Soap Opera Digest
Long before his days as B&B's Thorne, Winsor Harmon was working on the jump from college football star to model. Unfortunately, as he would soon learn, size does matter. After his first meeting with a major modeling agency, "[The agent] told me, 'You'll never be a model...you're too big.' I said, 'Okay, what do I need to do to be a model?' She said, 'You need to be in a 40 regular jacket and have a 32-inch waist.' I said, 'Okay, not only am I going to do that, but I'm going to go and compete with the [best] competitor in town,' and walked out," recalls Harmon with a laugh. "Then I went on a vegetarian diet and started studying nutrition and everything...because I was weighing about 230 pounds. I was really big, muscular from playing ball — I was wearing a 46-inch jacket and a 35-inch waist. So I went on a vegetarian diet, and I ran 5 miles in the morning and 5 miles in the evening and I dropped down to a 31-inch waist and a 40 regular jacket and 174 pounds. And then I went to her competing agency in town and I got picked up, and [eventually] wound up with Ford."
For a small-town boy like Harmon, getting paid to see the world was one of his modeling career's biggest perks. "I loved that part of it. When my parents took me to the airport, I was 18 years old or 19 and I had $500 in my pocket. I was so excited to go and my mother was sitting there, almost in tears. She was like, 'Oh, nothing bothers him...he's just going to move to a foreign country and it doesn't bother him.' And I was like, 'Why would it bother me? I'm going to get an education [by traveling the world] that Texas A&M couldn't give me.' It was a free education — a paid education. Although I remember the holidays being rough, because you wanted to be home with your family and stuff. And it was a challenge at times, because you couldn't communicate with anybody unless they spoke English. I tried very hard to learn the languages, obviously."
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