February 8, 2021 • 16 mins
The photo was blurry but unmistakable. Dressed in Western wear, next to a cowboy with a fistful of cash, was one of the most famous players in MLB. The story behind the story of the star athlete competing in a different sport, under a fake name, as told by the man who broke it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Trickeration, a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
to another episode of the Trickeration podcast. The podcast where
we deep dive into shocking, incredible, and often forgotten acts
of deception in sports with athletes and regular people who
were involved. Honest conversations about dishonest acts is what we're
(00:25):
all about here. I'm your host, Matt, constantly trolling for
these types of stories. Scams, schemes, hoaxes, devilish trick plays,
complicated pranks, you name it, I'm all over it. This
week the story of a current famous athlete pretending to
be someone he was not, at least until my guest
got involved. Enjoy the show. I'll never have a story
(00:48):
like this again. I mean, if you had told anybody this,
you know, even a year before it happened, I would
have said, are you insanes? That's not possible. But here
we are. This is Zack Buchanan. He covers the Arizona
Diamond acts for the website The Athletic. One day last February,
he and Andrew Baggerley, a fellow writer for The Athletic,
got the tip of a lifetime. Somebody sent us basically
(01:12):
a link to this Facebook post. Like this was his
scoop of all scoops. And before we get to what
was in this post, who sent it to you? Of
course cannot reveal my sources, but the way the story
started was screen training and maybe been going on for
just a week or so. In the post is a
blurry but unmistakable photo of the newly minted star pitcher
(01:35):
of the Diamondbacks, Madison bum Garner. The entire stories in
the photo, it's massive bum Garner, dressed in country western gear,
standing in the winter circle with his team roping partner,
having just won a cattle roping event. The man next
to bum Gardner is more than a head shorter. He's
holding an envelope of cash. I think he and his
partner in one dollars, but the photos caption makes no
(01:57):
mention of bum Gardner. Rather, an idea ifies the shorter
man as Jackson Tucker and the taller one as Mason Saunders.
So Zack, I ask you who is Mason Saunders. Mason
Saunders is the alter ego of Madison Bumgarner, under which
he would surreptitiously compete in team roping events at rodeos
(02:20):
around Arizona. In the off seasons. So when you're digging
into this whole thing and reporting it, what were your
expectations about how big a story this was. I knew that, like,
this was a crazy story and it was gonna blow up.
Like I knew we had something. I don't imagine that
every team has a player that's secretly competing in another
(02:41):
sport under a different name, And I think it's important
to establish, like who Madison Bumgarner is, Like, he's unlike
any professional athlete I can think of in American sports, Like,
how would you describe him, Well, Mason Bumgarner is uh.
I don't think it'd be unfair to call him like
a legendary picture to San Francisco Giants fans, has been
(03:03):
the hero of multiple World Series wins for them. He's
kind of this larger than life figure with this larger
than life personality on the field, you know, big country guy.
One of our other writers who covers baseball for US
divides pictures into tears like ace applicant stuff like that.
But there's a special tier just from MASSI Bumgarner called
American badass, and that's probably like the best way to
(03:25):
describe them. Six and a half feet tall, with a
bushy brown beard. Madison Bumgardner is a character from a
long ago era. He's like Paul Bunyan if Paul Bunyan
could throw ninety five from the left side. After leading
the Giants to three World Series titles in five seasons,
the future Hall of Famer signed a five year, eighty
(03:46):
five million dollar contract last offseason to anchor the Diamondbacks rotation.
The idea that here's this guy, a very recognizable professional
athlete who has been competing in these events and winning
under a fake name was just tours as to what
we had to get into it. So when you started
to do your reporting to figure out, like, what the
hell was going on here? What did you dig up? Well,
(04:07):
it's not super easy to find results from these events.
