Today is, as we all know, April 1, and so we must sift
through our inboxes, news feeds, and information sources and decide what is
real and what is not. Each year there are some April Fools’ jokes that are
extremely clever. These jokes draw you in and even though you are well aware
what day it is, you nonetheless find yourself wondering if it just might be
true and how fantastic that might be.

This year, April Fools’ Day came early for some. If you are
a follower of world soccer, you may have heard about the French journalist who
fabricated a story about a dream soccer league that was to be set up by Qatar
in which the very best club teams from all over the world would compete for
untold riches. The story was meant to be a commentary on the ridiculous amount
of money floating around the global game and the lengths to which people (and
countries, in this case) will go to get a piece of that cash. The journalist’s
story was picked up by a renowned
English journalist working for one of the biggest newspapers in England. After
the fake nature of the original story came to light, he indicated that he had
corroborated the story with his sources before publishing it in the newspaper.
The two journalists have since been in a standoff as to whether the story is
true or not. Either way, it has all the hallmarks of a classic and well-thought
out April Fools’ joke . . . just a little early.

Sport, whether soccer or otherwise, is famous for producing
real-life stories that couldn’t be made up, but which if read on this
particular day might cause you to pause and question if the person telling you
the story was pulling your leg. For example, Donn Risolo’s Soccer Stories: Anecdotes, Oddities, Lore,
and Amazing Feats is full of
just those kind of tales, from elderly hooligans to willful corruption to the
ineptitude of certain referees, but it can be read on any day you choose not
just April 1.

Books, whether about sport or not, are far harder to hard to
turn into an April Fools’ joke in and of themselves. Certainly, it would be
relatively easy to make up a book as a joke. A simple press release could be
generated, a fake cover, and a link on a website, and away we go. However, it
seems far less likely that anyone would actually publish a fake book because of
the expense involved, even in these days of print-on-demand.

Books provide us with solid (even in their digital form),
tangible items that are hard to fake even if their content is spoof or false or
full of jokes, or, as from Risolo, full of stories that seem as though they
should be fake. There are, of course, plenty
of books about April Fools’ Day, and the book
industry loves this day as much as any in the calendar. But even so, on a
day when jokes abound, I like to believe that when you pick up a book, what you
are holding is real and meaningful.

So, enjoy your pranks, jokes, and humorous efforts this
morning, but when you go to bed with a good book in your hand this evening,
rejoice in the knowledge that what you are reading is the real thing. 

-Martyn