Everybody is saying that fake news is a new phenomenon, an unwanted outgrowth of social media, WikiLeaks, and a gullible populace.

I know better.

That’s because I invented fake news, all the way back in 1980.

Let me explain.

It was mid-February. Pitchers and catchers had just reported to spring training, but talk of a baseball strike filled the news (such as it was then).

My buddy David and I were college seniors, about three months away from graduating. We were huge baseball fans and could remain friends despite the fact that he was a diehard Yankees fan and I was all about the Mets. And we thought, isn’t there something we could do to stop the strike?

After all, we are college students.

We hit on the idea of calling sports reporters at each of the newspapers representing the cities where major league baseball teams were located. Back then, there were only about two dozen, instead of the 50 or 70 major league cities today, if I have my facts straight.

We divided up the newspapers. Since Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet, I have no idea how we found the names and phone numbers of the newspapers. We probably got them out of the Almanac (if you’re under 30, look it up).

First, though, we called AP and UPI, and told them the same story we would tell each of the reporters—that the two of us were the cofounders of a nationwide stop the strike movement called “Fans Against Strike Talk” or FAST. We were planning a nationwide petition drive to convince labor and management could resolve their differences.

Responses on the part of the sports reporters ranged from skeptical to fascinated.

I guess at one point they had been college students, too.

The idea that two kids were trying to start a sports revolution from their dorm rooms was entertaining to them.

Back then, long distance calls cost 25 cents a minute, so David and I were clearly putting our money where our mouths were.

I had probably spoken to 10 or 11 reporters when I called the next one and he said, nonchalantly, “Oh, yeah. I just saw that come over the AP wire.”

Fake news was born.

Now that we had a wire service behind us, we called back all the other papers and told them to check the feed from the AP. We were legit. And practically every paper ran with the story.

Other baseball fans saw the stories and contacted us. In particular, there was a group called “Baseball Bugs of America” —you can’t make this stuff up—consisting of fans in half a dozen cities. They would carry our petitions at opening day.

The thing snowballed, and this was without the help of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any of those crutches that fake news creators lean on today.

Within a matter of months, David and I had amassed 22,000 signatures. So of course we did the only sensible thing—we went to Manhattan, located the East Side hotel where the negotiations were taking place, and invited ourselves in.

We met Ray Grebey, the chief negotiator for the owners, in the lobby, and tried to present him with the petitions.

“We don’t want a strike, either,” he told us. “Give that stuff to the Players Association.”

So we headed up in the elevator to the floor where the meeting was taking place in a hotel suite. Also in the elevator were Reggie Jackson and Mark Belanger.

I was fascinated by Reggie Jackson’s arms. He was in a double-knit polo shirt, and his arms looked surprisingly normal. I was certain that he would be just jacked. He looked, well, normal. But man, he could drive the ball.

We got upstairs, and for whatever reason, we were admitted to the negotiations. And there stood the god of sports labor relations himself, Marvin Miller, and he was in no mood for our collegiate nonsense.

Instead of giving us a nice pat on the head and telling us not to worry, baseball would find it’s way back to the stadiums and all would be well, he chose to give David and me a dressing down that still smarts to this day.

“You have no business being here,” he said angrily. “This is a negotiation between labor and management. You have no say in it. If you buy a shirt, do you think you have the right to go to the shirt factory and tell the owner how to make the shirt?”

The ball players, who had been watching Miller for a clue as to how to treat us, piled on. Jackson, Belanger, Rusty Staub, and the others basically told us that we were two of the stupidest people they had ever seen.

We left the petitions on the table and headed out of the room, with our tails between our legs.

But it wasn’t over.

Somehow, Good Morning America and Sports Illustrated had gotten a hold of the story. In May of 1980, three months after we had invented our “group,” we found ourselves on the set of Good Morning America, interviewed by David Hartman, a baseball prospect and therefore one with a personal interest in the story.

The morning we aired, I actually had a Latin exam scheduled. I called my professor from the St. Moritz Hotel, where ABC put us up, and told him that I wouldn’t be able to make the final because I was going to appear on national television.

He understood and let me take it the same afternoon.

Sports Illustrated called and ran a piece in the Scorecard section about our humiliation. I had been reading that column reverently almost from the time I could form words into a sentence.

The other night, I went online to see if there was any record of Fans Against Strike Talk, since it had occurred in pre-Internet times. Remarkably, there were a bunch of stories that came up immediately, from all those newspapers we had hoodwinked back in February, 1980.

But the best part of all? Marvin Miller eventually donated his papers to a graduate school at NYU focused on labor history. One of the items, catalogued online and preserved for all time, consists of a box of petitions from Fans Against Strike Talk.

Did David and I hasten the negotiations? Doubtful.

But that, kids, is how fake news was born.

(New York Times bestselling author and Shark Tank entrepreneur Michael Levin runs BusinessGhost.com, a book ghostwriting firm)