AMERICA AT LARGE/George Kimball: Seventeen years ago this week, readers of Sports Illustrated were treated to the astonishing story of Sidd Finch, an English-born, French horn-playing mystic who, having being schooled in a Tibetan monastery, turned up at the New York Mets' Florida training camp that spring, asking for a try-out as a pitcher.
Finch's fastball was clocked at a world-record 168 m.p.h, but less than a week after his arrival, Sidd (short for Siddartha) had disappeared, having given up the sport because he was unable to accept baseball concepts which contravened his Tantric principles - among other things, he found offensive the concept of "stealing" a base.
That Finch's saga was recorded by the incorrigible humorist George Plimpton, coupled with the fact it appeared in an issue dated April 1st, should have been a dead giveaway, but the magazine received over 2,000 Sidd Finch letters the week after the story was published. For months afterward the switchboards of both Sports Illustrated and the Mets were kept busy fielding phone calls from irate fans demanding the team track down Sidd Finch and sign him at any cost.
Over the years the Sidd Finch story assumed almost legendary proportions as the grand-daddy of all April Fool's Day sporting hoaxes. Surely someone must have wondered in the meantime what might have happened had it taken place in the so-called "information age", and over the past few days we finally got a chance to find out.
On Monday morning Charles Jay, whose TotalAction Fight Page serves as a clearinghouse linking worldwide boxing reports of the day, published an "exclusive" revealing, barely a week after it had been announced, the June 8th Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson fight in Memphis was off. Tyson, revealed Jay, had pulled out of the bout after learning that once his debts had been paid from his promised $17.5 million purse he would be fighting Lewis virtually for free.
Now, in terms of plausibility, Tyson baulking at the fight under these conditions was no more preposterous than, say, the morning's other big news, which was that the Queen Mother had passed away at 101, and my first reaction was to scour the wires to see how other newspapers might have been playing the story.
A more careful reader of Jay's account would probably have noticed the first letter of each paragraph combined to spell out A-P-R-I-L F-O-O-L, and there were other clues. In "confirming" the dissolution of the fight, for instance, it quoted a spokeswoman at the Pyramid in Memphis called "Rosie Ruiz", Rosie Ruiz having been the name of the notorious fraud who cheated her way to the gold medal in the 1980 Boston Marathon after completing most of the route via subway.
Another cited source was an alleged press aide to Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton named "Irving Clifford" (Clifford Irving was the author of a biography of Howard Hughes which later proved to be a hoax), while another was "Alan Smithee", that being the recognized nom de plume employed when a Hollywood director or screenwriter deems a product so unsatisfactory he refuses to have his name associated with it.
If those clues weren't sufficient, Jay quoted former University of Memphis basketball coach Larry Finch ("who, along with his brother Sidney and three other former Memphis players are investors in the group" backing Lewis-Tyson) as saying: "You can't believe everything you hear, everything you read. We just didn't pay close enough attention. It's like they write things in code. Things have been moving at 168 m.p.h., but does anybody even know what day it is?" And 168 m.p.h., remember, was the velocity of Sidd Finch's fastball.
TO their credit, most American newspapers held off on breaking the "story", though at least one was taken in. Spotting the item on Jay's website, Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Joe Hawk telephoned his office asking them to clear space on the front page of the sports section for a story of major importance. Hawk's breathless revelation that Lewis-Tyson was off made it into 1,300 newspapers before Jay explained the hoax to Review-Journal boxing writer, Kevin Iole.
Lewis' trainer Emanuel Steward, in Las Vegas for the US Amateur Boxing Championships, apparently read Hawk's story and was immediately on the phone to the heavyweight champion, demanding to know why he hadn't been informed the fight had been cancelled. (A baffled Lewis replied he didn't know any more about it than Steward did.)
If most US newspapers exercised more restraint than the Review-Journal, Total Action's immediate competitors on the Internet appear to have been more gullible. Fightnews.com, did its best to discredit Jay's "exclusive" while clearly never recognising it as a hoax. Fightnews editor Scott "Flattop" Pope quoted an anonymous source within the Tyson camp, refuting Iron Mike's alleged abdication from the big fight, while proudly trumpeting the news that in response to Pope's query, Pyramid representatives had denied even having a spokeswoman named Rosie Ruiz.
In Tuesday's editions, the Las Vegas newspaper felt constrained to publish a box containing an apologetic retraction: "A story appearing on page 1C in a small number of Monday's editions of the Review-Journal was an April Fools' Day hoax and incorrect. The Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson world heavyweight championship fight, scheduled June 8th in Memphis, Tenn., has not been postponed or cancelled."
Jay also received an irate letter from Joe Hawk, complaining that his "irresponsible shenanigans" had led to the NCAA basketball tournament, the opening of Major League baseball's season, and hometowner Andre Agassi's winning his "700th career tournament" (sic) being knocked off the front page of the Review-Journal.
Perhaps because he had played it so close to the line with his prank, Jay was briefly concerned when he received an e-mail from Pat English, the lawyer for Main Events, the lead promoter of the Lewis-Tyson fight, accusing him of stooping to a new low in journalism and threatening legal action over lost ticket sales. It was only when Jay carefully re-read the missive from English that he realised the first letter of each paragraph also spelled out A-P-R-I-L F-O-O-L-S.
