How To Invent a Fake Superstar

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 3 Eventually, I run out of questions.

Speaker 4 He runs out of career to talk about.

Speaker 5 You know, sports careers are finite.

Speaker 8 I can't keep pressing him about these things.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 13 there was a split second where I thought, shake hands and let him go.

Speaker 1 Right after this ad.

Speaker 14 You're listening to DraftKings Network.

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Speaker 16 in York, New York, 1738, Centaur design. Please drink responsibly.

Speaker 1 So I'm trying to keep up with all the Shohei Otani MLB free agency stuff, and every part of this makes me laugh.

Speaker 14 Breaking news from Major League Baseball, where Shohei Otani is signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The two-way superstar will get a 10-year deal worth $700 million.

Speaker 14 Far and away, the largest contract in the history of North American sports.

Speaker 15 Why?

Speaker 1 Because A, remember like when Shohei Otani was coming over and he was like being rumored as the Japanese Babe Ruth? Sure. And everyone was doubting him.
Like, could he possibly pitch?

Speaker 1 And now he's making $700 million over like 100 years or whatever it is that the the Dodgers worked out in that deal.

Speaker 18 The hype was so high on him that it's impossible to reach it and he's exceeded it.

Speaker 1 He's exceeded it.

Speaker 18 You never see that other than like LeBron who was on SI as like a kid. You never see somebody with that type of hype reach it and exceed it usually.

Speaker 19 It's insane.

Speaker 1 At this point, Babe Ruth is an insult to Shohei Otani. Right.

Speaker 1 Babe Ruth never had the entire internet tracking a private plane from Southern California to Toronto that turned out to be carrying that dude from Shark Tank on it.

Speaker 18 Babe Ruth played with a bunch of white plumbers. Like, get out of here with comparing him to Shohei Otani.

Speaker 1 But Otani is, hey, look, and I get all of the things about like, yeah, he had elbow surgery, blah, blah, blah. I don't give a shit.
We just cannot think this way about international players anymore.

Speaker 1 Cortez, the other thing that makes me laugh about this entire thing is that I'm just learning names for the first time now. And my instinct has gone from like skepticism to that guy rules.

Speaker 1 And I have not seen a second of these dudes.

Speaker 18 That's right. I mean, when I was a kid growing up, there were names all the time that had huge hype.
Like Hideki Matsui was the Godzilla of Japan and so forth. And he had a great career.

Speaker 18 He wasn't necessarily a Hall of Famer who exceeded expectations. He didn't do what Otani did.

Speaker 1 Enormous porn collection. That's right.
Enormous porn collections. Record setting.

Speaker 18 But it was different. Daisuke Matsuzaka, also another guy who had a decent career, had good moments, but didn't have like this exceptional career.

Speaker 1 But this guy now, who I was just googling, because I have never seen him before, but is the next guy.

Speaker 18 Well, he's supposed to get a ton of money, Yamamoto.

Speaker 1 You're right, so Yoshinobu Yapamoto has been hailed as the Japanese Pedro Martinez. I'm looking at an article right now.
It's Fox Sports. And that is what he's being declared.
And my response is,

Speaker 1 this guy rules.

Speaker 18 My response is give him all the money in the world.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Just in case.
I know nothing about him.

Speaker 15 All I know is that

Speaker 1 I should be less skeptical.

Speaker 1 of these promises now because of Otani, because we're living in this era where the international player, like in the NBA, we used to laugh at the premise of like the Greek Shaquille O'Neal baby shack.

Speaker 1 Sophocles shorts Sanitas.

Speaker 18 We are arrogant Americans is part of the issue too, because just because we get to watch guys doesn't mean we know anything. We talked about this on other episodes with quarterbacks in the NFL.

Speaker 18 Just because we have access to watch these guys, we still don't know shit. So maybe we should take people's word from other countries when they compare them to the greatest players of all time.

Speaker 1 I'm watching the Houston Rockets and they have this dude, Operan Shangun, who was hailed as the Turkish Jokic.

Speaker 1 And he basically is exactly that.

Speaker 18 Tom Hammershro was laughed at for talking about him as like a number one over there.

Speaker 1 He went on Dan's show and said this guy might be the best player in the draft. And no one even acknowledged it.

Speaker 18 Because the name itself was like, get out of here. Nobody knows who this is.

Speaker 15 You can't consonantly be this.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 And the skepticism is not necessarily warranted, as we've learned.

Speaker 1 So the point being that we're in this place of trying to figure out, okay, I'm supposed to trust these new

Speaker 1 promised superstars that I've never seen a second of. I've never seen a second of the only clip clip I've seen of Yamamoto involves this

Speaker 1 curveball thing that they call the yo-yo curve. And I'm like, cool.

Speaker 1 The Korean guy.

Speaker 1 Who's the Korean dude? I don't even know his name.

Speaker 1 Young-ho-li? Yes, Young-Hoo-Lee.

Speaker 18 Excuse me, $2 on me.

Speaker 19 Multiple vowels.

Speaker 18 The Giants just threw $113 million at him. Just a ton of money.
Yes. He's a monster.
I mean, but he also, you know, hits the ball on the ground a ton. We don't know a lot about him.

Speaker 18 Nobody's ever seen him play. Most people haven't seen him play.

Speaker 1 All I've seen from him is that clip,

Speaker 1 the bad flip.

Speaker 11 Yo, the badass bad flip.

Speaker 1 He's the South Korean Vladimir Guerrero. Yes.
Like that is the legend of him now, based on this one bit of data.

Speaker 1 And so what I wanted to do on today's show, Cortez, is that I wanted to go back in time a bit and look at a very notable case study in what it means to be the fill-in

Speaker 1 nation here,

Speaker 1 fill-in name of previous superstar here, sort of legend. Hmm, and so the legend of the Honduran maradona.

Speaker 18 Oh, that sounds intriguing. Okay.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We have to go across the pond.

