This article appeared in the 2007 edition of the annual Halloween joke issue. The content below was intended for entertainment and parody purposes only and is not true. Happy Halloween!
After over 16 years, Tom Emanski’s monopoly on the instructional sports video market is over. Instead, Willie Stroker Productions, the company behind Emanski’s popular long-running series, has hired Cornell’s own football coach Jim Knowles ’87 to market his own string of videos, entitled “Jim Knowles’s ’87 10 Greatest Motivational Speeches.” After Knowles showed the football team a video of water boiling before its season-opening win over Colgate and then told them a story about ancient Greek warriors burning their boats before homecoming, the coach was a natural choice.
“To be honest, Tom Emanski’s name wasn’t selling videos anymore,” said I.P. Frehly, CEO of Willie Stroker Productions. “Even though his team was AAU back-to-back-to-back National champions in the early 1990s and he showed kids everywhere how to throw the ball from the outfield into a hole behind home plate, our market research showed that he was the 3072nd ranked celebrity in the United States. So instead, we chose the 3071st ranked celebrity, Jim Knowles.”
Knowles promised that he would come up with a lot of new motivational speeches for coaches to use across the country.
“I have a ton of motivational speeches up my sleeve,” Knowles said. “For example, how about buying a magic lamp and conjuring a genie before the game? Or how about bringing in a sailor suffering from scurvy to give a speech? The team probably won’t know that scurvy was largely eradicated in the U.S. years ago.”
“I swear, the man doesn’t stop with the motivational speeches,” said an anonymous member of the team. “I remember when I was a sophomore, he tried to kill a live Tiger so that we would be motivated to beat Princeton. Unfortunately, our offensive coordinator was almost eaten. The next year, he showed us a graphic pornographic film and claimed we should the same horrible, horrible things to Dartmouth that were happening in the film. I still have nightmares about that one. Let’s just say it involved a chipmunk, a rope, a bucket, a bicycle and former first lady Barbara Bush.”
One drawback of the new Knowles videos is that former MLB superstar Fred McGriff will no longer be able to receive residual checks from the videos. McGriff filmed a role in the commercial for Emanski’s tapes in 1991, and has been used ever since. According to Willie Stroker Productions, he will no longer be used due to the fact that he hasn’t been an effective major leaguer in about five years.
"Best Of" Motivational Speeches
“Who the [expletive] are you?” The Crime Dog said. “Why are you calling me at my home? How did you get this number? And who the [expletive] is The Cornell Daily Sun? If you don’t hang up now, I will [expletive] break your [expletive] and shove it up your [expletive], you [expletive] piece of [expletive].”
Knowles will take a leave of absence from the team while he films the videos. Ricky Williams will coach the team on an interim basis, and has already ordered 1,000 bags of Doritos for his office.