They're small things. This aren't like rodeo events going on
at some big arena. It's kind of just people in
the community gathered at one of these ranches on certain
weekends when they have these meats. It just apparently seems
like a fun thing to do on the weekends, and
it kind of a way that that country rodeo community
(04:28):
gets together, and he actually one a decent amount of
money for a normal person not for a star baseball
player doing this kind of thing under a fake name
for at least several years until me and Andrew back
he found out. And for the city slickers at home,
can you explain what is team roping? It's a two
(04:51):
person events. One person who is called the header they
released this year, and that person immediately ropes uh the
horns of this year, and then the other person, who
was the healer, which is what Massive Bumgarner would do,
would rope the legs at the sea. Then you're just
trying to get the best time. And when you started
sniffing around on this, how easy or hard was it
to get people to talk about bum Gardner's secret life.
(05:17):
So my explanation for that is that this team roping world,
this this rodeal world that goes on in these ranches
outside the Phoenix area. It's pretty insulin and they're protective
of each other. I remember when I was first trying
to hunt down results, I called a couple of these places,
and I don't know if I was just being clumsy
(05:37):
about it, but I got pretty much shut down hard
by people, and they did not seem to be very helpful.
So what did you rely on to investigate. So it
was it was a lot of kind of like deep
internet searches, because if you're going to go up to
the guy and blow his cover, essentially, you want to
know as many of the facts as you can. So
(05:57):
we had to do some deep googling to find other
events in the area that showed a Mason Saunders listed
in their results. So we did some digging and found
Mason Saunders that had one or place and other events
at different points in time over the last couple of years.
So were able to piece together a little bit and
how much time were you spending researching all of this?
(06:19):
Each event has like five photos. I spent hours and
hours going through trying to find you know, do any
of these people look like massive bumbard? We found some
photos from other events that clearly showed him on a
horse in the act of roping a steer. It wasn't
surprising that he was doing this, but the crucial element
was that he was doing it under a fake name.
Can you just give a sense of how potentially dangerous
(06:41):
these rodeos are, Like how much risk was he undertaking
by competing? It's not super dangerous, but you know you're
on a horse these are live animals. They're unpredictable, so
it does have some danger. What they say that people
get hurt the most is like they dislocated thumb or
even lose a finger because they're holding tight to this
rope and it gets yanked. But I didn't hear a
(07:04):
lot of stories of like super serious injury. But it's
not the same as like shooting hoops in your backyard.
One relevant piece of information to this story. Back in
bum Gardner missed three months of the season after a
dirt biking accident in the Denver Mountains which required shoulder surgery,
(07:30):
and when he came back from that, he wasn't quite
as dominant as it was before. It's not keeps terrible,
but it's his pitching shoulder. You wonder how much it
took out of them. Shoulder surgery is no joke. And
guys like bum Garner getting paid like half a million
dollars a start, So dirt biking seems incredibly stupid to me.
But do we know if it was actually forbidden in
(07:50):
his contract? Uh? Yes, it very likely was prohibited by
his contract. I mean, I've seen baseball contracts the guys
signed that you know, say they can't skateboard, and so
the expectation is, especially during the season when this happened,
is you were going to stay away from things that
could take you off the field. And he apologized for
early at the time, So it was really stupid, and
so you're starting to see maybe a pattern of behavior
(08:12):
there of doing things that the team would probably say,
hold on, you need to stop doing this, which explains
why he's competing in rodeos under a fake name. You
can't use an alias and then claim you're not trying
to keep something secret. Ironically, if he had been doing
this under his normal name, it might not have been
a story, because he has a long history of talking
about his fondness for roping and saying that he had
(08:35):
entered some small competitions before. What made it a story
is that he was using a fake name, which suggests
he was trying to hide it from someone and potentially,
you know, he just signed this big contract, maybe he
wants to hide it from his employers. So from your
point of view when you're working on this, was this
like a fun you can't believe what's happening here story?
Or was this more like a hardcore investigative newsworthy piece.
(08:58):
It was a mix of both and more on the
fun side, mostly because the last time that we could
peg him doing this was when he was a free agent.
He hadn't signed any team, and so there's not a
team on earth they can tell him you're not allowed
to do roping. Since we couldn't show that he had
done it while a member of the Diamondbacks, we felt
like our best chance to kind of get a full
understanding of it was your approach him in kind of
(09:19):
a friendly manner at the clockhouse. So can you set
the scene for me when you and baggar Ley decide
to confront him. I think he had just thrown a bullpen.
