Mike Piazza, 'Teen Wolf' and Me

By: Michael Malone It was, perhaps, the silliest story in newspaper history. I was writing a regular column for a weekly paper called New York Sports Express, the edgy sister publication of the alternative weekly New York Press. My column was called "Wild Card," and I'd find the oddball stories -- competitive eating, fencing, dog shows -- around town. I had come home late one night and caught the '85 movie "Teen Wolf," with Michael J. Fox as a basketball-playing wolf, on cable, and thought Fox's bully nemesis Mick McAllister, played by an actor named Mark Arnold, looked like a young Mike Piazza.

So with April around the corner, I pitched my editor an April Fool's piece -- a "Q&A" with star ballplayer Piazza about his role in the movie, for which he assumed the screen name Mark Arnold. "The movie was for kicks," Piazza told me during our supposed interview. "I didn't want anyone thinking I was serious about being an actor. So Mike became Mark, and Piazza became Arnold -- kind of a Gary Coleman joke."

"Piazza Dances With Wolves" came out on April 1, right at home in a paper whose debut issue featured an interview with the thoroughbred Funny Cide, and which had regular departments like a sports crime blotter. The best I was hoping for was that a gossip writer from the New York Post or Daily News, hazy after a night of following around P. Diddy or some "O.C." starlet, might take the bait. But the Sports Express, a 65,000-circulation freebie, was too small to make much of a splash. I fooled a few friends, who were curious to hear what Piazza was like. A half-dozen readers wrote letters to the editor, saying how they were nearly fooled.

That was the end of it, or so I thought. Occasionally, I'd Google "Mike Piazza" and "Teen Wolf," but the number of links stayed the same: a handful of blogs, a few poster companies and DVD suppliers, the requisite porn site.

Jump ahead to late July. New York Sports Express had ceased publication two weeks before, not long after its one-year anniversary. But inexplicably, my Piazza piece caught a second wind on the Internet. One Friday, e-mails streamed in from friends who'd seen mention of the story on various Web sites, including The Boston Globe's, a site dedicated to urban legends, and on ESPN.com, in Bill Simmons' popular "The Sports Guy" column. "One of those goofy Internet things happened this week," wrote Simmons. "Thanks to a now-defunct New York sports Web site, an Internet hoax gained steam ..."

Ryan Ernst of The Cincinnati Enquirer called it "quite possibly the best sports rumor of all time." One Philadelphia Inquirer reader asked film critic Carrie Rickey if the rumor was true. Sports Illustrated even got in on it, reporting the story as the #1 item in an online Top 10 feature called the "10 Spot."

Some took the story at face value and others called it a hoax, while most straddled the fence. Fueling the myth were two factors: One, the link to the original story showed the current date, not the April Fool's date of publication. Two, as Simmons and Rickey noted, film reference site imdb.com had been duped, giving Piazza a film credit for "Teen Wolf" (as Mark Arnold, the credits read, stripping the real Arnold of his hard-earned credit). Skeptics who visited IMDB for the truth got anything but.

Every day, new Google links pop up. The Mets threatened the defunct paper with legal action ("Neither Mike, myself or anyone in the Mets organization was amused by the hoax," wrote a club exec). IMDB still hasn't fixed the error, and Amazon.com gives Piazza his ill-gotten McAllister credit as well. I appeared on an ESPN2 morning program called "Cold Pizza" last week, along with the real Mark Arnold, who flew in from California, and was testy to me in the Green Room moments before the show.

Who knows what other opportunities might pop up from "Piazza Dances With Wolves"? At various stages of my life, I dreamed of authoring the novel that compels people to name their kid after my protagonist, of penning the editorial that kicks social change in the ass, of writing the review that gives the reader nearly the same reaction to a musical performance that being there would have.

Instead, I've reached the masses with an utterly bogus piece about an aging ballplayer and a movie about a high school hoopster that turns into a wolf and leads his team to the championship.

I suppose it's a start.