During a football season, newspapers and wire services depend on people calling in to tell them the scores of games played between small colleges. There is no other way they can get those results. They print the scores in the Sunday sports pages.
During the 1941 season, the New York Times received a call from a man who identified himself as Jerry Croyden. He said he was the publicity director for Plainfield Teachers College in New Jersey. Croyden said that undefeated Plainfield had just beaten Ingersoll, 13-0. It was their third straight win, their previous victims having been Winona (27-0) and Randolph Tech (35-0). Croyden also called in the score to a Philadelphia newspaper.
That was the beginning of a whole series of news stories. After Plainfield’s fourth straight victory, Croyden began to send in stories about the team’s players. The star halfback, John Chung, had scored 57 of the team’s 98 points. Chung’s accomplishments were written up in the New York Post. Next, Plainfield added two more victims, Chesterton and Scott. John Chung was running wild, averaging 9.3 yards per carry. Croyden said that Chung seemed to get his power from eating plates of rice between halves.
Suddenly Plainfield Teachers stopped playing football. Future games with Appalachian Tech and Harmony Teachers were canceled. Croyden explained that the team had disbanded, “due to flunkings in mid-term examinations.”
The November 17 issue of Time magazine had another reason why the games were called off. It was because they were never scheduled in the first place. In fact, there was no Plainfield Teachers College! There were no colleges called Ingersoll, or Harmony Teachers, or any of the schools Plainfield had supposedly beaten. The whole thing was a hoax.
Finally, Caswell Adams, a sportswriter on the New York Herald Tribune, discovered that Plainfield Teachers and its star halfback, John Chung, were invented by a stockbroker named Morris Newburger and a group of his friends at the Wall Street brokerage firm of Newburger, Loeb & Co. Newburger and his friends took turns playing the role of Jerry Croyden (there was no such person). They just wanted to have little fun, so they had dreamed up a college, a winning football team, a few opponents and a great running back named John Chung.
From The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
Oh sure, just a bit of harmless fun.
But when Mitch Albom makes up events at a basketball game, suddenly everyone is outraged.
Poor Mitch. Don’t they know writing the same column over and over about how the kids today need to pull up their pants and stop listening to that rapper music means breaking ironclad rules of joutnalism sometimes?
“…Chung seemed to get his power from eating plates of rice between halves.”
Oh, that endearing Wall Street racism.