How To Invent a Fake Superstar

Summary

Pablo Torre Finds Out
Episode: How To Invent a Fake Superstar
Date: December 14, 2023
Host: Pablo Torre
Guest: Kieran Morris

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Pablo Torre dives into the remarkable true story of how a bored British teenager unwittingly altered a professional athlete’s life and narrative. The episode explores the phenomenon of sports hype, the creation of legends, and how easy it can be for a fake story to take on a life of its own, focusing on the case of “The Honduran Maradona.” Torre and guest Kieran Morris dissect how a made-up nickname and inflated stats for a little-known Honduran soccer player became international fact—and how the story forced Morris to finally confront what happens when fiction bleeds into real lives.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Absurdity (and Accuracy) of Hype in Sports [00:00–04:59]

• Conversation opens on the meteoric rise and hype of Shohei Ohtani and the huge contracts for international athletes.
  • Pablo notes, “At this point, Babe Ruth is an insult to Shohei Ohtani. Right. Babe Ruth never had the entire internet tracking a private plane...” [01:34]
• Discussion about how international players (like Yamamoto and Yung-Ho Lee) come with big reputations—often unverified by most American fans, who accept legendary tags without context.
  • “We’re arrogant Americans...just because we get to watch guys, doesn’t mean we know anything.” [03:25]

2. The Power of Whisper Networks and Sports Media [09:00–13:45]

• Kieran Morris recounts as a 13-year-old in Liverpool, he and friends amused themselves by making up transfer rumors for Sky Sports News.
• Their pranks escalated, culminating in placing a fake transfer rumor about French footballer William Gallas joining a lower-tier club.
  • “It was as easy as saying to a few papers, I’ve just heard from my friend who works at...the hotel, don’t take it from me, but apparently William Gallas is booked a room.” [12:04]
• The thrill of seeing their fake rumor echoed by real broadcasters and team managers: “…it was just—Oh my God. It was here, sat on this floor by this TV yesterday. Today it is coming out of the TV. That’s ridiculously powerful.” [13:12]

3. Creating the “Honduran Maradona” [14:24–19:36]

• Next, Morris ups the stakes. During the 2012 Olympics, they target an obscure Honduran player, Alexander Lopez. They rewrite his Wikipedia, giving him prodigious stats and the fake nickname “the Honduran Maradona.”
  • “He is known to Olympia fans as the Honduran Maradona.” [17:02]
• They also generate fake transfer rumors to Wigan, choosing believable paths (since Wigan had signed multiple Hondurans before).
• The hoax escalates as major outlets and the Houston Dynamo accept the legend as fact, referencing the fake stats and nickname in official releases.
  • “There were the stats on the press release. 18 goals, 34 assists. They had, you know, a YouTube clip of him up. The comments of that had: ‘welcome the Honduran Maradona.’" [22:24]

4. The Real-World Ramifications [22:24–28:20]

• Houston Dynamo sign Alexander Lopez for $1 million, referencing the fake stats and legend, which had now proliferated into Reddit, Fox News, and soccer forums.
  • “I am blown away by child you, this pubescent kid who is engineering this nickname, this legend, the Honduran Maradona, out of nothing.” [23:58]
• Morris reflects on how this legend influenced his own ego and even professional life, having woven this myth into job interviews and personal stories.
  • “Directly, directly led me to jobs. Directly led me into what I do today. The magazine job that I have today—I pitched doing the Honduran Maradona.” [25:12]

5. The Reckoning: Seeking Truth and Closure [27:27–38:20]

• A decade later, Morris decides to track down Dynamo staff and Alexander Lopez himself to find out what, if any, real impact his prank had on Lopez’s career.
• Conversations with Dynamo staff reveal the front office had not been swayed by the nickname—most hadn’t even heard it—relying instead on their own scouting.
  • Dom Kinnear, then-manager: “I haven’t heard that until you said it just now. Like, literally never.” [32:55]
  • Pablo: "The entire front office is telling you collectively, with great clarity, that you're not the story here." [35:07]

6. Meeting Alexander Lopez: The Human Impact [39:56–47:48]

• Morris finds Lopez in Costa Rica, now a star in the local league with a solid career—not a bust, but never quite the Maradona myth.
• Lopez shares personal stories: he was actually scouted by Arsenal, had both highs and lows, but ultimately forged his own path.
  • “When he was back in Honduras, he was banging in the goals... He finally had the record that we had made up for him when he was 19.” [42:49]
• When told of the prank, Lopez laughs—it was just a “fun, silly nickname made up by the fans,” and it hadn’t caused any harm or confusion in his life.

