“If the flap of a butterfly’s wings can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally well be instrumental in preventing a tornado.”
A lot of you are not sports fans. I know that. I didn’t need one of you to write that opinion piece in the New York Times titled, “Has Sporty Seth Struck Out and Isolated Intellectuals?” While a valid question, and beautifully alliterated, I didn’t appreciate the internationally accessible complaint. That said, you might be right. Sports tend to be the lens by which I see the world. For example, what if I told you that Heisman winner, pro-bowler, and 2020 NFL Offensive Player of the Year Derrick Henry was 6’3 and weighed 247 lbs?
You probably wouldn’t think anything of it, right? Sure, he’s large, he’s an incredible athlete, but why does that matter to you? What if I told you that 45th President of the United States Donald Trump was 6’3 and weighed 247 lbs? Now that suddenly matters.
You can begin to ask yourself, “How many yards could Donald Trump gain in a game behind the Tennessee Titans’ offensive line?” You begin to picture the two of them standing next to one another and wondering how two 6’3, 247 lbs bodies could look so drastically different. Take the homophonic phrase “offensive line”: depending on which 6’3, 247 lbs man I’m discussing, you would read that phrase in two entirely different ways. Fascinating.
EDIT: At the time of writing, Trump’s weight was listed at 247 lbs. Since he reported to the Fulton county jail, his weight has changed to 215 lbs. This puts him at the same height and weight as baseball star Fernando Tatis Jr. and Muhammed Ali at age 29.
Recently, sports did something many thought was impossible; made me question if my actions have consequences and if I should take responsibility for them. I read a story and saw myself in it. Not because it was written on a mirror, but because the protagonist (or antagonist depending on how you read it) reminded me of myself. Please do me a favor and sit in your proverbial comfy chair while I lay on the metaphorical couch and unpack some stuff. It all started when I was a young boy.
As has been chronicled in multiple previous issues, I love to weave the occasional tale. The comedian Tom Segura has a great bit about learning to tell stories as children and why we are predisposed to gossip. The bit begins with children being terrible story tellers and ends with how he found out that Tommy Lee Jones is, in fact, not actually gay. None of you thought he was, but Segura did and explains why. It is a hilarious bit and it came to mind when I began this introspective journey. I’ll link it below. It has a fair amount of bad language, so if that bothers you, skip the clip and stay tuned for the main point in the next paragraph.
Tom Segura Thinks Kids Are The Worst Storytellers | Netflix Is A Joke
Sugura points out that the face adults make when a child first tells a bit of gossip is burned in their psyche. For me, it wasn’t a face in response to gossip, but the phrase, “Really?”. I love a quick, unnecessary story that is incredible enough to get a reaction but not so ridiculous as to be unbelievable. I blame my father for this. He is an honest man, but from a very young age he encouraged me to be creative and to make up stories. How irresponsible. When I was an impressionable child, he and I would tell each other stories about three dalmatian brothers named Hewey, Louie, and Dewey. To him, it was a parenting tactic as I would tend to use these stories to tell him what was going on in my life and he would tell stories on how the brothers dealt with those problems. To me, it was the introduction to a whole world of fiction and creativity. Blending real life with made up stories.
This has been a lifelong hobby. Though mostly clear and present jokes, at times these tales have crossed the line to straight up lies. For example, as a young child through middle school I had to have multiple surgeries on my ears. My doctor’s name was Dr. Witherspoon. He was, in fact, Reese Witherspoon’s dad. That is the truth. The lie was I would tell everyone in my class that Reese would hold my hand during my surgeries. Something I was self conscious about was now something I could brag about. At what point does fiction for entertainment become lies?
The answer may be when the receiver no longer is aware a story is fiction, or at the very least, given reasonable doubt to know it is fiction. When there isn’t a knowing look or a clear exit to the fiction where we all laugh at the potential scenario. As I said, a story recently caused me to be introspective. I, like many who were young in the early 2000’s, would occasionally edit Wikipedia pages to make things kinda silly. Back then, edits could stay up for a long time before they were caught and you could have your friends fact check you only to stumble upon misinformation. It was a lot of fun. I read a story where this was taken too far. Kieran Morris was a more daring kindred spirit. He took my messing with friends and brought it to a whole new level. I’ll let him tell you about it. Out of the hands of this unreliable narrator and into the hands of another.
