“I had a lot of explaining to do back in the New York Giants locker room that year.” Nearly two decades before he was tasked with helping Clayton Echard find love, Jesse Palmer was the one handing out the roses.
“I do regret forgetting somebody’s name,” Palmer, now 43, said on Us Weekly’s “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast about his time as the lead. “That was the first [piece of] advice I gave Clayton, by the way, [was] do not forget anybody’s name. Having been there myself, I can tell you nothing good comes of that. Just lock in. And he’s done a really, really good job of that.”
Overall, the former quarterback has no real regrets about his time as the lead. “I had an unbelievable experience. In 2004, this whole reality TV thing was so new,” he said. “And the show was so young. And I think in a lot of ways that the show was still kind of figuring itself out, what was it gonna become? It was obviously a huge risk to kind of step out of my comfort zone [as] a football player — to really sort of bear yourself and look for love and do it on television at the time was really sort of unique.”
