Pablo Torre Finds Out - How an NHL Team Drafted a Fake Japanese Person

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

The greatest trick the Buffalo Sabres ever pulled was convincing the world that Taro Tsujimoto really existed. Correspondent Michael J. Mooney takes us from a mysterious call in western New York to a hockey rink in the Himalayas — and explains why this completely made-up human has never felt more alive. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. He's still skating on his pond in Tokyo, and he'll sometimes pay a visit, but he never stays long. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraff Kings Network. Okay, so I don't know if you know this, but they want us to call the sphere just sphere now. I refuse to do this like I did with the Facebook. Still the Facebook to me.

But the sphere is the site of the most technologically advanced draft in the history of sports television, which is happening tonight. The 2024 upper deck NHL draft will be held at Sphere Las Vegas. The draft will utilize spheres, cutting-edge technologies. This will truly be a unique draft unlike any other. And NHL Commissioner Gary Betman, who definitely wasn't reading that off a cute, card held slightly off-screen is actually right. Like, I'm not a huge hockey fan or anything, but this is going to be unlike any other draft.

You're going to see names and stats and video highlights of all of these draft picks, and they'll be wrapping around the giant IMAX orb that, you know, was otherwise better known as the place where your friend who loves fish says he touched the face of God. But what I wanted to do today for you is something that's actually the opposite. I wanted to identify the one draft that this giant IMAX orb is most unlike. Because if the sphere embodies the almost logical evolution of cutting-edge broadcast technology, the apotheosis of the draft as a live television show, I think it's useful to find out what sits at the complete opposite end of that spectrum.

And the story we found for you from the NHL draft, 50 years ago, it turns out, is somehow even trippier, which is why we had to assign one of the best magazine reporters working today, Michael Mooney, to help us investigate it. I should point out, though, that your beard is fucking incredible. Thank you very much. My wife is very much attracted to homeless Vikings. So I, uh, I'm, this actually her project. I'm just the host.

I feel like there's Viking, but also like playoff hockey in there, too. A little bit, yeah. It does feel like, like we've got to win the cup before I can take a razor to this thing. Yes, and that already qualifies as as much hockey talk as you've done on this show, by the way.

Michael Mooney. Thank you for joining us. We don't do a lot of hockey here. That is about it so far. This is one of the greatest hockey stories of all time. This is so nuts. The story you're here to talk about is not merely a draft story.

It's not merely a hockey story. It's also one of the great stories, one of the great legends when it comes to Asians in sports, Mike. And as a cataloger, as a human Dewey Decimal System for such stories, I am ashamed that I did not know this already,

but I am proud to have you an actual accomplished journalist like investigating this story for us. So I suppose I should say that the name of the person we're here to discuss is something that I'm not even sure how to pronounce. So how should we do this? I say Taro Sujimoto, but the vast majority of people involved in the story say

Taro Tujumoto. So I say Sujimoto like tsunami. Yes. And that's the way I've been told to pronounce it. But the vast majority of people involved who were older white men of a different time pronounced it to Jumoto. which is a familiar dynamic to the Asian experience in America. Not necessarily up to you what your own name is,

but we should explain who Taro Sue or Tu Jumoto was. So he was a draft pick in the 1974 NHL draft. He came from the Tokyo Catanas. It was rumored that he would be one of the fastest players in the NHL. In fact, the team that drafted him would really use him to wear down defenses all across the league. to kind of like bolster their incredible offensive attack. He had numbers, right?

These were like, he had data behind him. 15 goals, 10 assists. Right, and he was how old at the time? 20 years old. And his size had been debated. Some places he was listed at 5-8, 180, some places he was 5-10, 175, which is, you know,

kind of helped bolster that legend of who was this guy. because when he was drafted, nobody else in the NHL had ever heard of him. Taro was believed to be at the time the first Japanese player ever drafted into the NHL. In my attempt to fact-checked this, Mike, I mean, you can find the archival.