7. Lessons Learned: Myths, Identity, and Letting Go [47:48–End]

• Lopez has a new nickname, “El Ingeniero” (The Engineer), that truly fits him.
• Pablo reflects: "You were the engineer, you were the architect...it turns out that you were not the grand puppet master. Alexander Lopez was the engineer...of his own life." [47:52]
• Morris comes to terms with growing up, letting go of self-aggrandizing stories, and recognizing the agency and reality of the athletes themselves.
  • “Now we don’t need it.” [49:17]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the power of self-made hype:
  “At this point. Babe Ruth is an insult to SH Otani...Ohtani is...we just cannot think this way about international players anymore.” — Pablo Torre [01:34]
• On British teens playing puppet master:
  "It was as easy as saying to a few papers, I’ve just heard from my friend who works at the Malmaison...Apparently William Gallas is coming in tonight." — Kieran Morris [12:04]
• Invention of a legend:
  “He is known to Olympia fans as the Honduran Maradona.” — Kieran Morris [17:02]
• On seeing the prank go global:
  "There were the stats on the press release. 18 goals, 34 assists...We looked at the SB Nation posts and we looked at the Reddit boards, and there it was...welcome the Honduran Maradona." — Kieran Morris [22:24]
• Confronting myth versus reality:
  “I think the first thought was that I’m a long way from home. That I have got this far, what, 12 hours flight over...and just thinking, oh god, why did I even lift under the rock with this one?” — Kieran Morris [34:19]
• On real impact:
  “I expected no. I thought, no. If everybody else didn’t hear, he wouldn’t have heard. He had, he absolutely had. He had heard it, but he thought it was just a fun, silly nickname made up by the fans.” — Kieran Morris [43:23]
• The ultimate twist:
  “The Engineer is so perfect...the way you had framed and sold the defining story of your life...it turns out you had gotten it backwards...Alexander Lopez was the engineer...not you.” — Pablo Torre [47:52]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–04:59 — The absurdity and reality of hype in modern sports (Ohtani, international stars)
• 09:00–13:45 — How a teenage prank becomes a media headline (Gallas story)
• 14:24–19:36 — The “Honduran Maradona” gets invented (Wikipedia edits, fake stats, rumors)
• 22:24–28:20 — Houston Dynamo and the real-world consequences of the legend
• 27:27–38:20 — The search for truth: confronting Dynamo staff and their recollections
• 39:56–47:48 — The human impact: meeting Alexander Lopez and revealing the prank
• 47:48–End — Reflections on identity, myth-making, and growing up

---

Episode Takeaway

This episode seamlessly unpacks how sports myths are born, gain traction, and endure—sometimes based on nothing but imagination and a few clicks on Wikipedia. Torre and Morris tell a very human story about imagination, ego, and the gap between legend and life: the athlete outlasts the myth, and the truth is always more fascinating (and humbling) than fiction.

---

Highly recommended for listeners interested in sports, media, and the strange power of stories gone viral.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

[B]

Eventually I run out of questions. He runs out of career to talk about. You know, sports careers are finite. I can't keep pressing him about these things. And there was a split second where I thought, shake hands and let him.

[A]

Go right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network. So I'm trying to keep up with all the Shohei Ohtani MLB free agency stuff and every part of this makes me laugh. Breaking news from Major League Baseball where Shohei Ohtani is signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The two way superstar will get a 10 year deal worth $700 million, far and away the largest contract in the.

[B]

Of North American sports. Why?

[A]

Because a. Remember like when Shuttani was coming over and he was like being rumored as the Japanese Babe Ruth?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And everyone was doubting him, like, could he possibly. And now he's making $700 million over like a hundred years or whatever it is that the Dodgers worked out in that deal.

[C]

The hype was so high on him that it's impossible to reach it. And he's exceeded it.

[A]

He's exceeded it.

[C]

You never see that other than like LeBron who was on SI as like a kid. You never see somebody with that type of hype reach it and exceed it usually. It's insane.

[A]

At this point. Babe Ruth is an insult to SH otani. Right. Babe Ruth never had the entire Internet tracking a private plane from Southern California to Toronto that turned out to be carrying that dude from Shark Tank on it.

[C]

Babe Ruth played with a bunch of white plumbers. Like, get out of here with comparing him to Sh Otani.

[A]

Like, but Ohtani is. Look, and I get all of the, the things about like, yeah, he had elbow surgery, blah, blah, blah. I don't give a. We just cannot think this way about international players anymore. Cortez. The other thing that makes me laugh about this entire thing is that I'm just learning names for the first time now and my instinct has gone from like skepticism to that guy rules. And I have not seen a second of these dudes.

[C]

That's right. I mean, when I was a kid growing up, there were, there were names all the time that had huge hype. Like Hideki Matsui was the Godzilla of Japan and so forth. And he had a great career. He wasn't necessarily a Hall of Famer who exceeded expectations. He didn't do what Ohtani did.

[A]

Enormous porn collection.

[C]

That's right. Enormous porn collection.

[A]

Record setting but it was different.

[C]

Daisuke Matsuzaka, also another guy who had a decent career, had good moments, but didn't have, like, this exceptional career.

[A]

But this guy now who I was just googling because I have never seen him before, but is the next guy.

[C]

Well, he's supposed to get a ton of money.

[B]

Yamamoto.

[A]

Yeah. Right. So Yoshinobu Yabamoto has been hailed as the Japanese Pedro Martinez. I'm looking at an article right now. It's Fox Sports, and that is what he's being declared. And. And my response is, this guy. This guy rules.

[C]

My response is give him all the money in the world.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

Just in case.

[A]

I know nothing about him. All I know is that I'm. I should. I should be less skeptical of these promises now because of Ohtani. Because we're living in this era where the international player, like, in the NBA, we used to laugh at the premise of, like, the Greek Shaquille o'. Neal. Baby Shack Sophocles, short Sanitas.

[C]

We are arrogant Americans. Is. Is part of the issue, too, because just because we get to watch guys doesn't mean we know anything. We talked about this on other episodes with quarterbacks in the NFL. Just because we have access to watch these guys, we still don't know. So maybe we should take people's word from other countries when they compare them, well, to the greatest players of all time.

[A]

I'm watching the Houston Rockets, and they have this dude, Operand Shangoon, who was hailed as the Turkish Jokic, and he basically is exactly that.

[C]

Tom Hammerstroke was laughed at for talking about him as, like, a number one overall.

[A]

You went on Dan's show and said, this guy might be the best player in the draft. And no one even acknowledged it because.

[C]

The name itself was like, get out of here. Nobody knows who this is. You can't be this.

[A]

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

And the skepticism is not necessarily warranted, as we've learned.

