GARTH WOOLSEY
"If you were a salad dressing," William Hung was asked at the SkyDome yesterday, "what kind would you be?"
Fitting that the ultimate out-of-left-field entertainment phenom should be thrown such an out-of-left-field question, at a ball park of all places, on a blue-sky afternoon tailor-made for playing two.
Hung took the hanging slider of a query and hit, maybe, a ground-rule double: "You mean, like, a real salad dressing? (Pause.) Thousand Island."
The kid is game.
Heck, the kid has game.
You might even say, as many are, that he bangs.
For sure, the 21-year-old University of California at Berkeley engineering student is getting the last laugh on those American Idol judges who banished him from the first round of that TV show's qualifying round for aspiring singers.
"You can't sing, you can't dance, so what do you want me to say?" is the way that acerbic panellist Simon Cowell summed up Hung's performance.
"I already gave my best," responded Hung of his rendition of Ricky Martin's "She Bangs." "I have no regrets at all."
Such an honest response from such an obviously sincere but talent-challenged Everyman hit a chord with viewers, who made him an on-line cause célèbre. He recorded an album, titled Inspiration, which has sold an astounding 120,000 copies. He has got his own babe-filled music video.
He has done The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Today show, and there's a Web site attracting a lineup of marriage proposals for his consideration.
Hung may be a nerd, a geek and a dork, as some suggest, but he's also a very successful one ? living his little life large, getting and giving a charge by singing, as atonally and stiffly as one might have expected, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," in front of a paid attendance yesterday of 22,225.
The Jays scored a run in the bottom of the seventh, immediately after Hung's croon, but lost ? perhaps fittingly ? to the Texas Rangers 4-2 to end a four-game winning streak.
That's a half-decent crowd for a team that has been struggling in the standings and at the turnstiles. Bringing in the lovable loser cost the Jays about $5,000, plus expenses for Hung and his mother, Helen Chan.
The very first question Hung faced, a few before the salad dressing query from a CBC interrogator (follow-up: "Would you fight a robot?"), came from a Rolling Stone magazine writer, among a pre-game media contingent of perhaps 50.
"William, do you think you are a good singer? Yes or no," asked the reporter.
"No comment," he replied.
Turned out that was one of Hung's favourite responses, along with "it's confidential." You'd think he was being asked for the location of weapons of mass destruction, rather than what's likely to be on his already-scheduled second album, the role he is expected to play in a Hong Kong-produced movie or the precise nature of a video, Hang Out With Hung. Of that last, he says, "I can't tell. But everybody should go buy it."
He might not be able to sing, but he sure can sell. What makes him so popular, anyway?
"It's my attitude," he says, through an ever-present buck-toothed grin. "I have an optimistic attitude to life. I think people are inspired by that."
He does make people smile. He does come across as genuine.
"Is he in on the joke? What joke? He is absolutely serious," says Eric Alper of Toronto's Koch Entertainment, which handles Hung's local appearances.
Blue Jays outfielder Frank Catalanatto, on the disabled list but in uniform, presented Hung with a No. 1 Jays jersey. Asked if he has a favourite sport, or team, Hung diplomatically says on this day anyway the Jays are the only ones that matter. But he was adopted as a sort of unofficial mascot by the Los Angeles Dodgers earlier this season after former Jay Shawn Green played his CD in the clubhouse before a game, to great hilarity.
"He's the theme of the season," Green told reporters. "My favourite song of his is `She Bangs,' it's a classic. It's our victory song." *See that is why he is on my hit list. He does not respect Asians. He uses it as a Victory song for the team. How rude!
Asked, once again, if he has any real talent, Hung replies: "That's up to the people, not up to me.... I like singing. That's what I want to do, hopefully for a long time."
To that end, he is taking singing lessons, while continuing his studies at Berkeley, where he won a talent contest and was encouraged by fellow students ("they love me") to try out for American Idol.
Hung says his celebrity hasn't stopped him from riding the bus and taking the train. He's using his new-found wealth to, first, pay off his student loan.
Limos, maybe later. As for groupies, Hung plays the innocent. "You mean women who attack you left and right? That's a groupie, right?" He says, separately, that the strangest thing that has happened to him involved a middle-aged woman running up in a U.S. airport and throwing her arms around him.
Maybe that's the key to Hung's allure: As much as we love to embrace winners, it's the losers who need it most.
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