Eric Braeden Reenacts Caddyshack, Dodgeball & More as Y&R’s Victor Newman

Eric Braeden did not want to do this. That is the first thing you should know, and it is what made the whole segment work.

The show has had Braeden read coach rants as Victor Newman before. This time Rich switched the format to famous sports movie speeches, and Braeden pushed back immediately.

"I honor the actors too much who did this in the films," he said. "I don't want to imitate them."

Then he did four of them anyway, and every single one landed.

First up was Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. Braeden asked, genuinely, whether this was a baseball coach. Told that yes, Hanks plays a manager whose player is caught crying, Braeden took the card and went.

"Wait a minute. Are you crying? Are you crying? I said, are you crying? There's no crying. You got that? There's no crying in baseball." Then he leaned into the Rogers Hornsby passage, the parents driving down from Michigan, the whole thing, and closed it out with a stern "Doris, no crying."

The Caddyshack entry came with a bonus. Rich introduced Ted Knight as the actor playing Judge Smails, and Braeden stopped him.

"I knew Ted."

He had guested on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, playing what he described as a very arrogant critic, and remembered Knight as a wonderful guy. Then he christened the boat. "It's easy to grin when your ship comes in and you've got the stock market beat. But the man worthwhile is the man who can smile when his shorts are too tight in the seat."

The "Okay, Pookie" that followed brought the house down.

Any Given Sunday required a detour first. Braeden wanted to place Al Pacino, and could not get to the title. Was it The Last Tango? No. The one with the dance. Scent of a Woman. Yes. Fantastic performance. Now, back to football.

He gave the inches speech straight, no winking. "We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's going to make the difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying." He finished with "That's football, guys. That's all it is," then broke character to ask how he did.

The last one was Rip Torn's Patches O'Houlihan from Dodgeball, and Braeden delivered the five D's without a stumble. Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge. "If you master the five D's, no amount of balls on Earth can hit you." Then the sack of wrenches. "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball."

Braeden mentioned twice that he is known for ad-libbing, and he was not exaggerating. He also offered his review of scripted dialogue generally, which is the kind of thing only a man who has been doing this for decades can say out loud. "Some of the dialogue they give you, I said, who the hell wrote this?"

Rich, catching the assist, thanked him for dodging that ad lib.

The exit was as good as the entrances. Braeden said the drive in took ten minutes with no traffic on the 405, which he decided could only mean one thing.

"They said, clear it for Victor Newman."