April Fools’ Day

By James M. Jackson

Early morning March 31, 2025, I crawled into bed at home after a forty-eight-hour return trip from Leh, India, which is in the Indian Himalayan mountains region of Ladakh and ten and a half hours ahead of my home’s Central Daylight Time Zone (CDT). My flights were from Leh to Delhi to Dubai to Chicago to Madison. I caught some sleep on the Delhi to Dubai four-hour flight. I grabbed a few hours more on the fifteen-hour Dubai to Chicago leg, and that’s where I set my clock and tried to convince my body everything was now happening in CDT.

The Chicago to Madison flight was delayed an hour and a half because the crew was arriving on a plane from Raleigh-Durham, and that flight was diverted south to avoid massive thunderstorms curving from Michigan down to below St. Louis. I fought to stay awake on that flight so when I got home, I could sleep instead of being invigorated by a “nap.”

That worked. After I emptied my suitcase and took a shower, my Oura watch says I was asleep one minute after I climbed into bed. I arose at 8:00 am to keep adjusting to the CDT and after breakfast looked at my to-do list, which I had not done while on vacation.

That’s when I discovered that my first Tuesday of the month blog for Writers Who Kill was due to go live at midnight the next day, and I hadn’t paid attention to that and written this blog before I left for India. Normally, I would write about my trip and illustrate it with several of my photos—but I purposefully did not take a computer with me so I would be mindful of the special place I was visiting and not spend lots of time going through my thousands of images to find the best ones.

What to write then? Well, it is April Fools’ Day, so I thought I would share an April Fools’ joke created by George Plimpton, a wonderful sports writer who is best known for his realistic accounts of competing against professional athletes of various sports.

For the April 1, 1985 edition of Sports Illustrated, he wrote a story “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.”[i] Sidd was a reclusive 28-year-old Harvard dropout, trained by Buddhist monks. He was fluent in Sanskrit, played the French horn, and impressively could hurl a baseball at 168 miles per hour. (To understand how ludicrous this is, Aroldis Chapman threw the fastest recorded pitch on September 24, 2010, a blazing 105.8 mph.)

Back to the story, in which Plimpton reported the Mets had given Sidd a secret tryout. The Mets went along with the prank and allowed players and coaches to be photographed with a middle school art teacher who posed as Sidd.

The subhead of the piece should have given the joke away with its absurdity and initial letters spelling out April Fools’ Day (He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga.)

How could anyone fall for that? Well, the article purportedly led other teams to contact the Mets to learn more about this mysterious new phenom.

What’s your favorite April Fools’ Joke?

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[i] Sidd Finch: A pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. - Sports Illustrated https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/15/curious-case-sidd-finch 

James M. Jackson authors the Seamus McCree series. Full of mystery and suspense, these thrillers explore financial crimes, family relationships, and what happens when they mix. To learn more information about Jim and his books, check out his website, https://jamesmjackson.com. You can sign up for his newsletter (and get to read a free Seamus McCree short story).