When the news broke about Roy Williams stepping down as UNC’s head coach on April Fool’s Day, we were immediately reminded of another April Fool’s Day and, perhaps the best April Fool’s joke Boswell ever created.
A couple of things: we put April Fool’s jokes on pause a few years ago when we were asked to identify them as such. It’s an understandable decision but it also took the fun out of it all so we just took what is now an extended break.
And second, they were hilarious and almost entirely due to a particular, peculiar genius possessed by Boswell who is one of the most deviously funny people alive today. Among his other masterpieces was an open bow-and-arrow culling of excess lemurs at the Duke Primate Center, and the EPA declaring Krzyzewskiville a wetlands and forbidding camping. If you could make a living doing April Fool’s pranks, he’d be Bill Gates.
After Dean Smith retired, Bill Guthridge took over for three years and at some point, we can’t remember exactly which year, Boswell struck.
He came up with the idea that Dean Smith, having rested for a few years, was ready to return.
At the time, the Durham Herald-Sun had a web page but it was basically an advertisement. However, it had the logo and the look and feel of the Durham paper, which he gleefully swiped and reconstructed perfectly, but with a dukebasketballreport.com address, a detailed that few seemed to glean.
When we took it live, things quickly got crazy. It was picked up by local papers and radio stations and quickly spread across the country. We know it got as far as Kansas.
It also was picked up by UNC athletics. We heard this story from someone so we can’t verify it 100 percent but we think it actually happened. We certainly hope it did.
The story we heard was that SID Steve Kirschner took a printout into Gut’s office, handed it to him, and said: “have you seen this??”
Guthridge picked it up, read it and looked up at Kirschner and said....”Well, I guess this is goodbye.”
We loved him for that.
Later in the day, the Herald-Sun sent us a nice note saying that while it was very funny, they had to ask us to take it down as we used their logos and look without permission. We did of course and Boswell later made nice and sent over a lovely fruit basket.
All in all, we regard it as our best April Fool’s prank ever.