As a kid, Chris Conran showed up to St. Louis Cardinals games two hours early, clutching a baseball and pen in his hands, hoping to snag an autograph from a player.
He went to as many games as his parents would allow, and he did this just about every time.
But for all of his dedication, he never did get an autograph.
“My dad always told me, ‘If you ever make it to this level, I want you to sign until your hand falls off. Make all those kids’ days, because you know how you feel right now and how sad you are that you couldn’t get an autograph,’” Conran recalled.
After his family moved from St. Louis to Utah during his senior year of high school, Conran went on to play baseball for Salt Lake Community College and Utah Valley University. Persistent arm injuries kept him from pursuing the sport professionally, but Conran has still found ways to follow his dad’s advice.
Like last month, when the 27-year-old made his reality TV debut on “The Bachelorette.”
Even though he got sent home at the end of the first episode, he received around 1,200 messages of encouragement on Instagram — a couple hundred from friends, and 1,000 from people he didn’t know.
He responded to every single one.
“They took the time to reach out and message me, and so I figure I at least owe them a reply and a thank you,” he said.
Now back at home in Salt Lake City, where he works for a landscape architecture firm, Conran has returned to regular life and a more normal dating scene — he’s still closely following “The Bachelorette,” though. His time on the show was short, so Conran said he doesn’t know how the season ends. But he has ideas.
With the drama on “The Bachelorette” kicking into high gear, Conran spoke to the Deseret News about the show’s popularity, his parents’ reaction to him being a contestant, and the controversial dodgeball scene.
Blank stares.
That’s all Conran saw when he told his parents he’d be going on “The Bachelorette.” They had never heard of the show, and the more their son explained it, the more questions they had.
“You’re going to go try to date one girl with 30 other guys?” his mom said.
“Can you not find a date in Utah?” his dad asked.
It wasn’t until late March — when President Donald Trump tweeted out a New York Times article about how the daily coronavirus briefings were drawing a large audience on par with “The Bachelor” season finale — that Conran’s parents realized just how popular the show was.
“My dad was like, ‘So this a big show?’’ Conran said with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty big, dad.’”
Conran’s episode debuted to 5.03 million viewers — more than last year’s “Bachelorette” season premiere, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“I’ve had a lot of friends who have never tuned in to the show before who watched the first episode, saw me in there, and now they’re diehard into the season, watching every single episode,” Conran said.
A big reason for the show’s popularity, according to Conran, is that the network doesn’t recruit well-known names and celebrities as contestants.
“I’m just an average guy in Utah who goes to work, who goes out to eat, goes to the bars, talks to people, plays rec league sports and stuff like that,” he said. “They’re taking 31 guys who could be anyone in the country. So you’re seeing these guys on a platform trying to find love, and I think anyone watching it can say, ‘You know what? That could be me.’”
In fact, Conran was watching “The Bachelor” with a good friend when a casting call for “The Bachelorette” popped up on the TV. Against his mild hesitation, his friend went on to nominate him for the show.
He got a call from a casting producer — six months later. He had forgotten about the whole thing by then. But, with encouragement from his friend, he decided to go through with it.
“She’s been my No. 1 fan the past five years of my life,” Conran said. “The joke with her is that I had been through dating in Salt Lake and I needed to try something new and she thought it’d be a really good opportunity for me to try a whole different style of dating. I’m ... open for all and everything above, so I said, ‘You know what? I’ll give it a shot. See what happens.’”
Like all TV shows at the start of the pandemic, initial production on “The Bachelorette” stopped in March — right before Conran and the other contenders were supposed to arrive in their limousines and meet Clare Crawley, the show’s leading lady, for the first time.
Instead, much like the NBA, the “Bachelorette” production crew and cast ended up forming a quarantine bubble at La Quinta Resort in Southern California, where they stayed for nearly three months until resuming filming in July, according to Variety.
And then, for the second time, Conran found himself preparing to meet Crawley. When his limo finally arrived, he stepped out and let out a big sigh. Crawley noticed.
“That’s a deep breath,” she said during the premiere episode.
“I’ve been waiting 139 days to meet you,” Conran responded.
“I’ve never had a panic attack in my life or been nervous for anything, but this was like the first time in my life where I was nervous and I didn’t know what to do,” he explained. “When I got out of that limo I mean, everything just hit me and I was like ‘Oh boy, here we go. It’s happening.’”
Conran didn’t get a lot of screen time. But he said he did have a chance to chat more with Crawley and form a connection, and that although it didn’t work out for him, he does believe these shows can be successful in establishing relationships.
“There’s 31 guys, very good odds,” he said. “She had a lot to choose from. I would have loved to be out there longer and had a chance of finding love with Clare, but unfortunately, the stars didn’t align. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, but everything happens for a reason, and now I’m just finding that silver lining and continuing life and just trying to progress.”
Since the season premiere, “The Bachelorette” has come under fire for a scene in the second episode where bachelors were forced to strip during a dodgeball game. The Parents Television Council said the moment celebrated “blatant sexual harassment,” and former “Bachelor” star Ben Higgins called it a double standard, the Deseret News reported.
“If this was a ‘Bachelor’ season, no way this happens, no way they get away with it, no way it’s appropriate, no way this just becomes a weekly topic,” Higgins said on his podcast, according to the Deseret News. “This is all fun and games until my buddies and I are naked on national television. They push the envelope every season, but this felt like a lot.”
Conran wasn’t a part of that episode, but from his own experience, he said the crew tries to make the contestants “as comfortable as possible,” and that ultimately, the men are not forced into anything they don’t want to do.
“I know that there might be some skeptics out there who are gonna say ‘Oh, double standards, this that and the other,’” he said. “But the guys made their choice. Everything that they do is something that they choose to do.”
If given the chance, Conran said he would consider going on a show like “The Bachelorette” again. And he believes his parents — who now have a better understanding of the show — would be accepting of it.
Conran added that the show was especially eye-opening for his mom, who grew up in the farmlands of Thailand and is the only person in her family who has left Asia.
“They (his mom’s family) didn’t have TV, they didn’t even have electricity I think when I went there for the first time in the fifth grade,” Conran said. “A Thai lady growing up on the border of Thailand and Laos would never expect that she’d end up in America and see her son on national television. So it was a really cool moment for her, and she was extremely proud.
“I was just happy to be able to go out there and help represent Utah.”