Sam Venable  

Special Contributor

There’s this awful problem about an April Fool’s Day story: No matter how obvious the joke is, a few knuckleheads will believe it. In fact, sometimes they can’t swallow fast enough.

I’m talking about hook, line, sinker, rod, reel, boat, motor and trailer. In one gulp.

On April 1, 1974, the Knoxville News Sentinel carried a boldface sports story about how the University of Tennessee had recruited an 8-foot basketball player from Africa. His name was Ghroheuover Glhoehck—pronounced, the article said, “Grover Glick.”

The piece was fraught with giveaways. Among them:

  • Glick’s coach was Arlis W. Davison. (At the time, UT had an assistant coach named A.W. Davis.)
  • Glick had been reared in the home of a British nobleman, Lord Seward Alberteen. (Another UT assistant back then was Stu Aberdeen.)
  • The man who had alerted UT to Glick’s talents worked for a land-holding company called “Manning, Haywood and Woolruff, Ltd.” (UT Athletic Department officials were Gus Manning, Haywood Harris and Bob Woodruff.)
  • The “Ethiopian Broadcasting Company’s” ace play-by-play announcer, Jan Word (for Voice of the Vols John Ward) was to broadcast Glick’s debut as a Vol.
  • A sportswriter from the “Addis Ababa Sand-Times” also figured heavily in the story. His name was Harvin East. (The News Sentinel’s UT sports beat writer in those days was Marvin West.)

If those weren’t plain enough, the final paragraph of the story revealed all. Here’s how it read, word for word: “So there you have it, Big Orange fans, an 8-footer for the Vols. Mark down the date of this historic signing—April Fool’s Day, 1974.”

Surely no one believed it, eh?

Wrong!

“They flooded us with calls and letters, hundreds of them,” the late sportswriter Ted Riggs, mastermind of the trick, told me years later. “You know how UT fans are. People thought I was the greatest sportswriter in America to get such a scoop. But when they learned it was a hoax, they turned on me. Even women would call in and say vulgar, mean things. It was awful.”

Undeterred, Riggs tried it again the following year.

“I went to the editor and suggested we do an April Fool’s story saying that UT was going to build the largest athletic complex in history. It was to include a five-star hotel for athletes, an 18-hole indoor golf course and a basketball arena seating 58,000—to be shared with an NBA team that was coming to town. The editor mulled it over for a minute, then turned it down. He said it was too believable.”

The News Sentinel even has the distinction of scooping itself on an April Fool’s Day story. This occurred March 30, 1979, when Mark McNeely was our Nashville correspondent.

“It was late one week, and I had a Sunday column to write,” McNeely recalled. “I glanced at the calendar and noticed that Sunday happened to be April 1. So I worked up a big April Fool’s Day piece.”

This, too, was laced with obvious fiction. In virtually every paragraph, McNeely had politicians reversing themselves on important pieces of legislation. The biggie surrounded then-State Rep. Tommy Burnett of Jamestown, who had been a staunch opponent of funding for the Tennessee Amphitheater at the upcoming World’s Fair in Knoxville.

The spoof not only had Burnett reversing his stand—but at the same time, he was to accept a seat on the board of directors of (World’s Fair bigwig) Jake Butcher’s United American Bank.

You know what happened, of course.

Yep, someone in our newsroom glanced at the story as it moved across the wire and failed to notice the bold “April Fool! April Fool! April Fool!” caveat at the top. The paragraph about Burnett was plucked from the column and used – ver-by-gosh-batim – as a breaking-news bulletin on Page 1. It was one of those “stop-the-presses-we’ve-got-a-bombshell!” moments like you see in the movies. I am not making this up.

Naturally, with a contrite heart and the reddest of faces, the newspaper apologized profusely the following day. For weeks thereafter, every editor and department manager in the entire building remained in a foul mood.

All us peons, however, thought the whole affair was hilarious. We still do. And that’s no foolin’.

Sam Venable is an author, stand-up comedian, and humor columnist for the Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel. He may be reached at mahv@outlook.com.