How an NHL Team Drafted a Fake Japanese Person

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 2 He's still skating on his pond in Tokyo, and you know, he'll sometimes pay a visit, but he never stays long.

Speaker 1 Right after this ad.

Speaker 1 You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I don't know if you know this, but they want us to call the sphere just sphere now.

Speaker 1 I refuse to do this, like I did with the Facebook. Still the Facebook to me.

Speaker 1 But the sphere is the site of the most technologically advanced draft in the history of sports television,

Speaker 1 which is happening tonight.

Speaker 3 The 2024 upper deck NHL draft will be held at Sphere, Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 The draft will utilize Sphere's cutting-edge technologies.

Speaker 3 This will truly be a unique draft, unlike any other.

Speaker 1 And NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who definitely wasn't reading that off a cute card held slightly off screen, is actually right.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not a huge hockey fan or anything, but this is going to be unlike any other draft.

Speaker 1 You're going to see names and stats and video highlights of all of these draft picks, and they'll be wrapping around the giant IMAX orb that, you know, was otherwise better known as the place where your friend who loves fish says he touched the face of God.

Speaker 1 But what I wanted to do today for you

Speaker 1 is something that's actually the opposite. I wanted to identify the one draft that this giant IMAX orb is most unlike.

Speaker 1 Because if the sphere embodies the almost logical evolution of cutting-edge broadcast technology, the apotheosis of the draft as a live television show, I think it's useful to find out what sits at the complete opposite end of that spectrum.

Speaker 1 And the story we found for you from the NHL draft 50 years ago, it turns out, is somehow even trippier,

Speaker 1 which is why we had to assign one of the best magazine reporters working today, Michael Mooney,

Speaker 1 to help us investigate it.

Speaker 1 I should should point out though that your beard is

Speaker 1 incredible.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much. My wife is very much attracted to homeless Vikings.
So

Speaker 4 I'm this is actually her project. I'm just the host.

Speaker 1 I feel like there's there's there's uh Viking, but also like playoff hockey in there too.

Speaker 4 A little bit, yeah. It does feel like like like we've got to win the cup before I can take a razor to this thing.

Speaker 1 Yes. And that already qualifies as as much hockey talk as you've done on this show, by the way.
Michael Mooney, thank you for joining us. We don't do a lot of hockey here.
That is about it so far.

Speaker 4 This is one of the greatest hockey stories of all time.

Speaker 4 This is so nuts.

Speaker 1 The story you're here to talk about is not merely a draft story. It's not merely a hockey story.
It's also one of the great stories, one of the great legends when it comes to Asians in sports, Mike.

Speaker 1 And as a cataloger, as a human Dewey Decimal system for such stories, I am ashamed that I did not know this already. But I am proud to have you,

Speaker 1 an actual accomplished journalist, like investigating the story for us.

Speaker 1 So I suppose I should say that the name of the person we're here to discuss is something that I'm not even sure how to pronounce. So how should we do this?

Speaker 4 I say Taro Tsujimoto. But the vast majority of people involved in the story say Taro Tujimoto.
So I say Tsujimoto like tsunami.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 4 And that's the way I've been told to pronounce it. But the vast majority of people involved who, you know, were older white men of a different time

Speaker 4 pronounced it Tu Jimoto.

Speaker 1 Which is a familiar dynamic to the Asian experience in America. Not necessarily up to you what your own name is, but we should explain who Taro Su or Tu Jimoto was.

Speaker 4 So he was a draft pick in the 1974 NHL draft. He came from the Tokyo Katanas.
It was rumored that he would be one of the fastest players in the NHL.

Speaker 4 In fact, the team that drafted him would really use him to wear down defenses all across the league to kind of like bolster their incredible offensive attack.

Speaker 1 He had numbers, right? These were like, he had data behind him.

Speaker 4 15 goals, 10 assists.

Speaker 1 Right. And he was how old at the time?

Speaker 4 20 years old. And his size had been debated.
Some places he was listed at 5'8 ⁇ , 180. Some places he was 5'10, 175,

Speaker 4 which is, you know, kind of helped bolster that legend of who was this guy.

Speaker 4 Because when he was drafted, nobody else in the NHL had ever heard of him. Taro was believed to be at the time the first Japanese player ever drafted into the NHL.

