March mendacity
There's a weird subculture of guys falsifying their athletic exploits--and this madness is a year-round phenomenon.
Recently, a gentleman I worked alongside claimed to have played for a Division I basketball team back in the 1990s.
I adopted a “trust but verify” approach. Over the next few hours, woven in with other conversation as we worked together, I casually lobbed a few follow-up questions his way:
Who did you play for?
Did you ever play in March Madness (the NCAA tournament)?
Did you get to play much?
He answered without hesitation and with precision. My paraphrase of his replies:
“The University of Tennessee and, why, yes, we did have one game in the NCAA tournament but we got knocked out right away. And did I play? Oh, yeah! I was the sixth or seventh man [the first or second guy off the bench], so I got plenty of minutes.”
He didn’t stop there, either.
He offered that the team also made it to the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), a less-prestigious postseason tournament. Alas, the Volunteers lost their only NIT match, he lamented.
He’s a 6-foot-4 white guy, so I made a few references to his being the 1990s “Ernie” version of the “Bernie and Ernie Show,” an allusion to the formidable Ebony and Ivory duo of Bernard King and Ernie Grunfeld who were stars of the mid-1970s Tennessee teams.
Each time I dropped a “Bernie and Ernie” reference on him, he gave me a blank look. That should’ve been my tip-off.
Later that day I tried to locate this fella’s name in the year-by-year rosters for the Tennessee Volunteers of the Southeastern Conference, who, I noticed, never made it to the NCAA tournament during the mid-1990s window when he would’ve been there.
The only potentially accurate detail appears to be the 1995-1996 team, which lost its first-round NIT game, but this fellow is nowhere to be found in the team records for that season or any other year.
I was disappointed, but hardly shocked. It was just the latest reminder that there's a weird subculture of guys who falsify their athletic exploits.
Because of my passion for playing sports, covering sports and uncovering dishonesty over the years, inflated accounts of sports careers are especially intriguing to me.
I come upon this phenomenon regularly. A few examples:
A Cook County Board candidate in 1998 bragged to me one night that he’d played some years earlier for the Pittsburgh Penguins1 …so I followed up to learn more.
In 2009, a young buck moving up in the world of real estate blew his chance at being featured as a “30 Under 30” in Realtor magazine because he couldn’t resist whipping up a tall tale about his supposed college baseball prowess.2
My children had a teacher who told the class that he had played Triple A baseball in the Oakland A’s organization. When I amiably asked him about it at a school picnic, he poo-poohed it as a distant chapter in his life and declined to give details. That was smart, since there were none (as I’d already confirmed by looking, in vain, for any shred of proof that he’d played professionally).
There’s more, including one local character in my hometown of Oak Park, Ill. whose 2007 fish tales included military valor and playing for the University of Michigan football team. Unfortunately, a local newspaper lapped up that and other Forrest Gump-caliber whoppers.
As for that last doozy, I knew this man from chatting with him around town and alerted my editors at the Chicago Tribune: do not duplicate this egregious mistake.
They appreciated the heads-up; a few days later, they asked me to write a story about the whole debacle. In my draft, I dropped in a Forrest Gump reference, but my editor cut it. Here was the lede:
Mind you, it’s not as if I search the countryside for dudes waxing rhapsodic about their fake sports exploits. They just find me. And for every fib that I detect, how many more do I not bother to scrutinize because, well, it’s (usually) not my job?
Decades ago, it was easier to get away with these fictions. Athletic records weren’t readily available with a few taps of your smartphone. But nowadays? Do these folks really think that people won’t check it out?
What do you think? When people spin these yarns, what’s actually going on?
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This was in 1998 when Mike Olszewski, then clerk of a small government unit about an hour west of Chicago, Hanover Township, claimed to have played for the Pittsburgh Penguins. After gathering embellishment upon embellishment in an interview—clearly, he thought I was going to write a flattering profile of his faux hockey career—I confronted him with my research turning up no such thing.
That’s when he backpedaled like “Get Smart” secret-agent Maxwell Smart:
“Would you believe I played minor-league hockey in Decatur?”
Um, only if I can confirm it, Mike. When I tried verifying even that modest claim, there was no evidence backing it up. I dubbed the episode “Penguingate,” as this was a bit of an Onion-esque parody of the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Not longer after, Mr. Olszewski lost his bid for the county board. That was an era, dear young ones, when blatant lying was actually a political liability. Quaint, huh?
The real estate prodigy’s assertions didn’t hold up when I did a little digging. Realtor magazine editors agreed with my strong recommendation to drop him from consideration for the recognition. Meantime, this supposed rising star extended a LinkedIn invitation to me, which helped me keep tabs on his career. Within a year, maybe two, he exited the real estate industry altogether.
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This was a really interesting post, Matt! I can’t help wondering if there might be a book in this topic for you. Not sure of the angle, off-hand, but I can imagine a title like: “I Struck Out Babe Ruth!” or “I Was a Harlem Globetrotter!” and a subtitle like “The True Stories behind Fake Sports Legends” or something. I think it’s particularly interesting that it doesn’t seem like the folks you mention in your post were exaggerating or embellishing the truth; it seems like they were just making it up entirely. I would have thought there’d at least be *nuggets* of the truth there.
Here's my story: I played 16" softball in the 80s at Loyola Park on the far north side of Chicago. I played for a team sponsored by a bar named Helen and Gabby's (long gone). I played with a man named Jim Hobson, a decorated Viet Nam war hero. We were very good players. One year Jim told me that we received an invitation to try out for a semi pro softball team. That try out fell through. Bet you can't disprove that! The part about Hobson is true, though. He went on to run some Chicago Park District facilities with great success.