#... honestly steve probably wouldn't hang up on john even while being called names but let's not end the post on quite that tragic a note

[five-wow]

so i'm rewatching the pilot and i'm giggling a lot and i'm twelve minutes in (steve just picked up the wheel lube. he's about to meet danny. this is very stupid but it always has me going hm.) and we just learned that when john called him "champ", he was leaving a sneaky little clue to look in the toolbox in the garage:

and googling "champ toolbox" and finding a lot of champion brand results has convinced me that that's probably what this is (the streak of black grime is obviously covering part of the word/sticker), so now this whole thing is just making me think... was this a deliberately planned thing on john's end? did he sit down at some point in his life and go, "well, if i ever end up in a hostage situation and i have to convey to someone where i left the secret tapes on the investigation into my wife's murder which i've been obsessed with to the point of missing most of my children's lives to keep chasing that ghost, then i'd better have a codeword i can throw into the conversation" and then fortunately his champion toolbox just so happened to look like this? did he maybe even dump oily black dirt over the box to achieve the desired effect, like a macho man arts and crafts project?

because i wouldn't put any of that past a mcgarrett, but i'm seeing some incredibly obvious avenues to comedy here in a) what if the only person he could communicate with had been someone other than steve? would he have called, like, the elderly woman senator champ if she'd been held hostage with him somehow? and b) if this champ thing wasn't planned, but a spur of the moment idea, that would mean it's just pure coincidence that any of this worked out well enough to go undetected by the guys pointing the guns. what if the first three letters had been blacked out instead of the last three? "listen to me, mpion" just doesn't have the same ring to it. there are also many different toolbox brands, as i've discovered today! i found one that said husky on it. there's homak, which would be interesting with the last three letters crossed out like in canon. taparia with the first two letters gone would create something close to pariah, which might be a little too on the nose from this dad to this son. and then apparently there's also a brand called... dirtbag. i don't think i need to explain the joke for that one, but it has me wondering if the rest of the show would've happened if steve had hung up on john immediately after the first two words.