Speaker 1 In my attempt to fact check this, Mike, I mean, you can find the archival. You can find the documents, right, from 1974.
And there he is. He is listed on the record books as you describe.

Speaker 1 And when you say, okay, drafted in 1974, pick number 183,

Speaker 1 I try to cross-check this and I can't.

Speaker 4 But if you go to hockeyreference.com, if you go to the 1974 NHL draft and start scrolling down, you get pick 181, you get pick 182, and then it's immediately pick 184.

Speaker 1 I am led to wonder why the f did they erase the first Japanese player in NHL history from the NHL record books after having him there for all eternity to see? Um, before?

Speaker 4 The NHL officially called it an invalid claim. The record books are basically like, you know,

Speaker 4 doesn't exist, not applicable. The NHL has done their best to erase this guy.

Speaker 1 But what is happening here? What is the reason for the

Speaker 1 invalidity of this piece of history? Yeah, here's the big reveal.

Speaker 4 Taro Tsujimoto, Tsujimoto, never existed at all.

Speaker 1 All right, so you are about to to hear the story of how the first Japanese player ever drafted by an NHL team, a pioneer in the world of Asian athletes, a legend that is still memorialized all around Western New York, did not actually exist.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 but before we get to how all that happened and why,

Speaker 1 I need you to visualize what the National Hockey League was actually like 50 years ago when all this went down.

Speaker 4 Because there was a lot of blood.

Speaker 1 Now we've got Brad and Schultz.

Speaker 1 Now they're both on the ice and the other players have squared off.

Speaker 4 Very few helmets. There were brawls all the time.

Speaker 4 Paul McIntosh, who was drafted the same year as Taro and is now a scout for the Dallas Stars, told me, like, if somebody was caught high sticking or had a rough hit, Something dirty, it was handled right there on the spot on the ice.

Speaker 1 It was taken care of right away in terms of not through league discipline, just from the team taking care of it and looking after business itself.

Speaker 1 And as far as the which is very different, obviously, from the NHL of today, which is effectively a league of discipline.

Speaker 1 Back then, the league office didn't care about all the blood and fighting and general on-ice goonery.

Speaker 1 What the NHL spent most of its time worrying about, what it was freaked out about, honestly, was a newly existential business concern.

Speaker 1 because a deep-pocketed new competitor had crawled into the league offices' heads. And so the NHL was spending most of its time worrying about how to wage a war of its own now

Speaker 1 in secret.

Speaker 4 They were really worried about this upstart competitive league called the World Hockey Association.

Speaker 1 12 brand new, fully manned, well-balanced Canadian and American hockey teams took to the ice and began thawing out the first ice age and and opened up a closed shop that had become one of sport's most firmly locked up monopolies.

Speaker 1 The impenetrable fortress that had withstood years of onslaught had finally met its master.

Speaker 4 They were competing not just for like audiences and attention,

Speaker 4 they were competing for the same players. They were losing players to this other league, including Bobby Hull, who was like one of the greatest players of all time.

Speaker 4 And so the NHL decided in 1974 to have a secret draft so that the WHA wouldn't know which players to target and go to because if you had two leagues if you had two different teams who had drafted the rights to somebody competing well that was going to cost the owners a lot of money and so the setting for a secret draft 50 years ago um how secret is the room that the secret draft is being held in where was it all happening

Speaker 4 there wasn't even a room because this was entirely secret. It was done over the phone.

Speaker 4 And the man at the center of it was Clarence Campbell, who was almost 70 years old and like just the driest, most boring,

Speaker 4 old, lawyerly type man.

Speaker 4 And he would have to call each team and he would ask their draft pick. But before he asked the draft pick, he would have them listen to him read through every person who had been picked before that.

Speaker 4 And he would often stop and spell out the names in like just the most dry, monotonous, tedious process. It's so boring.

Speaker 1 It sounds incredible insofar as this is like the opposite of a TV show that millions of people would want to watch as they do today.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I just got to underscore the logistics, the math here that Mike is laying out for us.

Speaker 1 Because Clarence Campbell, the droning president of the NHL, a former ref, actually, who ascended to the top job and held it for 30 years, was best known for league expansion.