Speaker 15 Across the pond.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 18 Let me try it again.

Speaker 15 No, I don't.

Speaker 21 Across the pond.

Speaker 1 This is.

Speaker 18 I'm just trying to do a British accent. I've been watching a lot of, you know, Love Island and everything.
Everything from the Brits.

Speaker 15 I love the Brits.

Speaker 1 Love Island about Britain.

Speaker 20 The Villa.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 18 What do you do? What? It's a great show.

Speaker 18 Watch some Love Island. Get some culture in your life.

Speaker 1 The fact that you're wearing a, you're actually wearing today for the

Speaker 1 The podcast audience not watching YouTuber Death News Network. You're wearing a soccer jersey.
Yes.

Speaker 18 Sun is on the back of my jersey. Tottenham is the greatest soccer club of all time.
Our producer Chris can go to hell. Arsenal stinks.
And, you know, yes, I am wearing,

Speaker 18 it's not a jersey, it's a kit.

Speaker 1 Oh my god.

Speaker 18 So on the pitch, mate.

Speaker 15 This is

Speaker 1 only vaguely British, this accent.

Speaker 22 It does the job.

Speaker 18 It's fine.

Speaker 1 What I wanted to do, Cortez, is I wanted to go inside of one of these stories: the story of a player who was promised to be something grand and turned out to be,

Speaker 1 as it turns out, something quite different.

Speaker 16 Might

Speaker 1 If you're looking to add something special to your next celebration, try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Speaker 1 This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Speaker 1 Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

Speaker 1 So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Speaker 1 Learn more at remymartin.com.

Speaker 15 Remy Martin Cognac, Veeen Champain, a 14 alcoholic volume, reported by Remy Control, USA, Incorporated, New York, New York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Speaker 16 Please drink responsibly.

Speaker 1 So for the record here, how do you want to introduce yourself?

Speaker 25 Kieran Morris, 26 years young, 27 in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 26 I'm from Liverpool, the greatest city in the world.

Speaker 27 I've been exiled in London, the second greatest city in the world for nine years.

Speaker 30 And yeah, I'm a magazine writer, editor, and audio doc maker as of this year.

Speaker 1 So there's a meta aspect to this, as you just hinted at the very end, of your autobiography. But when you say that you're almost 27 years old, do people believe you?

Speaker 1 Because I need our podcast audience to understand that I'm looking at you and I'm like, you could pass for, I don't know, what's the drinking age in England? I guess it would be like 14. 13.

Speaker 22 Okay.

Speaker 1 But I want to go back to where this is all born, which was I think when you were around 13 years old.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so 2010.

Speaker 1 And so you're in Liverpool at this point?

Speaker 33 Yeah, back home in Liverpool.

Speaker 1 And what does 13-year-old Kieran Morris like to do for fun?

Speaker 7 We just like to get ourselves in like weird little bits of trouble that was somewhat adjacent with sports, sometimes not.

Speaker 35 Our reporters are still all across the country and believe me, they are braving the elements tonight because it's deadline deadline day and there will be late drama like when there's transfer deadline day

Speaker 1 so kieran is talking about one of the biggest days in european soccer which is transfer deadline day it is the final day for teams to make signings which they call transfers over there and yeah add new players to their team and as you might imagine like with other major sports it comes with an entire day full of endless television coverage.

Speaker 3 When sky sports news are there, they've got the cameras rolling, waiting for players to come in, last-minute medicals, all of that.

Speaker 38 The lights are still on behind me, the media team are still here. And I can tell you, Fulham fans, that there may well still be one more deal to be done in the next 55 minutes or so.

Speaker 19 But they have got one deal done.

Speaker 26 And we'd walk over and we'd just like stare really blankly into the camera like, you know, yokels that hadn't seen technology before.

Speaker 13 And then we'd rush back and we'd see if anyone had seen it on TV and be like, oh my God, who are those freaks freaks in the back?

Speaker 7 And that was us.

Speaker 1 You're describing now, truly, like a pubescent.

Speaker 1 And forgive me, 13-year-old Kieran, for saying it this way. You're describing a 13-year-old attention

Speaker 22 a little bit.

Speaker 20 Completely.

Speaker 1 And what did 13-year-old attention Kieran Morris like to do the most as those pranks were concerned?

Speaker 5 So the first big one that really had like a landing point to it was it was focused on the world that as 13, I think 14-year-olds by this point, 2011, the world we cared about the most, which was sky sports news, football transfers, the transfer rumor, gossip mill, and all of that.

Speaker 26 Every single time I was in my friend's house, Sky Sports News playing all the time.

Speaker 21 Little number on the bottom of it.

Speaker 31 Call us up if you hear anything, that kind of thing.

Speaker 5 Like sports media wasn't quite as glamorous then as simple.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. When a ticker and a bottom line meant something scrolling across your television.
Exactly.

Speaker 26 It felt like breaking news. I miss it.
And so we were just like, okay,

Speaker 9 what matters more to us than anything, football?

Speaker 31 What would be stupid?

Speaker 41 Oh, William Gallas, he's just left Arsenal.

Speaker 1 He was a free agent.

Speaker 37 What if he went to, like, Birmingham?

Speaker 1 Okay, just to clarify again for the Americans who do not closely follow soccer here. William Gallas is a really good French defenseman, or at least he was.

Speaker 1 He played for Chelsea and Arsenal for like 10 years. And then in the 2010-2011 season, he was on the decline.
He was entering the back end of his career.

Speaker 1 And so Kieran thought it would be funny if William Gallas's next move was to play at a really shub like Birmingham.

Speaker 44 Like, you know, lower mid-table, dowdy old Birmingham.

Speaker 5 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 45 You know, he's on the out. He's old.

Speaker 4 It could happen.

Speaker 37 Let's try and just put some calls in.

Speaker 39 And so we booked him a room at this really fancy

Speaker 29 luxury hotel in the center of Birmingham.