You can find the documents, right, from 1974. And there he is. He is listed on the record books, as you describe. And when you say, okay, drafted in 1974, pick number 183, I try to cross-check this, and I can't. But if you go to HockeyReference.com, if you go to the 1974 NHL draft and start scrolling down,

you get Pick 181, you get Pick 182, and then it's immediately Pick 184. I am led to wonder why the fuck did they erase the first Japanese player in NHL history from the NHL record books after having him there for all eternity to see before. The NHL officially called it an invalid claim. Their record books are basically like, you know, doesn't exist, not applicable.

The NHL has done their best to erase this guy. But what is happening here? What is the reason for the invalidity of this piece of history? Yeah, here's the big reveal. Taro Tujimoto, Sujimoto never existed at all. All right. So you are about to hear the story of how the. first Japanese player ever drafted by an NHL team, a pioneer in the world of Asian athletes,

a legend that is still memorialized all around Western New York, did not actually exist. Yeah. But before we get to how all that happened and why, I need you to visualize what the National Hockey League was actually like 50 years ago when all this went down. Because there was a lot of blood. Now we've got Brad and Schultz. Now they're both on the ice and the other players have squared off. Very few helmets.

There were brawls all the time. Paul McIntosh, who was drafted the same year as Taro and is now a scout for the Dallas Stars, told me, like if somebody was caught high sticking or had a rough hit, something dirty, it was handled right there on the spot, on the ice. It was taken care of right away in terms of not through league discipline

just from the team taking care of it and looking after business itself and as far as... Which is very different, obviously, from the NHL of today, which is effectively a league of discipline. Back then, the league office didn't care about all the blood and fighting

and general on-ice goonery. What the NHL spent most of its time worrying about what it was freaked out about, honestly, was a newly existential business concern. because a deep-pocketed new competitor had crawled into the league office's heads. And so the NHL was spending most of its time worrying about how to wage a war of its own now in secret. They were really worried about this upstart competitive league called the World Hockey Association. Twelve brand new, fully manned, well-balanced, Canadian and American hockey teams took to the ice and began thawing out the first ice age.

and opened up a closed shop that had become one of sports most firmly locked up monopolies. The impenetrable fortress that had withstood years of onslaught had finally met its match. They were competing not just for, like, audiences and attention. They were competing for the same players. They were losing players to this other league, including Bobby Hull, who was like one of the greatest players of all time. And so the NHL decided in 1974 to have a secret draft so that the W. WHA wouldn't know which players to target and go to because if you had two leagues,

if you had two different teams who had drafted the rights to somebody competing, well, that was going to cost the owners a lot of money. And so the setting for a secret draft 50 years ago, how secret is the room that the secret draft is being held in? Where was it all happening? There wasn't even a room because this was entirely secret. It was done over the phone. And the man at the center of it was Clarence Campbell.

who was almost 70 years old, and like just the driest, most boring, old lawyerly type man, and he would have to call each team, and he would ask their draft pick. But before he asked the draft pick, he would have them listen to him read through every person who had been picked before that.

And he would often stop and spell out the names in, like, just the most dry, monotonous, tedious process. It's so boring. It sounds incredible insofar as this is like the opposite of a TV show that millions of people would want to watch

as they do today. Okay, so I just got to underscore the logistics, the math here that Mike is laying out for us. Because Clarence Campbell, the droning president of the NHL, a former ref, actually, who ascended to the top job and held it for 30 years, was best known for league expansion.

Now, there's not a lot of surviving audio of Clarence Campbell, but you can hear him in this quick clip from 1966 announcing that he was doubling the size of the NHL, from six teams to 12. This is the year of the great expansion. This year, for the first time, the league will be composed of 12 teams. And less than a decade later, by 1974, the NHL under Clarence Campbell,

now tripled in size to 18 teams. And so in this secret draft, a secret enterprise meant to claim as much of the world as possible for the NHL, basically, there were 25 rounds. 25. The entire thing lasted three days in total. Picks would be revealed directly to every team, one by one, over the phone, yes, by Clarence Campbell, that voice you heard before. And it was exhausting.

and irritating. And nobody was more exhausted or more irritable than one team in specific, the Buffalo Sabres. And so the other end of the line here, for the purposes of our story here, across the country, is the Buffalo Sabers front office.

