From the Wednesday Journal archives, Aug. 30, 2000
The curious case of Sidd Finch just won’t die. Just ask Joe Berton, who teaches applied arts at Percy Julian Junior High in Oak Park [since retired]. He knows Hayden “Siddhartha” Finch as well as anyone.
Finch, you may or may not recall, was a hugely popular hoax perpetrated by George Plimpton and Sports Illustrated back in 1985 for their April 1 issue. In other words, an April Fool’s Day gag.
Plimpton wove a complicated tale of pure, unadulterated balderdash that, inexplicably, fooled a lot of Sports Illustrated’s loyal readers. Some were outraged by the hoax, but many more were delighted by it. The story concerns a mysterious rookie phenom kept tightly under wraps at the spring training camp of the New York Mets that year, who reportedly could throw a baseball 168 mph. He learned to do this, the story goes, while studying in a Tibetan monastery. He purportedly pitched with a work boot on his right foot and nothing at all on his left. He was supposedly an expert on the French horn as well, which he played for relaxation.
To pull off the hoax, of course, they needed photos, so when Sports Illustrated photographer Lane Stewart was given the assignment to “create” the image of an eccentric, mystical pitching sensation, he immediately thought of his friend from Oak Park, Joe Berton.
Why Joe? Well, in a roundabout way because of Joe’s interest in toy soldiers. He’s been painting — and later sculpting — toy soldiers since he was about 10 years old. As an adult, it dovetails with his interest in art and historical research. Berton belongs to the Military Miniatures Society of Illinois, and Stewart came across them years ago when he was doing a story on hobbies. Berton and Stewart hit it off, and Stewart invited Joe along on some of his assignments as an assistant, which mostly involved helping to carry the equipment and schmoozing with the subjects during the tedious set-up process. Joe, interested in photography and still single, had the time, especially during his summers off, and he got to meet some interesting people — Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, William “The Fridge” Perry and the like.
In 1985 when Stewart called and asked if he wanted to do a spring training story about the Mets in St. Petersburg, Florida, he said, “Sure.” Only this time he was going to be the subject. Stewart figured Joe was creative enough to assume the part and he was just the right physical type at 6-foot-4, 170 pounds and wearing size 14 shoes. His toes also splay nicely when he throws a baseball barefoot. Stewart describes Berton’s physical type as “goofy gone crazy.” Originally they were planning to use Plimpton himself as the model but figured it would be a dead giveaway.
Joe loves baseball and likes the relaxed atmosphere and optimism of spring training camp, so he readily agreed. He borrowed a French horn from Julian and took a quick lesson from former music teacher Ed Von Holst. He borrowed a very small black baseball glove from one of his students, a rug from Pier 1 and an old pair of work boots — which he still has and which, no doubt, will someday end up in Cooperstown — from the brother of a fellow teacher. Then he headed down to Florida.
“You’re Sidd,” Stewart told him. “Do whatever you want.” Mets pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre got into the spirit of it and they brought a few of the rookies into the shoot, including Len Dykstra. Joe chose number 21 for his uniform because it had a certain mystical significance for him — and nobody else on the roster was using it. They even decided to throw in a photo Lane took of Joe on vacation in Egypt riding a camel.
It was all very silly, and they didn’t have a clue, Joe says, how much of their work Sports Illustrated was actually going to use, but Plimpton and the editors liked the photos so much, they actually extended the article to 16 pages, knocking out some advertisers in the process in order to make room for it. Plimpton even rewrote sections of the story to accommodate the images.
The magazine hit the newsstands approximately a week before April 1, and the reaction was intense. Everyone wanted to be in on the joke. Within a few days, the Today Show and the New York Times were calling Julian to find out more about the model. The Mets decided to play it for all it was worth and invited Joe back to training camp on April Fool’s Day itself. He said he’d come but only if he got to keep the Mets jersey this time. They readily agreed. They even printed Sidd Finch T-shirts for the occasion. ESPN and ABC News were there covering the event.
Joe came out barefoot with a walking stick and read a “retirement speech,” ala Lou Gehrig, that Plimpton had written for him, claiming that after great deliberation, not to mention meditation, he was giving up the game of baseball for the greater challenge of golf.
Reporters interviewed him and he stayed in hoax mode, telling them that he and Stewart had met while camel racing in Saudi Arabia (Berton has been fascinated by T.E. Lawrence since he first saw Lawrence of Arabia).
A couple of baseball prospects came up to him and asked for tips. He told them they’d gain 5 mph on their fastballs if they took off their left shoe. “It was a wild experience,” he recalls.
And then it was over.
Well, not quite.
Actually, it has never really ended. The curious case of Sidd Finch has a life of its own. Every April Fool’s Day, he gets calls from the media wanting to do updates. The first anniversary, he was scheduled to call a radio sports talk show between classes, but the fire alarm went off, so he had to go the beauty salon next door to call on a pay phone. No one believed him. They figured it was another hoax.