Speaker 26 I put on my worst unrepeatable French accent as an agent.

Speaker 1 Hold on.

Speaker 1 What does your worst unrepeatable French accent sound like?

Speaker 43 Oh, it's talking like this, you know. So I can have

Speaker 43 roommates coming in.

Speaker 43 My client, William. Oh, you cannot tell what it is for.
It is for Birmingham.

Speaker 15 Pretty terrible.

Speaker 13 Yeah, admittedly.

Speaker 46 If that makes it to tape, oh my God, I will never be allowed to cross the Eurotunnel again.

Speaker 1 But wait, hold on. But using this terrible French accent, you've engineered this rumor out of nothing that you've sort of Goldilocks, right?

Speaker 1 It's not so implausible that people would dismiss it out of hand. You're kind of targeting something that might actually infiltrate the bottom line scroll on Sky Sports News.

Speaker 1 That is something that you've targeted very, very deliberately.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 30 That was the aim.

Speaker 47 And then from there, it was as easy as saying to a few papers, I've just heard from my friend who works at the Malmaison the hotel don't take it from me but apparently William Gallas has booked a room he's coming in tonight trying to build some kind of momentum for it and then telling sky sports all of this oh my god my phone has been blowing up apparently William Gallas is going to Birmingham.

Speaker 23 I've heard it from this guy at this paper.

Speaker 37 I've heard it from the guy at the hotel.

Speaker 36 And then the next morning, We're watching Sky Sports News again.

Speaker 3 There's a flash interview with Alex McLeish, who was the manager at the time.

Speaker 37 And it's it's just 10 seconds of, oh, you've been linked with William Gallas.

Speaker 19 Do you have anything to say about that?

Speaker 48 No, no, nothing on that. I've got two young centre-halves, and it's not the right move for me.

Speaker 48 I need to spend more money on other positions that, um, or spend the club's money on other positions that we really need to improve things.

Speaker 37 And for that tiny amount, that's all we wanted out of it.

Speaker 45 That was one of the funniest moments of our entire lives.

Speaker 1 What is the physical visceral sensation that you feel when you see that happening?

Speaker 12 Oh, it's just like being just hit by a tsunami.

Speaker 52 It was just, oh my God, it was here, sat on this floor by this TV yesterday.

Speaker 2 Today it is coming out of the TV.

Speaker 52 This is ridiculously powerful.

Speaker 51 It's like, if we can do that, what else can we do?

Speaker 1 The picture you have painted for me is that of one of those, you're not a kid who's scared.

Speaker 1 Like you're one of those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park who's testing the electrified fences like how much can you get away with before you just decide to destroy everything i think in in the terms of like

Speaker 54 you know media or

Speaker 33 kind of like the real world but anything that didn't involve like climbing trees or running very quickly or making hard tackles i was very scared at them but when it came to like actual people's lives i was yeah kind of reckless from an early point But wait, so you get this taste, right?

Speaker 1 You get this feeling that has that has been revelatory, that transforms you.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what do you want to do next?

Speaker 26 So it came to a year later, and all the way through this, we're making legends out of ourselves to each other.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're insufferable, I imagine.

Speaker 45 Oh, unbelievable.

Speaker 9 I couldn't put up with me if I had to deal with me at that age.

Speaker 13 We were 16 by this point, and the Olympics had just started, 2012.

Speaker 26 And I don't know, it felt like revisiting the Galas thing, the Galas playbook, was a bit like getting like an old video game out again and, you know, giving it one last really intense spin.

Speaker 11 Like, here we go.

Speaker 31 Let's see what we can do.

Speaker 23 We're a little bit older, a little bit wiser at 16, that is.

Speaker 5 And we're watching Honduras versus Morocco, a pretty staid game of football.

Speaker 13 And we get the itch again.

Speaker 26 It's, ooh, is there anyone here?

Speaker 41 Let's look through the squad list.

Speaker 31 And we looked at a few.

Speaker 40 You know, a few of them had already gone to Europe.

Speaker 13 A few of them already had a sort of bit of hype around them.

Speaker 26 But there was a 19-year-old, number 10, making his sort of first waves into the national team. It was fairly dynamic on the day.

Speaker 4 His name was Alexander Lopez.

Speaker 45 He hadn't left Honduras.

Speaker 37 He had a pretty modest but good goal record, a little bit of detail on him.

Speaker 53 And I don't know what it was, but we just fixed our eyes on him.

Speaker 26 And before we know it, we're at the big boxy computer in the study, going through Wikipedia, juicing it up a little bit with a bit more bio here.

Speaker 1 What are you editing on Wikipedia?

Speaker 26 Oh, it's it's basically at this point, it's a blank page.

Speaker 8 It's got a little bit of detail on him, other than that, total clear avenue for anything.

Speaker 19 So, a season had just gone by, the 11-12 season, it had no detail on it.

Speaker 47 Let's give him some references for you know a great series of goals in the Honduran League.

Speaker 1 Yeah, statistically, what are you giving him? What kind of an upgrade are you giving him?

Speaker 11 18 goals, 34 assists, you know, crazy, crazy, crazy figures.

Speaker 51 If you watch a player, do that to your league.

Speaker 9 They're an object of fascination.

Speaker 23 He was an all-action, you know, box-to-box, goal scorer, technical wizard, talisman, all of this stuff.

Speaker 26 He's this talent waiting to break out of Olympia onto the Olympic stage and then off into the world.

Speaker 45 And that nice mix of, hey, he can score a lot of goals, but he can make a lot of else happen for his team.

Speaker 26 There's strikers there who are benefiting off it.

Speaker 36 You know, other people are rising with his tide.

Speaker 26 He's that talented.

Speaker 52 The assists I always thought were the flourish.

Speaker 1 But hold on, because I need the scene, Kieran, of you settling, I presume at a computer, on the nickname that you knighted Alexander Lopez with.

Speaker 31 I've looked at the Wikipedia records.

Speaker 10 And you can still see them.

