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Local history: Fake pingpong team pulls off hoax at University of Akron in 1970s By Mark J. Price Beacon Journal staff writer The matches were over before they began. Without even working up a sweat, a tricky band of collegians swatted away foes across the Midwest. The University of Akron table-tennis team created a national sensation in the 1970s by compiling a winning record without playing a single game. Submitting articles about a pingpong team that didn’t exist, UA students pulled off an outrageous hoax against the Buchtelite newspaper. The prank, fondly remembered today, served as a cautionary tale for journalists of all ages. Honor students Jim Stein and Rick Nelson masterminded the 1974 scheme. Stein, a Coventry graduate, was working on his bachelor of arts degree in education, speech and theater, while Nelson, a Norton native, majored in biology. “Well, it just came to us one night,” recalled Nelson, now 59, who lives in Westerville and works as an emergency medicine doctor at Ohio State University. “We were both juniors at Akron and we were both kind of bored. We just decided to do this thing where we wrote an article and submitted it unsigned to the sports editor.” Stein, 59, a Massillon resident who owns Minnesota Insured Title Agency in downtown Akron, recalls visiting the deserted Buchtelite office one day and sliding a handwritten note into a wooden mailbox. “The first article was real small,” Stein said. “We were half scared that people would figure out it was fake. … The first match is pretty much ‘Jim Stein won 21-19, 21-18,’ whatever … and they picked it up and printed it word for word. Then the next week, we became more emboldened.” Sitting around a table at the old Student Union, the team asked classmates whether they would like to be mentioned as players in the next fake story. “They were all friends of ours and they thought it was really funny,” Nelson said. The team made up fictional opponents from rival schools by pulling names from the bibliographies of textbooks. Hinckley resident Rob Sekerak, who majored in commercial art and electronic technology, joined the UA team as “trainer-coach.” It was a familiar role because Sekerak had helped Stein win a pingpong contest at Spanton Hall when they were freshmen. Sekerak wore a uniform, carried a clipboard and psyched out Stein’s foes en route to a table-tennis title in the Zips marching band. That was the big secret of the fake team: Stein really could play. “Rick and Jim were mostly the brains behind the actual stories,” said Sekerak, 58, a project manager for an IT organization. “I remember sitting with them and coming up with some ideas, just throwing names and things like that.” The Buchtelite, which had a circulation of 10,000 in 1974, printed the team’s self-congratulatory articles verbatim. In six stories, Stein and Nelson mentioned themselves 47 times. “We never denied that it was a hoax,” Nelson said. “So if somebody saw the article and commented … we would always correct them and say, no, this is a hoax. There is no such thing as a pingpong team. “I think by the time that it finally came out, I’d say half the campus knew that it was a hoax. Everybody but the Buch­telite staff.” The team did get a little miffed, though, when a Buch­telite sportswriter’s byline began to appear on the stories. “That infuriated us,” Stein said with a laugh. “You’re plagiarizing our fake articles.” In one story, the pingpong team — or as Stein called it, “a bunch of geeks with no girlfriends” — announced open tryouts for female players. “A couple of girls showed up,” he said. “We told them that it was just fake. We weren’t going to be cruel and lead them on.” In a tough nonschedule, the UA team “beat” Defiance, Gannon, Wittenberg and Bowling Green, but “lost” to Toledo — just to keep the tale credible. “We didn’t want to get greedy,” Stein said. The writers peppered their stories with details about flagrant fouls and trying conditions: A foe threw ice chips on a table, a player hurt his knee, a coach got kicked out after protesting a referee’s call, rowdy fans interrupted a game. “We got more creative,” Stein explained. The Zips’ crowning triumph was at the fictional Northwestern Open Table Tennis Tournament in Evanston, Ill., where UA defeated Ohio University and Notre Dame while a TV crew supposedly filmed the event for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The Buch­telite published a 41-inch article about the title — and it overshadowed March Madness. “There’s a really tiny article at the bottom of N.C. State winning the NCAA divisional basketball championship,” Nelson said. “They had to cut down that story to make room for the pingpong.” Stein, Nelson and Sekerak took a team photo with their “championship trophy” — actually a bowling trophy turned sideways to disguise its purpose. They borrowed it from ABC Trophy off Case Avenue. “I had to put on a sport jacket and tie to pose for that photo,” Sekerak said. Alas, all good hoaxes come to an end. Someone blew the whistle on the fake team. “Whoever ratted us out, we never did figure that out,” Stein said. “But we have our suspicions who it was.” Buchtelite editor Jim Weyrick wasn’t laughing when he discovered that his sports staff had been hoodwinked. He said the “integrity and credibility” of the newspaper had been injured, and he threatened to prosecute for fraud. Ellet native Weyrick, 60, who today works as a travel agent in Schaumburg, Ill., had time to get over the prank. “After 38 years, it’s a joyful memory,” he said. When the hoax was exposed, Weyrick told a WEWS-TV crew that he “felt lower than a snake’s belly.” “I don’t know where it came from,” he said. He said he initially took his complaint to UA legal counsel Ted Mallo to see whether there were any prosecutable charges. “He gave me a form and I filled it out — all but the signature — and left it on my desk where everybody could see it,” Weyrick said. “I played with some heads there.” Ultimately, though, he never submitted the form. “Why bother?” he asked. After the Beacon Journal wrote about the hoax, wire services picked up the story and it spread across the continent. “When it finally came out, United Press International called my mom at home,” Nelson said. “She was really worried. My whole family knew about it. My dad thought it was real funny. My mom thought it was funny, but she said, ‘And this is going to be the last article, isn’t it?’ ” Weyrick also spent plenty of time in the spotlight. “It even got me on ‘The Laugher of the Day’ by Hughes Rudd, CBS Morning News,” he said. On the first anniversary of the hoax, Weyrick invited the perpetrators to dinner. “I went to Sully’s Tool Shed and got some of the out-of-season ‘Welcome Champ’ banners and hung them up in the back room at Sanginiti’s,” he said. Weyrick also went to All-Ohio Sports and had trophies made with jockstraps mounted on wooden bases. “I gave them a trophy cup,” he said. Believe it or not, Nelson went to work at the Buch­telite as a headline composer. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. The table-tennis hoax even played a role in his marriage. While serving on a surgery rotation at Akron City Hospital, Nelson met his future wife, Sue, an EKG tech who had gone to high school with Stein and knew about the UA hoax. “The first thing we talked about when we met was the pingpong hoax,” Nelson said. For the key players, the UA table-tennis team remains a pleasant memory of the 1970s. “My sordid past caught up with me,” Nelson joked. “It was fun,” Sekerak said. “We made national news,” Stein said. “In retrospect, it was a real gas,” Weyrick said.

