Ref, You Suck!

I think you can see what's going on right here in Secaucus, and we're approaching a four story rectangular, otherwise nondescript concrete building. There's a discreete little sign here that says NBA and shows a logo with a basketball player inside a recent concession to the world. We live in the Replay Center, a place where basketball referees review the calls made by other basketball referees in real time to minimize referee error. The Replay Center was built to persuade

people that life was fair. I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. It's a show about We'll give me just a minute to get to that it doesn't get beji or doesn't. It's like this is a place where brown is an exciting color and the door is locked. All right now for me, this story really begins not in Secaucus, but in Berkeley, California, with my eleven year old son. His name's Walker, Walker Lewis. He plays on a basketball team run if you can believe it, by

a Japanese Buddhist temple. My son isn't a Buddhist. The most of the time you could pass for one. He has no conflict with his teachers, or his classmates, or his Japanese Buddhist teammates. I wouldn't say his mind is exactly pure, but usually it's calm. The exception is when he deals with reffs, even Buddhist reffs. Anytime a reff blows the whistle on him, he throws up his arms in astonishment, and he jumps up and down with his little fist balled up in his mouth clenched tight. Everyone

knows just how much injustice he's suffering. Then he marches off with a scowl, and he doesn't get over it. After a game this season, he gets into the car and starts bitching and moaning, all over again. How did it make you feel when the ref made those calls? Very mad? Do you feel any better now? No, tell me how it feels. It feels like someone keeps poking you in the back of the shoulder and then saying, foul, foul, foul, foul. Have you ever fouled out in your career? No? Did

you know that you were a risk of felling out? Guess? But I also knew if I did, it would be unfair because I knew that he was calling the stupidest fouls. He'll look back and say, oh, I was being huge asshole. Clay with the steel playing a full race? How's he trying to catch him? Be cast? Play with him very degree. The thing is, I know why my son does what he does. He thinks he's Clay Thompson, the all star shooting guard of the Golden State Warriors. They research back

the tops of three potters. When Clay hits a three, Clay pounds his chest and points to the sky. And so when Walker Lewis hits at three, he too pounds his chest and points to the sky. I think we got a technical foul as well, Clay. It's very unusual when Clay's called for a fowl, he scowls and throws up his arms in astonishment, and sometimes even says something to the ref that gets him slapped with the technicals owl.

He only had one regular season, and Clay's the famously most laid back All Star in the entire National Basketball Association. Something has happened in the relationship between referees and players over the last I guess year or two. That's Ramona Shelburne. She's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN. It's been quite frankly ugly. This year. One of the Warriors headbutted a reth another chucked his disgusting mouthguard off

a ref's chest. Raymond Careful, who's already has a technical game, and some of the stuff I've seen, I mean, when Draymond Green is getting fined for calling Laurena holecap and can we cuss on your podcast? I think we already have you know, a fucking bitch, like like when when he is saying that to a female referee and getting fined and suspended for that, man, that's next level and

I haven't seen that before this season. It's the Stars now who are really pushing the issue, right, it's Kevin Durant getting thrown out of games, it's Steph Curry getting thrown out. Warriors completely unraveled. In a single season. Bad behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of ten different basketball games. Kevin Durant, their best player, tie a league record by getting tossed from five games, all by himself.

The men who coached the Stars aren't much better. Even Steve Kerr, the Warriors famously decent, civic minded coach, I can snap, I can completely lose it if you back away from the Golden State Warriors. I mean, they are exemplars of the way people should behave, especially your stars. They're like impeccably behave people. I'm so pleased to have my son emulating your players. The only time they have problems really is with referees. Yeah, I can't imagine you

in your life have another relationship like you have with referees. No, you're right, You're right. I would never say the things that I do to referees to a person in normal life. It happens two or three times a year, and I've been caught on camera. You know, amfing a ref and you know my daughter will send me a text like that, what are you doing? It's all over Twitter. I can read your lips. This is embarrassed and I'm embarrassed. So

