Guy Fieri's moment of decision

Guy Fieri has discovered the drawbacks of cooking for an audience. The self-taught cook won a Food Network competition several years ago, despite—or partly because of—his rock-star attitude and spiky blond hair, and now is the star of his own show. But it’s not always fun playing chef. “We were doing a show in upstate New York with 2,000 people in the audience,” he tells David Hochman in Playboy. “I came out onstage, the crowd was clapping, cameras overhead, cameras to the side—the whole thing. I wasn’t into this damn demo for more than 30 seconds and I cut this chunk off my finger. I thought it was my whole thumb. The butt of the knife had driven through. And it was so bloody. Ever seen blood when it’s blue? That’s what I’m talking about.” As the blood pumped out, Fieri realized he had a choice between properly attending to his self-inflicted wound and disappointing his audience or working through the pain. “I was like, ‘Oh s--t! Do I tell all these people who’ve paid good money that I don’t even know how to use a knife?’ I made the blink decision to keep going. I tied the towel around the thumb like a tourniquet and just barreled through. That finger was sore for the next four years.”

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