Zach Selwyn

Actor. Musician. Host. Writer. Dinner Guest.

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  • Buy Zach’s Book “Talent Will Get You Nowhere”Talent

    Available Now on Amazon!

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  • Zachariah & the Lobos Riders are set to release their newest 6 song EP “Cloud Road.” Z details how this surprise record came about…

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    Cloud Road EP * 2020 By Zachariah & the Lobos Riders

    In December of 2019 I blew out my knee playing basketball. I vowed to return to the court within a year and elected for surgery in January of 2020 – Following the surgery came the Norcos. As a decent wine drinker, painkillers were never my thing and I have been able to avoid them after major surgeries – of which I’ve had my share… But this time, things were a little different. Lying in bed, unable to walk or barely get up to use the bathroom, I would play a lot of music and drift off into the spacial tranquility of a few pain pills. At first it was 2, then it became 3 and I was pretty soon out of my bottle… The doctor had told me it would take about three days to not need them anymore, I was on day 11. What came to me during these lost moments was a lot of lyrics about childhood memories, dreams dying, and the main street that I grew up on in Tucson Arizona in the 80’s and 90’s… Cloud Road. The first song is the raw file you hear “Cloud Road Painkiller Freestyle.” That was done in one take off the dome. I quickly understood why so many artists get involved with Vicoden, Percoset etc. These five songs came to me in three days. The sixth was written for the TV show “Breaking Bad” but ultimately not chosen.
    CLOUD ROAD  (CLICK FOR SAMPLE)

    A different approach for me for sure. A nod to my teenage years in Tucson dying to go anywhere… now looking back and realizing I have gone everywhere. What’s next? I need another motivating factor to push me into whatever is next…

    PRAY TO THE LORD

    Back in high school, my friends and I would drive around all night and break into unlocked cars and steal stuff. We then took the stuff to Zia Records for trade money, Play it Again Sports for cash and second hand shops… One night a few guys broke into my old football coach’s truck and he was watching us from his window. At one point, one of the guys said he saw him flash a gun. We ran. The part about dropping my high school ring at the scene of the crime is based on a separate incident involving a girl’s bedroom when her boyfriend stopped by – but combining these two incidents into this song made sense.

    MY MIND GOT MIXED WITH WANDERING

    Yeah, where does the motivation go? I think I speak for a lot of young people here when I talk about how we all want to find that one comfortable place but then see something else a little more appealing just around the corner. I wasted a lot off my 20’s looking for something else and not recognizing what was in front of me.

    JUST A LITTLE INTERMISSION

    Again, painkillers had me rapping to myself a lot. And for some reason I was doing it in a Humpty Hump – Special Ed voice… This is a nod to the 90’s hip-hop I loved – and it’s really just a joke – as most of my rap songs are.

    CLOUD ROAD PAINKILLER FREESTYLE

    When putting this EP together, I came across this a week before releasing it. It is the seeds that grew into the title track of the record as well as the “Intermission” song. I was rapping into my phone on a galaxy of pain meds… In a studio this might actually be dope.

    THE BALLAD OF JESSE PINKMAN

    Since I rhymed about Jesse Pinkman in “Intermission,” I felt like this fit on this record as well. I wrote this before a season of breaking Bad and sent to the EP’s, tweeted about. And had a lot of show fans RT it as well. Ultimately, someone heard it and said they did not need any new music. So FUCK THEM. This song deserves to be heard, even if the show hasn’t been on for six years.

    “ALEXA PLAY RED FUCKIN WINE!”

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    Acid Rap americana Cloud Road desert Mac Miller springsteen steve earle ZAchariah Lobos Riders
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  • -2 Out of Touch at The Dream Hotel * 2015 By Zach Selwyn

    It was two-o-clock in the morning and I was standing on the street outside the Dream Hotel in New York City when a slick looking hustler in a Panama hat sided up to me.

    “You looking for girls tonight?” He said.