And who is the person manning the phones for the Sabres? George Punch Inlock. I mean, he was a legend. He's one of the most influential people in the history of the NHO. Imagine like Tom Landry, but older and Canadian and meaner. He would just absolutely would not suffer fools in the slightest. Our first guest, the coach and general manager of the Leafs Punch Him Lack and Punch you be going into the dressing room. Do you speak to them as a group or as individuals or what?

Well, usually I use a group idea. Once in a while I get bad and then I go to the individual, but most of it is usually done as a group and let them take out what they think this applies to them. Could you give us a little preview of what you're going to say? Paul McIntosh, the former player, told me that the trainers would tell him that they would keep ties right there in the locker room. You didn't go in his office without a tie.

It didn't matter if you had blue jeans on or what the rest of everything looked like you had to have a tie on. And they'd say, kid, make sure you put a tie on to see Mr. Imlack. Otherwise, he was immediately going down to the Farm League. Like, there was no discussion. He was gone. That's what kind of guy Punch Imlock was. Right.

And do we know why his nickname was Punch? Yeah. When he was playing in the junior leagues, he was knocked on conscious at some point. And when he came to, he just started punching everything in front of him, which happened to be the trainers who were. trying to take care of him. And his fellow players were so delighted by this that they started with nicknames

like punchy and it slowly worked down to punch. And it just seemed to fit his personality. Yeah. It again, as we say on this show a lot, it feels very on the nose, this detail, which also would be where a punch presumably would want to connect.

So I say... Punch is on the nose. I'd say all of this to say that he was also like deeply respected as an executive, right? Like this guy despite being this caricature of a of a principal himself, this bullying character was also famous for being good at his job. We have a slogan with the Maple Leaf. The price of success is hard work.

We think this is very important, so I will repeat it. Now listen carefully. The price of success is hard work. The previous decade, he basically oversaw a dynasty with the Toronto And when he took over as coach, the team was terrible. They were in last place when he took over. And that year, he led them to the playoffs. And then won in the first round of the playoffs.

And then ultimately won four Stanley Cubs in Toronto during that decade. And so when the Buffalo Sabres were an expansion franchise, there were actually a couple of franchises who were trying to get him. And so they basically tapped him to create their, entire franchise. We're talking about 1970. The Sabres are born in Buffalo. And, like, what is the level of excitement around town?

So the franchise was, like, immediately beloved in this area, right? In Buffalo and all of Western New York. And even, like, that part of Ontario across the lake in Niagara Falls, that area, they immediately loved this franchise. And they were very successful pretty early on. But they even had a song, like this cheesy theme song that was all about, like, they're going to win the Stanley Cup. Wait, Mike Mooney, give us a little bit of the song.

What did it sound like? I'm not going to, I don't want to sing it for it. But I don't want to sing it. We're going to win that Stanley Cup. You know, whatever, it's terrible. You know, we're going to win that Stanley Cup. Me and the Buffalo Sambers, yeah, yeah. In the first draft as GM, the Sabres had the first pick, which they won because the

NHL had a wheel to spin and had the various teams. picked numbers on the wheel. Like a physical wheel. A literal wheel of fortune. And of course, punch picked 11 on the wheel because that was his lucky number and his favorite number. Classic punch. And that's how the Sabres got Jill Barrow,

who became like basically the greatest player in their franchise history. He drafted Rick Martin, who was like this hardcore sharpshooter, and then Renee Robert, who was like a go in the corner dig-it-out guy, and the three of them became the French connection, who still considered one of the most exciting lines in NHL history. Think of something like the Steph, KD, Clay lineup with the Warriors a couple years ago. So, Mike, the mental image you're painting for me is coming into focus. So we have Clarence, the president of the NHL, effectively the commissioner figure here,

who is conducting, calling people, reading names. Every time Commissioner Clarence called your phone, He's reading 17 other names and stopping and spelling them out for you. I know, Mike, that email was not invented at the time, obviously, but really this meeting, this draft could have been an email. Oh, my God. But also, there's another thing that I think you should know about how Punch Imlock, this increasingly humorless Hall of Famer,

viewed the secret draft of 1974. Because Punch's bosses, the team's owners, had already vowed to never be outspoken, spent by the WHA, which was no small thing. And so Punch was specifically not even worried about what the NHL in general was worrying about. And so in Buffalo, the secret spelling of every single name over the phone over and over again, it didn't just feel inefficient. It felt pointless.