Speaker 31 They're obviously all publicly available.

Speaker 4 And there was a point, there had to be a point where we had completely juiced up the whole profile, read it back, laughed.

Speaker 26 One of us has turned their back, and then there's a second edit, a distinct edit that is just one line at the top. He is known to Olympia fans as the Honduran Maradona.

Speaker 1 That is the sound of Diego Maradona doing one of the greatest things we have ever seen in sports, scoring one of the greatest goals in the history of soccer.

Speaker 1 It is known as the goal of the century, in case you didn't know. And it put Argentina up 2-0 against England in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup.

Speaker 1 A World Cup that Maradona and Argentina would go on to win.

Speaker 1 And that goal and that run in the 86 World Cup, it would all cement Maradona as arguably the greatest of all time.

Speaker 1 And so the fact that Kieran was equating Alexander Lopez, this essentially anonymous Honduran soccer player, to Diego fing Maradona,

Speaker 1 it was patently absurd.

Speaker 1 But for the people who don't follow Honduran soccer, which is to say,

Speaker 1 basically all of us,

Speaker 1 it was still within the realm of possibility.

Speaker 9 It was a cherry on top of the cake.

Speaker 9 It was so easily could have just been left, wasn't part of the plan, but it was just, I know what could be an extra little something, is this nickname.

Speaker 13 Next step was finding a club that he could move to.

Speaker 10 So we were going to make another rumor and do the ringing around again.

Speaker 26 And this time we went for Wigan, who had signed, I think, three Hondurans in the few years before.

Speaker 23 So again, not unreasonable, all within this boundary of, huh, that makes sense.

Speaker 25 So we started the routine again.

Speaker 23 Starting low, local papers, local to regional papers, regional to national papers.

Speaker 30 Whole evening spent on the phone.

Speaker 25 I had a fake name this time.

Speaker 1 What was your fake name?

Speaker 4 I was Neil Barker.

Speaker 45 I was a kind of gruff-voiced Northwest football journalist.

Speaker 40 I just heard some rumors around in the Wigan area.

Speaker 13 I thought I'd ring up the Times news desk and I'd let them know.

Speaker 1 Do you lower your voice when you talk to the Times news desk? Give me Neil Barker calling up the Times news desk with the greatest scoop that anyone could have dreamed of.

Speaker 33 Oh, I think he talked a bit like this.

Speaker 45 So it's a bit more Mancunian and a bit more.

Speaker 23 Yes, so I've heard a little bit about

Speaker 13 Wigan signing another

Speaker 45 Honduran lad.

Speaker 13 He's playing at the Olympics now.

Speaker 9 He's called Alexander Lopez.

Speaker 4 He's apparently he's really, really good. Two and and a half million is what I've heard from the physio.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're the physio's friend.

Speaker 5 Oh, the physio's friend.

Speaker 52 Like, you just piece it together like that, where it's, ooh, a physio's friend could have let that slip.

Speaker 19 A medical could be happening.

Speaker 26 And then the Times, I remember I was on the phone with the guy for 20 minutes and he was taking down every detail.

Speaker 19 And he offers Neil Barker work in future.

Speaker 45 He says, I can't pay you money because

Speaker 28 the Times were under a lot of scrutiny at the time.

Speaker 21 Rupert Murdoch and all of that, all of that kicked out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's yada, yada, yada over Rupert Murdoch to get to Neil Barker's future employment prospects.

Speaker 15 Exactly.

Speaker 37 And so they offered me work, and obviously I couldn't take them up on it, but I just said, here's the tip.

Speaker 4 Here's the story.

Speaker 1 So this insane prospect who comes from Honduras, an incredibly poor Central American country that is just obscure enough as well to not be a thing that people know a ton about,

Speaker 1 no one should believe this story. Like, right? Like, objectively, this is obviously just something that you totally created.

Speaker 1 But what is insane is that clearly someone or someones of even greater consequence apparently did.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so I think, for the very least, the times, when they put it in the paper, they believed it.

Speaker 30 And then

Speaker 44 the year afterwards,

Speaker 34 we saw the news that the Houston Dynamo had paid a million dollars for Alexander Lopez

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 13 We just thought, oh my god, like there were the stats on the press release, 18 goals, 34 assists.

Speaker 3 They had, you know, a YouTube clip of him up.

Speaker 10 The comments of that had, you know, welcome the Honduran Maradona.

Speaker 26 We looked at the SB Nation posts and we looked at the Reddit boards and there it was.

Speaker 41 Like, we looked away for like a second.

Speaker 31 and this wildfire seemingly had spread through Major League Soccer, who saw this Central American gem that had been linked to the Premier League, you know, two and a half million.

Speaker 26 Let's sign him for 1 million.

Speaker 37 Bargain.

Speaker 1 I'm now looking at the press release off of HoustondynamoFC.com and it says, quote, his record of 18 goals and 34 assists in 51 league games for Olympia testifies, testifies to his creative and goal scoring potential, which feels like you you wrote that.

Speaker 1 But no, like this just got aggregated everywhere. Like you look it up now, and it's like Foxnews.com has a story about this, quoting those numbers.
And there's this one fan site.

Speaker 1 They're not just quoting the statistics, Kieran.

Speaker 1 They're quoting the legend, the nickname that you invented out of nothing.

Speaker 51 Yeah.

Speaker 52 As soon as I saw that press release, I was sat down in my study on the other side of the city where I lived.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 13 it's the one where he's holding the shirt and it says Alex 10.

Speaker 21 Got the number 10, Maradona's number,

Speaker 28 holding it proudly in orange in the sun in Houston.

Speaker 5 And the first thing I did was I made it my laptop background.

Speaker 7 I put it on the wall like

Speaker 4 a hunting trophy.

Speaker 17 I was just like,

Speaker 56 there we go.

Speaker 20 There we have it.

Speaker 39 You're a terror. I know.

Speaker 15 What a terror you were. Or

Speaker 6 were I hope.

