Rich Pitches Henry Winkler on a Sports Edition of His ‘Hazardous History’ Show

Henry Winkler's show Hazardous History, Sundays at 9 p.m. Eastern on the History Channel, revisits the things people used to do for fun or out of boredom that you simply can't do anymore. So Rich pitched him a sports edition on the spot.

Winkler set the table with a baseball one of his own: early catchers had no equipment and stuffed straw between their bodies and their shirts to stop the ball. It didn't help at all, he admitted.

Then Rich rolled the screen. First up, barefoot kickers, who used to boot a hard ball with no shoe and risk scraping a toe on the turf. Next, smoking in the locker room, illustrated by a photo of Len Dawson during the Super Bowl, a reminder of an era when players lit up during games. That prompted Winkler to confess he was a smoker himself until the 1980s, a habit that ran through his Happy Days years until Garry Marshall sent someone to his house to help him quit, and his own children told him plainly that he smelled.

The best entry was the NHL goalie without a mask. Winkler knew the story cold: a goalie took 33 pucks to the face, went to the locker room, came out wearing a makeshift mask, and was told by his manager that the audience wanted to see his face. He refused to go back on the ice without it. Rich had assumed it was a Jewish mother who insisted on the mask. Winkler corrected him that every mother would.

The closer was the one that wrote itself. Water skiing and jumping over shark-infested water, which Winkler famously did, minus the actual jump, as the star with no stunt double. He recalled letting go of the skis, walking up onto the sand, and the freeze-frame on his smile, half Fonzie saying look at that, half Henry Winkler in disbelief that he pulled it off. That stunt, of course, gave the world the phrase jumping the shark, an act Winkler proudly noted he has now done twice, the second time on Arrested Development.