patchyfogg
08-11-2004, 11:43 AM
At last, our long national nightmare is finally over. Or is it?
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000602778
Mike Piazza, 'Teen Wolf' and Me
My work finally reaches the masses ... and not a word of it is true.
By Michael Malone
(August 09, 2004) -- 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Malone (malone5a@yahoo.com) is a senior writer at Restaurant Business Magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, Playboy, the San Francisco Chronicle and ESPN.com.
Here is the story that launched it all:
http://www.nysportsexpress.com/2/14/columns/wildcard.cfm
Piazza Dances With Wolves
By Michael Malone
DURING A LITTLE downtime before the regular season, Mets superstar Mike Piazza chatted with NYSX about the catcher's love of heavy metal. A conversation about the worst-ever metal bands led to a discussion about the worst-ever films.
It was then that, while discussing Michael J. Fox's 1985 clunker Teen Wolf, Metal Mike dropped a doozy (which was corroborated by the film's producers): While a junior at Phoenixville Area High School in Pennsylvania, Piazza portrayed jock bully (and Fox nemesis) Mick McAllister in the movie.
NYSX: So you're an actor!
MP: Not sure if you really call that acting, but yeah, I was in a movie.
NYSX: Not just any movie. Teen Wolf!
MP: [Laughs]. That was me, dude.
NYSX: Your character Mick is a jock meathead. Did you feel you were typecast?
MP: I was a jock metalhead at the time, so jock meathead wasn't too much of a stretch.
NYSX: How the hell did you end up in Teen Wolf?
MP: Sort of like how I ended up in the majors. My dad knew a producer, and got me in.
NYSX: Had you acted before?
MP: Sure. I played a tree in a kindergarten production of Goldilocks.
NYSX: So at least you'd had experience working with wolves before.
MP: What do you mean?
NYSX: Goldilocks…the Big, Bad Wolf.
MP: That was Little Red Riding Hood. Goldilocks is the Three Bears.
NYSX: Of course. Were you billed as 'Mike Piazza' in the movie?
MP: No, Mark Arnold.
NYSX: Why not as yourself?
MP: I was really focused on either getting a baseball scholarship or getting drafted. The movie was for kicks, and 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.
NYSX: What was it like working with Michael J. Fox?
MP: He was great, man. I was totally nervous when we first started shooting. I mean, Michael J. Fox! Alex P. Keaton! McFlyyyy! But he was total class.
NYSX: Do you still keep in touch with him?
MP: I saw him a few years ago at a party.
NYSX: What kind of party?
NYSX: How could a guy do something as good as Back to the Future, and—no offense—as bad as Teen Wolf?
MP: I have no idea. You'll have to ask him
NYSX: Did he roll up his denim jacket sleeves in real life too?
MP: [Laughs] I think he did.
NYSX: The premise of the movie—ordinary ballplayer becomes extraordinary by becoming a monster. Is there a metaphor there for baseball in 2004?
MP: What do you mean?
NYSX: Like…without enhancement, Michael J. Fox…what was his name in the movie?
MP: Scotty. Scott Howard.
NYSX: Right. Scotty is your run of the mill 5' 3" point guard. Then he takes some magic potion—
MP: There was no magic potion. The wolf thing was in the genes—Scotty's dad was a wolf too.
NYSX: Okay. So Scotty turns into a wolf, and suddenly he's dunking from the foul line. It's sort of like 500-foot home runs—nobody hit those 10 years ago. Now it's every day.
MP: I'm not sure 500-foot home runs happen every day.
NYSX: Okay, but the metaphor. See what I'm saying?
MP: I think so.
NYSX: And?
MP: [Pauses, shakes head] Dude, I don't know. I think maybe you're giving the movie too much credit. Sometimes a wolf is just a wolf, ya know?
NYSX: Hmmm. Any concern that drinking that eye of newt, tooth of wolf potion your trainer's been brewing for you might give you wolf-like symptoms?
MP: [Laughs, looks at chest underneath shirt]. I haven't noticed any yet.
NYSX: If I remember correctly, you decked Scotty at the prom, right?
MP: The spring dance, yeah. He was making moves on my girl.
NYSX: But you waited until the wolf had turned back into Scotty before hitting him, right?
MP: Yeah.
NYSX: Why not take on the wolf? Why wait for him to turn back into little Alex P. Keaton?
MP: If I hit him when he was the wolf, he still would've gone down.
NYSX: So why didn't you?
MP: I don't remember, man. I guess that's just what the script called for.
NYSX: What was Scotty's girlfriend's name? She had a funny name.
MP: Boof.
NYSX: Why weren't you in the sequel, Teen Wolf, Too?
MP: First off, Jason Bateman is no Michael J. Fox. Just kidding. By then, I was already playing college ball down in Miami, and my acting days were behind me. Plus, I don't think Mick is even in the movie. The wolf is off at college, and Mick was probably stuck at home, driving a beer truck or something.
NYSX: Did the Teen Wolf gig help you become a pitchman for MCI?
MP: I think I got that one on my own. But at least I already had a SAG card.
NYSX: Can you give me one of the lines from the movie?
MP: [Pauses]. Sure.
NYSX: Stand up.
MP: [Rolls his eyes and stands up] "You don't scare me, freak. Underneath all that hair, you're still a dork."
NYSX: Nice! That's great. Will you act again?
MP: Sure! First base. The curtain goes up in about a week.
NYSX: If you could star in any movie, what would it be?
MP: I dunno. Catcher in the Rye?