Speaker 15 I think I'm reformed.

Speaker 1 So, Karen, I just do want to pause here because I am blown away by child you, this pubescent kid who is engineering this nickname, this legend, the Hunter and Maradona, out of nothing,

Speaker 1 except that that person who you nicknamed is a real guy named Alexander Lopez, and you watched as your boosted stats and your invented mythology leads to him roughly a year later getting signed by the Houston Dynamo, this MLS team in real life for a million dollars.

Speaker 1 And so you are on the one hand, an amazing shadow agent.

Speaker 5 for Alexander Lopez.

Speaker 1 Like what a thing you've done for this guy that you've never met, that you only kind of know about, but who now is the wallpaper of your computer.

Speaker 1 But I'm also realizing with great clarity that you're also just kind of an asshole.

Speaker 29 Yeah,

Speaker 21 yeah, a hundred percent.

Speaker 47 Um, it became very quickly to me, and I,

Speaker 8 you know, wrestled with it and tried to address it for a long time, it became a gimmick, it became a crutch, it became something that I fell back on time and time again.

Speaker 1 The story, the story of this, the accounting I just provided,

Speaker 1 you profited off of this.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 44 I mean, directly, directly led me to jobs, directly led me into what I do today.

Speaker 36 The magazine job that I have today,

Speaker 10 I pitched doing the Honduran Maradona, the whole run-through in my job interview.

Speaker 26 I have absolutely bled everything out of it there is to do.

Speaker 47 And that's, I think, there's something about

Speaker 8 when you are trying to get going in who you are and how you are going to be,

Speaker 23 what do you want people to see you as?

Speaker 52 And so a lot of it was, oh, I did this story.

Speaker 21 On top of that, oh, I do this.

Speaker 52 I do that.

Speaker 13 It's self-aggrandizement.

Speaker 26 It's, you know, hire me.

Speaker 13 I'm precocious.

Speaker 26 I can take a kid from Central America and make him into a millionaire.

Speaker 40 What could I do for you?

Speaker 1 I like the idea of you bragging about this, like on dates.

Speaker 59 Well, my now-fiancé,

Speaker 33 I started going out with Sarah,

Speaker 42 who will be listening. Hello,

Speaker 33 at the end of 2014.

Speaker 47 So it's nine years, just after school. And so it worked on her years and years ago, nine years ago.

Speaker 19 She hates every beat, every turn, every single mention of Alexander Lopez because she has heard me pull that routine hundreds of times with hundreds of different people.

Speaker 26 Like she rolls her eyes like default.

Speaker 9 All of this hype around this story that was all tied into this hype I did around myself.

Speaker 25 Never once did I think,

Speaker 20 you know, what's, what has happened to him?

Speaker 9 What really has happened to him, to his family?

Speaker 17 And that, bit by bit, as I got older, that became a bigger thing in my mind.

Speaker 1 The fact that your your love, your household, your ego, your identity, your story that you tell yourself about yourself

Speaker 1 is premised on the Honduran Maradona, raises an important question,

Speaker 1 which is what the fk happened to the Honduran Maradona when he actually went to the MLS. When did you actually decide to do something and figure out the answers to these pretty enormous questions?

Speaker 54 Well, it was coming up to 10 years on the original prank.

Speaker 8 So it was 2022 was on the horizon.

Speaker 26 I was speaking to

Speaker 26 another magazine editor, and I was telling him the story.

Speaker 33 I was doing the routine beat for beat.

Speaker 13 And once again, he's like, you should do something with this, but you should like

Speaker 8 really think about how you can do it.

Speaker 13 And it came to booking a flight to Houston and just thinking, can I just hit up anybody and everybody who was connected with that time, 2013, in Houston Dynamo's recent memory, any staff who were still at the club, and just put the question to them, find out a bit more, and then just try and see,

Speaker 26 did this really have an effect on Houston Dynamo?

Speaker 9 Did this have an effect on Alexander Lopez?

Speaker 1 So when you get to Houston and you begin to recreate a very suspiciously, I'll say this, suspiciously specific oral history of this random guy that you care about so much.

Speaker 1 What was their memory of just the very beginning?

Speaker 57 So at the very beginning, from what I've heard from speaking with Nick Cowber, who I think is now the assistant GM, he was one of the scouts who had flown out and watched him in the Gold Cup and had heard recommendations from inside the club that he was a talent.

Speaker 60 If you look at some of the profiles coming out of Central America, the Hondurans were really adjusting and adapting quickly. You know, those players, they're tough.

Speaker 60 They've dealt with a lot of adversity. They come here hungry and ready to prove themselves.

Speaker 42 He was like, he was a really nice kid when he arrived and he was fresh-faced and eager.

Speaker 26 There was a big Spanish-speaking contingent in the club, as there is in the city, and they just helped him settle in and get his fitness up.

Speaker 13 But what I've heard from speaking with Dom Kinnear, who was the manager at the time, was that fitness was, I think, the big obstacle.

Speaker 42 for adapting to the MLS.

Speaker 61 I think at first, I think the speed of play and the physicalness of the players and less different than what he was used to in Honduras.

Speaker 61 He's just that we were expecting a bit more of an attacking presence from him. And I think it took him a little while to get adjusted.

Speaker 1 What did they scout, actually? What did they tell you about what they saw themselves in terms of them evaluating him? What did they do?

Speaker 29 Oh, they flew out and watched games in like not just Tegusigalfa, but like furthest reaches of Honduras to watch Alexander Lopez.

Speaker 47 They put their due diligence in to monitor him and watch videos and all of these these things to make sure that, you know, this guy was something good.

Speaker 61 We did take a trip down to Honduras to watch him play for his club and he passed all the tests for us.

Speaker 61 And it was after that we kind of set up a meeting with our owners to let them know there's an interest in a Honduran player south of the border. It was a bright future.

