I may not know much about the celebrity game, but I do know that if Mickey Rourke wants to tell you a crazy story, you take that phone call every damn time. That’s why the man of the hour is Yahoo! Olympics writer Martin Rogers who posted a pretty standard Rourke story late last night, regarding how the famously batsh*t actor told him that he beat the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, in a street race in London earlier this year.
And you don’t have to ask, because yes, Rourke was drunk. I just assume that’s a given in any Rourke story.
“We were outside the Wellington in Central London and it was four in the morning,” Rourke said. “It was just that time of the night, you know, when anything can happen. So I went up to him and I said, ‘Come on, you are the world’s fastest man, let’s go.’ ”
“There was a space in the street of about 30 meters,” Rourke said. “I got him to back up about four paces, we set off and I got him by a few inches.”
Right there, that’s a great Rourke tale. He was hanging out, minding his own business, when Usain Bolt walks into the Wellington – which is a club for ridiculously wealthy people, yet Rourke has a suite there because they love how crazy he is – and Rourke is all, “Someone hold my parrot and this Civil War rifle, I’m gonna race this guy real quick.”
But no, it gets even better. Because it has to.
“I had been drinking tequila with these guys from the Huddersfield Giants rugby team,” Rourke continued. “I was arm wrestling with one of them, he was huge, and that is how I tore my bicep. I should have given in but I didn’t want to, you know.
“But at least I won something that night. We were going to go back into the bar again after I raced Usain but they had closed it down for the night. So it was a pretty good way to end up.”
Rourke has been preparing for a role as 37-year old openly gay rugby player Gareth Thomas, so it makes sense that he would be hanging out with a bunch of rugby guys. I just want to know what he did after he tore his bicep arm wrestling rugby players and then beat Bolt in a foot race. I like to think he walked up to Buckingham Palace and demanded to see the Queen before puking on a guard’s coat and waking up in a kiddie pool filled with mashed potatoes and 9-volt batteries.
But then, I don’t know if it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday.