The New York Times has an interesting piece about three smart-alecks who cooperated on a newspaper hoax in 1941, convincing several newspapers (including The Times) to run the weekly scores of a make-believe college football team and its make-believe opponents.

What the hoaxers did was simple: They called in the made-up score to the sports desk of the NYT and other major papers — and several of them, including The Times, ran it in the small type known as “agate”.

It was that easy. The people taking the result asked cursory questions … or no questions at all.

If we knew how much of this sort of thing went on, it probably would be disturbing — in part because much of the fake news probably was never exposed for what it was/wasn’t.

For decades, newspapers depended on outsiders to provide results, often over the phone, and our only defense against hoaxes was context and familiarity and trust.

We never ran a fake college football score; getting two fake names past us would have been too difficult.

Our vulnerability would have been on the high-school level, or other local-local news.

Such as the instance, nearly 40 years ago, when a local source made up a story — a good one — as he stood at my desk, and I promptly did a few hundred words on it. Which appeared in the morning sports section.

That hoax was quickly shot down — by those who were portrayed badly in the non-story I was given.

This happened at a time when tennis was a major participant sport. It seemed every town in California (and maybe the country) had popular and well-organized tournaments involving the best local players.

Some of these players were quite good, and some became local celebrities, in the pages of our newspaper.

I was working in the office. It was a weekend, when the final rounds of local tournaments, were played, and a member of the family who organized the competition came into the office with results … and he happened to mention the “fight” between two of the most prominent players in the community.

A fight? I pressed him for details, and he provided them. Words were exchanged on a key point. Tempers flared. The players confronted each other.

I was writing down all this as he spoke. And it was all fiction.

Should I have called one of the players and checked on this? I should have.

But this was straight from the son of the tournament organizer. Bringing in results was something he did regularly. I trusted him.

What made it easier to take on face value was that the actions the young man described were not wildly inconsistent with what I knew of the two players involved. One was often portrayed as volatile, and the other was one of his rising rivals.

So I bought the hoax. It went into the paper.

We found out about it the next morning. The alleged tennis “combatants” called the newspaper and complained in strong terms. Rightfully so.

It was one of the lowest ebbs of my career. I could have been fired. That I was not … was the confirmation by others on the sports staff that the local tennis results often had been brought in by the individual who had spun such a colorful story. As well as an abject retraction in the pages of the newspaper.

So, hoaxes. They happen. Usually, journalists don’t fall from them.

Once in a while, they do, and it’s an amusing story, 75 years later. In other instances, it’s a disquieting one, even decades later.