So pointless, in fact, that by the 11th round, not even halfway through, of 25 rounds. pounds. Punch snapped, and he turned to the employee in the Sabres front office, who seemed like his total opposite, a man who was arguably the most mischievous PR person in the history of sports. So Punch at some point was like so sick of this. He decided that he had already picked all the players that had any chance of making his roster. So by the 11th round, he said, we should draft somebody that nobody's ever heard of. He basically turns to his comms guy. Paul Whelan says, we should draft somebody who doesn't exist.

Paul Weeland was like this kind of classic prankster in Buffalo. I actually talked to a local historian in Buffalo named John Boutet, who was good friends with Paul at the end of his life. And he told me about the many, many pranks that Paul Weeland had played in his life. We have a couple boats here in Buffalo behind what was then Memorial Auditorium, with the Sabres plate. And one of them was the Little Rock. He says, okay, this is going to be my joke for this year.

April 1st, going to come around. And he put out a press release. He says the Buffalo Sabres will be doing training camp this year from the deck of the USS Little Rock out on Lake Erie. And they're going to do training camp. They're going to bring portable ice. They're going to do weightlifting. They're going to do cardio work. They're going to do all this stuff on the boat out in Lake Erie.

People were thinking this was real. I mean, you're going to be what? Doing what? Well, you know, obviously the joke would go on and then the next day he would come on and go, gotcha. So as serious as Punch Imlock was, that's how comical Paul Weeland was.

So I should just reiterate, this is all unthinkable in the present tense, Mike. The idea that the PR guy is the one fucking with everybody at the behest of the guy who is the least likely person to want to pull a prank or have a prank pulled on him. It makes me wonder, like, their endgame here was what? What were they hoping to accomplish?

Punch just really disliked a lot of the people in the NHL head office. He just really did not like the president, Clarence Campbell, and was just kind of petulant at the moment that this incredibly long, boring draft had continued and was even taking place, let alone that he had been forced to spend his time this way. And this part of the story stuck out to me, because as much as this whole episode has been about a time gone by, a time long ago, this fundamentally corporate kind of petulance does feel recognizably modern. The NHL's secret draft, through this lens, was basically office space on ice.

No, not again. Why does it so paper jam when there is no paper jam? I swear to God, one of these days, I just kick this piece of shit out the window. You meet both, man. The thing is lucky I'm not armed. Piece of shit. And so Punch and Paul wanted this all to be over as soon as possible, but they couldn't leave. And so they developed a highly specific plan that otherwise does not feel to me like the sort of

thing that I personally would be comfortable advocating. So Punch Emlock basically says, you know, we should draft somebody that nobody's ever heard of. And Paul Whelan says that we should draft a player from Japan. Well, hold on. Okay. So 1974, some white dudes in a room saying, let's invent a Japanese person. Mike, I'm preemptively, I'm concerned for everybody. Everybody involved here, I'm a little worried where this is going. Yeah, understandable. Paul says that he knows a Japanese name.

He knows a Japanese name. One single Japanese name. I've heard of a Japanese person before, sure. But first, they needed to make a phone call. Okay, so just to recap here. The Buffalo Sabres have pledged to invent a Japanese person. But first, they need to make this mysterious phone call, Mike. So who is on the other end of this phone call?

So the other end of the call is a man named Josh Sujimoto. And he is a farmer and a Christian missionary. He had been in an internment camp in America and somehow ended up in western New York running a produce stand called Sujomotos. And I actually talked to his grandson, Ben Sujimoto, who's a writer for the Buffalo News, about his grandfather. the gift store was on a main thoroughfare. It was on Seneca Street.

Some people know it is Route 16, but it had a lot of traffic going through it. So people would frequently drive by, see this big sign that said, Tushimoto's. And, I mean, obviously in Elma, I think we had maybe 99% white. So it was real strange to see an out-of-the-ordinary last name.