why is that? You know? It's a sense of right or wrong, you know, and I feel like there's like this personal offense, like something unfair is happening, which brings me to my hunch it has to do with referees, and not just basketball referees. The people everywhere charged not just with enforcing rules, but with preserving a sense of fairness on Wall Street, in the news, in courts of law, in the many little disputes that pock mark everyday life. There are many different kinds of refs, and most of

them are into some kind of attack. So maybe it's not that surprising that Americans one day woke up and thrilled to the message that life was unfair. You know, the system is rigged, sged acmom, banking system is rigged, and ystem. There's a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours, not to fairness that we grew up believing that a miracle was about, which brings me to what this show is about the people whose job it is to maximize fairness, not just in sports,

but most everywhere. What's happening to them tells us a lot about what's happening to us. You have to listen closely, but you can hear that same chant in a lot of American life. Ref you suck. Here we go back at the NBA's offices in Secaucus, New Jersey. Someone eventually came and unlocked the door, and then they led me down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff, jerseys and bobble heads and basketballs and posters of Michael Jordan.

The Replay Center was the ultimate man cave. It's also the latest weapon in the battle for fairness. So this place, just on first of you, is amazing. It's wall to wall screens, one hundred and ten of them. What's on them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in twenty nine NBA arenas across the country. This isn't the broadcast video with commercials and commentary. The screens here don't even have the scores of the games on them were

the names of the teams playing. And they're muted. Which you hear is referees staring at basketball games, which you see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts. Nobody's on a walk in here and walk down and said this polaby sucks. And I'm not going to say it sucks either. That's Joe Borgia, who designed the center back in twenty fourteen and now runs it. Before he volunteered for a secaucus duty, he refereed NBA games. His father was an NBA ref before him, with a break in

the late sixties. A. Borgia has been reffing professional basketball games since nineteen forty six. If you went back to your dad at the beginning of his career and said this is what it's going to look like. What do you think he'd have said? If I told him we would have replay? He turnover and it is great. Forget about a replay center. Is that right? Oh? Absolutely? You see, the refs used to insist on their authority at any rate.

Everyone agreed that there was no better way to ensure the fairness of the game than to let the ref play God. The replay center is an admission the ref is not God, that he makes mistakes. I think the mention of replay. None of us liked it when we first heard it. It's unnecessary, evil, it's necessary. You have to have it today. Everything's tape. Now everyone pays more attention to the referee's mistakes, so the NBA has to

as well. Now, when a ref thinks he might have screwed up some call or didn't get a good look at the action, he twirls his fingers in the air. That's the signal to the ref and the replay center, who goes to work reviewing the tape looking for the best angle to figure out what actually happened. That's the thing is everybody can see it now exactly. You can't have them be in a better position to judge the game than the referees. The replay centers what allows refs

on a basketball court to change their calls. A lot of those calls are subjective, like whether one player fouled another. The rests on the court still make most of those calls themselves. The exception is when the foul is flagranting. Sure, duke, we're gonna give me two good angles. That's the first one. The other one's going to give you. There's blood on

the screws. Kevin Love's front tooth got knocked in. Love plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the question is did the guy who popped him in the mouth do it intentionally? It's a sebasketball point, Kevin Lug happens to move into where the guy's elbow was going on. The refs need to decide if the violence was not just excessive but unsportsmanlike, which sounds our keg because we sort of lost the concept.

So the blood doesn't sweat the decision. Huh. Listen, there's a lot of contacts, a lot of its acres that the players all stand around scratching themselves while the refs put on headsets and talked to the replay center. We're looking for the unnatchural. Did he throw his elbow out? So the fo the fouls on cavil up correct. I thought he was outside his move. He was moving. Its late, Come on, you gotta be quick. One days stuck on the blood coming out of his mouth. Yeah, it's the

whole thing. Only takes thirty seconds, thirty seconds in which players, fans, coaches get even more pissed off at the rest for taking so long. The only thing stopping the replay center from checking every decision is that it slows the game down. Here in Secaucus is still trying to figure out how they might talk to the refs as they run up and down the court, because if they could do that,

they could just fix every call on the fly. The Special Forces we found that we actually used a chip over the bowler that worked off the vibration of the bone. Believe or not. Wead that we got a handful of Gene League referees molded and we tested that to wear a chip over their molar. But it wasn't good enough because they didn't know where the voice was coming from. It was just a voice in their heads. They didn't

