Most Elaborate Athlete Pranks

yeah that's the one he was thinking of!

 

OK, if you're a beat writer and the PR guy tells you they're going to do this to one of the players and they want you to play along, what do you do?

I love a good joke, but...

 

Sirs, Madames,

Guy Lapointe was the Habs' practical joke king back in the day. Still does it. He had a running thing with John Ferguson, y'know it started with nailing shoes the dressing room floor, that sort of thing. Lapointe dropped the bomb on Ferguson, almost literally. During a practice, Lapointe went up into the Forum rafters, filled a garbage can full of water (so heavy that he could barely drag it) and dropped the whole tankload on Ferguson, who was knocked to the ice and practically knocked out given the force.

That's not the elaborate one though. Pierre Trudeau, then Prime Minister, came out for the banner-raising after a Montreal Stanley Cup win (yeah, another). Red-carpet receiving line, Trudeau shakes everybody's hand, all the Hall of Famers smiling broadly, looking almost too happy to see the PM. Last one in line, Lapointe, gives Trudeau the grip, looks him in the eye.

Hand full of Vaseline.

(I once gave Lapointe a wet seat ... Piestany, April, 2002 ... while he was giving another scout a wet seat, to boot ... he looked at me like Kasparov did at Big Blue)

YD&OHS, etc

 

Fantastic, leo!

In all honesty, I actually think the "hot foot" pranks are funny. I mean, who carries a lighter?

 

Sirs, Madames,

I don't know how I forgot this, maybe because it wasn't a player.

Five years back Craig Button was the Calgary Flames GM and I was pretty tight (okay, drinking buddies) with him, his brother and a couple of scouts on his staff going back to days on the road in Europe and juniors. Happy for him getting the top job. I'd promised this one scout to pull a prank on another Calgary staffer at the draft in Toronto.

Button had a scout on his staff who, truth be told, was more boyhood friend than a NHL-calibre scout (okay, thick as two planks covers it). So I printed off a mock-up of a story with a heading that it had appeared not just in the Calgary paper but papers across the national chain. In the story, this loser scout shits on his boss. Various quotes attributed to the friend: "Draft day the general managers go up on stage and call out the names but at the draft table they don't say a lot. They know they have to leave all the talking to the people who have seen the players." "Yeah, Craig makes it out to junior games and tournaments. He has to keep up appearances." "I've know Craig for years. He was on my high school team ... a role player is what you'd call him if you were generous but the rest of us on the first line were glad to have him around." "European scouts, especially the Czechs, are notorious for padding their expenses and filing reports from games they didn't go to. Not our guy ... but you never know."

It was like a steady drumbeat of shots at the organization and the guy who hired him. The funniest thing is that this guy was so dense: a) you could believe he said it and b) he might actually think he did say it.

The scout I handed it off to is usually as deadpan as Jackie Vernon. He was falling down he laughed so hard. The plan was, I figured, they'd confront the dumb-ass with the document and let him twist in the wind like he humiliated his boss.

Not exactly how it turned out.

The guy I gave the document to handed it to Craig Button and told him, "You better read this ... someone is going to probably ask you questions about it." Meaning the club president. Button almost faints. "What the hell is Bob saying? And I thought FotF was a friend of mine." Button showed it to the p.r. guy. It gets passed around other scouts. Fools them all.

I saw the pr guy in the lobby of the Royal York and say hi -- he glares at me laser-like.

Well, after a few hrs the cat is let out of the bag and the scheme goes ahead as planned. They were going to slip it under the dumb-ass' door the night before the draft but they were afraid his wife would read it first and stab him in his sleep. Funny thing is, next day the dope scout hardly blinked when he was handed it. Button and friends let me watch it all unfold from a closet in the team's suite. They handed the guy the story, told him that it had appeared in all the papers, asked him if he had talked to me (he could never get my name right either). "Yeah," he said, reading it and then handing it back. "So?"

YD&OHS, etc

 

Kendrick just got Myers back to some extent on the Today show, with the old pie in the face.

 

I heard a story years ago about a handful of Brooklyn Dodgers, two hotel rooms, a common door, a prostitute and a violinist. I cannot remember the story's details, so if anyone on here knows the story, please save me the embarrassment of getting it wrong. It could also be an urban legend, but it was a Dodger beat writer that shared the story, so the source is solid.

 

The only possible way Kendrick could top Myers would be to actually trade Myers to Japan.

 

There was a buddy of mine who was a little to suggestive to a female usher at a B-Mets game a few years ago. She said she went to school at Endicott, and all of us prayed that was a college no one had heard of before. Well it was a high school.

Later that week to teach him a lesson, we got a hold of some B-Mets letterhead and doctored together a letter from the Mets saying that they were very dissappointed with his behavior at the game.

He was crushed. Needless to say this fool already had the Mets logo tattooed on his bicep.

We let him in on it after a few days.

 

Sounds like Guy has seen "Mallrats." The stinkpalm is one of my all-time faves - maybe he gave Trudeau the more polite Canadian version.