[A]

So the point being that we're in this place of trying to figure out, okay, I'm supposed to trust these new promised superstars that I've never seen a second of. I've never seen a second of. The only clip I've seen of Yamamoto involves this. This curveball thing that they call the Yo Yo Curve. And I'm like, cool. The Korean guy. Who's the Korean dude? I don't even know his name.

[C]

Young Ho Lee.

[A]

Yes. Young hooley.

[C]

Excuse me. $2 on me.

[A]

Multiple vowels.

[C]

The Giants just threw $113 million at him. Just a ton of money.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

He's a monster. I mean, but he also, you know, hits the ball on the ground a ton. We don't know a lot about him. Nobody's ever seen him play. Most people haven't seen him play.

[A]

All I've seen from him is that clip the bat flip.

[C]

The badass, bad flip.

[A]

The South Korean Vladimir Guerrero.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Like that is the legend of him. Now, based on this one bit of data. And so what I wanted to do on today's show, Cortez, is that I wanted to go back in time a bit and look at a very notable case study in what it means to be the fill in nation here, fill in name of previous superstar here, sort of legend, horror. And so the legend of the Honduran Maradona.

[C]

Well, that sounds intriguing. Okay.

[A]

Okay. Yeah, we have to go across the pond.

[C]

Across the pond.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[C]

Let me try it again. Across the. No, I.

[B]

Across the pond.

[A]

This is.

[C]

I'm just trying to do a British accent. I've been watching a lot of, you know, Love island and every. Everything from the Brits.

[A]

I love the Love island about Britain, the villa. Oh, my God.

[B]

What do you do? What?

[C]

It's a great show. You watch some of the violin. Get some culture in your life.

[A]

The fact that you're wearing a. You're actually wearing today for the.

[C]

The podcast.

[A]

Podcast audience not watching YouTuber Jeff' wearing a soccer jersey.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Sun is on the back of my jersey. Tottenham is the greatest soccer club of all time. Our producer Chris can go to hell. Arsenal stinks. And you know, yes, I am wearing.

[B]

It's not a.

[C]

It's not a jersey, it's a kit.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[C]

So on the pitch, mate, this is.

[A]

This is only vaguely British. This accent, it does the job.

[C]

It's fine.

[A]

What I wanted to do, Cortez, go ahead. Is I wanted to go inside of one of these stories. The story of a player who was promised to be something great brand and turned out to be, as it turns out, something quite different might.

[B]

Terrible.

[A]

So for the record here, how do you want to introduce yourself?

[B]

Kieran Morris, 26 years young, 27 in a couple of weeks. I'm from Liverpool, the greatest city in the world. I've been exiled in London, the second greatest city in the world, for nine years. And yeah, I'm a magazine writer, editor and audio doc maker as of this year.

[A]

So there's a meta aspect to this, as you just hinted at the very end of your autobiography. But when you say that you're almost 27 years old, do people believe you. Because I need our podcast audience to understand that I'm looking at you and I'm like, you could pass for, I don't know, what's the drinking age in England? I guess it would be like 14.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But I want to go back to where this is all born, which was I think when you were around 13 years old.

[B]

Yeah. So 2010.

[A]

And so you're in Liverpool at this point.

[B]

Yeah, back home in Liverpool.

[A]

And what does 13 year old Kieran Morris like to do for fun?

[B]

We just like to get ourselves in that weird little bits of trouble that was somewhat adjacent with sports. Sometimes not. Our reporters are still all across the country and believe me, they are braving.

[A]

The elements tonight because it's deadline day.

[B]

And there will be late drama like when there's transfer deadline day.

[A]

So Kieran is talking about one of the biggest days in European soccer which is transfer deadline day. It is the final day for teams to make signings, which they call transfers over there and yeah, add new players to their team. And as you might imagine, like with other major sports, it comes with an entire day full of endless television coverage.

[B]

When Sky Sports News are there, they've got the cameras rolling, waiting for players to come in, last minute medicals, all of that. The lights are still on behind me, the media team are still here. And I can tell you Fulham fans that there may well still be one more deal to be done in the next 55 minutes or so. But they have got one deal done and we'd walk over and we'd just like stare really blankly into the camera like, you know, yokels that hadn't seen technology before. And then we'd rush back and we'd see if anyone had seen it on TV and be like, oh my God, who are those freaks in the back? And that was us.

[A]

You're describing now, truly like a pubescent. And forgive me, 13 year old Kieran for saying it this way, you're describing a 13 year old attention a little bit completely. And what did 13 year old attention, Kieran Morris liked to do the most as those pranks were concerned.

[B]

So the first big one that really had like a landing point to it was it was focused on the world that as 13, 14 year olds, by this point, 2011, the world we cared about the most, which was Sky Sports News, football, transfers, the transfer rumor, gossip mill and all of that. Every single time I was in my friend's house, Sky Sports News playing all the time, little number on the bottom of it. Call us up if you hear Anything, that kind of thing. Like sports media wasn't quite as glamorous then.

[A]

Oh, it was a simpler time.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yes, yes. When a ticker. When a bottom line meant something scrolling across your television.

[B]

Exactly. It felt like breaking news. I miss it. And so we were just like, okay, what matters more to us than anything? Football. What would be stupid? Oh, William Gallas. He's just left Arsenal. He was a free agent. What if he went to, like, Birmingham?

[A]

Okay, just to clarify again, for the Americans, who do not closely follow soccer here, William Gallas is a really good French defenseman, or at least he was. He played for Chelsea and arsenal for, like, 10 years. And then in the 2010, 2011 season, he was on the decline. He was entering the back end of his career. And so Kieran thought it would be funny if William Gallas next move was to play at a really shitty club like Birmingham.

