The Plainfield Teachers

Morris Newburger, Lew Krupnick and Bink Dannenbaum pulled off one of the great pranks in sports: The Plainfield Teachers.

After a couple of phone calls showed the NYT would print imaginary scores from the imaginary Plainfield Teachers football team, they began to put out press releases on ginned-up stationary.
Mr. Newburger created a sports information director for Plainfield Teachers College. His name was Jerry Croyden, fashioned from Newburger’s familiarity with the Croydon Hotel on the Upper East Side. Mr. Newburger became Mr. Croyden, and was the only one who answered the new, $5-a-month phone line that was installed at the brokerage firm where he worked.

Jerry Croyden (Mr. Newburger), with Mr. Dannenbaum’s help, began producing news releases with a Plainfield Teachers letterhead. The team acquired a nickname (the Lions) and was outfitted in the school colors (mauve and puce). Its coach was Ralph “Hurry Up” Hoblitzel, a former Spearfish Normal star who devised the W-formation, in which both ends faced the backfield. One of the ends was “Boarding House” Smithers.

The peak was the creation of Johnny Chung, a 6-foot-3, 212-pound halfback who was half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian. Mr. Newburger had a dry cleaner whose name was Chung. Plainfield’s publicity ballyhooed Chung as a Heisman Trophy candidate. It claimed that, for energy, he ate bowls of wild rice during halftime. After Plainfield’s win over Randolph Tech, Herbert Allan, writing the “College Grapevine” column in The New York Post, said: “John Chung, Plainfield Teachers’ Chinese sophomore halfback, has accounted for 57 of the 98 points scored by his unbeaten and untied team in four starts."

Of course it could not last and eventually was exposed.

Newburger, under the name Jerry Croyden, sent out his final news release: “Due to flunkings in the midterm examinations, Plainfield Teachers has been forced to call off its last two scheduled games.”

No one printed that, but The Philadelphia Record, which had bought into the hoax, was remorseful that Plainfield Teachers was no more. Under an unsigned item titled “Football Casualty,” it said that the newspaper “regretted the passing (of Plainfield Teachers). The place had possibilities. We don’t see why exposure of the gag should have to end the team’s career. It should keep playing the rest of the season. We want to know how it made out with the now-cancelled games. And we want to know if the ‘Celestial Comet’ could make All-American.”

Bob Cooke, sports editor of The Herald Tribune in 1941, wrote, “The gentle humor that went into the Plainfield hoax appealed to the imaginations of both sportswriters and the public.”

(From Bill Christine in the NYT)