The Sidd Finch Hoax – Hoaxes in History, Part 3.
The story of the Sidd Finch Hoax is, like Tsang Wong Foo, the story of a great baseball pitcher who didn’t exist. This hoax, however, is much more modern than that of Tsang Wong Foo. It appeared in an article printed in Sports Illustrated on April 1, 1985. While the day of the year might have been a tipoff as to the verity of the article, publications of the stature of Sports Illustrated normally don’t need to resort to gimmicks, so once again, some members of the public bought the story.
The Sidd Finch Hoax has some interesting parallels to that of Tsang Wong Foo, however, which is why I’ve written about them in consecutive blog posts. First, however, here are the basics of Finch’s story. He was a bright yet extremely quiet kid who briefly studied at Harvard before disappearing in the Himalayas in an airplane crash that killed his foster parent, an eminent archaeologist. He had very few possessions, spoke several languages, and was also a world-class French horn player.
Here is where the Sidd Finch Hoax gets crazy. Much like Tsang Wong Foo before him, Finch learned unorthodox techniques of pitching that allowed him to have apparently superhuman abilities. He could throw a baseball with accuracy at 168 miles per hour. (In 1985, the fastest pitch ever registered was 103 mph.) He did this using a straight-arm motion and channeling “Tantric principles of body and mind.” Finch believed he could throw even harder if he bent his elbow when throwing but refrained from doing so in order to avoid injuring the catcher, thus observing a religious belief in not injuring living things.
If you want to read the whole story, you can do so here.
Please Click Here to Subscribe to My History Blog!
Observations on the Sidd Finch Story
What strikes me as interesting is that, once again, we have a baseball player who has learned incredible abilities through the mastery of Eastern principles unknown to Western observers. I don’t know if this qualifies as stereotyping, exactly, but smacks of a tendency to label people from Asia as fundamentally different from others in their understanding of nature and the human body. In the case of Finch and Tsang, it led to unusual but imaginary breakthroughs in athletic ability. It is all too easy, however, to see anyone from Asia through this lens of what makes them different and, in this case, mystical rather than scientific and thus less rational.
Please Subscribe!
If you enjoyed this blog, please consider signing up to follow it by scrolling down or clicking here, and recommending it to your friends. As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!