    “Naah man, I’m just trying to get some air.”

    “You sure? Just up those stairs across the street is all kinds of hoes… I’m talking Thai girls, Russians, Mamis… You ever bang a bad bitch?”

    “What exactly is a bad bitch?” I asked.

    “If you don’t know, then you’ve never banged one…”

    I have been in New York City for roughly 36 hours. In that time, I have averaged 4 hours of sleep a night, eaten 7 street hot dogs and drank close to 19 cups of bad deli coffee. I have also realized that I am the most out of touch loser in the city. The average Manhattan man around my age is sporting a hundred dollar undercut and a long beard – which is eerily similar to L.A. (With only a few less Man-Buns). The difference is, these guys are also rocking 3,000 dollar Ted Baker suits and wingtips. As for me, I am wearing a 1970’s – era Wrangler cowboy shirt, some Lee Riders from the early 80’s and a pair of ¾ boots I scored from a TV show wardrobe department about 4 years ago. My hair is pretty tame and I still have Beverly Hills 90210-era sideburns. I’m also wearing a trucker cap that reads “Roy Clark” on it, bellbottoms and a belt buckle that features Chester the Cheetah riding a Harley motorcycle beneath the inscription “Cheesy Rider.”

    $_35I feel a little like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy because NOBODY is dressed like me. Funny thing is, this is how I have been dressing for 15 years. A few years back, in the early 00’s, everybody started dressing like this. Now, those days are long gone and I’m the only guy on 8th Avenue wearing a shirt that unsnaps when you tear it apart and a turquoise ring.

    And apparently, I have no idea what a “bad bitch” is.

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    According to the web, this is a “Bad Bitch.”
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    Apparently, “Bad Bitches” like rolling around in one dollar bills.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    I realized I was grossly under-dressed when I attended the first business dinner with the company I am working for. I figured it would be a quick bite at a local bar, but it turned into the type of place where they asked me to remove my hat as I sat down. The next day, at the company’s request, I made my way to a J. Crew to try and find something respectable that I would feel comfortable wearing. I settled on a checkered red, white and blue button-down and some horrendously skinny jeans. The price? $254.

    When the sales associate asked me “how my sock game” was, I told him, “Fine. I buy all my socks at Ross: Dress for Less.”

    He grimaced.

    “How’s your shoe game?” He asked.

    “I have these nice ¾ boots,” I said.

    “Uggh, please – nobody is wearing ¾ boots anymore,” he retorted. “You need some wings!”

    I walked out of the store.

    I couldn’t place my finger on it, but Manhattan had begun to seem too cookie cutter. I guess I was aware of the Duane Reade explosion and the Starbucks on every corner, but I was not prepared for the fashion clones that had sprouted up everywhere. Sure I was ten years older than the average guy out on a Wednesday night, but even I could sense a lack of originality. New York City, which was once full of punk street kids, trendsetters and Mapplethorpe-worshipping leather daddies sticking whips in their asses and walking into a Saks Fifth Avenue, had become somewhat tame.

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    The Business Hipster. Everywhere in New York City.

    I recently read an interview with AdRock of the Beastie Boys talking about how the “New York of his youth had disappeared.” I was beginning to understand what he was talking about. Manhattan in the 70’s and 80’s – before the crackdowns and the $8200 a month rent – was an artistic and fantastic place to be. These were the days before the smelly Times Square Jack Sparrows. Before Hell’s Kitchen was a gentrified hipster paradise. In the late 80’s I would visit my second cousin and roll down Canal Street to buy fake Gucci jackets, leather African medallion necklaces and a bootleg cassette of LL Cool J’s Walking With a Panther. The tape-dealers would offer me “smoke,” which scared the crap out of me. At one point, my mom dragged me away from a couple of black guys who were standing around Washington Square Park discussing the new Bobby Brown On Our Own song from Ghostbusters II. I tried to inject some white boy wisdom by saying I thought Bobby should’ve written a second rap verse instead of repeating the “Too hot to handle, too cold to hold” line and they ignored me as if I was “Chester the Terrier” following around the bigger “Spike the Bulldog” in the Looney Tunes cartoons.

