True lies
My colleague Ron Kaplan, on his NJJN sports blog, does great detective work in tracking down the truth behind an anecdote told by former Yankee great Bill “Moose” Skowron a few months back on the NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
It’s funny, but I heard the original broadcast a few months ago and, never having heard of Skowron, thought he might actually have been a fictional character — you know, like Plimpton’s made-up pitcher Sidd Finch or another of those annual NPR April Fools bits.
Well, it turns out that Moose is real enough, but his memopry is a little, shall we say, selective. Writes Ron:
Was Skowron lying or is this just the way he remembers the incident? No one can say for sure, perhaps not even the Moose.
This seems to be the malady of the moment: Telling a story so often that it becomes a memory. Debunked Holocaust memoirist Herman Rosenblat explains his fabrication this way:
“In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.” [Emphasis added.]
And Conversations With God author Neale Donald Walsch has a similar alibi for having passed off as his own work an essay written by someone else:
“I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized … and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”
So can this actually happen? Can our brains really fool us into “misremembering” incidents from our own lives, or internalizing others memories as our own?
And does this mean the guy I drove home from the USY dance was not wearing a penguin suit?
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 
January 9th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Memory can play tricks on all of us but there is a big difference between plagiarism and a guy who played well over 100 games a year for nearly two decades getting some of his anecdotes mixed up.
And there is also a big difference between someone falsifying their past in terms of the Holocaust the time-honored American tradition of the “tall tale” in which the exploits of extraordinary people get inflated into larger than life stories told to make a point. Old ballplayers always exaggerate their past deeds but we find it charming because their tall tales are the fabric from which the myths of baseball tradition are created.
And by the way, though I bow to no one in my respect and admiration for the author of this blog, I am shocked by his ignorance about Moose Skowron. I suppose like his fellow Mets fans, he thinks baseball history began in 1962.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:12 am
There’s a difference in effects and implications, I agree. I don’t think the Moose and Rosenblat will occupy the same circle of Hell. (Okay, neither deserves Hell — it’s a metaphor.) But I’m asking if their stories spring from the same phenomenon, and is it a real one? Can you repeat a story often enough that you convince yourself, or your mind convinces you, that it is reality?
I shook Chris Chambliss’ hand at a father-son sports night in 1977 or thereabouts. Doesn’t that count for something?