Taro Tsujimoto
| Taro Tsujimoto | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Born |
November 16, 1954 Osaka, Japan |
||
| Height | 5 ft 9 in (175 cm) | ||
| Weight | 165 lb (75 kg; 11 st 11 lb) | ||
| Position | Center | ||
| Shoots | Left | ||
|
NHL team (P) Cur. team |
Buffalo Sabres Tokyo Katana (JIHL) |
||
| National team |
 Japan
|
||
| NHL Draft | 183rd overall, 1974 Buffalo Sabres |
||
| Playing career | 1974 –present | ||
Taro Tsujimoto (Japanese katakana: ツジモト タロウ; hiragana: つじもと たろう) is an imaginary ice hockey player who was drafted by the National Hockey League's Buffalo Sabres 183rd overall in the 11th round of the 1974 NHL Amateur Draft.
The Sabres' general manager at the time, Punch Imlach, was reportedly fed up with the slow drafting process via the telephone, a process intended to keep draft picks secret from the rival World Hockey Association. Imlach, who had already drafted several players that would go on to great success with the team (Derek Smith in the previous round and All-Stars Lee Fogolin and Danny Gare in the first two rounds) earlier in the draft, decided to have some fun at the expense of the league and Clarence Campbell, the NHL president for the last 28 years. He enlisted PR Director Paul Wieland to create a fictional player.
Wieland wanted the player to be of Asian descent and he knew instantly what the last name would be. As a college student driving Route 16 from Buffalo to St. Bonaventure, Wieland would regularly pass the Tsujimoto store and that name just stuck in his head. In 2013, hockey blogger Ben Tsujimoto revealed that Imlach eventually called his grandfather – Joshua Tsujimoto, a local grocery store owner – and a Sabres staffer asked for permission to use his family name without revealing the club's true intent, as well as asking what were "popular" first names in Japanese. Imlach chose to select star center Taro Tsujimoto of the Japanese Hockey League's Tokyo Katanas, with "Katanas" being an approximation for "Sabres" in the Japanese language, both referring to types of swords. (The JIHL, although it was a real entity, had no team representing Tokyo at the time; Kokudo would not relocate to the city until 1984. Incidentally, many years later, Kokudo would provide the first real Japanese player to play in the NHL, Yutaka Fukufuji.) The NHL made the pick official, and so it was reported by media outlets including The Hockey News.
...
Wikipedia