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    I bought a bootleg tape of this for $5 in 1989

    The only exception I could find was in the Dream Hotel. The first couple of nights I was in town, I took it easy, stayed in my room, watched TV and had sex with the full-length pillow. However, a hotel room can only hold you captive for so long and eventually I came downstairs to find out where the notorious dark side of this fantastic city had wound up. I now believe it all centers around the Dream Hotel. Within an hour of hanging in the lobby, I was propositioned by more pimps, hustlers, hoes and drug dealers than I have seen in 20 years in Los Angeles. Methy looking skinny teenagers were offering me weed, cocaine and what they claim is “Government pure MDMA.” The lobby was crawling with hookers and late night denizens of the rooftop nightclub, which is named “PDH.” An acronym for what I can only imagine is “Pimps, Drugs and Hoes” based on the army of thick women standing around comparing 9 inch Indian weaves and elastic black twat-length skirts that barely cover their clitori. (Is that the plural for “clitoris?”)

    The new Manhattan underbelly had become what Jay-Z sang about in Empire State of Mind. “Ballplayers, rap stars, addicted to that limelight…” Everywhere I went folks were talking about money, cars and rap music. If Los Angeles is supposedly a vapid, material city full of superficial idiots, New York City has embraced a lifestyle full of flashy watches, bottle service, velvet ropes and hangers on… So much so that when I tried to get access to the PDH nightclub on the top floor, the bouncer looked at my “shoe game” and instructed me to “please wait in the other bar.”

    I didn’t really want to go up to PDH, but it did seem like it had to be part of my Dream Hotel adventure. So I waited in the bar drinking 17 dollar glasses of shoddy tempranillo wondering how anyone can listen to this much house and trap music in one day. The hotel sort of felt like Miami, but it was 40 degrees cooler and Pitbull wasn’t here singing some shitty song about how “white girl got some ass.”

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    Club PDH. $2500 bottles. $12 beers.

    Finally a large Puerto Rican man came over and told me that since I was a guest of the hotel, all I needed to do was show my room key and I could gain access to the club. I sauntered up towards the door, bypassing the line of desperate gold diggers and club kids and flashed my hotel room key. It was the first time in my entire trip that I had felt somewhat cool.

    The nightclub was everything I always hated about nightclubs. Expensive drinks, a DJ mixing Calvin Harris with Blondie, hairy men pouring vodka-cranberry drinks for girls who were most likely being paid to hang around them and intimidating looking security guards who mad-dogged anybody ordering a single beer instead of a 2500 dollar bottle of Grey Goose.

    I stayed for 8 minutes.

    On my way downstairs, I decided I had to get outside and just see the street. I was sick of the lines, the attitude and the fact that a cast member from Real Housewives of Atlanta had demanded to cut the line… and was placated with a free bottle of vodka. I had to walk to a deli and buy some water and eat a sandwich and try to get some sleep before my work event the following day.

    I came back to the hotel with my snacks and drinks – which, by the way, were shoved into about 11 plastic bags by the deli owner as if the plastic problem doesn’t exist in New York – and stopped to listen to the sidewalk pimps do their thing. They were like the dude selling Eddie Murphy’s gold hair dryer in Coming to America. I heard some remarkable stuff:

    “You wanna table shower my man?”

    “I got one tranny but she visiting her brother at Riker’s right now.”

    “Playa, I can get you three at once, but you gotta wear three rubbers.”

    gal-america-ruben-santiago-hudsonI guess Manhattan hadn’t changed that much. Instead of bootleg tapes, men were looking for the booty. These hipster hotels had become infidelity dens and the cops just seemed to look the other way. And as for the falling crime rate – well – as this night was coming to a close, NBA player Chris Copeland was actually stabbed in an altercation outside of 1OAK nightclub just a few streets away from where I was staying.