“I’m going to tell the story like I’ve always told it. When I was a teenager, my best friend and I played a lot of pranks. We wanted to be like Chris Morris, fooling celebrities, journalists and politicians into absurd situations of our making. Morris, of course, is a genius and his satire remains the gold standard. We were not geniuses. To our 13-year-old minds, his work offered a simple lesson: you could just ring people up, influential people, and lie to them for fun…
…Over the next few years, as we aged a lifetime between 13 and 16, we continued to dabble and dupe, using fake emails, fake accents and Wikipedia tricks to make each other laugh. We dropped our names into the Wikipedia pages of minor indie bands in the hope of making it stick. I got as far as being named as the “multi-instrumentalist” for Mystery Jets by an Australian music critic; my friend is still listed on the Swedish-language page for the Scottish rock band Del Amitri. In 2011, we booked the veteran French footballer William Gallas a room in a luxury Midlands hotel, purporting to be his agent, and then tipped off the papers to his imminent signing by Birmingham City. When the club’s manager, Alex McLeish, was forced to deny those rumours live on-air on Sky Sports News the next morning, we laughed until our lungs gave out.
It was a powerful feeling. We were little masters, smart enough to mimic our targets and dumb enough not to fear their reprisals. But the best was yet to come. In 2012, the Olympics came to London. Among the nations competing in football was Honduras. A small central American country of 10 million people, Honduras does not have a glittering football history. As an ironic no-hoper for two annoying 16-year-olds to get invested in, it was perfect. And for our next grift, we wanted a blank canvas, which we found in their young midfielder in the number 10 shirt: Alexander López.
López was 19 years old, and had scored three goals in 28 starts with CD Olimpia, who had just won the Honduran league championship. As we took to his Wikipedia page, three career goals soon became 11; a column on his stats table then opened up for “assists”, and we judged that he should have 20. We built a grand narrative for him. As his stardom had grown in Central America, he had been invited for trials at Napoli, Malaga and Tottenham Hotspur. He was the next big thing. To fans, he was best known by his nickname: the “Honduran Maradona”.
With his online profile buffed and polished, we sought a bigger prize: his name in print. Our plan was to convince the British press that Wigan Athletic, the Premier League club that had brought three Honduran players to England in the previous few seasons, was on the verge of signing López for £2.5m. We spent a day ringing the local papers, then the regionals, then the nationals. At various points I pretended to be a club physio, a friend of the physio, an agent, and a local freelance journalist. By the evening, an editor, who believed he was talking to a journalist, was on the phone. And so, on 28 July 2012, in the back pages of the Olympics Opening Ceremony souvenir edition of the Times, you can find the following fateful words: “Wigan Athletic have agreed a £2.5 million deal for Alexander López, the Honduras playmaker, from Olympia.” The story was even picked up in Honduras by the local tabloid Diario Diez. We laughed; we loved it. We’d done it again.
López became our private joke. As months passed, we kept checking in with him, taking the time to further inflate his stats. By July 2013, he had 18 goals and 34 assists – figures that would put him alongside Messi and Ronaldo at a similar age. Figures that nobody would believe.
Then, one August afternoon, just over a year on from prank day itself, we came across something truly unbelievable. It was a press release from a major US team, Houston Dynamo. The club was announcing the $1m signing of a “young international with a bright future”, who had “registered 18 goals and 34 assists in 51 career league games”.
Oh god.
The new signing would be earning $212,000 a year, the fifth-highest salary at the club.
No way.
The club’s site celebrated this new arrival with a picture of López, beaming, holding an orange shirt with “ALEX – 10” on the back.
We didn’t, did we? Did we?…”
Ok, back to me. Kieran’s story taught me a valuable lesson. If a 16 year old editing a Wikipedia page could potentially lead to a soccer player getting a $1 million contract, and possibly derailing his career, could any of my fibs actually have consequences?
I recently reread all previous Daily Dispatch issues to collect my embellishments. Though you are likely not on a fact finding mission, I recommend rereading every issue because they are all brilliantly written.
Issue 3: “We are 17 subscribers away from being the number one newsletter in our great nation.” – False
The entirety of Issue 4, with the exception of the introduction, is false. Hilarious, but false.
Issue 8 I claim to spend a small fortune on dictionaries. Not true. I spend a large fortune.
In the previous sentence, I continued a lame joke. It was a false premise.
There are a lot more embellishments, half truths, and thinly veiled jokes. I realized I could keep listing them, but you get the point and we are already pushing 2,000 words. I doubt any of you will believe these and make decisions based on them, but I also doubt Kieran thought a random soccer player would get a $1 million contract based on his Wikipedia edits. I don’t know who all reads these. I do know we have readers in many different countries. That is not a lie according to the data Bluehost (not a sponsor) gives me. The point, however, remains, maybe I should reconsider the blasé nature in which I write jokes in a format without clear tone. What will the ripple effects of my lies be? Who knows, all I know is I will be giving a speech at this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Public Service ceremony as I claim the award.