We're standing in the Diamondbacks clubhouse at the spring training
facility at Salt River Fields. The club us is mostly empty,
but whenever a picture like bum Grunner throws a bullpen,
there's just a scrumber reporters there for like a five
(09:41):
minute session. How did it heal? You know? What pictures
are you working on? Just kind of the standard stuff
that gets asked after spring training and Backs in My
approach was to wait until that group had ended, So
we kind of waited for the crouch side. We went
up to him, showed him the photo and said, hey,
we saw this, can you tell us a little it
more about it. You know, my wife and I have
(10:02):
just been watching mad Men and we just got to
the scene where Pete Campbell approaches Don Draper and says,
I know your secret, that you're you're not who you
say you are, essentially the same thing that happened with
Madison Bumbar. We've come up and said we know your secret.
And what was it like for you going up to him?
I remember feeling nervous as health Um. I mean he's
like six five, he's very broad. I mean, there's no
(10:24):
way to stand next to a guy like that and
not just feel that there's his size in comparison to yourself. Now,
I don't find any athletes in committing the sense of
like I feel threatened or anything. But he is just
a large guy, like a guy wouldn't want to run
into in a back out. So how did bum Gardner
react when you showed him the photo? The first thing
(10:46):
he says to us is, while you're ruining my alias.
So I think he knew that the days of flying
into the radar as Mason Saunders were put And was
the conversation acrimonious? There was? It totally fine. It was
a pleasant conversation. He was cooperative, he was a little nervous, understandably.
I asked some questions and I felt like we got
a good story out of it. He spoke to us
(11:06):
for a good fifteen minutes or so, rather openly, explaining
why he liked Team roping, how many events he's entered
in one. There were some times where he was kind
of grinning through gritted teeth, but he killed in a
lot of details for us. Why Mason Saunders, Like, where
did that come from? It was a shortening at Madison
and Saunders as his wife's maiden name. We learned a
lot more about it by going through it that way
(11:28):
than if we had come in super hard guns and
blazing and he had shut its down, and then we
would have had to rely on just what we could. Finally,
Internet once we talked to Bum Garners, a PR person
hanging around in the clubhouse, and so we knew that
the cat was out of the bag. I did send
an email through Team PR to get the owners input,
and then the owner deferred to the g M Mike
(11:50):
Hasen and so I texted Hazen and said, hey, if
you got a minute, there's something urgent that I need
to get a response for you from. When he gave
me a call and essentially no mommented to me. Although
I got the sense that this was going to be
news to him. Immediately rushed back, transcribe quotes, put the
story together, backs, had some suggestions, and I'm pretty prid
about the story turned out. I feel like you learn
(12:11):
a lot about Madison Bumgard reading it, and what about
the critique that what this guy does in his private
time is actually none of your business and your job
is just to cover the Diamondbacks in baseball, and this
story isn't something that journalist should even be pursuing. He
was doing something that might be prohibited by his contract.
He was doing it in public, he was photographed, he
(12:32):
got posted on Facebook where anybody could see it, and
he was doing it under a fake name. If you
had a box for like most newsworthy story like things
that are journalist should pursue, that's it. And that's just
the price of being a famous athlete. The things that
you do that are interesting, especially if you do them
in public or fair game for reporters. But one question
I do have is is there any chance that the
(12:54):
people watching these rodeos didn't know there was an MLB
superstar on the whole. It's like they just thought it
was some random guy named Mason Saunders. Everybody there knew
that was Massive bump gun. But I'm also sure that
they all knew that if they started posting photos and saying, Hey,
check out Massive bump Gunner out here at this team
roping event, then Massive bum Burner wouldn't be coming around anymore.