[B]

Like, you know, lower mid table, dowdy old Birmingham. You know, he's on the out. He's old. It could happen. Let's try and just put some calls in. And so we booked him a room at this really fancy luxury hotel in the center of Birmingham. I put on my worst unrepeatable French accent as an agent.

[A]

What is. Hold on. What does your worst unrepeatable French accent sound like?

[B]

Oh, it's talking like this, you know, so can I have. I have roommates coming in. My client, William. Oh, you cannot tell what it is for. It is for Birmingham.

[A]

Pretty terrible.

[B]

Yeah. Admittedly, if that makes it a tape. Oh, my God. I will never be allowed to cross the Eurotunnel again.

[A]

But wait, hold on. But using this terrible French accent, you've engineered this rumor out of nothing that you've sort of goldilocked.

[B]

Right?

[A]

It's not so implausible that people would dismiss it out of hand. You're kind of targeting something that might actually infiltrate the bottom line scroll on Sky Sports News. That is something that you've targeted very, very deliberately.

[B]

Yeah, that was the aim. And then from there, it was as easy as saying to a few papers, I've just heard from my friend who works at the Malmaison, the hotel, don't take it from me, but apparently William Gallas is booked a room. He's coming in tonight, trying to build some kind of momentum for it, and then telling Sky Sports all of this, oh, my God, my phone's been blowing up. Apparently, William Gallas is going to Birmingham. I've heard it from this guy at this paper. I've heard it from the guy at the hotel. And then the next morning, we're watching Sky Sports News again. There's a flash interview with Alex McLeish, who was the manager at the time. And it's just 10 seconds of, oh, you've been linked with William Gallas. Do you have anything to say about that? No, no, nothing in that. I've got two young centre halves and it's not the right move for me. I need to spend my money on other positions that. Or spend the club's money on other positions that we really need to improve things. And for that tiny amount, that's all we wanted out of it. That was one of the funniest moments of our entire lives.

[A]

What is the physical, visceral sensation that you feel when you see that happening?

[B]

Oh, it's just like being just hit by a tsunami. It was just. Oh, my God. It was here, sat on this floor by this TV yesterday. Today it is coming out of the tv that's ridiculously powerful. It's like, if we can do that, what else can we do?

[A]

The picture you have painted for me is that of one of those. You're not a kid who's scared. Like, you're one of those dinosaurs in Jurassic park who's testing the electrified fences. Like, how much can you get away with before you just decide to destroy everything?

[B]

I think in. In the terms of, like, you know, media or kind of like the real world, but anything that didn't involve, like, climbing trees or running very quickly or making hard tackles, I was very scared at them. But when it came to, like, actual people's lives, I was, yeah, kind of reckless from an early point.

[A]

But wait, so you get this taste, right? You get this feeling that has been revelatory, that transforms you and what do you want to do next?

[B]

So it came to a year later, and all the way through this, we're making legends out of ourselves to each other.

[A]

Oh, you're insufferable, I imagine.

[B]

Oh, unbelievable. I couldn't put up with me if I had to deal with me at that age. We were 16 by this point and the Olympics had just started. 2012. And I don't know, it felt like revisiting the Galas thing. The Galas playbook was a bit like getting like an old video game out again and, you know, giving it one last really intense spin. Like, here we go, let's see what we can do. We're a little bit older, a little bit wiser, at 16, that is. And we're watching Honduras versus Morocco. Pretty staid game of football. And we get the itch again. It's, ooh, is there anyone here? Let's look through the squad list. And we looked at a few, you know, a few of them had already gone to Europe, a few of them already had a bit of hype around them. But there was a 19 year old, number 10, making his first waves into the national team. Fairly dynamic on the day. His name was Alexander Lopez. He hadn't left Honduras. He had a pretty modest but good goal record. Little bit of detail on him and I don't know what it was, but we just fixed our eyes on him and before we know it, we're at the big boxy computer in the study going through Wikipedia, juicing it up a little bit with a bit more bio here.

[A]

What are you editing on Wikipedia?

[B]

Oh, it's, it's basically at this point, it's a blank page. It's got a little bit of detail on him. Other than that, total clear avenue for anything. So a season had just gone by, the 1112 season. It had no detail on it. Let's give him some references for, you know, a great series of goals in the Honduran league.

[A]

Yeah, statistically, what are you giving him? What kind of an upgrade are you giving him?

[B]

18 goals, 34 assists, you know, crazy, crazy, crazy figures. If you watch a player do that to your league, they're an object of fascination. He was an all action, you know, box to box, goal scorer, technical wizard, talisman, all of this stuff. He's this talent waiting to break out of Olympia, onto the Olympic stage and then off into the world. And that nice mix of, hey, he can score a lot of goals, but he can make a lot of else happen for his team. There's strikers there who are benefiting off it. You know, other people are rising with his tide. He's that talented. The assists I always thought were the flourish.

[A]

But hold on, because I need the scene, Kieran, of you settling, I presume, at a computer on the nickname that united Alexander Lopez with.

[B]

I've looked at the Wikipedia records and you can still see them. They're obviously all publicly available. And there was a point where there had to be a point where we had completely juiced up the whole profile, read it back, laughed, one of us has turned their back. And then there's a second edit, a distinct edit, that is just one line at the top. He is known to Olympia fans as the Honduran Maradona.

[A]

That is the sound of Diego Maradona doing one of the greatest things we have ever seen in Sports scoring one of the greatest goals in the history of soccer. It is known as the goal of the century, in case you didn't know. And it put Argentina up two nil against England in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup. A World cup that Maradona and Argentina would go on to win. And that goal and that run in the 86 World cup, it would all cement Maradona as arguably the greatest of all time. And so the fact that Kieran was equating Alexander Lopez, this essentially anonymous Honduran soccer player, to Diego Maradona, it was patently absurd. But for the people who don't follow Honduran soccer, which is to say basically all of us, it was still within the realm of possibility.

