It was supposed to be a typical article about LaVar Ball. The outspoken father of UCLA’s Lonzo Ball calls into a radio show, says something crazy and makes the entire internet angry. This is something LaVar does on a near daily basis.

Why should we expect any different from the latest LaVar quote circulating on the internet? The quote in question has been making rounds on Kentucky Wildcats fan sites. It was some A-plus heat and bulletin board material, but did LaVar actually say it? For The Win investigated … and found the complicated backstory to a quote that almost certainly was never uttered by LaVar Ball.

This was the quote:

“Kentucky is just a tune-up game ’til the Final Four. We took care of Kentucky once and we will do it again.”

Whoa there.

When I saw the quote, I knew it had to be shared with the rest of you fine folks of the internet. The quote definitely stood out in its outlandishness. While UCLA beat Kentucky at Rupp Arena in its first meeting, even LaVar Ball would realize that it’s a new game and any team can win. Plus, with No. 1 North Carolina and No. 4 seed Butler looming in the Elite Eight, LaVar would have been overlooking not just Kentucky but also those Elite Eight opponents.

Something didn’t add up.

Still, I had to find this audio and hear it for myself. The most prominent site to initially run with the quote was the popular Wildcats site kentuckysportsradio.com. (Update: The site has since issued an apology). But it was odd. The story did not attribute where the quote came from. It just said it was from a Monday radio interview. See the screenshot below.

Strange. Where did KSR find the quote? Well, a search of the words “LaVar” and “tuneup” will take you to a tweet from a Twitter account with zero followers that sent the word-for-word quote to KSR at 8:13 a.m. Pacific Time. This was the earliest reference to the interview in question.

A few hours later, KSR’s founder Matt Jones tweeted the quote to his 154,000 followers. The tweet has since been deleted. (Screenshot below)

The quote in KSR’s article appeared to clean up some of the grammar, but it was strikingly similar to the tweet sent to its site’s Twitter account. After KSR posted the article, a few more Kentucky sites followed suit. At this point, I had no reason to believe the LaVar quote was a fabrication. It was just unclear when he said it and who he said it to — that’s what I looked to answer.

A sports site, The Spun, posted an article about the quote and attributed it to CBS Sports Radio’s Doug Gottlieb Show. I asked the article’s author on Twitter about the quote’s audio, and we both were unsure where exactly to find it. It wasn’t listed in the show archives on CBS Sports Radio’s site. But radio stations can be slow about posting audio archives. This could have been the case here. I reached out to CBS Sports Radio producer Adam Klug and awaited his response.

@AndyJ0seph I misread another post on it, looking now. Everyone's being strangely vague about what show it was. — Dan Lyons (@Dan_Lyons76) March 21, 2017

As the search for the audio continued, I suspected the quote didn’t come from CBS. Perhaps it was from his Monday radio appearance on ESPN LA. The topic of the Kentucky game did come up, but LaVar did not make nearly as absurd of a statement as he did in the KSR story. He told ESPN LA:

“If you’re ahead, all those guys are alpha dogs. So everybody is going to turn into Michael Jordan on that team and then it’s going to be hard. What UCLA does is they play with great chemistry. That’s a huge thing when you can have all of these guys shoot the ball and nobody’s saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got to shoot five in a row.’”

SB Nation’s Kentucky fan blog, A Sea of Blue, also attributed the quote to CBS Sports Radio. (Update: A Sea of Blue has pulled the article).

A Sea of Blue’s post was picked up by Reddit, and then several other Kentucky blogs ran with the story.

CBS Sports Radio’s Doug Gottlieb Show was again cited as the source of the quote on nationofblue.com. OK, so everyone is assuming it came from CBS — even CBS itself. At 5 p.m. PT, CBS Sports’ Kyle Boone posted an article about the quote and too credited the Doug Gottlieb Show. But it did not include the audio and attributed the transcription to The Spun.

This was all so strange, but just minutes later, we had a break in the case. Adam Klug responded to my email. He wrote:

I would be the right contact if Lavar Ball had been a guest on our show, but unfortunately, we have not had him on. I’m not sure where those quotes came from. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.

A search of LaVar’s media appearances on Monday revealed that ESPN LA’s Morning Show was his lone appearance. He joined Fox Sports Radio on Tuesday, and said “everybody got to play their best if they want to keep surviving” when asked about Kentucky. But that interview came after the Kentucky remark had circulated, and that verifiable statement was nowhere close to the message of the “tune-up game” comment. If he didn’t make the remark on ESPN LA’s program and he didn’t make it on CBS Sports Radio, then did he even say it at all?

It doesn’t appear that he did.