(13:16):
So where were you when the story was officially published
and what was it like for you? And what was
the reaction to the story. I don't know if I
can describe it accurately. It's like this crazy feeling of
excitement and anticipation. I think. I remember I was sitting
in the parking lot outside my gym when our editors said, Okay,
here it is, it's live, and then you know, your
(13:36):
phone just goes nuts with notifications and it's overwhelmed. It
was the talk of the sports world across the country
for probably two or three days. I mean, I appeared
on MPR, I appeared on Dan Lebotard Show, Like a
whole bunch of people called me that I never wanted
to talk to me before. And what was it like
when this crazy story that you reported and wrote with
(13:57):
Baggedley garnered such a huge risk bots I mean, it
was great to have people talking about the work that
you do. It was fun to see all the people
just blown away by it, not by anything that really
read it, but just that like he had been doing
this and just the ridiculousness of the story. And so
it was really fun. And you have to kind of
tell yourself as a reporter to not revel in it
too much and like not mix it up in the
(14:18):
mentions too much because I still have to cover match
and bum Runner for the next five seasons and I
want him to not hate me. That makes sense. And
what happens to his rodeo career, I would guess that
it's dead. I would be surprised if he competed again,
because the team is aware of it now, and I'm
sure they would be very angry if you did. One
(14:38):
final question I have for you is after outing his secret,
you then have to continue covering this person. I'm curious
where do you stand with him these days? The sadness
of the pandemics. I don't know where I stand with
match bump bar and uh so I actually never got
a chance to really get a sense of how he
feels about me after we reported this, so I guess
we'll find out whenever are allowed back to the club.
(14:59):
Euse all right, That is it for today's episode of Big.
Thanks to Zach Buchanan of The Athletic for sharing his story.
Go ahead and follow Zack on Twitter at z h Buchanon.
And if you see any athletes competing in weird sports
or on horses or anywhere you wouldn't expect, please make
(15:20):
sure to let me know. In a related note, I'm
working on a story about a hoops game on a
Norwegian cruise ship that may or may not have involved
Michael Jordan's, so tune in to find out what's happening there.
One piece of bookkeeping, if you have a moment, please
be so kind as to rate and review and share
and all that good stuff. And finally, as we do
every week, we check in with the legend Chris, Matt
(15:41):
Doug Russo, Chris, how do we do this week? Maddie?
Good job, keep up to good work, all right, thank you, Chris,
that's it for the show. To talk to you guys
next week. Triggeration is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Trickeration, a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
to another episode of the Trickeration podcast. The podcast where
we deep dive into shocking, incredible, and often forgotten acts
of deception in sports with athletes and regular people who
were involved. Honest conversations about dishonest acts is what we're
(00:25):
all about here. I'm your host, Matt, constantly trolling for
these types of stories. Scams, schemes, hoaxes, devilish trick plays,
complicated pranks, you name it, I'm all over it. This
week the story of a current famous athlete pretending to
be someone he was not, at least until my guest
got involved. Enjoy the show. I'll never have a story
(00:48):
like this again. I mean, if you had told anybody this,
you know, even a year before it happened, I would
have said, are you insanes? That's not possible. But here
we are. This is Zack Buchanan. He covers the Arizona
Diamond acts for the website The Athletic. One day last February,
he and Andrew Baggerley, a fellow writer for The Athletic,
got the tip of a lifetime. Somebody sent us basically
(01:12):
a link to this Facebook post. Like this was his
scoop of all scoops. And before we get to what
was in this post, who sent it to you? Of
course cannot reveal my sources, but the way the story
started was screen training and maybe been going on for
just a week or so. In the post is a
blurry but unmistakable photo of the newly minted star pitcher
(01:35):
of the Diamondbacks, Madison bum Garner. The entire stories in
the photo, it's massive bum Garner, dressed in country western gear,
standing in the winter circle with his team roping partner,
having just won a cattle roping event. The man next
to bum Gardner is more than a head shorter. He's
holding an envelope of cash. I think he and his
partner in one dollars, but the photos caption makes no
(01:57):
mention of bum Gardner. Rather, an idea ifies the shorter
man as Jackson Tucker and the taller one as Mason Saunders.
So Zack, I ask you who is Mason Saunders. Mason
Saunders is the alter ego of Madison Bumgarner, under which
he would surreptitiously compete in team roping events at rodeos
(02:20):
around Arizona. In the off seasons. So when you're digging
into this whole thing and reporting it, what were your
expectations about how big a story this was. I knew that, like,
this was a crazy story and it was gonna blow up.