Local history: Fake pingpong team pulls off hoax at University of Akron in 1970s

By Mark J. Price 
Beacon Journal staff writer

The matches were over before they began. Without even working up a sweat, a tricky band of collegians swatted away foes across the Midwest.

The University of Akron table-tennis team created a national sensation in the 1970s by compiling a winning record without playing a single game.

Submitting articles about a pingpong team that didn’t exist, UA students pulled off an outrageous hoax against the Buchtelite newspaper. The prank, fondly remembered today, served as a cautionary tale for journalists of all ages.

Honor students Jim Stein and Rick Nelson masterminded the 1974 scheme. Stein, a Coventry graduate, was working on his bachelor of arts degree in education, speech and theater, while Nelson, a Norton native, majored in biology.

“Well, it just came to us one night,” recalled Nelson, now 59, who lives in Westerville and works as an emergency medicine doctor at Ohio State University. “We were both juniors at Akron and we were both kind of bored. We just decided to do this thing where we wrote an article and submitted it unsigned to the sports editor.”

Stein, 59, a Massillon resident who owns Minnesota Insured Title Agency in downtown Akron, recalls visiting the deserted Buchtelite office one day and sliding a handwritten note into a wooden mailbox.

“The first article was real small,” Stein said. “We were half scared that people would figure out it was fake. … The first match is pretty much ‘Jim Stein won 21-19, 21-18,’ whatever … and they picked it up and printed it word for word. Then the next week, we became more emboldened.”

Sitting around a table at the old Student Union, the team asked classmates whether they would like to be mentioned as players in the next fake story.

“They were all friends of ours and they thought it was really funny,” Nelson said.

The team made up fictional opponents from rival schools by pulling names from the bibliographies of textbooks.

Hinckley resident Rob Sekerak, who majored in commercial art and electronic technology, joined the UA team as “trainer-coach.” It was a familiar role because Sekerak had helped Stein win a pingpong contest at Spanton Hall when they were freshmen.

Sekerak wore a uniform, carried a clipboard and psyched out Stein’s foes en route to a table-tennis title in the Zips marching band. That was the big secret of the fake team: Stein really could play.

“Rick and Jim were mostly the brains behind the actual stories,” said Sekerak, 58, a project manager for an IT organization. “I remember sitting with them and coming up with some ideas, just throwing names and things like that.”