Speaker 1 Now, there's not a lot of surviving audio of Clarence Campbell, but you can hear him in this quick clip from 1966 announcing that he was doubling the size of the NHL from six teams to 12.

Speaker 5 This is the year of the great expansion. This year, for the first time, the league will be composed of 12 teams.

Speaker 1 And less than a decade later, by 1974, the NHL under Clarence Campbell had now tripled in size to 18 teams.

Speaker 1 And so in this secret draft, a secret enterprise meant to claim as much of the world as possible for the NHL, basically,

Speaker 1 there were 25 rounds. 25! The entire thing lasted three days in total.

Speaker 1 Picks would be revealed directly to every team, one by one, over the phone, yes, by Clarence Campbell, that voice you heard before. And it it was exhausting and irritating.

Speaker 1 And nobody was more exhausted or more irritable than one team in specific,

Speaker 1 the Buffalo Sabres.

Speaker 1 And so the other end of the line here, for the purposes of our story here, across the country, is the Buffalo Sabres front office. And who is the person manning the phones for the Sabres?

Speaker 4 George George Punch Imlock.

Speaker 4 I mean, he was a legend. He's one of the most influential people in the history of the NHL.
Imagine like Tom Landry, but older and Canadian and meaner. He would just absolutely

Speaker 4 would not suffer fools in the slightest.

Speaker 5 Our first guest, the coach and general manager of the Lee's Punch Imlock. And Punch will be going into the dressing room.

Speaker 5 Do you speak to them as a group or as individuals or what?

Speaker 5 Well, usually I use the group

Speaker 5 idea. Once in a while I get mad and then I go to the individual, but most of it is usually done as a group and let them take out what they think applies to them.

Speaker 5 Could you give us a little preview of what you're going to see?

Speaker 4 Paul McIntosh, the former player, told me that the trainers would tell him that they would keep ties right there in the locker room.

Speaker 1 You didn't go in his office without a tie. It didn't matter if you had blue jeans on or what the rest of everything looked like.
You had to have a tie on.

Speaker 1 And they'd say, kid, make sure you put a tie on to see to see Mr. Imlak.

Speaker 4 Otherwise, he was immediately going down to the farm league. Like there was no discussion.
He was gone. That's what kind of guy Punch Imlak was.

Speaker 1 Right. And do we know why his nickname was Punch?

Speaker 4 Yeah. When he was playing in the junior leagues, he was knocked on conscious at some point.

Speaker 4 And when he came to, he just started punching everything in front of him, which happened to be the trainers who were trying to take care of him.

Speaker 4 And his fellow players were so delighted by this that they started with nicknames like Punchy, and it slowly worked down to Punch. And it just seemed to fit his personality.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it again is, as we say on this show a lot, it feels very on the nose, this detail,

Speaker 4 which also

Speaker 1 would be where Punch presumably would want to connect.

Speaker 1 So I say.

Speaker 4 Punch is on the nose.

Speaker 1 I say all of this to say that he was also like deeply respected as an executive, right? Like this guy, despite being this caricature of

Speaker 1 a principal himself,

Speaker 1 this bullying character was also

Speaker 1 famous for being good at his job.

Speaker 6 We have a slogan with the Maple Leafs. The price of success is hard work.

Speaker 6 We think this is very important, so I will repeat it. Now listen carefully.
The price of success. is hard work.

Speaker 4 The previous decade, he basically oversaw a dynasty with the Toronto Maple League. And when he took over as coach, the team was terrible.
They were in last place when he took over.

Speaker 4 And that year, he led them to the playoffs and then won in the first round of the playoffs and then ultimately won four Stanley Cups in Toronto during that decade.

Speaker 4 And so when the Buffalo Sabres

Speaker 4 were an expansion franchise, there were actually a couple of franchises who were trying to get him. And so they basically tapped him to create their entire franchise.

Speaker 1 We're talking about 1970. The Sabres are born in Buffalo.
And like, what is the level of excitement around town?

Speaker 4 So the franchise was like immediately beloved in this area, right? In Buffalo and all of Western New York and even like that part of Ontario across the lake in Niagara Falls, that area.

Speaker 4 They immediately loved this franchise and they were very successful pretty early on.

Speaker 4 But they even had a song, like this cheesy theme song that was all about like, they're going to win the Stanley Cup.