Like I knew we had something. I don't imagine that
every team has a player that's secretly competing in another
(02:41):
sport under a different name, And I think it's important
to establish, like who Madison Bumgarner is, Like, he's unlike
any professional athlete I can think of in American sports, Like,
how would you describe him, Well, Mason Bumgarner is uh.
I don't think it'd be unfair to call him like
a legendary picture to San Francisco Giants fans, has been
(03:03):
the hero of multiple World Series wins for them. He's
kind of this larger than life figure with this larger
than life personality on the field, you know, big country guy.
One of our other writers who covers baseball for US
divides pictures into tears like ace applicant stuff like that.
But there's a special tier just from MASSI Bumgarner called
American badass, and that's probably like the best way to
(03:25):
describe them. Six and a half feet tall, with a
bushy brown beard. Madison Bumgardner is a character from a
long ago era. He's like Paul Bunyan if Paul Bunyan
could throw ninety five from the left side. After leading
the Giants to three World Series titles in five seasons,
the future Hall of Famer signed a five year, eighty
(03:46):
five million dollar contract last offseason to anchor the Diamondbacks rotation.
The idea that here's this guy, a very recognizable professional
athlete who has been competing in these events and winning
under a fake name was just tours as to what
we had to get into it. So when you started
to do your reporting to figure out, like, what the
hell was going on here? What did you dig up? Well,
(04:07):
it's not super easy to find results from these events.
They're small things. This aren't like rodeo events going on
at some big arena. It's kind of just people in
the community gathered at one of these ranches on certain
weekends when they have these meats. It just apparently seems
like a fun thing to do on the weekends, and
it kind of a way that that country rodeo community
(04:28):
gets together, and he actually one a decent amount of
money for a normal person not for a star baseball
player doing this kind of thing under a fake name
for at least several years until me and Andrew back
he found out. And for the city slickers at home,
can you explain what is team roping? It's a two
(04:51):
person events. One person who is called the header they
released this year, and that person immediately ropes uh the
horns of this year, and then the other person, who
was the healer, which is what Massive Bumgarner would do,
would rope the legs at the sea. Then you're just
trying to get the best time. And when you started
sniffing around on this, how easy or hard was it
to get people to talk about bum Gardner's secret life.
(05:17):
So my explanation for that is that this team roping world,
this this rodeal world that goes on in these ranches
outside the Phoenix area. It's pretty insulin and they're protective
of each other. I remember when I was first trying
to hunt down results, I called a couple of these places,
and I don't know if I was just being clumsy
(05:37):
about it, but I got pretty much shut down hard
by people, and they did not seem to be very helpful.
So what did you rely on to investigate. So it
was it was a lot of kind of like deep
internet searches, because if you're going to go up to
the guy and blow his cover, essentially, you want to
know as many of the facts as you can. So
(05:57):
we had to do some deep googling to find other
events in the area that showed a Mason Saunders listed
in their results. So we did some digging and found
Mason Saunders that had one or place and other events
at different points in time over the last couple of years.
So were able to piece together a little bit and
how much time were you spending researching all of this?
(06:19):
Each event has like five photos. I spent hours and
hours going through trying to find you know, do any
of these people look like massive bumbard? We found some
photos from other events that clearly showed him on a
horse in the act of roping a steer. It wasn't
surprising that he was doing this, but the crucial element
was that he was doing it under a fake name.
Can you just give a sense of how potentially dangerous
(06:41):
these rodeos are, Like how much risk was he undertaking
by competing? It's not super dangerous, but you know you're
on a horse these are live animals. They're unpredictable, so
it does have some danger. What they say that people
get hurt the most is like they dislocated thumb or
even lose a finger because they're holding tight to this
rope and it gets yanked. But I didn't hear a
(07:04):
lot of stories of like super serious injury. But it's
not the same as like shooting hoops in your backyard.
