CRAIG SJODIN/ABCThe Dancing With the Stars injury count keeps going up, and host Tom Bergeron is beginning to think he has something to do with it.
"I hope I'm not the cause," he told us before hosting the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's 30th College Television Awards Saturday night in Culver City, Calif. "But, you gotta remember the two shows I host at ABC have the highest injury count on network television: America's Funniest Videos and now Dancing With the Stars. It could be me. Oh God, now I'm paranoid!"
Get the dish on the latest injury, on why Tom's calling the dancers Oompa-Loompas, and what Woz himself has to say…
Already dealing with a fractured left foot bone, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak suffered a second injury at rehearsal on Friday: a pulled hamstring, sources tell E! News. Tom says that Steve is "determined to be there on Monday and dance." Another source tells E! that as of Saturday, Steve is "still in the competition."
"There has to be some anxiety about the amount of injuries, because all of a sudden it feels like we're in an Ingmar Bergman film, only with spray tans," jokes Tom. "We're actually thinking of getting Pauley Perrette from NCIS to do a forensic sweep of the ballroom to see what's going on. I might just ask her to do that."
Speaking of those spray tans, did you see how orange everyone is this season (word to Shawn Johnson!)? "Yeah, a few people have gone overboard," Tom quips. "We have people come in to spray them. But there's a little Oompa-Loompa going on this season. It's not for me. I'm holding to the middle-age pasty-white-guy look."
So if Woz's injuries take him out of the competition entirely, are we going to see a replacement for him? "No," says Tom. "The only thing it will impact is if there is one week we were going to have a double elimination and we wouldn't do that. But we'd still eliminate someone. So if [he] can't dance this week, we're still going to knock somebody else out anyway because that's the way we roll."
It's not looking good that Steve will make it until Monday. He was spotted Friday night at a CVS pharmacy in Los Angeles "limping pretty badly," according to a source. When a female fan offered Woz a "good luck" on this Monday's show, he replied that he might be "off" by then and then limped away. "I hurt it today," Woz added.
—Additional reporting by Ken Baker
(Originally published March 21, 2009, at 11:05 a.m. PT)
Is this season jinxed or what? So Woz isn't a good dancer, but don't we want to see him shake his moneymaker just one more time? Give us your thoughts below.