Speaker 1 Wait, Mike Mooney, give us a little bit of the song. What did it sound like?

Speaker 4 I'm not going to, I don't want to sing it for you, but

Speaker 4 I don't want to sing it. We're going to win that Stanley Cup.
You know, it's like, whatever, it was terrible.

Speaker 4 You know, we're going to win that Stanley Cup.

Speaker 4 Me and the Buffalo Sabres. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 in the first draft uh as gm the sabers had the first pick which they won because the nhl had a wheel to spin and had the various teams pick numbers on the wheel like a physical wheel a literal wheel of fortune

Speaker 4 and of course punch picked 11 on the wheel because that was his lucky number and his favorite classic classic punch

Speaker 4 And then that's how the Sabres got Jobert Perot,

Speaker 4 who became like basically the greatest player in their franchise history. He drafted Rick Martin, who was like this hardcore sharpshooter.

Speaker 4 And then Rene Robert, who was like a go-in-the-corner, dig it out guy. And the three of them became the French connection, who'd still considered like one of the most exciting lines in NHL history.

Speaker 4 Think of something like the Steph KD Clay lineup with the Warriors a couple of years ago.

Speaker 1 So Mike, the mental image you're painting for me is coming into focus. So we have Clarence, the president of the NHL, effectively the the commissioner figure here who is conducting, calling people,

Speaker 1 reading names.

Speaker 4 Every time Commissioner Clarence called your phone, he's reading 17 other names and stopping and spelling them out for you.

Speaker 1 I know, Mike, that email was not invented at the time, obviously, but really this meeting, this draft could have been an email.

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 But also,

Speaker 1 there's another thing that I think you you should know about how Punch Imlock, this increasingly humorless Hall of Famer, viewed the secret draft of 1974.

Speaker 1 Because Punch's bosses, the team's owners, had already vowed to never be outspent by the WHA, which was no small thing.

Speaker 1 And so Punch was specifically not even worried about what the NHL in general was worrying about.

Speaker 1 And so in Buffalo, the secret spelling of every single name over the phone over and over again, it didn't just feel inefficient, it felt pointless.

Speaker 1 So pointless, in fact, that by the 11th round, not even halfway through of 25 rounds,

Speaker 1 Punch snapped. And he turned to the employee in the Sabre's front office, who seemed like his total opposite.
A man who was arguably the most mischievous PR person

Speaker 1 in the history of sports.

Speaker 4 So Punch at some point was like so sick of this. He had decided that he had already picked all the players that had any chance of making his roster.

Speaker 4 So by the 11th round, he said, we should draft somebody that nobody's ever heard of. He basically turns to his comms guy, Paul Whelan, says, we should draft somebody who doesn't exist.

Speaker 4 Paul Whelan was like this kind of classic prankster in Buffalo. I actually talked to a local historian in Buffalo named John Boute, who was good friends with Paul at the end of his life.

Speaker 4 And he told me about the many, many pranks that Paul Wheland had played in his life.

Speaker 1 We have a couple of boats here in Buffalo behind what was then Memorial Auditorium when the Sabres played. And one of them was the Little Rock.

Speaker 1 He says, okay, this is going to be my joke for this year, April 1st, going to come around. And he put out a press release.
He says the Buffalo Sabres will be doing training camp this year.

Speaker 1 from the deck of the USS Little Rock out on Lake Erie. And they're going to do training camp.
They're going to bring portable ice. They're going to do, you know, weightlifting.

Speaker 1 They're going to do cardio work. They're going to do all this stuff on the boat, on the ship, out in Lake Erie.
People were thinking this was real. I mean, you're going to be what?

Speaker 4 Doing what?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, obviously the joke would go on. And then the next day you would come out and go, gotcha.

Speaker 4 So as serious as Punch Imlock was, that's how comical Paul Wheland was.

Speaker 1 So I should just reiterate, this is all unthinkable in the present tense, Mike. The idea that

Speaker 1 the PR guy is the one

Speaker 1 with everybody at the behest of the guy who is the least likely person to want to pull a prank or have a prank pulled on him. It makes me wonder, like, their end game here was what?

Speaker 1 What were they hoping to accomplish?

Speaker 4 Punch just really disliked a lot of the people in the NHL head office, right?