One relevant piece of information to this story. Back in
bum Gardner missed three months of the season after a
dirt biking accident in the Denver Mountains which required shoulder surgery,
(07:30):
and when he came back from that, he wasn't quite
as dominant as it was before. It's not keeps terrible,
but it's his pitching shoulder. You wonder how much it
took out of them. Shoulder surgery is no joke. And
guys like bum Garner getting paid like half a million
dollars a start, So dirt biking seems incredibly stupid to me.
But do we know if it was actually forbidden in
(07:50):
his contract? Uh? Yes, it very likely was prohibited by
his contract. I mean, I've seen baseball contracts the guys
signed that you know, say they can't skateboard, and so
the expectation is, especially during the season when this happened,
is you were going to stay away from things that
could take you off the field. And he apologized for
early at the time, So it was really stupid, and
so you're starting to see maybe a pattern of behavior
(08:12):
there of doing things that the team would probably say,
hold on, you need to stop doing this, which explains
why he's competing in rodeos under a fake name. You
can't use an alias and then claim you're not trying
to keep something secret. Ironically, if he had been doing
this under his normal name, it might not have been
a story, because he has a long history of talking
about his fondness for roping and saying that he had
(08:35):
entered some small competitions before. What made it a story
is that he was using a fake name, which suggests
he was trying to hide it from someone and potentially,
you know, he just signed this big contract, maybe he
wants to hide it from his employers. So from your
point of view when you're working on this, was this
like a fun you can't believe what's happening here story?
Or was this more like a hardcore investigative newsworthy piece.
(08:58):
It was a mix of both and more on the
fun side, mostly because the last time that we could
peg him doing this was when he was a free agent.
He hadn't signed any team, and so there's not a
team on earth they can tell him you're not allowed
to do roping. Since we couldn't show that he had
done it while a member of the Diamondbacks, we felt
like our best chance to kind of get a full
understanding of it was your approach him in kind of
(09:19):
a friendly manner at the clockhouse. So can you set
the scene for me when you and baggar Ley decide
to confront him. I think he had just thrown a bullpen.
We're standing in the Diamondbacks clubhouse at the spring training
facility at Salt River Fields. The club us is mostly empty,
but whenever a picture like bum Grunner throws a bullpen,
there's just a scrumber reporters there for like a five
(09:41):
minute session. How did it heal? You know? What pictures
are you working on? Just kind of the standard stuff
that gets asked after spring training and Backs in My
approach was to wait until that group had ended, So
we kind of waited for the crouch side. We went
up to him, showed him the photo and said, hey,
we saw this, can you tell us a little it
more about it. You know, my wife and I have
(10:02):
just been watching mad Men and we just got to
the scene where Pete Campbell approaches Don Draper and says,
I know your secret, that you're you're not who you
say you are, essentially the same thing that happened with
Madison Bumbar. We've come up and said we know your secret.
And what was it like for you going up to him?
I remember feeling nervous as health Um. I mean he's
like six five, he's very broad. I mean, there's no
(10:24):
way to stand next to a guy like that and
not just feel that there's his size in comparison to yourself. Now,
I don't find any athletes in committing the sense of
like I feel threatened or anything. But he is just
a large guy, like a guy wouldn't want to run
into in a back out. So how did bum Gardner
react when you showed him the photo? The first thing
(10:46):
he says to us is, while you're ruining my alias.
So I think he knew that the days of flying
into the radar as Mason Saunders were put And was
the conversation acrimonious? There was? It totally fine. It was
a pleasant conversation. He was cooperative, he was a little nervous, understandably.