So it stuck with people. Yeah, I can imagine that there weren't a lot of Japanese farm stands around Buffalo in the 70s, Mike? There were very, very, very few, so much so that this really stuck out in people's minds when they went there. It was a popular place, too. They had, like, Japanese trinkets.

They had bonsai trees that nobody had ever seen before, right? This was a decade before the karate kid came out. What are you doing? Oh, I'm trimming my baby tree here. Bonsai tree. Bonsai tree. Bonsai.

Bonsai. This was quite an anomaly in upstate New York. One of the people who never forgot this place was Paul Wheelan, who had passed by driving between Buffalo and St. Bonaventure when he went to college and just remembered this name. So when they decided to concoct a Japanese player, he remembered this fruit stand. The way Ben told me, his grandfather and grandmother get a call from Punch Imlock's secretary. Punch gets on the phone.

They know who he is, right? Because the sabers are giant in Western New York. They don't get into a lot of details, but they ask two very basic questions. And those questions were, what is a common Japanese boy's name? Which, you know, my grandfather knew who Pon Jimlach was at the time. So what must have been going through his head was probably wild, right? He's like, so Buffalo Sabres, you know, GM's calling me, you know, I know a little bit about the Sabres. I know who the French connection is, but how am I involved in this?

So you can see in his shoes that he's probably like, huh, this is an interesting question. But he gave a good answer. He said, Taro. Taro was a common Japanese boy's name. And then they said, what would a team name, a hockey team name in Japan? What would a mascot for that name be?

To set the record straight and to give my grandparents, you know, proper props, they had the cleverness to say, oh, the katanas, which, you know, is Japanese for, saber. And then they, you know, hang up and go their separate ways. And the Sujimoto's are just left kind of wondering what the hell just happened. It is remarkable that Paul Weeland, at the very least, went through the trouble of calling the family to be like, look, I'm not going to explain what's happening here necessarily, but just know that you're the only people I can think of who can help me with this. I kind of tip my cap to him, honestly. You're the Japanese people. You're the Japanese

I'm aware of. Right. I'm like, good instinct, Paul. Better than guessing. Yeah, they just whipped up the stats. They thought, like, you know, imagine these guys just sitting around giggling. Oh, we'll come up with the stats, too. We'll come up with this team.

His age. They came up with a birthday. Mike, we have the documentary evidence here in front of us. John Boutet was kind enough to provide the actual Buffalo Sabres 1974-75 roster. And it's marked up. We can very clearly see about two-thirds of the way down. Taro Sujimoto, number 13, 5'8, 180 pounds from Osaka, Japan. Born November 16th, 1954,

973-74 Club, Tokyo, the katanas, as we now know. 15 goals, 10 assists, 25 points. Fully legitimized. On paper, next to several Hall of Famers. like some of the greatest players in hockey history and Taro. Right. Like they prank called the NHL commissioner, basically, the man who was in charge.

How long did the Buffalo Sabres keep this a secret? How long did they hold out? This is truly the fundamental problem with this prank, right? Like, this is a really good prank has to have a moment of payoff. And they're sitting around laughing, thinking about this commissioner, having to pronounce this name and having to spell this name over and over. And they're thinking about all of the other executives sitting in their offices, wondering what has just happened.

But they don't get to see that, right? They don't get to, like, they don't get their delivery on the payoff. And so then there's this, like, question of what do we do now? And they essentially decided, let's just keep it going. Let's just keep it going as long as we can. So how do you keep it going? What do they do from their, given that they can't, yeah, get the payoff of actually hearing the secret draft phone call

that the commissioner is making to every team. Well, so this name gets printed in newspapers across the country. Then when camp comes around, they're at St. Catharines in Ontario, they have a locker for Tarot. They have a stall with his name and his jersey and sticks. And I think he was number 13. Right. And when they asked, when reporters ask, punch about this person, he talks about their scouting operation in Japan

and how he's actually been practicing in the Himalayas, which of course is not particularly close to Japan. It's like India. Yeah. I don't think the fact checkers were that thorough at the time. No. And tells people that he's waiting to hear from his agent. And they didn't, by the way,

they didn't even tell the owners of the Buffalo Sabres that they were doing this. They made it all the way to camp. The Knox brothers who own the same. savers, and of like imbued punch with this power and said, you know, we're not going to let this league, this other league take our players, like we're going to spend whatever it takes. We trust you. They have not told those people that they have drafted a fictional human being.