Speaker 4 He just really did not like the president, Clarence Campbell, and was just kind of petulant at the moment that this incredibly long, boring draft had continued and was even taking place, let alone that he had been forced to spend his time this way.

Speaker 1 And this part of the story stuck out to me. Because as much as this whole episode has been about a time gone by, a time long ago,

Speaker 1 this fundamentally corporate corporate kind of petulance does feel recognizably modern. The NHL's secret draft through this lens was basically office space on ice.

Speaker 1 No, not again.

Speaker 1 Why does it say paper jam when there is no paper jam? I swear to God, one of these days I just kicked this piece of s out the window. You and me both, man.
Thing is lucky I'm not armed.

Speaker 4 Piece of shit.

Speaker 1 And so Punch and Paul wanted this all to be over as soon as possible, but they couldn't leave.

Speaker 1 And so they developed a highly specific plan that otherwise does not feel to me like the sort of thing that I personally would be comfortable advocating.

Speaker 4 So Punch Emluck basically says, you know, we should draft somebody that nobody's ever heard of. And Paul Whelan says that we should draft a player from Japan.

Speaker 1 But hold on. Okay.
So 1974, some white dudes in a room saying, let's invent a Japanese person.

Speaker 1 Mike, I'm preemptively, I'm concerned for everybody. Everybody involved here.

Speaker 1 I'm a little worried where this is going.

Speaker 4 Yeah, understandable. Paul says that he knows a Japanese name.
He knows a Japanese name. One single.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I've heard of a Japanese person before. Sure.

Speaker 4 But first, they needed to make a phone call.

Speaker 1 Okay, so just to recap here. The Buffalo Sabres have pledged to invent a Japanese person.
But first, they need to make this mysterious phone call, Mike. So who is on the other end of this phone call?

Speaker 4 So the other end of the call is a man named Josh Sujimoto.

Speaker 4 And he is a farmer and a Christian missionary. He had been in an internment camp in America and somehow ended up in western New York

Speaker 4 running a produce stand called Sujimoto's. And I actually talked to his grandson, Ben Sujimoto, who's a writer for the Buffalo News, about his grandfather.

Speaker 2 The gift store was on a main thoroughfare. It was on Seneca Street.
Some people know it as Route 16, but it had a lot of traffic going through it.

Speaker 2 So people would frequently drive by, see this big sign that said Tushimoto's. And I mean, obviously in Elma, I think we had maybe 99% white.

Speaker 2 So it was real strange to see an out-of-the-ordinary last name. So it stuck with people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can imagine that there weren't a lot of Japanese farm stands around Buffalo in the 70s, Mike.

Speaker 4 There were very, very, very few. So much so that this really stuck out in people's minds when they went there.
And it was a popular place, too. They had like Japanese trinkets.

Speaker 4 They had bonsai trees that nobody had ever seen before, right? This was a decade before the Karate Kid came out.

Speaker 1 What are you doing? Oh, I'm trimming my baby tree here. Bonsai tree.

Speaker 1 Bonsai tree. Bonsai.

Speaker 1 Bonsai.

Speaker 4 The beautiful.

Speaker 4 This was quite an anomaly in upstate New York. One of the people who never forgot this place was Paul Wheland, who had passed by driving between Buffalo and St.

Speaker 4 Bonaventure when he went to college and just remembered this name. So when they decided to concoct a Japanese player, he remembered this fruit stand.

Speaker 4 The way Ben told me, his grandfather and grandmother get a call from Punch Imlock's secretary. Punch gets on the phone.
They know who he is, right? Because the Sabres are giant in Western New York.

Speaker 4 They don't get into a lot of details, but they ask two very basic questions.

Speaker 2 And those questions were, what is a common Japanese boy's name?

Speaker 2 Which, you know, my grandfather knew who Punch Imlak was at the time. So what must have been going through his head was probably wild, right? He's like, so Buffalo Sabers, you know, GM is calling me.

Speaker 2 You know, I know a little bit about the Sabres. I know who the French connection is, but how am I involved in this?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 you can see in his shoes that he's probably like, huh. This is an interesting question, but he gave a good answer.
He said, Taro. Taro is a common Japanese boy's name.