[B]

It was a cherry on top of the cake. It was, it was so easily could have just been left. Wasn't part of the plan, but it was just. I know what could be an extra little something is this nickname. Next step was finding a club that he could move to. So we were gonna make another rumor and do the ringing around again. And this time we went for Wigan, who had signed, I think three Hondurans in the few years before. So again, not unreasonable. All within this boundary of. Huh, that makes sense. So we started the routine again, starting low. Local papers, local to regional papers, regional to national papers. Whole evening spent on the phone. I had a fake name this time.

[A]

What was your fake name?

[B]

I was Neil Barker. I was a kind of gruff voiced Northwest football journalist. I just heard some rumors around in the Wigan area and I thought I'd ring up the Times news desk and I'd let them know.

[A]

Do you lower your voice when you're talking to the Times news desk? Give me Neil Barker calling up the Times news desk with the greatest scoop that anyone could have dreamed of.

[B]

Oh, I think it talked a bit like this. So it's a bit more. A bit more Mancunian and a bit more. Yeah, so I've heard a little bit about Wigan signing another Honduran lad. He's playing at the Olympics now. He's called Alexander Lopez. He's abs. Apparently he's really, really good. Two and a half million is what I've heard from the physio.

[A]

Oh, you're the physio's friend.

[B]

Oh, the physio's friend. Like you just piece it together like that where it's, oh, a physio's friend could have let that slip. A medical could be happening. And then the Times. I remember I was on the phone with a guy for 20 minutes. And he was taking down every detail. And he offers Neil Barker work in future. He says, I can't pay you money because. Because the Times were under a lot of scrutiny at the time. Rupert Murdoch and all of that. All of that kicked off.

[A]

It's yada, yada, yada over Rupert Murdoch to get to Neil Barker's future employment prospects.

[B]

Exactly. And so they offered me work, and obviously I couldn't take them up on it, but I just said, here's the tip, here's the story.

[A]

So this insane prospect who comes from Honduras, a an incredibly poor Central American country that is just obscure enough as well to not be a thing that people know a ton about. No one should believe this story. Like, Right. Like, objectively, this is. This is obviously just something that you totally created. But what is insane is that clearly someone or someone's of even greater consequence apparently did.

[B]

Yeah. And so I think for the very least, the Times, when they put it in the paper, they believed it. And then the year afterwards, we saw the news that the Houston Dynamo had paid $1 million for Alexander Lopez. And we just thought, oh, my God, like, there were the stats on the press release. 18 goals, 34 assists. They had, you know, a YouTube clip of him up. The comments of that had, you know, welcome the Honduran Maradona. We looked at the SB Nation posts and we looked at the Reddit boards, and there it was, like, we looked away for like a second. And this wildfire seemingly had spread through Major League Soccer. Who saw this Central American gem that had been linked to the Premier League, you know, two and a half million. Let's sign him for one million. Bargain.

[A]

I'm now looking at the press release off of houstondynamofc.com and it says, quote, his record of 18 goals and 34 assists in 51 league games for Olympia testifies. Testifies to his creative and goal scoring potential, which feels like you wrote that, but no, like, this just got aggregated every. Everywhere. Like, you look it up now, and it's like foxnews.com has a story about this, quoting those numbers. And there's this one fan site. They're not just quoting the statistics, Kieran, they're quoting the legend, the nickname that you invented out of nothing.

[B]

Yeah. As soon as I saw that press release, I was sat down in my study on the other side of the city where I lived, and it's the one where he's holding the shirt and it says, Alex 10 got the number 10, Maradona's number, holding it proudly in orange in the sun in Houston. And the first thing I did was I made it my laptop background. I put it on the wall like a, like a hunting trophy. I was just like, there we go. There we have it.

[A]

You're a terror. I know what a, what a terror you were or were, I hope.

[B]

I think I'm reformed.

[A]

So, Kieran, I just do want to pause here because I am blown away by child, you, this pubescent kid who is engineering this nickname, this legend, the Honduran Maradona, out of nothing. Except that that person who you nicknamed is a real guy named Alexander Lopez. And you watched as your boosted stats and your invented mythology leads to him roughly a year later getting signed by the Houston Dynamo, this MLS team in real life, for a million dollars. And so you are on the one hand an amazing shadow agent for Alexander Lopez. Like what a thing you've done for this guy that you've never met, that you only kind of know about, but who now is the wallpaper of your computer. But I'm also realizing with great clarity that you're also just kind of an asshole.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It became very quickly to me and I, you know, wrestled with it and tried to address it for a long time. It became a gimmick, it became a crutch. It became something that I fell back on time and time again.

[A]

The story, the story of this, the accounting I just provided. You profited off of this?

[B]

Oh, yeah. I mean directly, directly led me to jobs. Directly led me into what I do today. The magazine job that I have today. I pitched doing the Honduran Maradona. The whole run through in my job interview, I have absolutely bled everything out of it there is to do. And that's. I think there's something about when you are trying to get going in who you are and how you are going to be, what do you want people to see you as? And so a lot of it was, oh, I did this story on top of that. Oh, I do this, I do that. It's, it's self aggrandizement. It's, you know, hire me. I'm precocious. I can take a kid from Central America and make him into a millionaire. What could I do for you?

[A]

And I like the idea of you bragging about this like on dates.

[B]

Well, my, my now fiance, I started going out with Sarah, who will be listening. Hello. At the end of 2014. So it's nine years, so it's just after school. And so it worked on her years and years ago, nine years ago, she hates every beat, every turn, every single mention of Alexander Lopez because she has heard me pull that routine hundreds of times with hundreds of different people. Like she rolls her eyes like default. All of this hype around this story that was all tied into this hype I did around myself. Never once did I think, you know, what's, what has happened to him, what really has happened to him, to his family. And that bit by bit, as I got older, that became a bigger thing in my mind.