Right. They've drafted the great Japanese hope. And now they're not telling anybody except for the people who are in, again, the secret draft war room. They're even telling people, by the way, they're even telling reporters that, like, Taro is so fast, he might be the fastest player in the NHL, and he's going to wear down defenses,

so when the French connection comes on, they're going to score even more. And other franchises were wondering, had the Sabres just landed a gold mine of talent? As, you know, like, we don't have a scouting operation in Japan. Maybe we should. So when does Paul Weeland, when does the tag team,

the unlikely tag team of Punch Imlock and Paul Weilland tell the owners, their bosses, that, you know, this great Japanese hope thing actually was, you know, a whole entire prank. Seymour Knox was kind of like the lead owner at the time. To his credit, Seymour didn't show anger. Just confusion. That's about right. I'm going to say, I would be immediately confused, but then I think immediately furious if I was

the owner of the team and I was like, wait a minute. didn't we give this guy a locker? How much did we spend on this guy's jersey? Right, right, right, right. You knew he was fictional when you drafted him. Someone at the NHL office must have had some anger towards this. Like the idea of like the NHL being in on the joke clearly like they weren't. Right.

Apparently Clarence Campbell was very angry when he eventually found out this guy was fictional. exactly when the reveal happens, it's not clear. But he is really pissed. And he immediately orders the removal of Taro Sujumoto's name from all of their records. And he was so upset that they'd already printed all of this material. In newspaper accounts, in Buffalo even, for years when this guy would be mentioned in stories about previous drafts, they were like parentheticals that say like some say he's fixed. For, again, for years, people were still not sure if he was real or not.

So on some level, I should say instinctively that this all seems like it could have gone very, very wrong in a bunch of different ways, right? You have a bunch of white guys saying, we're going to invent a Japanese dude, and there is actually one Japanese dude that they know. And so it's a prank pulled on someone else, but the real person with their real last name is being used fundamentally as a means. to this end. And so it makes me wonder, actually, how Ben, the grandson of Josh Sujimoto, the aforementioned owner of the farm stand, who inspired the name, how he feels about all of this. Yeah, he didn't see any ill intent, right? He thinks that this entire thing is really funny. And that this is like a delightful story that the family tells. It was very clear what their goal was, right? Their goal was to achieve a prank that, you know,

they had to have certain ingredients to that prank that would fool people. And having a foreign hockey player made sense as a way to fool people. And I think there was nothing that was at all malicious. And I think it actually made the story cooler that it was a Japanese hockey player because there just weren't, as far as I know, many Japanese hockey players who made it to the NHL. I always had an affinity for Paul Korea or any hockey player that had some kind of Asian ancestry just because it was so unusual, but also because, you know, that could have been

Taro down the road. Okay, so I should point out here that this road when it comes to Japanese players was ridiculously long. All that wondering about Taro and how maybe the NHL should draft and scout more Japanese players, that didn't come to fruition. An NHL team didn't draft a Japanese player until 1992. when the Montreal Canadiens drafted a very real defenseman named Hiroyuki Murah, and Mira never appeared in an NHL game.

In fact, a Japanese player didn't even get into a game until 2007, more than 30 years after Taro got drafted, when goalie Utaka Fukufuji finally came off the bench and stood between the pipes for the Los Angeles Kings. Utaka Fukafugi, what's the left pad on Brewer? An outstanding save. He's challenging the shooter. He comes across and desperately gets...

that left pad in there. What a save. But I also want to be clear about this part. I do get what Ben was saying just a minute ago about his complete and genuine fondness for this prank. Because the most pivotal component of this hoax, it turns out, is that his family, this family of outsiders, the real-life Sujimoto's, got personally called.

