I love stories that seem to go in one direction and end up with a surprise conclusion, complete with a “gotcha.”

My friend David Housel, former sports information director and athletic director at Auburn, has a touch of genius in his writings. He makes his points cogently, accompanied by a devilish sense of humor. It’s what you might expect from a man who has “B.B.” inscribed inside his wedding ring, standing for, ahem, “Beat Bama.”

I found this one in “From the Desk of David Housel: A Collection of Auburn Stories,” a compendium of columns published in 1991 by the Auburn Network. I keep this little book at the ready, searching for story ideas, looking for inspiration.

David is also the author of the “Auburn Football Vault: The History of the Auburn Tigers, 1892-2007,” the equivalent of my tome on Tennessee football. I tell him I made all his mistakes for him. He says I “set the standard” for the rest of the series.

In this case, David pulled off a real con job on Auburn partisans and some of their fiercest competitors (no names mentioned).

It was in October 1987 that Housel wrote a sad story about some other school (or schools) reporting Auburn for alleged SEC and NCAA recruiting violations. He called these allegations “troublesome” for his beloved Tigers football program. There was official confirmation that Auburn was recruiting two prospective student-athletes, a definite no-no.

In recruiting parlance, there are more things you can’t do than you can. It’s sometimes hard to fathom, but rules are rules. Everyone is watching your every move. You’re watching everyone else’s moves. It’s cloak-and-dagger stuff.

The “prospects” in question were identified as Joe Mack and Otto Mcnab, both of whom “possessed all the assets we look for in our athletes,” from both a physical and intangible standpoint. They were “can’t miss” prospects who wouldn’t.

In his apparent exuberance, Housel had written a story about them for the Auburn game program. He noted that their appearance in his column resulted in Auburn having to stop recruiting them. “At least two schools in the SEC turned us in for recruiting violations, and we were called on the carpet to answer, “ he wrote, thinking mea culpa.

You could only imagine what happened when these two names, not on anybody’s recruiting list, suddenly appeared to be headed to Auburn, termed the “Loveliest Village on the Plains,” according to Oliver Goldsmith, and, really, no one else outside of the family.

The questions came in torrents from everyone. Who are these guys and how did we miss them? How were the experts so wrong? Is the fabric of society coming unraveled?

All over the South, maybe beyond, the phone lines were buzzing. The call-in shows were in a tizzy. Had there been message boards in those days, comments would have been “hot,” as many similar controversies on this newspaper’s Website are designated. Tiger fans might have screamed to the heavens about the injustice of it all. Fans of other schools may have gloated in Auburn’s apparent misery.

Even the SEC honchos were concerned. Letters of inquiry were sent. Meetings were scheduled. Housel noted that the SEC guy in charge of these matters, a man named Bob Barrett, was “justifiably upset” when he read the column.

The upshot of all this was, alas, they would never get to play for Auburn, but also would never play for anybody else, any time, anywhere.

Here’s the catch. Neither of them existed, except in the pages of popular fiction.

It was a big-time April Fool’s joke at the end of October. Joe Mack was the hero in Louis L’Amour’s “Last of the Breed,” and Otto Macnab was a hero in James Michener’s “Texas.”

When Housel told Bob the real story, that he had conned everybody, Barrett could hardly wait to tell the informants what had happened.

Their response is consigned to history, but Housel said their comments were “unprintable, because this is, for the most part, a family publication.”

He then added that, “They laughed, too, in the end.”

“The note about Macnab and Mack was included to show just how ridiculous recruiting talk can be,” Housel said. The prospects were not who they were cracked up to be. Let that be a lesson for all of us.

Housel wrote this story to warn overzealous fans about being involved in recruiting, but there’s another perspective that is equally important, i.e. fans placing too much stock in the recruiting rankings.

“There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” even in recruiting.

By the way, there is a prospect in a small Middle Tennessee town near Carthage and Gallatin who is “just a sophomore, but no one can tackle him. No one knows about him, but he’s the real deal … .”

More than a few years ago, Tom Mattingly interviewed many Tennessee signees once the requisite paperwork was in hand. In his present life, he is the author of “The Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006” (2006), to be published in second edition in 2008, and “Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years” (1998). He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called “The Vol Historian.”

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.