Speaker 4 And then they said, what would a team name, a hockey team name in Japan? What would a mascot for that name be?

Speaker 2 To set the record straight and to give my grandparents proper props,

Speaker 2 they had the cleverness to say, oh, the katanas, which is Japanese for saber.

Speaker 4 And then they

Speaker 4 hang up and go their separate ways. And the Tsujimotos are just left kind of wondering what the hell just happened.

Speaker 1 It is remarkable that Paul Whieland, at the very least, went through the trouble of calling the family to be like, look, I'm not going to explain what's happening here necessarily, but just know that you're the only people I can think of who can help me with this.

Speaker 1 I kind of tipped my cap to him, honestly.

Speaker 4 You're the Japanese people I'm aware of.

Speaker 1 Right. I'm like, good instinct, Paul.
Better than guessing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they just whipped up the stats. They thought like, you know, imagine these guys just sitting around giggling,

Speaker 4 thinking, oh, we'll come up with the stats too. We'll come up with this team, his age, his, they came up with a birthday.

Speaker 1 Mike, we have the documentary evidence here in front of us.

Speaker 1 John Boute was kind enough to provide the actual Buffalo Sabres 1974-75 roster. And it's marked up.
We can very clearly see about two-thirds of the way down.

Speaker 1 Taro Tsujimoto, number 13, 5'8, 180 pounds from Osaka, Osaka, Japan, born November 16th, 1954, 1973-74 club, Tokyo, the Katanas, as we now know. 15 goals, 10 assists, 25 points.
Fully legitimized.

Speaker 4 On paper next to several Hall of Famers,

Speaker 4 like some of the greatest players in hockey history and Taro.

Speaker 1 Right. Like they prank called the NHL commissioner, basically, the man who was in charge.
How long did the Buffalo Sabres

Speaker 1 keep this a secret? How long did they hold out?

Speaker 4 This is truly the fundamental problem with this prank, right? Like, this is a really good prank has to have a moment of payoff.

Speaker 4 And they're sitting around laughing, thinking about this commissioner having to pronounce this name and having to spell this name over and over.

Speaker 4 And they're thinking about all of the other executives sitting in their offices wondering what has just happened. But they don't get to see that, right?

Speaker 4 They don't get to like, they don't get their delivery on the payoff. And so then there's this like question of what do we do now? And they essentially decided, let's just keep it going.

Speaker 4 Let's just keep it going as long as we can.

Speaker 1 So how do you keep it going? What do they do from there, given that they can't get the payoff of actually hearing the secret draft phone call that the commissioner is making to every team?

Speaker 4 Well, so this name gets printed in newspapers across the country. Then when camp comes around, they're at St.
Catharines in Ontario. They have a locker for Taro.

Speaker 4 They have a stall with his name and his jersey and sticks. And I think he was number 13.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 4 And when they ask, when reporters ask Punch about this person, he talks about their scouting operation in Japan. and how

Speaker 4 he's actually been practicing in the Himalayas, which of course is

Speaker 4 not particularly close to Japan.

Speaker 1 It's like India.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I don't think the fact checkers were that thorough at the time.
No. And tells people that he's waiting to hear from his agent.

Speaker 4 And they didn't, by the way, they didn't even tell the owners of the Buffalo Sabres that they were doing this. They made it all the way to camp.

Speaker 4 The Knox brothers who own the Sabres and have like imbued Punch with this power and said, you know, we're not going to let this league, this other league take our players.

Speaker 4 Like we're going to spend whatever it takes. We trust you.

Speaker 4 they have not told those people that they have drafted a fictional human being right they've drafted the great japanese hope and now they're not telling anybody except for the people who are in again the secret draft war room they're even telling people by the way they're even telling reporters that like Taro is so fast he might be the fastest player in the NHL and he's going to wear down defenses so when the French connection comes on they're going to score even more.

Speaker 4 And other franchises were wondering, had the Sabres just landed a gold mine of talent?

Speaker 4 Like, we don't have a scouting operation in Japan. Maybe we should.

Speaker 1 So when does Paul Wheland, when does the tag team, the unlikely tag team of Punch Imlock and Paul Wheland tell the owners, their bosses, that

Speaker 1 this great Japanese hope thing actually

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 a whole entire prank?