I asked some questions and I felt like we got
a good story out of it. He spoke to us
(11:06):
for a good fifteen minutes or so, rather openly, explaining
why he liked Team roping, how many events he's entered
in one. There were some times where he was kind
of grinning through gritted teeth, but he killed in a
lot of details for us. Why Mason Saunders, Like, where
did that come from? It was a shortening at Madison
and Saunders as his wife's maiden name. We learned a
lot more about it by going through it that way
(11:28):
than if we had come in super hard guns and
blazing and he had shut its down, and then we
would have had to rely on just what we could. Finally,
Internet once we talked to Bum Garners, a PR person
hanging around in the clubhouse, and so we knew that
the cat was out of the bag. I did send
an email through Team PR to get the owners input,
and then the owner deferred to the g M Mike
(11:50):
Hasen and so I texted Hazen and said, hey, if
you got a minute, there's something urgent that I need
to get a response for you from. When he gave
me a call and essentially no mommented to me. Although
I got the sense that this was going to be
news to him. Immediately rushed back, transcribe quotes, put the
story together, backs, had some suggestions, and I'm pretty prid
about the story turned out. I feel like you learn
(12:11):
a lot about Madison Bumgard reading it, and what about
the critique that what this guy does in his private
time is actually none of your business and your job
is just to cover the Diamondbacks in baseball, and this
story isn't something that journalist should even be pursuing. He
was doing something that might be prohibited by his contract.
He was doing it in public, he was photographed, he
(12:32):
got posted on Facebook where anybody could see it, and
he was doing it under a fake name. If you
had a box for like most newsworthy story like things
that are journalist should pursue, that's it. And that's just
the price of being a famous athlete. The things that
you do that are interesting, especially if you do them
in public or fair game for reporters. But one question
I do have is is there any chance that the
(12:54):
people watching these rodeos didn't know there was an MLB
superstar on the whole. It's like they just thought it
was some random guy named Mason Saunders. Everybody there knew
that was Massive bump gun. But I'm also sure that
they all knew that if they started posting photos and saying, Hey,
check out Massive bump Gunner out here at this team
roping event, then Massive bum Burner wouldn't be coming around anymore.
(13:16):
So where were you when the story was officially published
and what was it like for you? And what was
the reaction to the story. I don't know if I
can describe it accurately. It's like this crazy feeling of
excitement and anticipation. I think. I remember I was sitting
in the parking lot outside my gym when our editors said, Okay,
here it is, it's live, and then you know, your
(13:36):
phone just goes nuts with notifications and it's overwhelmed. It
was the talk of the sports world across the country
for probably two or three days. I mean, I appeared
on MPR, I appeared on Dan Lebotard Show, Like a
whole bunch of people called me that I never wanted
to talk to me before. And what was it like
when this crazy story that you reported and wrote with
(13:57):
Baggedley garnered such a huge risk bots I mean, it
was great to have people talking about the work that
you do. It was fun to see all the people
just blown away by it, not by anything that really
read it, but just that like he had been doing
this and just the ridiculousness of the story. And so
it was really fun. And you have to kind of
tell yourself as a reporter to not revel in it
too much and like not mix it up in the
(14:18):
mentions too much because I still have to cover match
and bum Runner for the next five seasons and I
want him to not hate me. That makes sense. And
what happens to his rodeo career, I would guess that
it's dead. I would be surprised if he competed again,
because the team is aware of it now, and I'm
sure they would be very angry if you did. One
(14:38):
final question I have for you is after outing his secret,
you then have to continue covering this person. I'm curious
where do you stand with him these days? The sadness
of the pandemics. I don't know where I stand with
match bump bar and uh so I actually never got
a chance to really get a sense of how he
feels about me after we reported this, so I guess
we'll find out whenever are allowed back to the club.
(14:59):
Euse all right, That is it for today's episode of Big.
Thanks to Zach Buchanan of The Athletic for sharing his story.
Go ahead and follow Zack on Twitter at z h Buchanon.
And if you see any athletes competing in weird sports
or on horses or anywhere you wouldn't expect, please make
(15:20):
sure to let me know. In a related note, I'm
working on a story about a hoops game on a
Norwegian cruise ship that may or may not have involved
Michael Jordan's, so tune in to find out what's happening there.
One piece of bookkeeping, if you have a moment, please
be so kind as to rate and review and share
and all that good stuff. And finally, as we do
every week, we check in with the legend Chris, Matt
(15:41):
Doug Russo, Chris, how do we do this week? Maddie?
Good job, keep up to good work, all right, thank you, Chris,
that's it for the show. To talk to you guys
next week. Triggeration is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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