John Stamos Recalls Being 'Not That Cool' When a High School Bully Punched Him 'Right in the Eye' Over a Girl

• John Stamos says getting a black eye from a school bully — right after he landed his breakout role on General Hospital — helped push him to succeed
• The actor told Seth Meyers and his brother Josh on the Oct. 22 episode of their podcast, Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers, that he was "not that cool" in high school and was into "magic and puppets"
• Stamos shared that he’s thought about his bully from time to time throughout the years — but admits “I can’t remember his name”

John Stamos is looking back on how an encounter with a bully helped push him to succeed.

The conflict happened right when the Doctor Odyssey star, then 19, landed a role on General Hospital, as he told Seth Meyers and his brother Josh on the Oct. 22 episode of their podcast, Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers.

“It was right as I was going from the caterpillar to the butterfly, and so I didn't really even think of myself as good [looking]. I mean, I wanted girls so bad,” the Full House alum, now 61, said.

Stamos shared he was “a nerdy kid in junior high and high school” who spent a lot of time with “magic and puppets.”

“Those things are not chick magnet-type things,” he said jokingly. “I'm in marching band, which is also, you know, not that cool.” 

But it was during marching band practice when he found out that “the hottest girl” wanted to go out with him — right around the time, Stamos said, that “there was always someone who wanted to beat me up.” 

“And I had this bully guy [when] I was just about to graduate. I was just starting to kind of grow into some sort of look, whatever it was.”

Stamos said he was at a block party involving different houses. Stamos was “at this crappy party where the nerds [were] — not the cool, you know, like Animal House [party].”

But at the party, “I tell everybody that this girl wants to go out with me. It just goes like a telephone, you know, each house [to] each house. It hit the jock area where her boyfriend was.”

“I'm at the nerd party in a car talking to a friend, and knock, knock, knock at the window. He goes, ‘Roll the window.’ Okay, roll the window. Bam! Punched me right in the eye. Big black eye. And it was the most humiliating, awful thing. To this day, I can feel it. “

Stamos said he went to the bathroom and found that the bully had written on the wall, “I'm gonna kill you, big nose. And, I was like, ‘That's not nice.’ ”

“He didn't spell anything right,” Stamos added. But the incident inspired Stamos to do “something drastic,” he recalled. 

“I remember saying, ‘I gotta get famous. And that way, I'll show him.’ So to this day each milestone in my career, I remember thinking, like, ’I'm gonna show him. I'm gonna get on TV, and then I'm gonna have bodyguards, and I’ll be playing with the Beach Boys. I'm gonna invite him to a concert. And in the middle of my drum solo, I'm gonna go, ‘Get ‘em, boys!’ “

“And they would beat him up, and I would drive off into the limo and wave at him, and that would be that.“

“I wanted to dedicate the book to him,” he shared about his memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, which comes out in paperback this month. “I didn't because the publishers wouldn't let me ... I was gonna call him 'Small Weiner 'or something, because I can't remember his name.“

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