“He could even win one,” Sally said, apparently rethinking her snap judgment. “I mean, if the weather was bad enough and most people were shooting in the high 70s and 80s, a guy who shot par could actually come out on top.”
“Cory Pavin won a U.S. Open shooting par,” Bill said. “Doesn’t happen often, though.”
By this time I was feeling secure enough at the Chronicle to propose a harmless hoax. We would invent a fictitious golfer named Sidney Paar and stick him in the standings for each weekly tournament. He would shoot par for every single round. If par didn’t make the cut, he would disappear on the weekend. If par made the cut, he would finish the tournament and we’d credit him with the appropriate prize money. Anybody who follows golf would be bound to catch on quickly, but it would be fun to see how long it would take our golf-hating editor to figure it out.
When I described my plan, Bill Toolmaker said, “I think I speak for all of us when I say that is an inspired idea, and when Millard Glass finds out, none of us knows a thing about it.”
I shrugged. “Millard has a sense of humor. Sort of. And he likes color and creativity, doesn’t he? I’ll be in charge of sticking Sidney in the standings every week, and, right, none of you know anything about it.”
I never figured the joke would last beyond the second weekend. Millard would find out, maybe laugh and maybe not, and instruct me to knock it off. But the career of Sidney Paar lasted through the summer, shooting par for every round in every tournament. Every golfer reading the paper had to be on to the gag, but nobody felt obliged to tell the sports editor.
“Millard has to know,” I said to Bill in the newsroom one afternoon. “How could he not? He must just think it’s funny, and he’s letting it go on, not saying anything.”
Bill shook his head. “Remember, the guy hates golf. He pays no attention to it. Sidney’s name only appears in a long column of names Millard has no interest in. You’ve never inserted our boy in an actual news story, have you?”
I shook my head.
“There you are. He may glance at the editorial content, but he sure doesn’t look at the tournament standings. Believe me, Millard knows nothing about it.”
“How will he react if he finds out?”
“When it’s gone on this long, I think we can confidently say he’ll be royally pissed.” Bill smirked at me. “Fortunately, you’ll remember, I never look at those golf standings myself, and when your perfidy is revealed to the world, I’ll be as shocked as anybody.”
As the year went on, the pressure built up. I was starting to worry. Was my position on the paper really secure enough to weather the fallout? Of course, it was always possible the whole year would go by without Millard catching on. And if Sidney didn’t make enough on the tour to qualify the following year, I’d have to drop him, wouldn’t I? Only one thing could guarantee Millard would find out: if Sidney got high enough on the leader board that he’d have to be mentioned in a story. But I could finesse that unless (gulp!) a score of par actually won a tournament.
As I guess you’ve figured by now, that’s exactly what happened. High winds struck an East-Coast tournament in late summer. Scores were high the first day and only got worse as the tournament went on. After Saturday, Sidney Paar would have been sitting two strokes off the lead, and at the end of Sunday, his closest competitor was two behind him. Sidney was a winner.
What could I do? If par had won the tournament, I could have had Sidney lose in a playoff, but then I’d have had to fake the wire story. That would have compromised my journalistic ethics, if I hadn’t already nuked them with the hoax to begin with. When Sunday’s results were printed in Monday morning’s paper, Sidney unaccountably disappeared from the leader board and some other guy, Retief Goosen, I think it was, was credited with the winner’s purse. Ironically, it was a call to the sports editor from a little old lady who thought Sidney was real that finally revealed the truth to Millard Glass. She had started following Sidney’s progress because Paar had been her mother’s maiden name or she used to watch Jack Paar on TV or something.
When I heard Millard had found out, I felt a combination of relief and dread. All that day I waited for the axe to fall. Clearly wanting to make things as miserable for me as possible, he waited until nine o’clock that night to order me to meet him at his office. The session wasn’t pleasant.
“Lying to your readers is not the guiding principle of journalism on this paper,” he said, his voice lowered, the calm before the storm.
“It was just a joke, Millard.”
“Not very funny.”
“No, I suppose not. But try to think of it as a statistical experiment. A lot of readers wondered, like I did, how a golfer would do who shot only par.”
“I didn’t hire you to run experiments on my sports page,” Millard said, voice rising. “Maybe you’d like to take your test tubes and Bunsen burner to the unemployment office!” He was getting into it now. He really liked to yell. And yeah, I contributed to the noise pollution a bit myself.
The upshot of all our yelling: I was out on the street. Was I mad at Millard Glass? At that moment, sure. Did I want to kill the guy? For a few hours, maybe. But within a week, things started to turn around for me. I got an offer from a golf magazine to write up my Sidney Paar hoax. They paid me well, they asked me for some more articles, I got a book contract, and I got interviewed on TV flogging my book, as a result of which I got an offer to join the network’s golf-commentary team. My stock was rising like dot-coms in the bubble.
Here’s the kicker. When the magazine with my Sidney Paar article came out, I sent a copy to Millard Glass with a conciliatory note. And he replied with an e-maiclass="underline" “Nice piece. And I do get it now. But I still hate golf.” So you see, we weren’t enemies. Whoever the Sidney Paar was who killed him, he wasn’t referring to me.
When I finished the story, the two cops looked at me impassively, absorbing it. Finally Ortega said, “So who was he referring to if not you?”
“Let’s kick that around a little,” I said, inviting myself in on their investigation. “Maybe he was incriminating somebody who reminded him of Sidney Paar in some way. Or it could be it was an indirect reference, that he thought the Sidney Paar hoax somehow set in motion the events that led to his death.”
“If it’s something that subtle,” Nakamura said, “what was the point of telling the nine-one-one operator? Glass was dying and saying what he said was the most important thing to him. He was sending a message. I think he was trying to tell us who killed him.”
“He was sending a message, all right, but maybe not to you.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“It’s the kind of thing that always bothers me in stories. If he’s trying to tell you who killed him, why make it so damned cryptic? It’s not as if he was writing something down, and he feared the killer would come back and find it. What he said to the nine-one-one dispatcher would be safely recorded away from the crime scene. Why get cute and attribute the crime to Sidney Paar, a guy who didn’t even exist? Why not just say the killer’s name?”
“You tell us,” Ortega said.
“Millard didn’t think he needed to identify his killer. He was sure the person who shot him would be caught. The killer only got away through a freak of luck. Millard didn’t know Frank’s stomach flu would keep him out of the lobby. I think he was sending a message to his murderer, an in-your-face way of letting the killer know with what contempt Millard regarded him.”
They looked unconvinced, but Nakamura asked me, “You have anybody particular in mind?”