Episode 2: Values of the Game

Pushkin.

His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen foot jump shots from the right side.

That's John McPhee, now ninety three years old, the grand Master of literary nonfiction. He's reading for us from the first book he ever published, back in nineteen sixty five. He called the book A Sense of Where You Are. It was about a Princeton University basketball player named Bill Bradley.

He got off to a bad start, and he kept missing them six in a row, hit the back rim of the basket and bounced out.

The writer had talked the player into letting him watch his private workout. It was just the two of them alone in some high school gym that Bradley he had never been in before.

He stopped looking discomfited and seemed to be making an adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly.

I'm eleven years old when I read what John McPhee wrote about Bill Bradley. But I don't care about John McPhee. I only want to know more about Bill Bradley. At this point, he's in the NBA and I've set up a poop in my bedroom to create the upcoming nineteen seventy two finals, which I care about only because Bradley will be in them. I play out this entire two hour game. I also serve as the play by play announcer into a tape recorder I've set up on my desk.

Four more shots went in without a miss, and then he paused and said, you want to know something, That basket is about an inch and a half low.

The main thing I learned from the book is that if I want to be Bill Bradley, it won't just happen. It won't be easy. When Bradley was himself eleven years old. He shot baskets until his fingers bled. By the time he got to Princeton, he'd shot so many different basketballs on so many different hoops. Then when he missed, he knew that the problem wasn't him, it was the hoop.

Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a step ladder, and measured the height of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven eighths inches above the floor, or one and one eight inches too low.

Much later, I'd realize that all the time I thought I was learning how to be Bill Bradley, I was actually learning how to be John McPhee. But that's another story. Anyway, eleven year old me would never believe what I'm about to do. When you were a player, when did you first have the sense that kids were looking at you as an example of excellence?

Thousands, literally thousands of fathers would bring their son or mothers or daughter and father bring a daughter or whatever to the game, and they'd always say, you know, you want to be like Bradley. Well, I always disagreed with that.

I'm talking with Bill Bradley for real.

No, do you want to be like the father? You don't want to be like Bradley, But do you want to be like Bradley in terms of the values that you see exemplified in the development of his game, Because that's what you want to do in your life, to develop your skills to their highest and best years.

I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules this season. I'm looking at what's happening to the American fan and in this episode, what happens when Bill Bradley's ideal of the game collides with the way other people think of it. Bill Bradley always seemed to have a plan Basketball was just a piece of it before he got to Princeton. During his senior year in high school, he actually signed with Duke, but then the summer before college he went on a trip to Europe.

And on one of those days he toured Oxford and I walked into christ Church Quad and looked around and thought to myself, I got to figure some way to get back here.

When he got home, he looked into it, learned about Rhodes scholars and that Princeton generated the most of them. So he wrote to Duke and told them he wasn't coming. Duke was pissed. Princeton scrambled to find him a bed. Bradley then nearly flunked out of the college.

I came from a small town high school in ninety six. I had so called low college board scores, and I certainly had no reference for French or biology.

The two of that gave me problems.

Basketball had already taught him that the harder you work, the better you get. He proceeded to spend so many hours in the Princeton library that he would graduate with honors. Midway through his senior year, he was offered the Rhodes Scholarship. The New York Knicks then took him with the first pick of the entire nineteen sixty five draft. Bradley thanked them politely, then left for Oxford to study for years.

Your imagination by the noise I love the roar of the crowd, and it wasn't a fan, It was twenty thousand fans when your team came together and did something amazing and the garden roof almost came off. And so the fans were instrumental in the experience for me as a player, as a whole, not as individuals.

The fans were the congregation recipients of a kind of moral instruction which Bradley always honestly tried to supply. He always carried himself with this superhuman dignity. Even at peak fame. He refused to endorse products. And then there was the sordid underbelly in sports, which he someone managed to avoid really noticing until well into his pro career.

We were ahead by six points and there were just seconds left, and I shot and hit the shot, and some people in the crowd bowed, and I asked afterwards, I asked the trainer.

Why were they buy?

We won by eight points, not six points?

That's good.

Oh, well, those are people gambling on the game. And I thought, oh, that's sick, because for me, the game was always about values. The idea of gambling on sports was always something that was counter to the values of the sport.

Bill Bradley retires from basketball in nineteen seventy seven to run for public office. He'd become one of New Jersey's US Senators for almost two decades, and in that time an argument would develop that no one really wanted to have between Bradley's ideas about sports and American life and what was actually going on in sports and American life. When did you make your first sports bets?

Oh, my first sports bet was made. They're probably eighth, seventh or eighth grade and in through high school, you know, just betting the parley cards. A buddy of mine used to bring in these green parley sheets where you'd have to pick a three for three, four for four, five for five. You know, you bet five ten bucks.