[A]

The fact that your, your love, your household, your ego, your identity, your story that you tell yourself about yourself is premised on the Honduran Maradona raises an important question, which is what the happened to the Honduran Maradona when he actually went to the mls? When did you actually decide to do something and figure out the answers to these pretty enormous questions?

[B]

Well, it was, it was coming up to 10 years on the original prank. So it was 2022 was on the horizon. I was speaking to another magazine editor and I was telling him the story. I was doing the routine beat for beat. And once again he's like, you should do something with this, but you should like really think about how you can do it. And it came to booking a flight to Houston and just thinking, can I just hit up anybody and everybody who was connected with that time, 2013 in Houston Dynamo's recent memory, Any staff who were still at the club and just put the question to them, find out a bit more and then just try and see, did this really have an effect on Houston Dynamo? Did this have an effect on Alexander Lopez?

[A]

So when you get to Houston and you begin to recreate a very suspiciously, I'll say this suspiciously specific oral history of this random guy that you care about so much, what was their memory of? Just the very beginning.

[B]

So at the very beginning, from what I've heard from speaking with Nick Kalba, who I think is now the assistant gm, but he was one of the scouts who had flown out and watched him in the Gold cup and had heard recommendations from inside the club that he was a talent.

[D]

If you look at some of the profiles coming out of Central America, the Hondurans were really adjusting and adapting quickly. You know those players, they're tough, they've dealt with a lot of adversity. They come here hungry and ready to prove themselves.

[B]

He was like, he was a really nice kid when he arrived and he was fresh faced and eager. There was a big Spanish speaking contingent in the club, as there is in the city and they just helped him settle in and get his fitness up. But what I've heard from speaking with Dom Kinnear, who was the manager at the time, was that fitness was, I think, the big obstacle for adapting to the mls.

[E]

I think at first, I think the speed of play and the physicalness of the. The players, nonetheless a little bit different than he was what he was used to in Honduras. It's just that we were expecting a bit more of an attacking presence from him, and I think it took him a little while to get adjusted.

[A]

What did they scout actually? What did they tell you about what they saw themselves in terms of them evaluating him? What did they do?

[B]

Oh, they flew out and watched games in, like, not just Tegusa Galpa, but like, furthest reaches of Honduras to watch Alexander Lopez. They put their due diligence in to monitor him and watch videos and all of these things to make sure that, you know, this guy was something good.

[E]

We did take a trip down to Honduras to watch him play for his club, and he passed all the tests for us. And it was after that we kind of set up a meeting with our owners to. To let them know there's an interest in Honduran players south the border as a bright future.

[B]

But as the MLS was professionalizing and intensifying as the kind of the tactical abilities of the managers and the acuity of the players, to, like, put that into place as that was dialing up and ramping up at that point, you need to run a lot more. You need to run a lot, lot more. You need to contribute to all sides of the game. You need to be that, you know, modern total footballer to an extent.

[A]

You kind of need to be a bit more like the Honduran Maradona that was promised, who is, again, like Maradona, one of the fastest and most physical athletes as well as the most, you know, one of the most infamous. Right. Like, but he's known for, for his athleticism, his physicality, his speed. Also, obviously rampant cocaine use. But as a side note, but the point is that the guy who arrived, he was less than unsurprisingly, what that fake nickname you made up had suggested.

[B]

Exactly. And early doors, I watched, I think it was first game against New York Red Bulls, and there's a moment he pulls out this, like, amazing pass to, I think Jason Johnson, and he scores to make it, I think one, one with the Dynamo and there's Lopez. That's what he can do.

[A]

Lopez Johnson is tied it up. Spectacular goal.

[B]

Alexander Lopez with a passing gem And.

[A]

A first ever goal.

[B]

And then the Dynamo get turned over, they lose 4 1. The season generally falls off the rails fairly quickly.

[A]

I think this is one of the most important questions in this story. I mean, we know that the Dynamo website, right? They wrote the nickname, they enshrined it for all time. Lots of outlets everywhere around the world picked it up in 2013 when the signing of Alexander Lopez was announced. What did the team's actual front office tell you, the decision makers who were responsible for signing him, paying him? What did they tell you about the nickname? What did they remember in terms of their actual personal scouting reports?

[B]

Well, I remember the one, the one that really set me back was speaking to Dom Kinnear and I asked him, you know, have you ever heard the nickname the Honduran Maradona? And he sort of rocks back in his chair and he smiles and he laughs and he goes, I've heard some.

[A]

Nicknames in my day, but the first I heard that was from you today.

[B]

Kieran. I haven't heard that until you said it just now. Like, literally never, like, okay, check one on that. Chris Canetti, who was the president at the time of Houston Dynamo, he very like, breezily, like, almost offhandedly said, yeah, yeah, we heard of that.

[A]

Yeah, we knew about that at the.

[B]

Time of the signing, but didn't.

[A]

Didn't make too much of that.

[B]

I don't think he not meant it, but I think what he meant by that was we knew there was some hype around him because it was so breezily toughed off. It wasn't. It didn't give me anything like, oh, yeah, he's heard it. And then Nick Kalba, the assistant gm, was just clear as anything.

[D]

Nope, you know, you get the Honduran Messi, you get the, you know, whatever. So I don't really take stock in the. In somebody's nickname, to be honest.

[B]

Even if we did hear it, we wouldn't care because those nicknames don't matter to us in the professional soccer industry.

