The M*A*S*H cast created the 'World Championship Surgical Clamping Contest' behind the scenes

They competed for the "world record" between takes.

The Everett Collection

M*A*S*H  ran for 11 seasons. That's a long time to be working with the same people, on the same sets, playing the same characters. While it certainly made a family out of the cast, it could also get a little boring over the years.

The cast found their own ways to keep themselves entertained over long days of shooting. One of those ways was what the cast called the "World Championship Surgical Clamping Contest".

In a 1979 Chicago Sun-Times article, David Ogden Stiers, who came on the cast as Winchester in season six explained how he was introduced to the sport when he was new and nervous on set. "They (the other actors) could have made it very difficult for me. They could have had me for lunch the first day. And believe me, I was a puddle that day; I had no knees. I couldn't function."

"But they were very supporting," Stiers said. "They let you know very quickly that you are a valuable person, and you are going to be taken very seriously as a human being and an actor. And after you are very secure, they pull out all the stops and start throwing vegtables at you."

For Stiers, it wasn't a vegetable at all, but something much more on-hand on set. "...we were in the operating room, and I was supposed to turn into a close-up, say a line and turn back to the patient. And just as I turned into a camera and was drawing a breath to say the line, a big piece of surgical gauze hit me right between the eyes. 'God,' I said to myself, 'I'm so bad they are throwing stuff at me.'"

At that point, he spotted Harry Morgan, who was another mid-show cast as Potter, "standing back with that demented and gleeful look in his maligned little eyes, and I said my line and turned back, and as I did, I realized that someone had clamped me to the patient. I was trying to exit, and I was pulling some poor [actor] across the set behind me."

Stiers adapted fast though, and for a while he even held the record for the World Championship Surgical Clamping Contest. "I had seven of them on Loretta Swit... she didn't know until she walked out of the scene and heard 'tink, tink, tink' from the sway."

He bemoaned losing his record when "Harry got an assistant nurse with eight of them. Now I have to find someone who is insensate in the derriere and hang nine on them — or better still, do it on Harry."

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7 Comments

Pacificsun 23 months ago
MeTV Staff Writers, WAIT! This poor story ONLY has 5 comments. What happened? So here's a repeat of another story about Loretta Switt you forgot to include with your current run of them for Veteran's Day. It was found by searching on two of your other popular Shows, 𝓻𝓮𝓶𝓮𝓶𝓫𝓮𝓻 them??
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May 7, 2018, 4:50PM By MeTV Staff
TITLE: This is how Mannix and Matt Dillon helped Loretta Switt get cast on M*A*S*H. She almost became a movie star instead!

Sorry, no time to post the images that went with it, but here's the URL to find it!!

https://www.metv.com/stories/this-is-how-mannix-and-matt-dillon-helped-loretta-swit-get-cast-on-m-a-s-h
djw1120 Pacificsun 1 month ago
Actually, it DOES have 5 comments. Unless you are adding the reply from summer21 which was made 22 months ago.
CoreyC 23 months ago
The only cast member who was hard to deal with was Gary Burghoff.
Summer21 23 months ago
Hard to watch that show after the first 5 years. They all look so old. Way too old to have been drafted. The minute Mcclean Stevenson left the show it was done.
CoreyC Summer21 23 months ago
The doctors who served in a MASH unit was drafted in the Korean War.
Andybandit 23 months ago
How fun. It sounds the cast did a lot of fun stuff to pass the time.
LoveMETV22 23 months ago
Sounds like the M*A*S*H cast had fun on the set. Although there are several outtake and blooper clips from the series (they're not uncensored). The 'World Championship Surgical Clamping Contest' behind the scenes, would have been fun to see.
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