His real name is goadoon Kirollas, but he's always been known as Spanky, after a character from the TV show The Little Rascals, which his mom loved. Spanky grew up in Jersey City, born the year before Bill Bradley became the state senator.

He'd have one kid in the class the night of one and you know, he'd win, like, you know, fifty sixty bucks whatever, but most people lost. And then I sort of realized. I'm like, hey, can I get in on this. The only thing I knew as a high school kid is the house always won, So I knew it was unfair because I never won.

Spanky maybe had an edge over some of the other kids at school because at home he was basically raised on games of chance, just a.

Part of life. Every holiday we'd get together Christmas, New Year's, you know, we'd sell it. We'd have dinner and then we'd whip out the cards.

And we just play poker for actual money.

Oh yeah, for actual money.

And so if you lost to your mom, she made you pay up.

Oh yeah, I would just by this is my allowance and everything. This is this is the real deal. There's you know, my mom, and she taught me, you know, a valuable lesson, don't gamble what you're not willing to lose.

Spanky gamble didn't Spanky lost until Spanky started to gamble and win. By the time he entered high school, he was effectively running an illegal book of NFL parlays, not simple bets on which team wins and loses, but compound bets that give you like twenty to one odds if you say pick the winner of five different NFL games and pay you nothing if you only get four, right, Parley, they would have been illegal.

Yeah, when you're in high school, one hundred percent. Yeah.

And so there's an illegal bookie in Hoboken, absolutely yes. And so he is using what like some high school kid as a sort of a salesman as a runner exactly, as a as a runner and these things is you're getting distributed in your nobody, nobody stops it.

Nobody. Not only does nobody stopping it, you know, you know, I'm not going to name names obviously, but you know there will be teachers that will fill out all day cards and handle it, you know, you know what I mean. And it was a great school, big sports school, you know, just a part of life gambling on sports, betting on sports, the football games and stuff. So you know, that's what's what we did.

You're getting a different kind of education.

And I absolutely from from from people that really weren't supposed to be teachers and stuff. But it just it's just part of it.

We're laughing. But Spanky is learning something. He's learning why bookies exist. They always win. The kids all want to bet on the local teams and so the local bookies shift the odds against them. Spanky sees the bookies exploiting fan loyalty and decides he wants a piece of the action. He takes the parlay cards from the bookie and gives them to a barber. The barber passes them out to customers,

I won't want to wake up in the morning and I can't wait to break the law today. But you know, the money's the money I figured with gambling and with book making, it's really not that bad. It's not like I'm putting it under somebody's head and saying you got a bet. You know, these are the ones that are asking me, hey, you got the sheets in it? The sheets ready this week? It was just, you know, like you're selling cracks to a crack at it. It's just it was just so easy.

At the same time as Spanky's raking it in the high school cafeteria. New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley is rising to political prominence. He sponsored bills on healthcare and gun control in the environment, but there was one issue he hadn't really touched that was dear to his heart. What got you interested in taking up gambling as an issue when you were in the Senate.

I'd never done anything on sports. In fact, I wouldn't even talk about sports when I became a senator. You know, I would never raise the issue of sports. Other senators would want to talk sometimes about but I never raised it because I wasn't trying to bring basketball into my senate life and have it affect that.

But at some point Bradley couldn't resist. That point came when he decided to write a book about the moral influence of sports, values of the game he'd call it.

I thought about how gambling really didn't celebrate those values to the contrary, and so I passed this little bill.

It was not a big bill.

It was a little bill that banned sports petting in the states that didn't have it, and it was the law of the land, and I felt good about it.

At the time. A few states allowed better on sports, but most didn't. Bradley's bill, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, effectively banned it except in states where it already existed, like Nevada. It was a weird law because it didn't ban sports gambling directly. It banned states from regulating it. But it accomplished what Bradley wanted to prevent people from betting on sports. What were the values that were kind of threatened or challenged by gambling.

I didn't want players to be Roulette chips. I wanted to protect the purity of the game, the values that were important to me, and gambling polluted that in a very fundamental way.

How gambling did that was obvious to most of the Senate. It encouraged athletes to throw games or rig them. It encouraged fans to think about their bets rather than the game. It introduced money where money really didn't belong in sports. The Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act passes in nineteen ninety two with hardly a peep of protest or anything else. Once the Senators from Nevada are sure that they can keep doing whatever they want to do inside their state,

I thought this was very quiet. I mean, I thought, Okay, I passed the law. It's now illegal. That's the law land. A few New Jersey casino people were pissed, but there are a couple people Nobody came up to me, ever, I said, why did you pass that casino?

Bill?

Never, I want to pause for a moment to point out how volatile our country is. No other culture on the planet experiences the same violent swings between virtue and between freedom and repression, between fear and greed. Sports gambling is a good example of it.