know where it was. This is actually insane the time and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what, after all, is just a basketball game. A jillion miles a fiber optic cable connect this room directly to the NBA arenas around the country, all for two calls again at two goals a game. Fifteen million dollars to build this room to get two goals right the game. But

you gotta do it, You gotta do it. Can I just pause here a moment just to consider what the NBA has done in the past few years to improve the calls. For example, they brought in serious managers to hire and train the refs. Joe Borgia calls his boss the general because she's actually a general and an Air Force pilot. Her name is Michelle Johnson, and before she

supervised NBA refs, she ran the Air Force Academy. It sounds like overkill to use a general to make sure a basketball games are well reft, but the NBA thought it needed overkill, or at least Adam Silver, the NBA Commissioner, did, if people don't believe that the league office is unbiased and that the officials are unbiased, you're gonna have a problem, regardless of the accuracy of the calls. Silver took over in twenty fourteen and also hired Joe Borge to create

the Replay Center. Since then, the NBA Commission has taken a ridiculous amount of grief for trying to improve justice in basketball. There are a group of people who think that without the sort of transparency that we see in this day and age, that it enabled certain officials and maybe with a touch of frontier justice, to overall create

more of a fair environment. Even if that were true, and I'm not sure it is, those days are over, and I think it's whether it's in sports or other walks of life that you cannot turn the clock back on transparency. So here's what else Silver has done. He's broad in the pool of people from which refs are selected. They used to be mostly white men, mostly from the same background. At one point fifteen years ago, four NBA refs came from the same high school. He's hired more

black refs and female refs. He's insisted that referees be physically fit so they can get into position to see all the plays. While everyone else in AMA is getting fatter, the rests are getting buff. They're also now getting new feedback on all their bad calls. Silver decided to publish the mistakes made by every reff in the last two minutes of every game so everyone could see them. He gives the teams and the refs a private document listing

every refereeing mistake. All this new data on refs means that we and they know all sorts of strange things about their minds. For instance, we now know that their calls have tended to favor whichever team's losing. Their calls also favor the home team. Some large part of home court advantage is just the refs. The analytics department of the Houston Rockets has even done a study that shows that the home team that gets the best calls is the Utah Jazz. Why Utah? Who knows? But you can

be sure that someone will figure that out. There's now basically a small army of geeks analyzing all this new data. Look, I don't really like writing papers about sports. I'm pre feder write them about the economy. That's Justin Wolfers, a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan and the co author of a paper about NBA refs. But the thing is, this is a domain where the NBA referees have tremendous incentives not to make the wrong call. Every era they

make is tracked. Those eras determine whether they get more games. Those games determine how much they get paid. This is arguably the most analyzed workforce in the country. Basketball referees are now picked apart in ways that not long ago would have seemed preposterous, not just for the fairness of their calls, but for their unconscious behavior. Wolfers took years of data from every NBA game. Then he set out

to look for evidence of the reff's racial bias. The question here isn't whether people are anti black or anti white, but whether there's an in group bias. So, if a predominantly black team is playing and the refereeing crew is predominantly white, they're more fouls called against them than on nights when the same team is playing with the dominantly blank refereeing crew. And it turns out the answers yes. Wolfers wrote his paper back in two thousand and seven,

before this new age of referee transparency. Well, it was a bit of a lesson for me. You can probably tell by my accident, Michael. I'm an Australian, you know. I thought it was an interesting piece of social science. It turned out the New York Times put it on the front page and the NBA wasn't happy. The commissioner at the time attacked the study and embarrassed the league by trying and failing to refute its findings. This morning

we'll hear from the NBA Commissioner, David Stern. Our referees are the most reviewed, most ranked, and most rated, and that's why we take exception to what the Times did here. That's Stern on NPR in two thousand and seven. The result of all this coverage, every single referee was made aware of his unconscious bias. When the dust settled, Justin Wolfers was curious to know if his paper had had