[A]

What you're thinking as you are as your life, the story you tell yourself about yourself is just being dismissed as just like, obviously unserious. Like, of course we don't give a about that. That's like just a thing someone says when they tell you that the legend doesn't even matter to them who made the decision. What's going through your head?

[B]

I think the first thought was that I'm a long way from home, that I have got this far, what, 12 hours flight over FaceTime with, you know, Sports executives who've taken time out of their day to speak to me and just thinking, oh, God, why did I even lift under the rock with this one? Like, I could have just kept on not bothering the story, leaving the ghosts to rest and all of that, and I didn't. And I picked at the scab too much. And now. Now it's all coming out now I'm seeing it now. I'm in the room with the adults, the adults who made the decisions, the proper people who weren't just spinning yarns and telling stories and smoking areas and all of that, with the actual people doing their job.

[A]

So what this entire front office is telling you collectively, with great clarity, is that you're not the story here. Like, we. We messed up this signing insofar as. Yeah, like, it didn't go well, but that's on us. Like, we didn't buy your legend. Like, you're not responsible for any of this.

[B]

Yeah, that was pretty clear as day by that point. To think that I've been entertaining the idea that one day they opened up their laptops while they were watching the Olympics, just as I was, and thought, look at all these goals and assists. You know, Chris, go get your. Go get your checkbook. When you see it all now, just.

[A]

Kieran. What a literal child's version of how sports works. Just that idea. No, but. But it's. It's. I'm laughing also because I am now wondering, like, okay, the. The actual person then that they scouted, that they visited, that had a life beyond your invention of one, what's Alexander Lopez feeling about all of this? Right. Like, where is he now? What happened to him?

[B]

The last sort of time I hear from him as I'm going around and telling the story to people, is that he fell out and it didn't quite work. The way that Dynamo played, they moved between managers, they moved between formations. That, you know, sparkling number 10 role falls out of favour when you don't have everyone else carrying the piano, as it were. And he went back to Honduras, and then he ended up in Saudi Arabia. When I spoke to Dom Kinnear, he said that he'd last seen him in the CONCACAF Champions League the year before, and he was playing for a club called Alajualense in Costa Rica, and he was doing well. He was a regular starter for, like, a continental team.

[E]

So I have watched him over the years, and it's kind of funny, like I said, you know, watch them play for Ala Wolenza against the MLS team maybe about a year and A half ago. And every time I see him play, he hasn't changed. He plays the exact same way.

[B]

He'd been the captain a few times and all of that. He'd been, I think, racked up like 200 appearances for them that time. He was a bit of a star in Costa Rica. So I thought, Houston is, what, three hours from San Jose? I'm never going to be this close to Costa Rica again. I don't think I'm going to be allowed back in the state of Texas. So I think I've got to make my move now. And I thought, at the very least, I can go and tell him, or I can try to go and tell him, because if I get this far and there is an opportunity just to see what all of this really has been about, to look into the whites of his eyes and kind of get all of this off my chest, as if he even needs to hear it, you know, the time is now, it needs to be now to get something out of this, you know, pretty wasted trip of smashing down my own preconceptions.

[A]

And so what do you do? How do you get access to him? How do you convince him to sit down with a random person he has never met before, has never heard about, but has a weird investment in him very specifically?

[B]

So this was a bit of a Hail Mary. So I arrived at the airport and the only thing I had was a number for his agent that I'd rooted around at the back of the seventh page of Google stuff to try and find, like, one PDF that left it on the very bottom. Here's the number, as the name was Paolo Paulo Hernandez. And I shot him a message and I said, I'm a journalist, which is true. I'm doing a story about wonderkids and their reputations, which is true to a point, technically. And I really, really want to speak to your client, Alexander Lopez. Do you have, like, is he around in Costa Rica at the moment? And he was like, well, are you in Costa Rica first off? Yes, I am in Costa Rica. I've arrived. I can do a face to face. You know, I can set that up. He's like, okay, I'll speak to him. And eventually I realized that I've got to go find an interpreter because I cannot speak very good Spanish at all. And then I get a text through and it's Alex. And he's been put through to my number and I say, I would like to interview you. Where's. Where's good for you? And so he suggests the Hilton in the center of San Jose. And so I tell Ileana, my interpreter, who was the one who was available to come for that time, and it was great, arrive 4pm tomorrow and we'll go and do it.

[A]

So when you finally sit down with him after that day, but also more than a decade now, what did you learn about his actual real life when you, when you see him face to face?

[B]

We shook hands. It was, you know, journalist and subject, sit down, interpreter in the middle, Kiera Morris speaking.

[F]

Ileana Castillo, the translator, and Alex Lopez.

[A]

And Lopez and whoever.

[B]

And I just, I learned so much because I asked so many granular questions that just stalled me for time, asking him all these details about when he made his professional debut. When was the first time he was identified as like a talent when he was younger.

[F]

What happened was the president of the Rosenborg team from Norway came to Honduras to watch me train and watch me play and he wanted to buy my services, to buy me from the team. But unfortunately the president said they had never sold the player to Norway.

[B]

And then one thing that really, really, really staggered me was that as he was talking to me, he tells me that, oh, in 2011. So this is a year before I started messing with his page in 2011, Arsenal had invited him for a trial.

[F]

There came a point when, before The World cup, sub 20 Arsenal wanted El Chocolozano and me to go to England to do some tests.

[B]

It had genuinely happened. Like a far more reputable club than Wigan. A real link to the Premier League. Something like that was not public knowledge until then.

[A]

A link to a previous prank you had pulled too. A big money, real club, had actually flirted in real life with the guy that you invented these flirtations about.

