Harry’s ham saga
PATRICK Dangerfield has been dragged into Harry Taylor’s “ham shake” saga as one of footy’s most bizarre pranks took a new twist yesterday.
Josh Jenkins, the man who received “about 25g of ham” from Taylor in a post-match handshake last Friday night, reckons the mastermind was all Dangerfield.
Taylor souvenired a slice of ham from the hotel buffet in Adelaide and supposedly played with it in his sock in a premeditated prank after Jenkins suffered ham-related food poisoning before the game.
Jenkins nearly didn’t play against the Cats after losing almost 7kg.
“I think ‘ Danger’ sort of threw it up to him at lunch the day of the game,” Jenkins suggested on Triple M in Adelaide yesterday.
“And said: ‘I think it would be funny if you give him a piece of ham’.”
We put the latest claim to the Cats yesterday: “Wouldn’t surprise me if Pat was involved but that hasn’t come up at all internally,” a Cats source said.
“A bit like the lone gunman shooting JFK — could be an enduring mystery!”
A week on, Jenkins still can’t quite work out why someone he hardly knew would consider — and follow through with — such a gag.
“I’m more famous for a piece of ham than I am for football at the moment,” Jenkins said. “It was a very, very strange scenario . . . to say the absolute least.
“I saw him rolling something up just as we sort of walked towards each other, and I thought it was just his finger tape. And he sort of reached out, and I knew he had it in his hand.
“And we separated and I had some shaved deli ham in my hand. We didn’t speak.
“I was honestly, and I still am as you can tell, dumbfounded. I had no idea what was going on.”
So what are some of the other footy pranks that have gone down in recent years? JAMES Kelly was known as the prankster at Geelong but this gag with Cats teammate Shannon Byrnes went on for weeks.
“Our most basic prank was going down to Rebel Sport and buying an air horn and driving down to the local golf course and waiting for players to tee off,” Byrnes said in May.
“We would do it every Saturday morning for a period and I reckon we got the same bloke every Saturday morning for a month.
“And I reckon he would have been wondering when it was going to go off every time for the next month.” THIS one also involved some food. Brett Deledio thought it was funny at the time, but what seemed harmless turned into a costly ordeal at Richmond last year.
When players returned from the bye during the week last season, Deledio planned a special welcome back present for a young teammate.
“I tried to just have a bit of a gag with my locker mate Dylan Grimes,” Deledio said.
“I dipped his (car) key in a bit of tuna just to make it smell like fish.”
But that is where the prank went belly up.
“Unfortunately, it was an electronic key and $800 later I am paying for his key to be fixed,” Deledio said. STEVE Johnson made sure a wide-eyed Nakia Cockatoo remembered his first interstate trip with the Cats in 2015.
Johnson took on the role of a Sydney Morning Herald sports journalist, ringing Cockatoo from opposite ends of the team bus to ask about preparations for the Sydney game.
The questions started harmlessly enough — “How have you found the move in temperature from up at Darwin to cold Geelong” — before testing whether he would trip up on injury news about Tom Hawkins — “There’s news that Josh Walker has made the trip up on the bus”.
Once questions turned to “do you have a girlfriend, those AFL players are known to be batting above their average”, Cockatoo twigged, much to the enjoyment of his teammates.