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Jose Canseco has been at the center of a number of strange tales over the course of the fairly fascinating life he’s lived, but it’s pretty hard to top the time he lied about his finger falling off in the middle of a poker tournament.
The former MLB slugger rose to fame in the 1980s as one half of the “Bash Brothers” (the nickname he and Mark McGwire earned while playing for the Athletics), but what he achieved on the field has been largely overshadowed by his antics off of it.
Given his well-documented use of performance-enhancing drugs during his time in the league, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest roid rage contributed to the slew of legal issues Canseco has found himself dealing with over the years, but the notorious attention-seeker has figured out plenty of other ways to make headlines.
That was the case in October 2014 when the world learned Canseco had been rushed into surgery after shooting off the tip of the middle finger of his left hand while cleaning a handgun he’d forgotten to empty after a trip to the range.
While that would have been strange enough on its own, it marked the start of a miniature saga thanks to the lie he was compelled to tell after it was successfully reattached.
Jose Canseco made up a strange story about his finger falling off during a poker tournament
Canseco was still recovering from the surgery he’d had a few weeks before when he hopped on Twitter to share a very unexpected twist concerning his recovery by claiming he’d been playing in a poker tournament when the stitched-up digit unexpectedly fell off.
Ok well I might as well tell you .I was playing in a poker tournament last night and my finger fell off .someone took a video of it.
— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) November 14, 2014
A few days later, Canseco said he was planning to sell the severed tip of his finger on eBay. While the platform’s ban on the sale of human body parts would’ve made it difficult for him to make a quick buck in that particular manner, he could at least fall back on the supposed video in his possession after it attracted the interest of TMZ.
However, it was at that point he realized his bluff had been called, as he told the outlet he’d been toying with the idea of passing off a video featuring a fake finger he’d come across at a Halloween store in the wake of the accident as the real thing before coming clean.
Jose Canseco is a very interesting guy.