Speaker 4 Seymour Knox was kind of like the lead owner at the time. To his credit, Seymour didn't show anger.
Yeah. Just confusion.

Speaker 4 That's about right.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say, I would be immediately confused, but then I think immediately furious if I was the owner of the team and I was like, wait a minute, didn't we give this guy a locker?

Speaker 4 How much did we spend on this guy's jersey?

Speaker 1 Right, right, right, right, right.

Speaker 4 You knew he was fictional when you drafted him.

Speaker 1 Someone at the NHL office must have had some anger towards this. Like the idea of like the NHL being in on the joke, clearly like they weren't.

Speaker 4 Right. Apparently, Clarence Campbell was very angry when he eventually found out this guy was fictional.
Exactly when the reveal happens, it's not clear, but he is really pissed.

Speaker 4 And he immediately orders the removal of Taro Sujimoto's name from all of their records. And he was so upset that they'd already printed all of this material in newspaper accounts in Buffalo even.

Speaker 4 For years, when this guy would be mentioned in stories about previous drafts, they were like parentheticals that say, like, some say he's fictional.

Speaker 4 Again, for years, people were still not sure if he was real or not.

Speaker 1 So, on some level, I should say instinctively that this all seems like it could have gone very, very wrong in a bunch of different ways, right?

Speaker 1 You have a bunch of white guys saying we're going to invent a Japanese dude, and there is actually one Japanese dude that they know.

Speaker 1 And so, it's a prank pulled on someone else, but the real person with their real last name is being used fundamentally as a means to this end.

Speaker 1 And so it makes me wonder actually how Ben, the grandson of Josh Sujimoto, the aforementioned owner of the farm stand who inspired the name,

Speaker 1 how he feels about all of this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he didn't see any ill intent, right? He thinks that this entire thing is really funny. And that this is like a delightful story that the family tells.

Speaker 2 It was very clear what their goal was, right?

Speaker 1 Their goal was to

Speaker 2 achieve a prank that, you know, they had to have certain ingredients to that prank that would fool people. And having a foreign hockey player made sense as a way to fool people.

Speaker 2 And I think there was nothing that was at all malicious. And

Speaker 2 I think it actually made the story cooler that it was a Japanese hockey player because there just weren't, as far as I know, many Japanese hockey players who made it to the NHL.

Speaker 2 I always had an affinity for Paul Korea or any hockey player that had some kind of Asian ancestry just because it was so unusual, but also because that could have been Taro down the road.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I should point out here that this road, when it comes to Japanese players,

Speaker 1 was ridiculously long.

Speaker 1 All that wondering about Taro and how maybe the NHL should draft and scout more Japanese players.

Speaker 1 That didn't come to fruition.

Speaker 1 An NHL team didn't draft a Japanese player until 1992, when the Montreal Canadiens drafted a very real defenseman named Hiro Yuki Miura, and Miura never appeared in an NHL game.

Speaker 1 In fact, a Japanese player didn't even get into a game until 2007, more than 30 years after Taro got drafted, when goalie Yutaka Fukufuji finally came off the bench and stood between the pipes for the Los Angeles Kings.

Speaker 7 Yutaka Fuka Fuji, what's the left pad? On Brewer, an outstanding save. He's challenging the shooter.
He comes across and desperately gets that left pad in there. What a save.

Speaker 1 But I also want to be clear about this part.

Speaker 1 I do get what Ben was saying just a minute ago about his complete and genuine fondness for this prank.

Speaker 1 Because the most pivotal component of this hoax, it turns out, is that his family, this family of outsiders, the real-life Sujimotos,

Speaker 1 got personally caught.

Speaker 1 They got invited inside an an inside joke,

Speaker 1 which meant that they too

Speaker 1 were now proudly a part of yet another community, yet another culture that's worth discussing here.

Speaker 1 The very strange culture of Buffalo, New York.

Speaker 4 I asked John Boute about that specifically. right?

Speaker 4 For me,

Speaker 4 it just seems like a very Buffalo, New York story. It just feels like Buffalo somehow and it's like gritty silliness.

Speaker 4 And he pointed out that this just could not have happened in one of the other cities.

