On the eve of his team's final road trip of the 2005-06 college basketball season, USC guard Gabe Pruitt received an instant message from a secret admirer.

SexyBruinBabe introduced herself in bubbly pink font as "Victoria," a UCLA student who had her eye on Pruitt since watching him play earlier in the season.

The longer Pruitt chatted with Victoria, the more intrigued he became. Victoria flirted unabashedly with Pruitt, sent him pictures and complimented him on his "amazing body." Pruitt responded by telling her, "u have a nice fit body" and "I want to see u bad now."

Victoria eventually invited Pruitt to a party she and her friends were throwing that Saturday night and urged him to bring a few teammates. Pruitt quickly agreed to meet her in Westwood after he returned home from a road game that afternoon at Cal.

"Me being girl crazy at the time, I took high interest," Pruitt told Yahoo Sports. "I was with my teammate Chris Penrose and I couldn't wait to share the news with him about these new girls I met for us."

Pruitt was still excited about his date with Victoria until the moment he stepped onto the floor at Haas Pavilion and took a peek at Cal's student section. Only then did he realize Victoria was a hoax and he was the victim of one of the most devilish pranks in college basketball history.

One group of Cal students held up sheets of paper that spelled out "C-A-L-L G-A-B-E" on one side and the digits of his cell phone number on the other. Other students waved posters with pictures of "Victoria" on them and messages like "We'll see you at UCLA tonight" scrawled underneath. As USC players lined up on the floor for the national anthem, the entire Cal student section serenaded Pruitt in unison with chants of "Victoria! Victoria!"

"I just remember going, 'Oh my God,'" said Penrose, a walk-on guard who roomed with Pruitt on the road. "Gabe came up to me and the look on his face was unforgettable. He was so rattled, so rattled. It's hard to actually articulate the sickening feeling in your stomach when you come to realize that the date you were looking forward to was one big prank and the whole student section was in on it."

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Uncovering the identity of the prank's mastermind isn't easy because for a long time he did not want to be found. Even after graduating from Cal in 2009, Steven Kenyon chose not to speak publicly about it for years out of fear a future employer might not find humor in what we now know as catfishing.

With the 10-year anniversary of the prank set to arrive on Friday, Kenyon no longer has such concerns. He told Yahoo Sports the purpose was to give Cal a competitive advantage by throwing Pruitt off his game, something he'd been doing to opposing players all season that year.

A passionate Cal basketball fan with a penchant for heckling, Kenyon usually arrived early enough to home games to snare a floor seat as close to the opposing bench as possible. Instead of resorting to cussing or cliches like most hecklers do, Kenyon befriended dozens of opposing players on social media and sought out potential fodder that way.

"Facebook was brand new," Kenyon said. "Not a single person used Facebook like they do now in the sense of security and personal boundaries. Athletes from all over the Pac-10 added me at will and I was literally staring at phone numbers, email addresses, screen names, personal photos, girlfriend names. I was like, 'Hmmmm, how I can I use this to give my team an advantage?'"

Sometimes he'd mess with an opposing player by poking fun at a silly TV show or movie he liked. Other times he'd come to games armed with printouts of the star player's goofiest Facebook photos. Responses varied from an Akron forward hurling insults back at him, to Stanford's Brook and Robin Lopez laughing uproariously at his barbs and high fiving him after the final buzzer.

When Cal entered the final week of the 2005-06 season in need of at least one victory to secure an NCAA tournament bid, Kenyon decided his trademark methods of distraction were insufficient for games this important. The Cal freshman instead decided to up the ante by attempting to dupe an opposing player with the help of the contact information at his disposal.

View photos Former USC guard Gabe Pruitt (AP Photo/Roy Dabner) More

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