[B]

Yeah, and that, that had never been on the record. And he just talked me through his career, he talked me through Houston. He had no bad memories whatsoever of Houston. It was just a kind of a. Didn't work out. But his daughter was born in the us which he was really happy about. And obviously, like Houston was a really good sort of welcoming community for him. There were Honduran players already at the club. It was a nice like community feel. Saudi Arabia. He was pretty hard on. He just said it. He was there for six months. He was meant to be for two years. And it just didn't work for someone who had grown up through the Honduran system and then into America. So he just took a chance on himself and cut the contract and went back to Honduras, to Olympia and that run before he went to Costa Rica. When he was back In Honduras, he was banging in the goals, he was winning trophies, he was a all, you know, free flowing goal scoring number 10 in Honduras. He finally had the record that we had made up for him when he was 19. He was at 24 or whatever he was then. He was ripping up the Honduran league.

[A]

And so, I mean, the other obvious question to me here is, had Alexander Lopez ever heard of the nickname the Honduran Maradona? The nickname that he began to live up to? Years, years since you had given up on it.

[B]

I expected no. I thought, no. If everybody else didn't hear, he wouldn't have heard. He had, he absolutely had. He had heard it, but he thought it was just a fun, silly nickname made up by the fans.

[F]

The surname came along simply because, you know, a lot of newspapers and journalists were talking about it and they would say that I was like a young Maradona. I had the same skills that Maradona had when he was that age too. I know that. But of course, we all know the Maradona, you know, what he was really. So it's just that.

[B]

And that was about as far as it went. But that's something that was like, okay, cool, got back to you. Eventually I run out of questions, he runs out of career to talk about, you know, sports careers are finite. I can't keep pressing him about these things. And there was a split second where I thought, shake hands and let him go. Tiniest split second. But I don't know what dragged me out of that. And I can hear it on the interview tape, those first, like, stutters, like, excuse me, before you go, one thing, one more thing. While I'm here and while I have you. And then I've already rehearsed the spiel with the interpreter.

[A]

She's not caught off awkward imagining this.

[B]

So beat for beat, I'll do like 1/10 of the story and then I'll pause and then she'll do it in Spanish. When you were linked with Wigan, what I had done was I booked a hotel room in your name. I had called the papers.

[A]

Alexander Lopez.

[B]

And then I will do the next bit and the next bit and then all of those moments where I know I'm talking and he's not reacting, but then I just sit back and watch his reaction. I'm studying him while I'm waiting to say something again. And I just keep talking and talking and talking, not giving him the chance to respond until, again, the story is over and there's nothing more I can say. Ten years ago, I invented the name the Honduran Maradona.

[A]

Yo fu y il que in bento el nombre el Maradona undureno.

[B]

It's me. And he starts laughing. And then I'm like. That could mean a multitude of things. Like, the laughing is not the automatic get off the hook.

[A]

That's like, oh, could reach over this.

[B]

Table and do something and I'm going down. I'm not. I don't think it would. I couldn't even fight back in that instance. I would have to just put my hands behind my back and say, take your shot. Yeah, you deserved it, 100%. But he thought it was funny and benign and inconsequential and saw it for what it was, which was nothing.

[F]

When my agent told me a journalist wanted to do an interview, I was sort of like, huh, why?

[B]

But now I get. Was actually really refreshing by that point, for all of that to be put in a box and be let to be as stupid and silly and childish as it always was. It wasn't a childish thing that went horrendously wrong. It wasn't like, you know, a drowning by the old lake that you don't talk about for years and years. It was just a silly kid thing. That remains a silly kid thing.

[A]

How does he feel about using that nickname, the Honduran Maradona? Does he. Does he embrace it? Does he. Does he plan to actually lean into it?

[B]

What.

[A]

What. What's. What's his feeling on that?

[B]

Oh, no, he was very old school about it. He was like, oh, no, no, no. There's only one Maradona. But he's got a better nickname now. He's the Engineer, El Ingeniero, as they call him. And his mum loves it. I think his brother actually is an engineer. So, like, it's cool for them. The fans gave it to him, which is how nicknames should work. And, you know, it sums him up. He dictates play from the middle of the field. You know, he's crafty, he's intelligent. It's who he is. It's a good nickname because it's who he is and what he's about. And it wasn't randomly made up by a child.

[A]

That nickname, though, the Engineer is so perfect, isn't it?

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

As a poetic concern, it's so perfect because the entire time, Kieran, this entire time, the way you had framed and sold the defining story of your life, the thing you rested everything on, your identity, ego, marriage, ambitions, professional life, it turns out you had gotten it backwards, right? Like you were you were the engineer, you were the architect. You were the guy who organized this entire thing. You were the schemer. And it turns out that you were not the grand puppet master. Alexander Lopez was the engineer. It turns out, of course he was of his own life with all of these ups and downs, on his own. And, and that means that the legend that you had most invented was, was your own.

[B]

Dead right. Dead right. And the process, after all of this ended and flying back has been dealing with that and dealing with what life looks like now without this story to fall back on, without this, you know, self aggrandized reputation. This is what it's a story of. It's a story of a kid who just took something way, way, way, way, way too far in his own mind and has been telling people about it for 10 years since. And what I'm glad I could do is that this relatively young adult can go back and put that kid's delusions completely to bed. Now we're different. Now we don't need it.

[A]

Kieran Morris, thank you for coming clean about who you actually are.

[B]

It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I'm closer to knowing.

[A]

So I want to point out that Kieran's story here is part of a larger collection of long form stories that we here at Metalark Media have made by, you know, stealing DraftKings money and giving it to the narrative kings over at Wondery and Campside Media. The whole franchise is called Sports Explains the World and you can and should go find it on Apple podcasts. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out a Meadowlark Media production and I'll talk to you next time. Sam.