Speaker 1 Would it have happened in Montreal? Never. No way.
Toronto? No way. New York? No way.
It would have never happened in any of those cities. But Buffalo is just that kind of town.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, whatever we can do to, you know, upset the establishment, we'll do, because that's the kind of people we are.

Speaker 4 You know, it struck him as the kind of thing that just fits that culture, that kind of underdog, antagonistic attitude. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, the community brought this guy to life in a really interesting way, right?

Speaker 4 Very, very quickly, there were like bumper stickers that came out the next year that said in kanji, like think Stanley Cup.

Speaker 4 And the community would wear Taro Tujimoto. jerseys and still to this day.

Speaker 4 And occasionally, when there's a blowout, one way or the other, the crowd, the home crowd in Buffalo still chants things like, we want Taro.

Speaker 4 We want Taro. Like he became this character that's part of the franchise lore.
When Ben Tsujimoto goes to hockey games, he sees people wearing his family name on jerseys.

Speaker 4 Often the number that they use is 74 instead of 13 because it was 74 draft. But he said he's at 30 or 40 people over his life ask him, like, are you related to that fictional character?

Speaker 4 Like, what is this?

Speaker 1 And this brings us now, at the end here, to my favorite thing that I found out today.

Speaker 1 Because it's not just that Ben Sujimoto's family name has become a literal rallying cry in Buffalo for decades now, helping keep the memory of his grandparents and their family business very much alive.

Speaker 1 My favorite thing is that when Ben himself goes to these games as an actual Sabres fan,

Speaker 1 he's

Speaker 1 reviving the prank.

Speaker 1 Enough time has passed, 50 years, that he's been creating his own inside joke inside an inside joke.

Speaker 1 Because he's been telling people that Taro Tsujimoto was his actual relative.

Speaker 1 He's been telling people that Taro Tsujimoto was real

Speaker 4 after all.

Speaker 2 And I think that's pretty cool. You know, if I saw a Tujimoto jersey, even if that person were a stranger, I'd say, hey, I'm a Tujimoto as well.
You know, here's how Taro is doing.

Speaker 2 Or like, just, you know, have a good time with them and kind of create that camaraderie without even knowing the person.

Speaker 4 He tells people that, like, yeah, Taro was an uncle.

Speaker 4 He says, oh, you know, he's not in skating shape anymore. He's in his 70s now.

Speaker 4 He could never compete with with the NHL skates these days.

Speaker 2 Sometimes they'll say,

Speaker 2 he's still skating on his pond in

Speaker 2 Tokyo. And he'll

Speaker 2 sometimes pay a visit, but he never stays long kind of thing. You can just have a good time with the story because

Speaker 2 there's nothing you can say that could be wrong.

Speaker 4 It's kind of an ongoing joke in the community, right? And there's something very buffalo about all of this, about the way that the community

Speaker 4 embraced this hoax and this joke and this like fictional speed skater, you know, and everyone else is just confused as to like, what the f are you guys celebrating?

Speaker 4 That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 It makes me nostalgic, weirdly, right?

Speaker 1 Because none of this would ever happen again. Sports in 2024.
is basically a surveillance state. We have video of everybody and everything.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 in this way, way, we lose, I think, some of the fundamental silliness of what the roots of all of this used to be.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, now a draft is like a coronation, right? There's like a sanctimoniousness that's associated with our professional drafts.
At the time, this was like clearly the total opposite. right?

Speaker 4 They had it, they played a phone prank. They basically made a prank phone call to the NHL on one of the most important moments in the league that year.

Speaker 1 The stakes have risen to the point where billion-dollar assets rise and fall on draft picks. It's being held in, I guess, literally the all-seeing eye that is the sphere.

Speaker 1 And meanwhile, all of this started with a bunch of dudes being like, this is boring.

Speaker 4 You know what would be hilarious? Yeah,

Speaker 4 that's essentially like how one of the greatest legends of the NHL started.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Michael Mooney, thank you for reminding us where all of this actually came from.

Speaker 4 That's great. Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful.

Speaker 1 As for where this episode came from, you should know that it is produced by a lot of people whose names you have heard but have not seen, including Michael Antonucci, Walter Averoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren.

Speaker 1 CD Engineering by RG Systems, sound design by NGW Post, our theme song by John Bravo.

Speaker 1 All of us will see you on Tuesday.