Sports Illustrated invited him to their Sportsman of the Year banquet that fall. He was transported by limo to the Rockefeller Center, where he met the likes of Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Mary Lou Retton, and Edwin Moses. Most of the athletes seemed just as excited about meeting him as he was meeting them. He brought a baseball along and had everyone sign it, but ended up giving out just as many Sidd Finch autographs. The wives of Brett Saberhagen and Charlie Liebrandt tried to get him to go downstairs to the ballroom to dance.
He met his future wife, Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute, later that year, but she had no idea who he really was until they were walking on Michigan Avenue during the holidays and someone stuck his head out a car window and yelled, “Hey, Sidd!”
The Mets were beholden to him for all the positive publicity. During the summers of 1985 and 1986, they would leave tickets for him at Wrigley Field whenever the Mets came in to play the Cubs. Maybe it had some mystical impact. The Mets won the World Series in 1986. Unfortunately, Joe is a Cubs fan.
The power of the media never ceases to amaze him. Berton was standing in line in a pub in Oxford, England with his brother a few years back and the guy standing in front of him — an American — suddenly turned and said, “Sidd Finch, what are you doing in Oxford?” He was a Mets fan.
Berton and Plimpton became friends and the author usually has dinner with Joe whenever he comes to Chicago for a book signing [Plimpton has since died].
SI update
Which brings us to this summer, late June, in fact, when Lane Stewart called his buddy and said Sports Illustrated wanted to do an entire issue devoted to updates on past athletes. And, of course, they wanted to find out whatever happened to Sidd Finch. Plimpton was writing the update, of course, but this time under a pseudonym — Mark Hofmann, which happens to be the name of a guy in prison for forgery.
They needed another photo spread, which meant they needed another model, and the magazine was delighted to hear that Joe Berton was still available and willing. Of course, he was also about to move to a new house — and his wife had a book deadline looming and they now have two kids, and Joe had to attend a 25th wedding anniversary celebration of a friend in L.A.
But the return of Sidd Finch would not be denied. They concocted a cow-chip-throwing competition outside Tulsa, Oklahoma — because that’s where Gloria’s family comes from — and the magazine flew them out there. Which is why, in the July 31 issue, you’ll see Joe Berton, cow chip in hand, face partially obscured, ready to let fly. The sign in back, surrounded by locals, reads “Beaver, Oklahoma,” but they’re actually on a farm outside Tulsa that belongs to a friend of a friend. Most of the people in the photo’s background are Gloria’s relatives. “There is a cow chip contest in Beaver,” says Sidd, er Joe, “but this isn’t it.”
Berton says that as a sculptor, he frequently works with clay, so the still-soft cow chips weren’t a problem for him, and he ended up chucking about a hundred over the space of several hours. The only stipulation from the farmer next door — from whom they borrowed the cow chips — was that he throw them “to the right of the tree,” so he didn’t have to clean them up.
A week or so later, they flew to England, where Lane Stewart now lives, for shots of Sidd playing cricket and tossing a javelin — the rumor being that he was considering a tryout with England’s Olympic javelin team. One of the shoots called for tossing his spear at dawn in front of the White Cliffs of Dover. The photo that made the article, however, has him flinging it in a field of rye with sheep in the background, though Joe is quick to note, “No sheep were harmed in the process of photographing this article.”
In the update, Plimpton describes his former phenom as “a guy who could throw a strawberry through a locomotive,” his prowess deriving from years in the Tibetan monastery, where he learned the science of Lung-Gom, which enabled him to “peg stones at snow leopards coming down out of the rhododendron forests to prey on the yaks in their pens.”
Joe originally thought about suggesting that they do a photo shoot in Tibet, but there wasn’t enough time.
The cricket players were gamers, but a little fuzzy on the line between fact and fiction until he threw the ball, at which point, “They knew I was a fake.” That was on July 2. By July 4, he was back in Oak Park watching the fireworks at the high school.
He didn’t tell his friends that he was doing the update because he wanted them to have the fun of discovering it for themselves. And many did, including Pam and Scott Ascher, the former owners of the Sidd Finch Restaurant in Oak Brook.
So Sidd Finch lives on, and has given Joe Berton far more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame. He’s met all sorts of interesting people as a result. And his fastball has improved to 75 or 80 mph, he says, as a result of all the throwing he’s done lately. “Maybe with a little coaching,” he says. “I already have the mind stuff down pat.”
His two sons, Alexander, 7, and Philip, 4, [now in college and at OPRF H.S.] have a little trouble with the line between fact and fiction, too. Alexander tells people his dad is “a teacher and a baseball player.”
But blurring the line between fact and fiction has always been part of the allure of Sidd Finch — and why the legend of Sidd will never die.