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

Mar. 15, 2025

John Stamos (left) on “General Hospital” in 1982; (right) in Los Angeles in 2024.Photo:ABC Photo Archives/Getty; Michael Buckner/Getty

ABC Photo Archives/Getty; Michael Buckner/Getty

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

The conflict happened right when theDoctor Odysseystar, then 19, landed a role onGeneral 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,” theFull Housealum, 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.”

John Stamos in New York in 2023.Noam Galai/Getty

Noam Galai/Getty

“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, likeAnimal 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, andknock, knock, knockat 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. “

John Stamos and Jack Wagner on “General Hospital” in 1983.ABC Photo Archives/Getty

ABC Photo Archives/Getty

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.

“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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source: people.com