Jerry Seinfeld Says Jason Alexander Memorized ‘Seinfeld’ Golf Ball Speech in Half an Hour

The beloved golf ball reveal of Seinfeld‘s “Marine Biologist” episode almost never happened. Jerry Seinfeld revealed this week he and Larry David wrote the scene just hours before filming it, and actor Jason Alexander only had minutes to memorize the script.

“I don’t know the schedule that week, but let’s say we’re shooting it on Wednesday. It’s Tuesday,” Seinfeld said during an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show. “We don’t have the golf ball goes into the blowhole of the whale. We don’t have it — it was never in the script.”

In Seinfeld season 5, episode 14 (“The Marine Biologist”), Alexander’s George Costanza delivers an impressively long monologue about trying to impress a woman, in which he eventually reveals that Kramer’s (Michael Richards) golf ball got stuck in a whale’s blowhole. Famously, the speech begins with the line, “The sea was angry that day my friends.”

“It was the night before we shot the scene with Jason,” Seinfeld recalled this week. “I said to [co-writer David], ‘Hey, what if what puts the whale in distress is Kramer’s golf ball?’ He’s hitting golf balls at the beach. George is walking on the beach with the girl, we haven’t connected them. We saw no connection the night before. We write that speech the night before. Two o’clock in the morning.”

After the late-night light bulb of inspiration, Seinfeld said it was Alexander who became the true hero of the day.

“We show up the next day. We hand Jason, who’s an effing genius, that speech. How long is that speech? It’s a page, two pages. This is TV, OK? This is why film sucks. You go to a TV actor like Jason and you hand him two-and-a-half pages, and I go, ‘We’ve got to shoot this in a half hour. Memorize it.’ He goes, ‘No problem.’ That’s TV. No preciousness.”

Seinfeld said Alexander’s feat made for an even better performance from everyone that day, including himself. “When Jason is doing the speech, this one shot, there’s one cut to me with my eyes. My eyebrows — I’m watching him. You think I’m reacting to the story, I’m reacting — ‘I can’t believe he’s getting this speech, word perfect.’ That is what I’m thinking,” Seinfeld said. “I’m not even in the scene. I’m not acting. I’m just watching Jason get the speech right in front of a live audience. OK, it’s not film. In film, movies, you screw it up and we’ll do it again. In TV, this live audience is going to hear this speech for the first time once. So you want those juicy laughs, they’re hearing these jokes the first time, and he’s getting it perfect. That is why I have that look on my face.”