We shoulda learned by now. Isn't that what folks who never seem to learn always wind up saying?
And so here came a man named Joe McClendon to town promising some sort of minor-league pro football (Indoor? Outdoor? Take your pick), and again we fell for it. Same old shuck, same old jive, and you can't fool me, mister, the pea's under that shell right there.
The National Gridiron League, McClendon called it. There would be two teams in Indiana, both called "Indiana." It was gonna start in May 2019, and it was gonna be wonderful entertainment, and, here, go on this website and order your tickets NOW.
Well. Two years down the road, and the NGL is still the No Go League. Or the Never Gonna League. Or the Nick (the) Gomers League.
If you haven't read Dylan Sinn's piece in The Journal Gazette yet, feast your eyes. It's the latest chapter in Joe McClendon's big con, and it's not only like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg in slow motion, it's like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg while a three-ring circus was happening on the promenade deck.
McClendon claimed the city of Fort Wayne was going to loan him money for deciding to play a football season in a "bubble" in the Fort. The city of Fort Wayne had no idea what the man was talking about. Folks at the prospective game venues that showed up on the league's website had no idea what he was talking about, either. And the players, the biggest victims of all, were stuck in a strange city with no way to get home and no way to pay the hotel bills the NGL said had been taken care of.
There is this, though: Two years after its launch, the NGL at last delivered something approximating football yesterday.
OK, so it wasn't football. It was a fight in a hotel conference room between McClendon and one of the players. There might have been a tackle or two involved, though, before McClendon and the player wound up rolling around on the floor, and McClendon wound up falling over a table when someone tried to pull him away.
The Thrilla in Manila it wasn't. More like the Melee Over My Hotel Fee.
Of course, this is how it goes in every professional sport, right? I mean, we've all seen the video of Roger Goodell rolling around on the floor with Dak Prescott after the Washington game because Goodell wouldn't pony up car fare to the airport. Haven't we?
Yeesh. What craziness is this?
Unfortunately for the Fort, it's what we always seem to get every time we roll the dice on semi/quasi/kinda-sorta professional football. And there have been a few times. On at least four occasions we tried indoor football, and sometimes the folks who brought it to us were well-intentioned but under-capitalized, and at least one time we got fleeced by a con man.
You'd have thought those would been cautionary tales. You'd have thought the aforementioned con man, Jeremy Golden and his Fort Wayne Fusion, would have enabled us to see Joe McClendon coming from half a continent away.
The guy virtually screamed bad news from his first news conference, but we went along with him anyway. I have no earthly idea why. Making a big play for the Easy Mark Hall of Fame, I guess.
In any event, it wound up yesterday with the players getting flim-flammed again, and one of them rolling around on the floor with McClendon, and the coach of the theoretical Fort Wayne team calling McClendon, his theoretical boss, a "fraud" and a "scumbag." Oh, and the folks who went on the website and ordered tickets NOW?
They all got their money back.
Psych! Of course they didn't. One poor guy who's into McClendon's scheme for $700 told Sinn he still hasn't seen a refund, two years later.
Which means I guess we should leave the last word to good old Major Clipton from "The Bridge on the River Kwai."
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