It was the spring of 1974, and the National Hockey League was facing a serious threat. The nascent, cash-flush World Hockey Association had begun to sign top players. To keep the upstart WHA from poaching young talent, the NHL held its annual draft in private. Prior to every selection, league president Clarence Campbell phoned each team, then read and spelled out the names of the round’s previous picks.
It didn’t take long for the onerous process to wear on the Buffalo Sabres brass. General manager George “Punch” Imlach, whose vocabulary was saltier than a kummelweck roll, spent the interminable event cursing out the NHL. Eventually, scouting director John Andersen perked up. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he said, “if someone would take a player who isn’t eligible for the draft?”
Public relations czar Paul Wieland liked the idea, but took it a step further. “Why don’t we just make up a player and draft him?” he asked. Andersen, for reasons unknown, suggested that the fictional player should hail from Japan. The country, Wieland pointed out, did have professional hockey. New Sabres head coach Floyd Smith was on board. Wieland remembers Imlach excitedly saying, “Let’s do it.”
The last step was making up a Japanese team. Wieland wanted something that roughly translated to Sabres. That part was easy. So, when it came time for the Sabres to make their 11th-round choice, Imlach said, “Buffalo selects Taro Tsujimoto from the Tokyo Katanas.” He even spelled out the name for Campbell, a stiff-backed former war crimes prosecutor who reminded Wieland of a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. “But,” Wieland says now, “he wasn’t a Gatsby type.”
Wieland soon prepared a press release that listed the Sabres’ prospects. Sure enough, on June 1, Dick Johnston of the Buffalo Evening News included a blurb in his draft recap about a hotshot forward who didn’t exist. “TARO TSUJIMOTO, Tokyo Katanas, center, 5-8, 180, shoots right,” Johnston wrote. “Who knows how they came up with this fellow?”