Speaker 13 But as the MLS was professionalizing and intensifying, as the kind of the tactical abilities of the managers and the acuity of the players to like put that into place, as that was dialing up and ramping up at that point,

Speaker 7 you need to run a lot more.

Speaker 37 You need to run a lot, lot more.

Speaker 25 You need to contribute to all sides of the game.

Speaker 16 You need to be that, you know, modern total footballer to an extent.

Speaker 1 You kind of need to be a bit more like the Honduran Maradana that was promised, who is, again, like Maradana, one of the fastest and most physical athletes, as well as the most, you know, one of the most infamous, right?

Speaker 1 Like, but he's known for his athleticism, his physicality, his speed, also obviously rampant cocaine use.

Speaker 1 But as a side note, the point is that the guy who arrived, he was less than, unsurprisingly, what that fake nickname you made up had suggested.

Speaker 53 Exactly.

Speaker 33 And early doors, I watched, I think it was first game against New York Red Bulls.

Speaker 36 And there's a moment he pulls out this amazing pass to, I think, Jason Johnson.

Speaker 59 And he scores to make it, I think, 1-1 with the dynamo. And there's Lopez.
That's what he can do. Lopez Johnson is turning it up.

Speaker 59 Spectacular goal.

Speaker 59 Alexander Lopez

Speaker 59 with a passing gem and a first ever goal for Jason Johnson.

Speaker 59 And then the Dynamo get turned over.

Speaker 40 They lose 4-1.

Speaker 26 The season generally falls off the rails fairly quickly.

Speaker 1 I think this is one of the most important questions in this story. I mean, we know that the Dynamo website, right, they wrote the nickname.
They enshrined it for all time.

Speaker 1 Lots of outlets everywhere around the world picked it up in 2013. When the signing of Alexander Lopez was announced, what did the team's actual front office tell you?

Speaker 1 The decision makers who were responsible for signing him, paying him, what did they tell you about the nickname? What did they remember in terms of their actual personal scouting reports?

Speaker 21 Well, I remember the one.

Speaker 26 The one that really set me back was speaking to Dom Kinnilla.

Speaker 26 And I asked him, you know have you ever heard the nickname the Hondura Maradona and he sort of rocks back in his chair and he smiles and he laughs and he goes I've heard some nicknames in my day but the first I heard that was from you today

Speaker 47 Kieran I haven't heard that until you said it just now like

Speaker 21 literally never like

Speaker 10 okay check one on that.

Speaker 5 Chris Connetti, who was the president at the time of Houston Dynamo, he very like breezily, like almost offhandedly said, yeah, yeah, we heard of that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we knew about that at the time of the signing, but didn't

Speaker 17 make too much of that.

Speaker 8 I don't think he

Speaker 8 not meant it, but I think what he meant by that was we knew there was some hype around him.

Speaker 26 Because it was so breezily toffed off, it wasn't, it didn't give me anything like, oh, yeah, he's heard it.

Speaker 13 And then Nick Calber, the assistant GM, was just clear as anything. Nope.

Speaker 60 Yeah, you get the Honduran Messi, you get the, you know, whatever. So

Speaker 60 I don't really take stock in the, um,

Speaker 60 in somebody's nickname, to be honest.

Speaker 9 Even if we did hear it, we wouldn't care because those nicknames don't matter to us in the professional soccer industry.

Speaker 1 What you're thinking as you are, as your life,

Speaker 1 the story you tell yourself about yourself, is just being dismissed as just like obviously unserious.

Speaker 22 Like, of course, we don't give a f ⁇ about that.

Speaker 1 That's like just a thing someone says.

Speaker 1 When they tell you that the legend doesn't even matter

Speaker 1 to them who made the decision, what's going through your head?

Speaker 3 I think the first thought was that I'm a long way from home, that I have got this far, what, 12 hours flight over

Speaker 26 FaceTime with, you know, sports executives who've taken time out of their day to speak to me.

Speaker 13 And just thinking, oh, God,

Speaker 4 why did I even lift under the rock with this one?

Speaker 1 Like I could have just kept on not bothering the story, leaving the ghosts to rest and all of that.

Speaker 26 And I didn't and I picked at the scab too much.

Speaker 10 And now

Speaker 27 it's all coming out.

Speaker 24 Now I'm seeing it.

Speaker 25 Now I'm in the room with the adults, the adults who made the decisions, the proper people who weren't just spinning yarns and telling stories and smoking areas and all of that with the actual people doing their job.

Speaker 1 So what this entire front office is telling you collectively with with great clarity is that you're not the story here.

Speaker 1 Like, we messed up this signing insofar as, yeah, like it didn't go well, but that's on us. Like, we didn't buy your legend.
Like, you're not responsible for any of this.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 52 That was pretty clear as day by that point.

Speaker 13 To think that I've been entertaining the idea that one day they opened up their laptops while they were watching the Olympics, just as I was, and thought,

Speaker 1 look at all these goals and assists.

Speaker 5 You know, Chris,

Speaker 17 go get your checkbook.

Speaker 7 When you literally,

Speaker 1 Kieran, what a literal child's version of how sports works. Just that idea.
No, but it's, it's, I'm laughing also because I am now wondering, like, okay,

Speaker 1 the, the actual person then that they scouted, that they visited, that had a life beyond your invention. of one

Speaker 1 what's alexander lopez feeling about all of this right like where where is he now? What happened to him?

Speaker 31 The last sort of time I hear from him as I'm going around and telling this story to people is that he fell out and it didn't quite work.

Speaker 26 The way that Dynamo played, they moved between managers, they moved between formations, that, you know, sparkling number 10 role falls out of favor when you don't have everyone else carrying the piano, as it were.

Speaker 27 And he went back to Honduras and then he ended up in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 26 When I spoke to Dom Kinnear,

Speaker 2 he said that he'd last seen him in the CONCACAF Champions League the year before.

Speaker 5 And he was playing for a club called Alaqualense in Costa Rica.