The Buchtelite, which had a circulation of 10,000 in 1974, printed the team’s self-congratulatory articles verbatim. In six stories, Stein and Nelson mentioned themselves 47 times.

“We never denied that it was a hoax,” Nelson said. “So if somebody saw the article and commented … we would always correct them and say, no, this is a hoax. There is no such thing as a pingpong team.

“I think by the time that it finally came out, I’d say half the campus knew that it was a hoax. Everybody but the Buch­telite staff.”

The team did get a little miffed, though, when a Buch­telite sportswriter’s byline began to appear on the stories.

“That infuriated us,” Stein said with a laugh. “You’re plagiarizing our fake articles.”

In one story, the pingpong team — or as Stein called it, “a bunch of geeks with no girlfriends” — announced open tryouts for female players.

“A couple of girls showed up,” he said. “We told them that it was just fake. We weren’t going to be cruel and lead them on.”

In a tough nonschedule, the UA team “beat” Defiance, Gannon, Wittenberg and Bowling Green, but “lost” to Toledo — just to keep the tale credible.

“We didn’t want to get greedy,” Stein said.

The writers peppered their stories with details about flagrant fouls and trying conditions: A foe threw ice chips on a table, a player hurt his knee, a coach got kicked out after protesting a referee’s call, rowdy fans interrupted a game.

“We got more creative,” Stein explained.

The Zips’ crowning triumph was at the fictional Northwestern Open Table Tennis Tournament in Evanston, Ill., where UA defeated Ohio University and Notre Dame while a TV crew supposedly filmed the event for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The Buch­telite published a 41-inch article about the title — and it overshadowed March Madness.

“There’s a really tiny article at the bottom of N.C. State winning the NCAA divisional basketball championship,” Nelson said. “They had to cut down that story to make room for the pingpong.”

Stein, Nelson and Sekerak took a team photo with their “championship trophy” — actually a bowling trophy turned sideways to disguise its purpose. They borrowed it from ABC Trophy off Case Avenue.

“I had to put on a sport jacket and tie to pose for that photo,” Sekerak said.

Alas, all good hoaxes come to an end. Someone blew the whistle on the fake team.

“Whoever ratted us out, we never did figure that out,” Stein said. “But we have our suspicions who it was.”

Buchtelite editor Jim Weyrick wasn’t laughing when he discovered that his sports staff had been hoodwinked. He said the “integrity and credibility” of the newspaper had been injured, and he threatened to prosecute for fraud.

Ellet native Weyrick, 60, who today works as a travel agent in Schaumburg, Ill., had time to get over the prank.

“After 38 years, it’s a joyful memory,” he said.

When the hoax was exposed, Weyrick told a WEWS-TV crew that he “felt lower than a snake’s belly.”

“I don’t know where it came from,” he said.

He said he initially took his complaint to UA legal counsel Ted Mallo to see whether there were any prosecutable charges.

“He gave me a form and I filled it out — all but the signature — and left it on my desk where everybody could see it,” Weyrick said. “I played with some heads there.”

Ultimately, though, he never submitted the form.

“Why bother?” he asked.

After the Beacon Journal wrote about the hoax, wire services picked up the story and it spread across the continent.

“When it finally came out, United Press International called my mom at home,” Nelson said. “She was really worried. My whole family knew about it. My dad thought it was real funny. My mom thought it was funny, but she said, ‘And this is going to be the last article, isn’t it?’ ”

Weyrick also spent plenty of time in the spotlight. “It even got me on ‘The Laugher of the Day’ by Hughes Rudd, CBS Morning News,” he said.

On the first anniversary of the hoax, Weyrick invited the perpetrators to dinner.

“I went to Sully’s Tool Shed and got some of the out-of-season ‘Welcome Champ’ banners and hung them up in the back room at Sanginiti’s,” he said.

Weyrick also went to All-Ohio Sports and had trophies made with jockstraps mounted on wooden bases. “I gave them a trophy cup,” he said.

Believe it or not, Nelson went to work at the Buch­telite as a headline composer.

“I really enjoyed it,” he said.

The table-tennis hoax even played a role in his marriage. While serving on a surgery rotation at Akron City Hospital, Nelson met his future wife, Sue, an EKG tech who had gone to high school with Stein and knew about the UA hoax.

“The first thing we talked about when we met was the pingpong hoax,” Nelson said.

For the key players, the UA table-tennis team remains a pleasant memory of the 1970s.

“My sordid past caught up with me,” Nelson joked.

“It was fun,” Sekerak said.

“We made national news,” Stein said.

“In retrospect, it was a real gas,” Weyrick said.

Filed under Ohio Akron University Pranks Pingpong