Punk'd
This golf tournament prank that Patrick Mahomes (and fans) fell for has people all sorts of riled up on social media
We live in an attention-seeking Tiktok world, and with that comes out lot of utterly nonsensical "pranks," often staged and/or just plain not funny. One prank pulled at the American Century Championship this past weekend, however, was definitely not staged, was definitely funny, and will definitely produce a ton of #takes in the aftermath. So, all in all, a quality prank.
The gist: a fan at Lake Tahoe threw a ball near a large group of other fans just off one of the fairways and said "heads up" in the hopes they'd believe the ball had been hit by a competitor. Once the small crowd began noticing the ball and pointing it out to each other, news that it was possibly the ball of Patrick Mahomes began to spread like wildfire. As Mahomes made his way up the fairway, an even larger crowd began to form around the golf ball.
Of course, as Mahomes came to find out, it was not his ball, but the ball the fan tossed near a crowd and got them all to believe it was Mahomes', including Mahomes, who walked over to check and said "That's not me." We should point out that a marshal actually pointed Mahomes in the direction of the prank ball, so the marshal fell for it and, in turn, Mahomes did too.
Here's the clip:
I mean, you just gotta tip your cap to this kid. He had everybody fooled, so much so that Mahomes, knowing he hit the ball way farther than that, still checked to see if it was his. This was more well executed than one of those magical Andy Reid play-action screen plays that somehow always result in a touchdown.
As you can imagine, there were plenty of takes on social media regarding the prank, ranging from "this is hilarious" to "give this kid the electric chair." OK, not that far, but still, people love to share their opinions. Here's a sampling of the responses in another Instagram account's comment section:
All fair points. It's a very good prank. It's also one that probably never needs to see the light of day again because A. it will never be as good as this one, and B. people will absolutely ruin it, just like we ruin everything else. Pace of play is slow enough already, let's not add to it.