any effect. He made another study of referees after the controversy he'd created, and guess what demonstration study that we did seems to suggest that that form of racial bias is gone away. He has no idea why. Maybe simply making the refs aware of the problem was enough to correct it. But in the end this became a case study not in ref ineptitude but ref reform. NBA refs have achieved what police forces can only dream of, race blindness. The refs have no choice. The world's now too good

at seeing their mistakes. Look, there's no way any basketball referee is going to be perfect. But there's also no way these refs or anything but more accurate than they've ever been. I mean, even home court advantage means less than it used to, and yet these refs are treated as if they're trying to rig the games. Does the sound of those eighteen thousand people screaming at you, are booing you, does it sound any different than it sounded

when you started in nineteen ninety one. Yeah, there's there's a little more anger involved, and you know it used to be sort of the garden variety. You're terrible, you suck any of those kinds of terms. That's Monte McCutcheon, who recently quit reffing NBA games to serve as a kind of life coach to the other NBA refs to talk them through their problems. Now, you know, people do their research. They things are out there on the internet.

They know your record with their team. They they've done all there's all these sights on all these different they know personal things about you. Oh sure, of course, some death threats are made from time to time in playoff series, and you'll get security all the way to both the hotel and then the hotel the next morning out to the airport. They security to the hotel not every night, but when those threats are are a known factor that has happened in my career, security to your car is

mandatory every night. Yep. These days refs need bodyguards to escape after the game. Here are people who are mostly just trying to do these extremely difficult jobs as well as they can, and at some point you feel this question rising up in you, in me. It rose up while I was talking to Ramona Shelburne, the ESPN reporter. Why would anybody want to be a ref Seriously? I wonder that too. Man. You know, they're not allowed to say anything. They're not allowed to explain themselves, they're not

allowed to defend themselves. Look, obviously, they get paid. They started one hundred and fifty grand a year, and if they're great at their job and work extra games, they can make as much as five hundred. But there are lots of ways to get paid without spending half your life in hotel rooms and the other half being insulted by arenas filled with crazy people. Do you think the refereeing has gotten worse or better? I actually think it's gotten better. Of course it's gotten better. How could it

not have. The mystery is why the stars and the coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse. I have a hundred about that too, which you'll hear in a minute. Okay, So Sacramentals checking in right sore ten Oclos on an hour before Clippers. So Golden Stag will check in and the Clippers will check in about the nine thirty I'm back with Joe Borgia in the replay center. The refs here sit dressed in black, staring at screens, waiting for a signal from somewhere in America.

The end of games is when they get most involved, because that's when fans and coaches and players are most likely to accuse some ref of having made the mistake that change the outcome. Of course, a mistake at the beginning has just as much effect on a game as a mistake at the end. But the end is what people notice and get outraged about, so the justice at the end of the game must be more exact than

it is at the beginning. These replay center refs have video technicians with them who can freeze a moment on screen, then zoom out or zoom in so that the entire screen contains only a player's fingertips or his toes. Here you just scroll through tiny slivers of the game, not the game itself, the slivers where injustices might occur. I mean, goodness, graces. If you don't have slow motion in here or freeze frame, it's very difficult. Of course, in slow motion you can

see things that the naked eye misses. Magicians sometimes perform during halftimes of the NBA games. When Joe Borgi slows it down, he can see how they do their tricks. It's kind of the same thing with the players, exactly, I can go with sixtieth of a second at a time. He's going to pick a lot of little things. So what these players are getting good at is creating optical illusions. And then it comes to sort the sort of things that a magician does well. Isn't flopping an optical illusion.

Flopping is what they call it when a player pretends to have been knocked over by another player. Tricking the refs into making bad calls is now considered a skill. Okay, replay sing on gimma, so you just hit a game? Ref in Houston twirls his fingers in the air. Some players hit a three point shot at the buzzer or has he The Houston reff wants to know if the player's toe was on the three point line and if

he got off the shot before the buzzer. It's just now that Joe says I can work the equipment, can I? Just the truth is, I'm not a big equipment guy. My first step when something needs to be assembled or operated is to call someone and say I'll pay whatever it costs. I start twisting dials just to see what happens. They appear to cause the picture to zoom in and out. Watch the referee on the bottom of the screen. There's your SI. Yeah, you got to see that. You have

