Will Ferrell in SI Swimsuit Issue!

Sports Illustrated has appealed to my prurient interests with their 2008 Annual Swimsuit Issue, but not in the way you may think! This year's issue contains a photo shoot of my favorite mis-shapen funny man, Will Ferrell, posing with Heidi Klum in promotion of his new movie Semi-Pro which comes out later this month.

In the movie, Ferrell plays for the Flint Tropics, no doubt a nod to the famous "Flintstones" from Flint, Michigan that dominated college basketball while I was at Michigan State. This man is adorable- love handles and all!

Here's the transcript from Sports Illustrated's interview with Will Ferrell:

When you and Heidi got together for the Swimsuit shoot, the atmosphere seemed ...
Hot! Yeah, she's a wildcat. Pretty much every shot came down to one of us trying to get the other's pants off. The one where I'm biting her -- can I say A-S-S? -- that was one of the craziest moments. She told me, 'You need to just bite my ass.' I was kind of mimicking, half-doing it, so she stopped and said, 'No! Really bite it!' It was one of the most surreal moments in my entertainment life.
How did Mrs. Ferrell feel about that?
My wife is incredibly accepting of all these things. She just rolled with it. She came by the shoot and walked in right at the moment when I was biting Heidi's butt. Heidi felt slightly self-conscious for a second -- and then she went right back into it. [Will stops to tend to his 3-year-old son, Magnus.]
I bet he's going to appreciate these photos some day.
Yeah. He'll either be incredibly proud or incredibly embarrassed by it. One or the other. Probably the latter.
Do you have any Swimsuit memories from, well, not Magnus' age, but after that?
I wasn't exactly a Playboy-under-the-bed kind of kid, but I do remember -- I think -- a Christie Brinkley shoot down in the Seychelles Islands. I remember thinking, 'Wait. This is Sports Illustrated? WHAT is going on here. Mooom?' It threw me for a loop, but I remember being extremely excited about it after that.
You were one of the rare models who had issues about disrobing for SI. Why?
Well, Heidi kept trying to get me in my underwear. Begging, really. I had to say, 'Believe me, I don't have a problem [disrobing]; I do it a lot in my movies. But I'm riding the line of people who celebrate that and the people who are getting sick of it.' There isn't a moratorium on pants removal; I'm just trying to be a little more judicious about it. It put me in the unimaginable position of turning Heidi Klum down when she asked me to take my pants off.
Did you have fun with the period clothes you wore for the shoot and for the movie?
Absolutely. Especially the short shorts. I actually had to push our wardrobe person to make mine shorter. I think today's basketball player doesn't have the guts for it. The Lakers came out in them a month ago and they seemed ashamed. But I found that they lent increased mobility and supreme aerodynamics.
And the other fashions -- like the plaid getup and the neckerchiefs?
Loved it. To give you an idea, when I was 10 I had a vest-and-shorts hot pants suit that I requested to wear just about every day. For [Semi-Pro] we looked at a lot of old footage for ideas. There was this press conference where Rick Barry had this ridiculous neckerchief -- it was like he had a tablecloth tied around his neck it was so long. Immediately I said, 'Jackie has got to wear neckerchiefs.'
And how well-prepared were you to play a basketball star?
Well, I was captain of my basketball team my junior year; a tough 6-foot-3 power forward. I think I averaged about 1.4 points per game. Not quite all-state, but I played tough defense.
And your game now?
In ABA terms, I'm like a Billy Paultz type.
Who?
Exactly. I really only know how to play in the post, but there are a lot of guys who are taller than me. Plus, I've lost a few inches in my vertical. It all makes my game pretty antiquated for my abilities.
How long before you do another sports movie?
Talladega Nights into Blades of Glory into Semi-Pro ... The way things go, people start to focus on that as a story, like 'He only does sports movies rahrahrah.' So I hope there isn't a good sports movie that comes along because I will probably say no to it. Unless they do one about the midget that Bill Veeck used with the St. Louis Browns. Through the wonders of CGI, I would play that midget. [Editor's note: Eddie Gaedel was a dwarf, not a midget.]
To be fair, that's a lot of sports movies. You entered our Sportsman of the Year discussion this year ...
How long was I in the running? Half a second? I have to do some more lobbying, I think.
I can be bribed.
Then gifts are on the way.