The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - Listen Now: Sports Explains the World

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think it tells an epic on the field glory or incredible against all ads comeback stories. But what about the moments that don't make the front page? Well, on the new podcast Sports Explains World, you hear some of the wildest and most surprising sports stories you've never heard, like the teenager who wrote a fake Wikipedia page

Starting point is 00:00:30 for a young athlete and didn't watch it as a real team fell for his prank. As a kid, Karen Moore's love pulling pranks to full-dapress. Then, when England played Honduras in a friendly soccer match, he found a young player on the Honduran side and inflated his stats on Wikipedia that equidose of a young Messi and Ronaldo. Stats, no one should have believed. But when a real major league team bids $1 million on the player, Kiran starts to wonder how homeless his fun really was. I'm about to play a clip from Sports Explains World.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Enjoy Sports Explains World on the Wondry app. Or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Sports Explains World early and ad- on the Wondry app. Or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Sports Explanings World early and ad-free on Wondry Plus. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app on Apple Podcasts today. Ha! So here it goes. When I was 13, me and my best friend got really into prank calls. We were obsessed with this comedian, a guy called Chris Morris. We cleared through his TV shows, then hunted down his radio calls.

Starting point is 00:01:34 We even joined his fan forum. The veterinary surgery? I need advice from somebody. I've got a tortoise in a bad situation here. It got sent to me through the post. The tortoise? Yeah, and my colleague basically took it out of its shell. bad situation here. It got sent to me through the post. The toy toys. Yeah, and my colleague basically took it out of its shell. Morris had this unbelievable knack for getting his subjects on the hook and tying them up in knots. Time and again, he tricked politicians, TV stars and athletes into saying shocking, unbelievable things.

Starting point is 00:02:01 Morris was a genius. All his tricks and pranks, even the really stupid ones, had a deeper meaning. Exposing just how shady and self-serving Britain's elites could be. I, on the other hand, was not a genius. I was just a kid. And I didn't perceive the depth in Morris' humour. The only thing me and my friends learned from him was that you could just phone people up and lighten them for fun. Our next target, naturally, was football. In the few crazy months of the Summer Transfer window, the whole sport becomes a hive of rumours and whispers. And we knew that we could prey on some gullible journalists craving their next scoop.

Starting point is 00:02:40 So, we hatched a rumour that was tailored to catch a reporter's eye, surprising enough to be funny, but not so far fetches to be ridiculous, the Christmas sweet spot. For us, that was the veteran French centre-back William Galas, swapping Arsenal for the unglamorous Birmingham City. First, we made a fake booking at a fancy hotel under Galas' name. Then, we called all the local papers and told them that GALAS was about to sign for Birmingham, having heard from our friend of the hotel reception desk. The bait was set. Now, all we had to do was wait.

Starting point is 00:03:14 The next morning, Birmingham's manager Alex McCleish was quizzed by the anchors on Sky Sports news and forced to deny an interest in signing GALAS. No, nothing on that. I've got two young scents and a half, and it's not that I move from here, I need to spend my money on other positions to improve things. We laughed our heads off.

Starting point is 00:03:34 The whole scheme began to feel like a little teenage side skill, like forging a grade or flashing a fake ID. Dumb, slightly illegal, but somehow pretty forgivable. And now we've made a dent with the British press, we wanted to go even bigger. So this time, instead of picking someone who was already famous, we decided to use our skills to make our own superstar. It was 2012, the summer of the London Olympics, and my friend and I were watching Honduras take on Moroccan.

Starting point is 00:04:10 Playing in the midfield that day was Lopez. We'd never heard of him before, but reading Wikipedia, we found that he was 20, had just broken into the national side, and played for CD Olympia, a professional club in Honduras. Perfect, we thought. Alex Lopez looked like our new star. Our plan was to try and sell him to an English club that had signed a lot of Hondurans. We're in athletic. But before we did that, we needed to give him a makeover. Diving into his Wikipedia page, we turned three career goals into eleven. Now, a twenty-never assists for good measure. We gave him fake trials at big clubs like Napoli, Malaga and Tottenham Hotspur. And to top it all off, we wrote that Olympia's fans had given him a nickname,

Starting point is 00:04:52 the Honduran Maradona. His profile was complete, so we followed the Galas playable, phoning newspapers and pretending to be journalists, agents, club doctor, even a friend of the club doctor. By the end of the night, we duped the Times of London, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK, to print our nonsense. We can athletic have agreed a £2.5 million deal for Alexander Lopez. The fake story even made it back to the papers in Honduras.

Starting point is 00:05:22 We were unstoppable. We'd done it again. Over the next year, we kept boosting Lopez's online profile. Soon enough, Lopez had 18 goals and 34 assists, having barely reached his 20s. Figures that put him alongside Messi and Ronaldo. Figures that nobody would nobody would or should have believed. Then, just over a year after the times fell for our prank, we saw a press release from an American MLS club, the Houston Dynamo, that blew our minds. The Dynamo were proud to announce the signing of a young international with a bright future for a transfer fee of a million dollars. This player had, wait for it, 18 goals

Starting point is 00:06:10 and 34 assists and he would, like any Maccurial playmaker, be wearing the number 10 shirt for the Dynamo. On their homepage was a smiling Alex Lopez and fan fan boards and forums were crazy with excitement about the arrival of the Honduran Maradona. You can listen to Sports Explains World early in ad free on Wondery Plus. Get started with your free trial at wundery.com, slash plus. you you you

The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - Listen Now: Sports Explains the World

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.