Gambling has always been a part of American history. George Washington bet on cockfights.

David Hill's a writer who grew up in Arkansas, like Spankey, in a family of gamblers, so out of curiosity, he set out to write a book about the country's long relationship with this particular vice.

Sports gambling really began with betting on foot races in early America, and that evolved into betting on the fights, you know, first bare knuckle fights and then more sort of sanctioned boxing matches which were really put on just so that people could gamble on them.

We don't seem to have sports ever without gambling on sports, and Americans have always been fanatical gamblers. At the same time, Americans have always been extremely hostile to gambling. At the turn of the last century, anti gambling forces got the upper hand for a while.

They shut down a lot of race tracks when they passed these anti gambling laws, and without any horses to bet on, the bookmakers who made their living booking bets on the horses went to the ballpark.

In other words, when Americans were told they couldn't bet on horses anymore, they figured out a way to bet on people. In horse racing, the odds aren't fixed until the betting stops, and are driven by how much is bet on any given horse. If everyone bet on the same horse, they wouldn't bother to run the race. In baseball or really any other sport, that clearly wouldn't work. The book he needed a way to attract interest in both teams before the game, even if one team was

He created this idea of the points spread, where you would give the favorite a certain number of points that they would have delay to the underdog, so that the proposition between these two teams is as close to an even money proposition as possible. Right, you're spotting the worst team a certain number of points. And McNeil was a pretty bright guy.

Was he a Wall Street guy?

He was?

Yeah, he was a Wall Street guy and worked in finance as it was back then, right, and he saw sports and the ability to bet on sports is just another market.

Once Americans learned to bet on people instead of horses, it wasn't long before people started to fix the games. Various point shaving and game fixing scandals plagued college basketball in the years before, enduring Bill Bradley's college career. They obviously had an effect on Bradley. His law that prevented states from legalizing sports gambling was to make just this

A bookmaker who needs to meet you on the corner of forty sixth and seventh and hand you a bag full of cash. And that's kind of what got my wife nervous, want my mom nervous.

And you know, so this this literally happened. You actually got given.

Cash, oh, all the time, all the time, got given cash, gave cash, received and gave cash all the time.

More on that in just a moment. Spankey graduates from high school, goes to Rutgers, graduates summa cum laude in computer science and finance, all the while still betting on sports. After college, he takes a job on Wall Street. It's now two thousand and one, and he has computers and the Internet and access to illegal bookies across the country. He writes programs that allow him to in effect see the entire national sports betting market. No one else is

This is one of these things you start learning that there's a bias depending on the geographic region, and then you start picking up on these things and saying, my god, these discrepancies are real. Then you know it's just, you know, just snowballs from there.

Which you're doing, in a funny way, is exploiting fan emotion that you got the fans in LA you want to bet on the Lakers, and the fans in New York I want to bet on the knicks, and they distort the odds.

Exactly exactly, and the book maker knows that the majority of his customers are going to bet on that fan emotion, and that's when I come in and I just scoop up the value. On the other.

Side, he's scooping up the values. And by two thousand and three, he's asking himself a question, why am I wasting my time on Wall Street? Why not just quit and become a full time sports gambler.

I had my mother in law, my mother, my brother, and my wife's family all have individual conversations with me, asking me if I was sure of this, or are you sure about this? Nobody gamble for a living or you out of your mind? Spanky knows that's not true. People do gamble for a living, lots of people. They just don't advertise it.

But the Spanky's way of thinking, betting on sports isn't any worse than working on Wall Street.

This isn't something that I just took on a whim. I'm a risk averse guy. I want to make sure that it's going to work before I actually take that step forward.

You're not betting on the sports in the sense that you're not depending on your superior knowledge of sports. You're just arbitraging sports books.

Exactly.

He's becoming Bill Bradley's worst nightmare. In Spanky's world, the games themselves are beside the point. He's no longer even watching the games, just the lines.

No matter what sport it was, underlying asset didn't matter, it was just great. It was just printing money. At that time.

He's no longer even doing anything illegal. There's no law against placing a sports bet. The law simply forbids making a book. It's the bookies he's using who are breaking the law. And there's some differences between Spanky's new trading business and his old job on Wall Street. What's the largest amount of cash you got handed or you handed over? And what's the scariest situation you found yourself in.

The largest cash? You know? It was probably close to a million bucks? If I'm not you know it was it was probably a million bucks. I was thinking of those are a few went form between, But several hundred thousands was always the case? Was it? Always?

What undred hundred dollar bills?

Always? Yeah? Always, you know, I'll as somebody you don't if the guy didn't like you, then he would give you twenties and stuff and that would suck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you know what's drug money too. That's another thing, you know what I mean? You know, I remember picking up a package I think it was seven hundred thousand, and most of them was all twenties and tens, and I was like, oh, this is custing, this is definitely

So what were they handed to you in like a briefcase.

