About 30 years ago on the third floor of the Ann Arbor (MI) News building sat the sports department. The Sports Editor at that time was a fella named Geoff Larcom (check him out in Episode 16 of our podcast, “Conversations with Sports Fans”). Geoff was always looking for ways to allow his staff to excel within the framework of reader engagement.
During this era, dare I say, there was as talented and inventive a stable of part-time staff at the News as it ever had. One of those part-time sportswriters was Pat Schutte. Pat was a quirky guy who wrestled in high school at Rochester Adams, graduated from Northern Michigan University, and was a professional snowboarder who helped pay the bills by working at the News.
Larcom knew when he had someone with the creativity to turn loose on a project and that’s what he did with Pat and thus was born, The Fan Teaser.
The concept was unbelievably simple: Pat would take one of the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of photos the paper received (some of which were filed) from the Associated Press wire service each week, have it enlarged and cropped in such a way that only a small, yet somewhat recognizable, portion of the image was seen. An irreverent (because that was Pat’s style) written clue accompanied the image. The idea was for readers of the daily sports section to attempt to figure out who or what the photo was. The reveal, along with the full-sized image, would run a day or two later in the sports section.
As long as he kept it in good taste, Pat essentially had carte blanche on The Fan Teaser.
Fast forward these 30 years and, through the beauty of social media and images aplenty online, Pat has revived The Fan Teaser. Out of the kindness of his heart (and my required public admission right here that South Lyon High School’s Billy Ray Porter was a more talented football player than Tecumseh High School’s Heath Fowler) we have received permission from Pat to run The Fan Teaser in this space each week.
All of the work is Pat’s. The images (cropped and full size) were selected by him and he wrote the clues. We here at The Sports Fan Project are merely a conduit to, perhaps, a slightly larger audience.
We invite you to use the Comment option to take a crack at solving the Teaser and, if you’re so inclined, participate in some good-spirited banter with your fellow sports fans. The Fan Teaser will appear each Friday morning with the reveal coming to you by the early kickoff on Sunday.
Who is this? And who did this?
