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After Shirtless Bro's brush with viral fame when he asked out a reporter on live TV, he just wanted to clear things up: it was his friend's idea.
Clay Narey and his friend drove up the street to check out the Etiwanda Fire that was making their neighborhood so smoky. When they arrived, they saw KTLA's Courtney Friel was live on the scene and his friend planted in him the idea for what the Daily Bulletin has dubbed the "shot seen 'round the world."
"That chick's cute, you should hit on her," said Narey's friend John Harsh.
And so Narey did, fresh and shirtless from his daily workout, with a dog in his hands. "Wow, you're super pretty. Do you wanna go on a date sometime?" he responded when Friel asked if he lived in the area. Friel is married to CBS' Carter Evans.
There's much more to the Shirtless Bro than meets than meets the eye, his brief moment of (shirtless) bro-ness aside. Narey is an Iraq vet, having served two tours and receiving the Purple Heart. The Huntington Beach native formerly worked as an accountant in Las Vegas for Caesars, and recently moved back to Southern California to live with his friend Harsh in Rancho Cucamonga. And yes, ladies, he is single—he divorced from his wife of six years six months ago.
And speaking of Caesar, Shirtless Bro is also an Erudite Bro. To explain his boldness in asking Friel out on the air, he quotes the Bard from Julius Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their deaths, but the brave die only once." (The actual line is "The valiant never taste of death but once.") His strategy for finding the next Mrs. Bro is asking out as many girls as he can, cutting straight to the chase, and being direct, just like in the infamous clip. "It seems like a lot more work," he says of doing it the old-fashioned way of getting to know someone.
As for whether or not Shirtless Bro thinks of himself as a bro: "I fit into that culture, but I don't identify with it."
Clay Narey speaks about his brush with fame from the scene of the incident
