Off the Wall: The Greatest Athlete of 1941 Never Existed. Neither did His Team
The Plainfield Teachers College and Johnny Chung: The Fake Football Sensation of 1941
The Plainfield Teachers College and Johnny Chung: The Fake Football Sensation of 1941
(Commonplace Fun Facts) - In the fall of 1941, sportswriters and football fans in the Northeast began hearing about a small but ferocious college team called Plainfield Teachers College. It was undefeated. It was rolling over opponents with cheerful brutality. It had a brilliant coach, a revolutionary offense, and a dazzling Chinese halfback named Johnny Chung, nicknamed the Celestial Comet. This young man, readers were told, was so electrifying that he was already drifting into the kind of sports mythology that guaranteed he would be remembered as one of the greatest players of all time.
So what became of the Celestial Comet? Why haven’t we heard of his contributions to the world of professional sports? And for that matter, what ever became of the Plainfield Teachers College football program? Why doesn’t it continue to turn out world-class athletes?
The answer is surprisingly simple: Plainfield Teachers College was fake.
The school was fake. The team was fake. The schedule was fake. The opponents were fake. The star player was fake. The press agent was fake. The whole thing was essentially a football season assembled out of telephone calls, stationery, imagination, and the willingness of newspapers to accept obscure scores without asking too many annoying questions.
The mastermind behind this nonsense was…