NYSX: Good one.
MP: Thanks.
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000602778
Mike Piazza, 'Teen Wolf' and Me
My work finally reaches the masses ... and not a word of it is true.
By Michael Malone
(August 09, 2004) -- 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Malone (malone5a@yahoo.com) is a senior writer at Restaurant Business Magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, Playboy, the San Francisco Chronicle and ESPN.com.
Here is the story that launched it all:
http://www.nysportsexpress.com/2/14/columns/wildcard.cfm
Piazza Dances With Wolves
By Michael Malone
DURING A LITTLE downtime before the regular season, Mets superstar Mike Piazza chatted with NYSX about the catcher's love of heavy metal. A conversation about the worst-ever metal bands led to a discussion about the worst-ever films.
It was then that, while discussing Michael J. Fox's 1985 clunker Teen Wolf, Metal Mike dropped a doozy (which was corroborated by the film's producers): While a junior at Phoenixville Area High School in Pennsylvania, Piazza portrayed jock bully (and Fox nemesis) Mick McAllister in the movie.
NYSX: So you're an actor!
MP: Not sure if you really call that acting, but yeah, I was in a movie.
NYSX: Not just any movie. Teen Wolf!
MP: [Laughs]. That was me, dude.
NYSX: Your character Mick is a jock meathead. Did you feel you were typecast?
MP: I was a jock metalhead at the time, so jock meathead wasn't too much of a stretch.
NYSX: How the hell did you end up in Teen Wolf?
MP: Sort of like how I ended up in the majors. My dad knew a producer, and got me in.
NYSX: Had you acted before?
MP: Sure. I played a tree in a kindergarten production of Goldilocks.
NYSX: So at least you'd had experience working with wolves before.
MP: What do you mean?
NYSX: Goldilocks…the Big, Bad Wolf.
MP: That was Little Red Riding Hood. Goldilocks is the Three Bears.
NYSX: Of course. Were you billed as 'Mike Piazza' in the movie?
MP: No, Mark Arnold.
NYSX: Why not as yourself?
MP: I was really focused on either getting a baseball scholarship or getting drafted. The movie was for kicks, and 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.
NYSX: What was it like working with Michael J. Fox?
MP: He was great, man. I was totally nervous when we first started shooting. I mean, Michael J. Fox! Alex P. Keaton! McFlyyyy! But he was total class.
NYSX: Do you still keep in touch with him?
MP: I saw him a few years ago at a party.
NYSX: What kind of party?
NYSX: How could a guy do something as good as Back to the Future, and—no offense—as bad as Teen Wolf?
MP: I have no idea. You'll have to ask him
NYSX: Did he roll up his denim jacket sleeves in real life too?
MP: [Laughs] I think he did.
NYSX: The premise of the movie—ordinary ballplayer becomes extraordinary by becoming a monster. Is there a metaphor there for baseball in 2004?
MP: What do you mean?
NYSX: Like…without enhancement, Michael J. Fox…what was his name in the movie?
MP: Scotty. Scott Howard.
NYSX: Right. Scotty is your run of the mill 5' 3" point guard. Then he takes some magic potion—
MP: There was no magic potion. The wolf thing was in the genes—Scotty's dad was a wolf too.
NYSX: Okay. So Scotty turns into a wolf, and suddenly he's dunking from the foul line. It's sort of like 500-foot home runs—nobody hit those 10 years ago. Now it's every day.
MP: I'm not sure 500-foot home runs happen every day.
NYSX: Okay, but the metaphor. See what I'm saying?
MP: I think so.
NYSX: And?
MP: [Pauses, shakes head] Dude, I don't know. I think maybe you're giving the movie too much credit. Sometimes a wolf is just a wolf, ya know?
NYSX: Hmmm. Any concern that drinking that eye of newt, tooth of wolf potion your trainer's been brewing for you might give you wolf-like symptoms?
MP: [Laughs, looks at chest underneath shirt]. I haven't noticed any yet.
NYSX: If I remember correctly, you decked Scotty at the prom, right?
MP: The spring dance, yeah. He was making moves on my girl.
NYSX: But you waited until the wolf had turned back into Scotty before hitting him, right?
MP: Yeah.
NYSX: Why not take on the wolf? Why wait for him to turn back into little Alex P. Keaton?
MP: If I hit him when he was the wolf, he still would've gone down.
NYSX: So why didn't you?
MP: I don't remember, man. I guess that's just what the script called for.
NYSX: What was Scotty's girlfriend's name? She had a funny name.
MP: Boof.
NYSX: Why weren't you in the sequel, Teen Wolf, Too?
MP: First off, Jason Bateman is no Michael J. Fox. Just kidding. By then, I was already playing college ball down in Miami, and my acting days were behind me. Plus, I don't think Mick is even in the movie. The wolf is off at college, and Mick was probably stuck at home, driving a beer truck or something.
NYSX: Did the Teen Wolf gig help you become a pitchman for MCI?
MP: I think I got that one on my own. But at least I already had a SAG card.
NYSX: Can you give me one of the lines from the movie?
MP: [Pauses]. Sure.
NYSX: Stand up.
MP: [Rolls his eyes and stands up] "You don't scare me, freak. Underneath all that hair, you're still a dork."
NYSX: Nice! That's great. Will you act again?
MP: Sure! First base. The curtain goes up in about a week.
NYSX: If you could star in any movie, what would it be?
MP: I dunno. Catcher in the Rye?
NYSX: Good one.
MP: Thanks.