April Fools' Day: The All-Time Greatest Sports Prank
DALLAS - We’ve noted soberly that maybe right here, right now in America isn’t the very best spot to celebrate April Fools’ Day 2020 - because so much of what we’re all dealing with seems like a horrible “hoax” gone morbidly wrong.
But celebrating the brilliance of an April Fools’ Day prank gone right - with such ideal frantic flair and comedic timing that 17 years later it stands as the grandest April Fools’ sports trick time?
That’s worth a review and a chuckle.
Watch it again and re-live especially two Dallas Mavericks characters, owner Mark Cuban and assistant coach Del Harris.
Cuban has no problem playing the “kook” ... let alone a look with an out-of-control temper, the latter fact a result of his then-still-freshly-minted battles with the NBA and its referees.
Cuban also prides himself on having some “acting chops.”
So, of course, does Harris, who as the former coach of the Los Angeles Lakers finds himself listed on IMDb as an “actor.”
But Del is also a deep-thinking and serious-minded curator of the sport ... who simply cannot fathom what he’s watching his boss do to it ... Or, as it turns out, what Cuban was pretending to do to it via this glorious 2003 fake dust-up.
April Fools’ Day 2020? We’re playing about as many jokes as the NBA is playing games. But great reruns? We still have those.
