Belgium and the phone call that preceded it.

"Under no circumstances was that a red card," Braeden said. But the players knew that if they won that game, they would be attached forever to the idea that it had been rigged for them, and Braeden believes that weighed on them negatively.

The segment closed with Braeden delivering A League of Their Own, Caddyshack, Any Given Sunday and Dodgeball as Victor Newman, and with a prediction. Spain 2, Argentina 1, in stoppage time, hopefully after penalties.