    As I strolled towards the entrance, I passed by my friend in the Panama hat one last time.

    “Yo, son – I got you. I know you wanna find out what a bad bitch is,” he propositioned.

    “I’m good, man,” I said. “I gotta get to bed.”

    I went up to my room and had sex with the full-length pillow.

    BUY ZACH'S BOOK at AMAZON.COM!
    BUY ZACH’S BOOK at AMAZON.COM!

    http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Will-Get-You-Nowhere/dp/0983723737/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1397244717&sr=8-2&keywords=Zach+Selwyn

     

    Bad Bitch Bad Bitches bukowski Club PDH dream hotel hoes Hustlas LL Cool J manhattan New York New York City NYC pimps Sedaris Selwyn short stories The Dream Hotel words Zach Selwyn
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  • In these scary times, we all need a little sports and a little humopr to get us by – Zach has been hired by theoddsfactory.com/runthetable to host a comedic sports trivia show EVERY DAY!!! 2pm EASTERN/ 11 am PST.

    You can win $100! – Test your sports knowledge and LAUGH!

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  • The wait is almost over! Missi Pyle & Zach Selwyn are this week’s guests and we play “Fake or Florida” – here’s a preview! http://bit.ly/1LaN6u0

    Posted by Anna Faris is Unqualified on Monday, March 7, 2016

    Download the episode TOMORROW!!!

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  • Z36974ZACH joins RUDE JUDE and ROSS from BINARY STAR to talk hand jobs, proper towels for that time of the month and some secret slang!

     

    more here: http://foreallyshow.com/

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  • Thanks to the Mangy Moose Saloon for having us for 6 sets in 2 nights!

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Read the deleted ZACH SELWYN pages of ESPN: THOSE GUYS HAVE ALL THE FUN!

  • September 17, 2011
  • by zachselwyn
  • · Uncategorized

The following was deleted from the final printing of ESPN: Those Guys Have all the Fun. It is available as part of an online-bonus section. *

Around 2004, ESPN ventured into the world of reality TV for the first time. The project was DREAM JOB – A sort of an American Idol – like search for the most talented sports broadcaster in the country not on ESPN. The prize was incredible: a year-long contract to appear on SportsCenter as an anchor. Most of the current anchors hated the idea.

DAN PATRICK:

Fuck Dream Job. I mean, seriously. Here we were, legitimate journalists who had braved the world of sports, from high school to division 3 Hockey – and these idiots made it through in 2 weeks what it took us our entire lives to accomplish. I was not a supporter of the show.

KEITH OLBERMANN:

I left ESPN by then, but I was so upset by this bullshit contest, I would have taken my job back just to pummel the snot out of whoever won it.

NEIL EVERETT:

I was sitting in my cubicle when they gave the final four contestants a tour of the Bristol compound. That prick with the shaggy hair and the beard came by my desk and commented on my red Swingline stapler, saying it was a reference to the film Office Space. I ignored him, and he quoted the film by saying “Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.” Recognizing that as a brilliant catch phrase, I immediately stole it and used it on the 11:00 SportsCenter when Allen Iverson went 2 for 19 from the field. It became one of my calling cards.

The “Prick with shaggy hair” turned out to be memorable contestant Zachariah Selwyn, a 28-year-old actor and musician from Los Angeles. Arriving to the contest with a long beard, 70’s leisure suit and bushel of curly hair, he was anything but what ESPN had ever considered for an on-camera position. Problem was, he was also the front-runner to win the contest.