They got invited inside an inside joke, which meant that they, too, were now proudly a part of yet another community, yet another culture that's worth discussing here, the very strange culture of Buffalo, New York. I asked John Boutet about that specifically, right? For me, it just seems like a very Buffalo, New York story. It just feels like Buffalo somehow,

and it's like gritty silliness. And he pointed out that this just could not, have happened in one of the other cities. Would it have happened in Montreal? Never. No way. Toronto, no way. New York? No way. It would have never happened in any of those cities. But Buffalo is just that kind of town. It's like, hey, whatever we can do to upset the establishment, we'll do, because that's the kind of people we are. You know, it struck him as the kind of thing that just fits that culture, that kind of underdog antagonistic attitude. Yeah.

I mean, the community brought this guy to life in a really interesting way, right? Very quickly, there were like bumper stickers that came out the next year that said in kanji, like, think Stanley Cup. And the community would wear Tarot Tujimoto jerseys and still to this day. And occasionally, when there's a blowout one way or the other, the crowd, the home crowd, and Buffalo still chants things like, we want Taro, we want Taro. Like he became this character that's part of the franchise lore. When Ben Tsuchamoto goes to hockey games,

he sees people wearing his family name on jerseys. Often the number that they use is 74 instead of 13 because it was 74 draft. But he said he's at 30 or 40 people over his life, ask him, like, are you related? to that fictional character? Like, what is this? And this brings us now, at the end here, to my favorite thing that I found out today.

Because it's not just that Ben Tsujamoto's family name has become a literal rallying cry in Buffalo for decades now, helping keep the memory of his grandparents and their family business very much alive. My favorite thing is that when Ben himself goes to these games as an actual Sabres fan, he's reviving the prank.

Enough time has passed, 50 years, that he's been creating his own inside joke, inside and inside joke. Because he's been telling people that Taro Sujimoto was his actual relative. He's been telling people that Taro Sujimoto was real. After all.

And I think that's pretty cool. If I saw a Tujamoto jersey, even if that person were a stranger, I'd say, hey, I'm a Tujimoto as well. Here's how Taro is doing. Or just, you know, have a good time with them and kind of create that camaraderie without even knowing the person. He tells people that, yeah, Taro was an uncle. He says, you know, he's not in skating shape anymore. He's in his 70s now. He could never compete with the NHL skates these days.

You know, sometimes I'll say, you know, he's, you know, he's not. he's still skating on his pond in Tokyo, and he'll sometimes pay a visit, but he never stays long kind of thing. You can just have a good time with a story because you can, you know, there's nothing you can say that could be wrong. It's kind of an ongoing joke in the community, right? And like there's something very buffalo about all of this, about the way that the community like embraced this hoax and this joke and this like fictional. speed skater, you know. And everyone else is just confused.

It's like, what the fuck are you guys celebrating? Yeah, that's exactly right. It makes me nostalgic, weirdly, right? Because none of this would ever happen again. Sports in 2024 is basically a surveillance state. We have video of everybody and everything. And in this way, we lose, I think, some of the fundamental silliness.

of what the roots of all of this used to be. Yeah. I mean, now a draft is like a coronation, right? There's like a sanctimoniousness that's associated with our professional drafts. At the time, this was like clearly the total opposite, right? They played a phone prank. They basically made a prank phone call to the NHL

on one of the most important moments in the league that year. The stakes have risen to the point where billion dollar assets rise and fall on draft picks. It's being held in, I guess, literally, the all-seeing eye that is the sphere. And meanwhile, all of this started with a bunch of dudes being like, this shit is boring. You know, it would be hilarious. Yeah, that's essentially, that's essentially like how one of the greatest legends of the NHL started.

Yes, yes. Michael Mooney, thank you for reminding us where all of this actually came from. That's great. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful. As for where this episode came from, you should know that it is produced

by a lot of people whose names you have heard, but have not seen, including Michael Antonucci, Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman,

Rob McRae, Rachel Miller, Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumenello, and Juliet Warren. Studio Engineering by RG Systems,

sound designed by NGW Post, our theme song by John Bravo, All of us will see you on Tuesday.