Season 6 Episode 13: I Who Have Nothing

December 22, 1991

Published 12/22/91

A relative of Peg’s has died, and the arrival of an aunt and her lawyer to collect the estate forces Al into an inventory of his own holdings. The result is bleak. After twenty-five years of work, the complete list of objects in that house that actually belong to Al Bundy comes to a 45 of “Under the Boardwalk” and a Joe Nuxhall baseball card. Everything else is Peg’s, the bank’s, or scheduled to leave in the back of a lawyer’s car. Faced with that accounting, Al decides to repossess the one thing he ever owned that mattered: the football from the 1966 city championship, the game where he scored four touchdowns, which he gave away as a gesture to a cheerleader named Sandy Jorgenson and has regretted ever since. Sandy still has it. Sandy is also still extremely annoyed about having been dumped before the homecoming dance, and she is prepared to return the ball on terms. Those terms involve Al, and Al is not interested, and the episode becomes a negotiation between a man who wants a football back and a woman who has waited twenty years to extract something for it. Wendie Jo Sperber plays her, and when she first walks on, the studio audience gives her a standing ovation. Meanwhile Peg has been systematically looting the dead man’s house, and the portable televisions and silverware she keeps producing from under her coat are the only assets the family gains all episode.What makes the episode work is that the football is not a joke to Al. Everything else in the house can go, and he will make a crack about it, but the ball is the one object he wants back on its own terms.

Episode Facts

Original air date: December 22, 1991
Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 13
Overall episode number: 118
Written by: Katherine Green
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: December 6, 1991
Production note: Wendie Jo Sperber received a standing ovation from the studio audience on her first entrance.
Title note: Most likely from Ben E. King’s 1963 recording “I (Who Have Nothing).”