ZACHARIAH SELWYN:

At the time, I was in a band, had just done a film as an actor and thought my music career was about to take off – so I was a bit reluctant to want to suddenly uproot and move to Bristol to talk sports 24/7 – I had gone to the open audition hungover, after seeing a “Dream Job” crawl advertisement on the TV at Ye Rustic Inn on a random Tuesday night. But, I had majored in Broadcast Journalism at USC and had just spent 7 years emceeing Bar Mitzvahs and weddings in L.A. so I was somewhat seasoned in presentation – but The Dream Job audition was sort of a throwaway thing i did as a laugh. When I started making it past certain rounds, I started to get excited about the possibility of making the final 200, then the final 10 and then it became a mission to win the entire thing.

STUART SCOTT:

That kid had talent, but he was a Kilborn-type. He wanted to be an actor, a rapper? who knows – All I remember was that he knew how to drink like an ESPN anchor, which is 80% of the job requirement.

NICK STEVENS:

I met Zach in the top ten and we hit it off immediately. We had similar comedy backgrounds and we certainly knew how to party. But the night before the show taped, I would be in my room studying hockey stats, NCAA basketball players, whatever. Zach never did that – his way of gathering information was to go to the Mustang Sally’s sports bar across from the hotel and drink with the sports fans. He would have a beer with a stranger, talk the NCAA tournament and come in the next day and kill it.

ZACHARIAH SELWYN:

One night I won $100 off of Nick betting that I wouldn’t pee in the pop-a-shot at Dave and Busters. As a result of that, I am never allowed in Dave and Buster’s again.

TONY KORNHEISER:

I had a fun time doing the show, but the qualifications were just ridiculous. And of course, I went on PTI after cutting Zach and admitted it was a mistake. I had received more emails from that decision than any other in my career. The fans were pissed and I made a mistake. Oh well, Zach and I kept in touch for awhile and he bought my books, so that was a sweet deal on my part.

AL JAFFEE:

I had watched Zach from the beginning of the auditions. He was a quick study and a great personality. Ultimately, he was exactly the kind of guy who would be bigger than the brand. I figured he eventually might work in a Kenny Mayne- like way for us but he was so busy with his weird rap-country band, I didn’t think he had the commitment level we needed at the time.

Later that year, ESPN had Zach host Around the Horn during the NBA Finals. He had cleaned up his image by then, but as only the third host of the show ever, he had trouble adjusting to the rapid-fire movement of the show. He also took a sarcastic approach to the show which ultimately did not work.

BILL WOLFF:

I hated him. When we were discussing the greatest rivalries in sports, Woody Paige or Cowlishaw would present arguments for Yankees – Red Sox, Michigan – Ohio State? Zach would mute them and say “Guys, you’re all wrong. It’s Pete Weber vs. Walter Ray Williams in professional bowling…” That stuff didn’t go over well… Plus. I still wanted the hosting job.

The eventual winner of Dream Job was 22-year-old Chicago resident Mike Hall. He eventually went to anchor ESPNU and used his new found fame to bed every North Carolina co-ed who recognized him around campus.

Selwyn was awarded another ESPN pilot in 2005 – called Holla Back, which he co-hosted with BET personality Free. John Walsh and Selwyn hit it off, but the show, which was based in Times Square – like MTV’s Total Request Live, never saw the light of day. Dream Job went on to have one more season of unknowns, and a season with athletes – but the declining ratings made it the last reality show the network has attempted.

ZACHARIAH SELWYN:

The show changed all of our lives… Nick, Mike, Aaron Levine, Casey Stern –  I went to a Yankees game that summer and had the NYPD escorting me through the crowd. They upgraded my family from the upper deck to a box seat – and then two off-duty cops and I got hammered during a rain delay. I didn’t pay for anything for a period of about a year in New York. I felt like Joe Namath or something. Although I have yet to try and make out with Suzy Kolber.

Dream Job winner MIKE HALL and runner up ZACH SELWYN at the SportsCenter desk in 2004

*Excerpted from ESPN: THOSE GUYS HAVE ALL THE FUN (uncut edition) by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. Not really. Zach wrote all of this.

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