Back, you know, in a bag it's a plastic bag, or in a book bag or whatnot. I was dealing with one guy and he goes, my boss wants to see you first before he pays you. So I go and meet him at this like you know, abandoned restaurant that, you know whatever. And that's a scary.

And then you know he's there in New Jersey.

This is in Jersey and North Jersey and it's in a restaurant this and the soprano is his airing, yeah, you know exactly. And the guy I think ran a tanning salon or something or whatever it was. I don't even remember, but I went to this restaurant, and then you know, he goes, why should I pay you this money? And then I go because I wanted fair and square and if I would have lost, I would have paid you.

Spanky's world maybe a little CD, but it has its own values. They're just a bit different from Bradley's values, like keep your word and your mouth shut, see when the odds are off and exploit them, take the right end of any stupid bet. Spanky's good at all of this. He makes more money as a sports gambler than he

So they got us on some of these wiretaps thicking. Oh my god, we know these illegal bookmakers are operating illegally, and then they're giving money to this guy Spanky. That means Spanky must be this kingpin bookmaker. And they rounded up everybody. I was accused of a crime. Ithentic command. And that's the god's honest truth, whether anyone wants to believe me or not. I wasn't a bookmaker. I was just a better It didn't really matter what he was.

How much did they get for me?

They got I think about seven hundred and fifty thousand.

Oh my god.

Yeah, yeah, they just took it. Yes, this took it.

Yeah, they took seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You plead guilty to a felony, and what are the consequences of that? You don't spend any time in jail?

Right? I spent I spent two nights in jail.

And Spanky's now are convicted felon. But that party's kind of okay with the felony.

Did nothing I couldn't coach my son's baseball team because you know, they do background checks and then fall of a sudden on my fist. So that was like the big hit to me other than that, I can't vote, which I've never voted anyway. I can't own a gun, which I've never owned a gun anyway. And I can't serve on a jury, which is actually a plus because time I get calls for jury duty, I just tell him I'm the felon and they go, oh sorry, and that's it. It's over. So it really wasn't that bad.

Yes, there was this law to stop the spread of sports gambling, and yes the Feds occasionally went and arrested people, but even the cops who arrested Spanky didn't seem to have their hearts in it.

The pinch happens in October, so I have my attorney calling up the DA's office saying, listen, my client needs his computers backed. My clients needs his computers back. And then eventually the ADA wind up calling my lawyer and goes tell Spanky, we're gonna give him his fucking computers back before football season starts, and lo and behold. In August, I get a call from Queen's saying, your computer's already to be packed up, and I went and I went

So Spanky gets his stuff back and he can get his bets down on NFL games. Right after that, New Jersey holds a referendum on sports gambling. This is in twenty eleven. The referendum puts a simple question to a popular vote, should sports betting be legal in New Jersey? Two thirds of the voters say yes. The vote has no practical effect. Bradley's law is federal law and overrides the results of a state referendum. But the referendum tells

Following the results on Tuesday night, I've decided to withdraw from the Democratic grace for president.

We have been defeated.

But the cause for which I ran has not been the cause of trying to create a new politics in this country, the cause of trying to fulfill our special promise as a nation that cannot be defeated by one or one hundred defeats.

What was it about Bill Bradley that failed to appeal to his fellow citizens. He always exemplified these great values, but I've always thought his values were the problem. When push comes to shove, we want to live like Spanky, not like Bill Bradley. Your view of the purity of sport is you know, I share it, but it's old fashion.

You know, I don't think it's old fashion at all. Nope, No, you ever shoot five hundred shots in a row and do a hundred push ups and run ten miles to get into shape to be the best you could be. Is that old fashion?

Nope? I swear to God in that moment, I felt eleven years old all over again.

People don't do that so they can make a bet. They do that because they want to be the best at what they do. I don't think that's old fashion at all. That's what kids need. They need to be able to have parents that say, you know, look at the way Steph Curry practices. That's what you want to say to your kid. And if your kid isn't interested in that, but always interested in is a parlay bet with fifteen teams in a game on Saturday Night that said, we are living in a different world and we've lost

It, or people know they're about to lose it and they don't care. There was always more than one New Jersey and the other New Jersey. It wants a piece of the action. Welcome to the Garden State, Baby That's Next. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia Gen Kott, Catherine Gerardo, and Ariela Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Jake Korski. Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and

You have to be able to differentiate between the mics. Chinese Mic is my partner, but he's not even Chinese. He's actually Vietnamese, but we call him Chinese Fike because it's just shorter.

I want you to give me my nickname if I'm gonna come, if I ever come to join you as a partner. I can't be Mike anymore.

I could be something Mike if you I think that's you know that word.

All right? I think I would got my moneyball Mike