Speaker 37 And he was doing well.

Speaker 11 He was a regular starter for like a continental team.

Speaker 40 So I have watched him over the years.

Speaker 61 It's kind of funny. Like I said, I think I watched him play for Ala Valense against the MLS team maybe about a year and a half ago.
And every time I see him play, he hasn't changed.

Speaker 61 He plays the exact same way.

Speaker 45 He'd been the captain a few times and all of that. He'd been, I think, racked up like 200 appearances for them in that time.

Speaker 9 He was a bit of a star in Costa Rica.

Speaker 32 So I thought

Speaker 37 Houston is what, three hours from San Jose.

Speaker 26 I'm never going to be this close to Costa Rica again. I don't think I'm going to be allowed back in the state of Texas.

Speaker 21 So I think I've got to make my move now.

Speaker 23 And I thought,

Speaker 39 at the very least, I can go and tell him,

Speaker 8 or I can try to go and tell him.

Speaker 13 Because if I get this far and there is an opportunity

Speaker 11 just to see what all of this really has been about, to look into the whites of his eyes and kind of get all of this off my chest, as if he even needs to hear it.

Speaker 26 You know, the time is now.

Speaker 7 It needs to be now to get something out of this, you know, pretty wasted trip of smashing down my own preconceptions.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 what do you do? How do you get access to him?

Speaker 1 How do you convince him to sit down with a random person he has never met before, has never heard about, but has a weird investment in him very specifically?

Speaker 52 So this was a bit of a Hail Mary.

Speaker 21 So I arrived at the airport and the only thing I had was a number for his agent that I'd rooted around at the back of the seventh page of Google stuff to try and find like one PDF that left it on the very bottom.

Speaker 13 Here's the number.

Speaker 9 The name was Paulo, Paulo Hernandez. And I shot him a message and I said, I'm a journalist, which is true.

Speaker 31 I'm doing a story about wonder kids and their reputations, which is

Speaker 7 true

Speaker 17 to a point.

Speaker 27 And I really, really want to speak to your client, Alexander Lopez.

Speaker 40 Do you have, like, is he around in Costa Rica at the moment?

Speaker 37 And he was like, well, are you in Costa Rica?

Speaker 9 First off, yes, I am in Costa Rica. I've arrived.

Speaker 11 I can do a face-to-face, you know, I can set that up.

Speaker 2 He's like, okay, I'll speak to him.

Speaker 46 And eventually, I realize that I've got to go find an interpreter because I cannot speak very good Spanish at all.

Speaker 29 And then I get a text through.

Speaker 13 and it's Alex and he's been put through to my number and I say I would like to interview you where's where's good for you and so he suggests the Hilton in the center of San Jose

Speaker 25 and so I tell Ileana my interpreter who was the one who was available to come for that time and it was great I said arrive 4 p.m.

Speaker 10 tomorrow and we'll go and do it

Speaker 1 so when you finally sit down with him after

Speaker 1 that day but also more than a decade now What did you learn about his actual real life when you see him face to face?

Speaker 37 We shook hands.

Speaker 50 it was you know journalist and subject sit down interpreter in the middle here Morris speaking Ileana Castillo the translator and Alec Lopez Alex Lopez

Speaker 54 and I just I learned so much because I asked so many

Speaker 40 granular

Speaker 13 questions that just stalled me for time asking him all of these details about when he made his professional debut when was the first time he was identified as like a talent when he was younger

Speaker 49 what happened was the president of the Rosenberg team from Norway came to Honduras to watch me train and watch me play and he wanted to buy my services to buy me from the team but unfortunately the president said they had never sold the player to Norway and then one thing that really, really, really staggered me was that as he was talking to me, he tells me that, oh, in 2011, so this is a year before I started messing with his page, in 2011, Arsenal had invited him for a trial.

Speaker 49 There came a point when, before the World Cup sub-20, Arsenal wanted El Choco Losano and me to go to England to do some tests.

Speaker 8 It had genuinely happened.

Speaker 37 Like a far more reputable club than Wigan,

Speaker 25 a real link for the Premier League, something like that was not public knowledge until then.

Speaker 1 A link to a previous prank you had pulled too. A big money real club had actually flirted in real life with the guy that you invented these flirtations about.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 21 And that had never been on the record.

Speaker 2 And he just talked me through his career.

Speaker 24 He talked me through Houston.

Speaker 9 He had no bad memories whatsoever of Houston.

Speaker 19 It was just a kind of a didn't work out.

Speaker 25 But his daughter was born in the US, which he was really happy about.

Speaker 36 And obviously, like Houston was a really good sort of welcoming community for him.

Speaker 26 There were Honduran players already at the club.

Speaker 8 It was a nice community feel.

Speaker 11 Saudi Arabia, he was pretty hard on.

Speaker 11 He just said he was there for six months.

Speaker 25 It was meant to be for two years.

Speaker 26 And it just didn't work for someone who had grown up through the Honduran system and then into America.

Speaker 21 So he just took a chance on himself and cut the contract and went back to Honduras to Olympia.

Speaker 25 And that run, before he went to Costa Rica, when he he was back in Honduras, he was banging in the goals.

Speaker 47 He was winning trophies.

Speaker 21 He was all, you know, free-flowing, goal-scoring number 10 in Honduras.

Speaker 56 He finally had the record that we had made up for him when he was 19.

Speaker 9 He was at 24 or whatever he was then.

Speaker 25 He was ripping up the Honduran League.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 I mean, the other obvious question to me here is: had Alexander Lopez ever heard of the nickname the Honduran Maradona?

Speaker 1 The nickname that he began to live up to years, years since you had given up on it.

Speaker 3 I expected no.

Speaker 26 I thought, no, if everybody else didn't hear, he wouldn't have heard.

Speaker 7 He had.

Speaker 51 He absolutely had.

Speaker 4 He had heard it.

Speaker 13 But he thought it was just a fun, silly nickname made up by the fans.