to see the referee doing that? Are you? Someone may say something. There's a lot of subjectivity in refee, but a whole bunch of the questions that arise on a basketball court have objective answers, like who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds? Or was there still time on the clock before the shot left the player's hands. This is one of those. Did the player's foot touch the three point line when he leapt for

his shot? Did the ball leave his fingertips before the buzzer sounded one of the dials, or maybe it's actually a joystick. Lets me choose which angle of the court I see. I need to find one still frame with the shooter's foot in it and another with the clock in it. Then I need to freeze the picture in the one sixtieth of a second that the ball left the shooter's fingertips just then I realized I have no idea who the player is. I don't even know which team he's on. All I know is he's in Houston.

Can I get it here? All the same, it's pretty much yeah, Houston still waiting on me. I didn't. I think it occurred to me at that moment that they were possibly actually using what I was doing, and that because it was a little bit of anxiety. The coaches get to stop the game with pointless timeouts. The advertisers get to stop the game to sell beer. But when a ref stops a game to make it more fair, the crowd booze and the announcers launch attacks on them.

It's not enough to be right, You've got to be fast. Borgia tracks the average response time of the replay refs. It's between twenty and thirty seconds. Okay, the replay under official confirmed successful. Three point you got it right? The problems dealt with I think it is, But right away another one comes up on a bunch of screens showing one arena. All these people are jumping around and hollering

at refs. The ruckets appears to be confined to Cleveland, but in here it feels like the entire universe is disturbed. It turns out Lebron James is upset. He's arguing there, he goes roun is going from ref to ref. He seems to know which refs to are with. Yeah, they're talking about goalten, so they're talking about they're talking about it. I think they might change that James is James. Any other guy had the best angle? Do you think that Lebron James has any effect doing that? The ref in

Cleveland is not twirling his finger. There's no signal to us to do anything in the replay center. Lebron's drama, strictly speaking, is pointless. It's strange the way these players argue. They must think that if they make life unpleasant enough for the ref, he'll think twice before the next call. It's then that it occurs to me, just looking around the room at one hundred and ten TV screens, I've had a hard time following the games, never mind the scores.

I sometimes don't even know which teams are playing. But every time a player gets up into a referees phase, I've recognized the player. And I actually don't know that many NBA players, but I know all the ones who pitch these hissy fits because the only players getting up into the faces of the refs are the famous players or the coaches who protect them. Ramona Shelburne put her finger on it. The more aggressive behavior towards reffs isn't

coming from every player, It's coming from the stars. So we just got really interested in a very simple question of does this sense of being privileged make you disobey the rules of the road or the laws of the land. That's Daker Keltner. He's a professor of psychology at cal Berkeley and someone who wonders about the effect inequality has

on people's behavior. It experience I had at Berkeley whereas riding my bike up this hill and I got to the four away stop sign and I was halfway through this Fouraway stops sign and this guy in a black Mercedes rolled through the stop sign. Is halfway there is a foot away from me, about to take me out, and he's on a cell phone. And I looked at him. I was ready to take him on, like all right, buddy,

this is it. And what was most telling about this whole experience was he looked at me as if I was in the wrong and I should get out of his way, and you know, even though I'd made it through the stop sign first. So Daker in a colleague dreamed up this weird experiment. They hid two Berkeley undergraduates in the bushes near four way stop signs. The undergrads noted the makes of all cars coming through the intersection assigned them numbers one to five according to their market value.

A new Mercedes was a five, a Honda was a three, and an old Pacer was a one. We positioned a Berkeley undergrad by a pedestrian zone, and we make sure they look like they want to cross the street right, and they're sort of leaning into the pedest zone where it's required by California law to stop. It's a game of one on one at the California crosswalk, one car versus one pedestrian, and zero percent of the drivers of

poor cars zoom through the pedestrian zone. They all stop, and forty some odd percent, forty five percent of the drivers of the fives of rich cars blaze through the pedestrian zone and just say the rules don't apply to me. I'll carry on. This one study led to a bunch of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior.

