Who's That Girl (Sports Illustrated hoax)

Simonya Popova is hot. Smoking. Close to it, anyway. It's a preposterously humid August afternoon in Bradenton, Fla., and Popova is on a back court at the Bollettieri Tennis Academy, midway through a series of practice sets. Strikingly attractive, her skin and hair colored by the sun, Popova is dripping sweat like a busted faucet. Her opponent, a toned and tanned academy instructor who claims to have played in the Davis Cup for Peru, is panting. "Never hot like this in Tashkent," says Simonya's father, Sergei, looking on from his usual perch behind the court. "This worse than Cairo."

I hadn't seen this posted anywhere on the freeper board -- this is the Sports Illustrated hoax story. It's one thing to do a fake story for April Fool's Day, like SI did with Sidd Finch back in the 80s. But the Sidd Finch story was funny and well-written. This is neither.

Sports Illustrated had a "hit" with that fake story about a baseball phenom years and years ago and have been trying to duplicate it ever since. It is not amusing. Like Raymond J. Johnson, they just don't know when to quit. They probably should never have done it in the first place.

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I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this "story."

For one thing, it isn't even half as cleverly written, as witty, or as half believeable as George Plimpton's classic, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch in 1986, from which jewel this is clearly enough derived other than the sport it addresses. (For those who don't remember, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch was a fictitious essay written about a supposedly white-hot and eccentric New York Mets pitching hopeful who seemed a third Mark [The Bird] Fidrych, a third actual Met hurler Dwight Gooden [namely, the impossible fastball], and a third half-cracked neo-Sufi mystic. Plimpton's story worked in large part because it timed up to a point where the resurrected Mets had such promising looking new pitching - Gooden off his career year and the talk of baseball, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, relievers Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco, incoming by trade Bob Ojeda - that it would not have been unthinkable for them to have come up with such a surreal pitcher-in-waiting.)

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