Speaker 62 Muchos periodicos.

Speaker 49 The surname came along simply because, you know, a lot of newspapers and journalists were talking about it, and they would say that I was like a young Maradona.

Speaker 49 I had the same skills that Maradona had when he was that age, too. I know that, but of course, we all know that Maradona, you know, what he was, really.

Speaker 1 So it's just that.

Speaker 13 And that was about as far as it went.

Speaker 17 But that's something.

Speaker 20 That was like,

Speaker 20 okay, cool. I got back to you.

Speaker 3 Eventually, I run out of questions.

Speaker 5 He runs out of career to talk about, you know, sports careers are finite.

Speaker 8 I can't keep pressing him about these things.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 13 there was a split second where I thought, shake hands and let him go.

Speaker 5 Tiniest split second.

Speaker 53 But I don't know what dragged me out of that.

Speaker 24 And I can hear it on the interview tape.

Speaker 52 Those first like stutters, like, excuse me.

Speaker 56 Before you go,

Speaker 50 one thing, one more thing, while I'm here and while I have you.

Speaker 7 And then I've already rehearsed the spiel with the interpreter.

Speaker 27 So, beat for beat, I'll do like one-tenth of the story, and then I'll pause, and then she'll do it in Spanish.

Speaker 50 When you were linked with Wiggin, what I had done was I booked a hotel room in your name, I had called the papers.

Speaker 59 And then I will do the next bit, and the next bit, and then

Speaker 5 all of those moments where I know I'm talking and he's not reacting, but then I just sit back and watch his reaction.

Speaker 12 I'm studying him while I'm waiting to say something again,

Speaker 26 and I just keep talking and talking and talking, not giving him the chance to respond until again the story is over and there's nothing more I can say.

Speaker 4 Ten years ago,

Speaker 50 I invented the names the Honduran Maradona.

Speaker 1 It's me.

Speaker 55 Esse fayo, es fayo.

Speaker 27 And he starts laughing.

Speaker 40 And then I'm like, that could mean a multitude of things.

Speaker 46 Like, the laughing is not the automatic get off the hook.

Speaker 20 That's like, oh,

Speaker 1 could reach over this table and do something.

Speaker 39 And I'm, I'm going down.

Speaker 45 I'm not, I don't think it would, I couldn't even fight back in that instance.

Speaker 26 I would have to just put my hands behind my back and say, take your shot.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you deserved it.

Speaker 45 100%.

Speaker 2 But he thought it was funny and benign and inconsequential and saw it for what it was, which was nothing.

Speaker 49 When my agent told me a journalist wanted to do an interview, I was sort of like, huh?

Speaker 7 Why?

Speaker 21 But now I get it.

Speaker 11 It was actually really refreshing by that point for all of that to be put in a a box and be let to be as stupid and silly and childish as it always was.

Speaker 5 It wasn't a childish thing that went horrendously wrong.

Speaker 26 It wasn't like, you know, a drowning by the old lake that you don't talk about for years and years.

Speaker 3 It was just a silly kid thing that remains a silly kid thing.

Speaker 1 How does he feel about using that nickname, the Honduran Maradona?

Speaker 1 Does he embrace it? Does he, does he plan to actually lean into it?

Speaker 1 What's his feeling on that?

Speaker 4 Oh, no, he was very old school about it.

Speaker 21 He was like, oh, no, no, no. There's only one Maradona.

Speaker 40 But he's got a better nickname now.

Speaker 13 He's the engineer.

Speaker 29 El Ingenheiro, as they call him.

Speaker 25 And his mum loves it.

Speaker 26 I think his brother actually is an engineer. So, like, it's cool for them.

Speaker 2 The fans gave it to him, which is how nickname should work.

Speaker 25 And, you know, it sums him up.

Speaker 46 dictates play from the middle of the field, you know, he's crafty, he's intelligent.

Speaker 7 It's who he is.

Speaker 47 It's a good nickname because it's who he is and what he's about.

Speaker 25 And it wasn't randomly made up by a child.

Speaker 1 That nickname, though, the engineer is so perfect, isn't it? Oh, yeah. As a poetic concern, it's so perfect because the entire time, Kieran,

Speaker 1 this entire f ⁇ ing time,

Speaker 1 the way you had framed and sold the defining story of your life, the thing you rested everything on, your identity, ego, marriage, ambitions, professional life.

Speaker 1 It turns out you had gotten it backwards, right? Like you were, you were the engineer, you were the architect, you were the guy who organized this entire thing, you were the schemer.

Speaker 1 And it turns out that you were not the grand puppet master. Alexander Lopez was the engineer, it turns out.
Of course, he was, of his own life with all of these ups and downs on his own.

Speaker 1 And that means that the legend that you had most invented

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 your own.

Speaker 17 Dead right.

Speaker 37 Dead right.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 40 the process after all of this ended and flying back has been dealing with that and dealing with what life looks like now without this story to fall back on, without this, you know, self-aggrandized reputation.

Speaker 11 This is what it's a story of.

Speaker 52 It's a story of...

Speaker 31 a kid who just took something way, way, way, way, way too far in his own mind

Speaker 13 and has been telling people about it for 10 years since.

Speaker 8 And what I'm glad I could do is that this relatively young adult can go back and put that kid's delusions completely to bed.

Speaker 13 Now we're different.

Speaker 59 Now we don't need it.

Speaker 1 Kieran Morris, thank you for coming clean about who you actually are.

Speaker 41 It's a pleasure.

Speaker 25 It's a pleasure.

Speaker 10 I'm closer to knowing.

Speaker 1 So I want to point out that Kieran's story here is part of a a larger collection of long-form stories that we here at Meadowlark Media have made by, you know, stealing DraftKings' money and giving it to the narrative kings over at Wondry and Campside Media.

Speaker 1 The whole franchise is called Sports Explains the World, and you can and should go find it on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark Media production.

Speaker 1 And I'll talk to you next time.