Another experiment, we bring people to the lab and as they're leaving, there's this big bowl of candy and it's like and it says on it for the children of the Institute of Human Development on the bowl, and we say, oh, you gonna take a candy or two if as you're leaving, and well to we count up how many candies they take after they leave the experiment. Privileged people grab a big handful of candy compared to poorer people. So let's

turn the conversation something much more important. Basketball, most important of all. In the last five or six years, the NBA has embarked on essentially a dramatic reform of refereing. At the same time, the friction between the players and some of the owners and some of the coaches and the refs is going through the roof. The source of

the outrage is the star players. The people are getting thrown out of games, or Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and James Harden and the Warriors, the most famous team ever to walk on the court, are the chief culprits exhibit a and bad behavior towards refs. So you got this weird combination. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, I still remember being a Lakers fan, you know, the great Magic Johnson teams and watching Larry Bird do his nine step layup and I'm like, come on, make the call. You know.

Larry Bird was like Lebron the New Mercedes of his day. He played with certain assumptions about the rules and how they apply to him. For most players of his era, two steps counted as traveling. The inequality on a basketball court is more found, it's profound, and it's more profound there wasn't Larry Bird's era. Larry Bird was a millionaire. Lebron James might be a billionaire, and these guys are global franchises. Yeah, so you've got, in a funny way,

a microcosm. It's an odd microcosm on a basketball court of what's going on in the largest society. The NBA is set out to ref the game more objectively, more accurately, more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their fans and coaches. You want to know why, the more objectivity there is, the less power they have. Objective refs eliminate some of their privilege. The stars can't get the calls anymore.

Just because they're stars, or anyway not as often. Lebron James and Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and Clay Thompson, they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better than everyone else. They don't need unfairness to win. But what happens where there are no replay centers, where there's no hope for pure objectivity or technology to improve calls, where the refs can no longer defend themselves from the stars.

Welcome to the reason for our show. I think American life just now has at least one thing in common with basketball. The authority of its referees is under attack. And when you have a weak referee, you have a big problem. Because a weak referee is a referee who can be bought, or intimidated or just simply ignored. A situation goes from being more or less well refereed to more or less not. Then one day you wake up in a world that seems not just unfair, but actually

sort of rigged. That is, it's incapable of becoming fair because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the power to preserve it. Boom, do you do you flip a switch in one hundred and ten screens go dark. Um all the law small screens you got to do manually. The big TVs, we got the remote. For most nights, Joe Borgia stays at the replay center until almost two in the morning, just him and a couple of refs, staring at tiny slivers of basketball games, trying to impose

justice on powerful people who don't want it. I am nuts. That's another story. Got admit you do. Now you have to be partially one hundred percent negative business. That's why my son doesn't want to write that. I don't like people yelling at me. One day, a young Borgia naturally becomes a referee, the next he doesn't. One day, most people think the refs are more or less fair, or at any rate, they don't spend a lot of time blaming them for all their problems. The next day they

wake up to radical inequality. The people on top, the elites, I think they're special. They behave as people do when they think they're special. Young people emulate them without even thinking about it. They just assume that's how you act if you're a star or want to be. My first question is why when you hit a three point shot, which you often do. Why in the past have you pounded your chest and pointed to the sky? I did it because of people on the MBA and the IMBA

did it? What do you think they're doing? Like? What does it mean? I don't know? Just like I'm cool. Do you believe in God? No? I knew it would it? I mean now I know what it meant, but no, I don't. So what does it mean? Basically, it's like, thank you God for hitting a three point shot? Do you do you think God was responsible when Clay Thompson hit a three point shot? To be honest, if God was watching over everybody whenever they hit a three point shot, I don't think that he would be able to like

actually make them make the shot. So do you have anything you'd like to say to the referees of the world before we turn this recording off? Don't pick sides unless it's my side. Thank you. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. It's our first episode. We've got a lot more to come. Against the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Garedo, with research assistance from

Zoe Oliver Gray. Our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobell as our executive producer. Our theme was composed by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Seth Samuel, mastering by Jason Gambrel. Our show was recorded at Northgate Studios in Berkeley by TOFA Ruth. Special thanks to our founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell