Remember that time Steve Harvey took all the heat for a major, meme-inspiring Miss Universe fuck-up? Hell yeah you do. Though Pia Wurtzbach from the Philippines had been declared the winner by the judges, Harvey mistakenly announced that Colombia's Ariadna Gutiérrez would be taking the crown. Harvey ultimately got the last laugh with a hilarious holiday messageand a multi-year contract to host future Miss Universe broadcasts, but there's a bit more to the story.
While promoting his new book Jump: Take the Leap of Faith to Achieve Your life of Abundance on the Tonight Show Monday, Harvey broke down the unfortunate series of events for Jimmy Fallon. "It wasn't that quick," Harvey said after Fallon incorrectly recounted his own version of that fateful day. "It was four minutes of pure hell."
That hell started, Harvey explained, thanks to an apparent miscommunication among the crew. "It was crazy man," Harvey recalled. "Look, I'm a smart guy. I can read. I read the teleprompter. But the guy in my ear said 'Read the next name.' Now the teleprompter had just said 'and the new 2015 Miss Universe is,' and he said 'Read the next name now.' So I said Miss Colombia. [The] crowd goes crazy and he says 'Great job, Steve.'"
Once he made it backstage, however, the fuck-up became clear thanks to a flurry of "words you can't say on TV." To fix the error, organizers wanted to just straighten things out in the media the following day. But Harvey wasn't down for that approach. "I said 'Nah man, I'm gonna go and do it now,'" Harvey remembered. "And I walked out there." Though that walk was one of the "most gut-wrenching" walks of his life, Harvey is stoked to do it all again for the next Miss Universe pageant. "Hell yeah," Harvey told Fallon. "I'm going back."
