Not everybody believes this, of course, and the doubters are not without wisdom. It is no accident that the Dog-racing tracks do a booming business on Saturday or that people swarm into nightclubs and dance to a feverish beat. Why not? At least they’ll have plenty of company.…
Indeed, even the Jails will be crowded, and the lines will be long at neighborhood check-cashing windows. Nobody feels guilty for things that happen on Saturday—not even the ones who fly off to Las Vegas and get married at Midnight by a Preacher who claims to be Elvis and fondles the bride while he talks. What the hell? It goes with the territory, these days. We are Modern people, and we like to do Modern things.
Ho ho. That is dangerous gibberish in some circles, and the Gambling fraternity is one of them. There is nothing Modern about doing dumb things for dumb reasons, and nothing new about the feelings of shame and disgrace that come down on people who think it is “Fun” to bet against Duke in a high-stakes basketball game that tips off on the last Saturday night of the season. Even when you’re getting 5 points and your hot-shooting team jumps out to a 22-point lead before halftime, you’re doomed. Take my word for it.
It was just about then, in fact, when the game shifted gears and I began feeling Fear in my heart. I looked around the room and saw gloom on the faces of those who were betting against me.
They laughed bitterly when I said I was nowhere near comfortable with my bet. “Those swine are still dangerous,” I assured them. “This game is too weird to be true. We are seeing a false dawn, sure as hell.”
They snickered. A few even paid up and left, unable to tolerate the prospect of suffering for 20 more minutes in a trap with the corpse of Duke. One beating was Enough, they said, but two in a row would be utterly Unacceptable.
I shrugged and turned back to the game, but I set that money in a separate pile. There was no doubt in my mind that something horrible was going to happen, and it would happen very soon. Nothing in Nature was any more certain than that Duke would come out of its stupor and make a desperate run at me.
It had already started, and I shuddered when I saw the clock showing five or six minutes still left before halftime. That’s impossible, I thought. The game should be over by now. The timekeeper must be on the Take. I slumped in my chair and squawked helplessly as I watched Maryland turning to jelly in a blizzard of dumb fouls and turnovers. My 22-point lead was getting chopped up like a pig falling into a meat grinder.
By halftime I’d abandoned all hope of winning—or even Losing by less than 5 points. I saw panic in the eyes of the Maryland guards as they brought the ball up the floor. Coach Williams was screaming desperately, but his wild cries fell on deaf ears. He knew he was beaten, and so did I.
The mood in my kitchen had changed drastically. They were still down by 16, but they sensed a wild turn of the tide. I saw smiles on their faces for the first time all afternoon. The Sheriff was feeling so bold that he offered to double his bet. Benicio Del Toro called in on the phone and also doubled down. I grimly accepted all offers, despite what I knew in my heart.
It was a matter of Honor, I felt, and also a deep-set Tradition.… No bet goes unchallenged in This room.
Whoops! Have I forgotten to say that I’d already won all my bets on the Arizona–Michigan State game? Yes, I have—but things like that are easily lost in the horror of seeing a 27-point lead (with the spread) disappear right in front of your eyes. It seems impossible—especially for a very good team that has just beaten Stanford and Illinois—but Maryland was a special case this year, and only a fool would have bet real money on them to hold a big lead for more than 33 seconds against Duke in a serious game. They curled up like worms in a bonfire.
But so what? All that matters in the sports-gambling business is the score at the end of the day, and if you don’t win Two out of Three, it is time to quit the business. They will call you a hopeless Loser and your wife will file for Divorce. Strange men in black suits will show up and kick down your door at night. That is the fate of Losers in this country.
—April 2, 2001
Running Away with the Circus
It is no accident that this column is titled Hey Rube. That is what’s called my “Standing Head” in the arcane jargon of Journalism, and it will not change anytime soon. “Hey Rube” is an old-timey phrase, coined in the merciless culture of the Traveling Carnival gangs that roamed from town to town in the early 20th century. Every stop on the circuit was just another chance to fleece another crowd of free-spending Rubes—Suckers, Hicks, Yokels, Johns, Fish, Marks, Bums, Losers, Day traders in Portland, fools who buy diamonds from gypsies, and anyone over the age of nine in this country who still believes in his heart that all cops are honest and would never lie in a courtroom.
These people are everywhere. They are Legion, soon to be a majority, and 10,000 more are being born every day. It was P. T. Barnum, the Circus man, who explained the real secret of his vast commercial success by repeating his now-famous motto, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and his job was to keep the suckers amused. Which he did—with a zeal that has never been equaled in the history of American show business.
Barnum knew what people wanted: Freaks, Clowns, and Wild Animals. The Barnum & Bailey Circus only came to town once a year, and those days were marked as sacred holidays on the John Deere calendars of every Rube in America.… Those dates were Special; many schools closed when the Circus came to town, and not every student returned when the public frenzy was over. “Running away with the Circus” was the dream of every schoolboy, and the nightmare of every mother with a bored and beautiful daughter.
Ah, memories, memories. They are not always good for the brain—so let’s get back to Rubes and the fact that I am still one of them on some days, and the final round of the Masters was one of those. I was lured, tricked, and then Fleeced without mercy by my trusted old friend John Walsh—now the Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of ESPN.com—who is also a lifelong Gambler.
I was not ashamed. The Fleecing Instinct is strong in the gambling fraternity. It is an irresistible urge, even for the few Rogues among us who call themselves “Gentleman Gamblers.” My own firm rule is that I MUST WIN TWO OUT OF THREE. That is the Mandatory minimum for any gambler who plays with Real Money. Anything less is Unacceptable. If you can’t win Two out of every Three things you bet on, it is time to quit the business. Gambling is an Acceptable Vice for most people, but a Fatal Addiction for others.… All medicines are deadly and dangerous, if taken repeatedly in large doses. A pound of pure Aspirin will kill a whole busload of young athletes. A craving for french-fried potatoes can make you swell up and stink like the rotting corpse of a whale.
These things are mathematically certain—just as sure as the fate of fools who make too many bad bets with sports bookies or of those millions of hapless Rubes who got fleeced in the Day-Trading racket. They got trapped in the flaming remains of the Too Much Fun Club. They stayed too long at the party. They knew it was dangerous, but they stayed anyway.
That is what happened to me last week. I bet against Duke in the NCAA final, and I bet against Tiger Woods in the Masters. Both bets went wrong from the start, just as I knew they would—even though I had Eight (8) large points against Duke and a reasonable-looking 2-stroke edge against Woods.… Ho ho. Never bet against the Smarter team in a major championship game. Especially when the point spread is so short as to fall “within the margin of error.”
Those are dangerous numbers. The Vegas line finally settled on Duke (minus 4½), and that was clearly not enough. Duke could have flogged Arizona by 22, if necessary—but it was Not, so they mercifully wasted the clock. I admired them for it—just as I admired Tiger Woods for the graceful Dominance he showed by staying just far enough ahead of his challengers to keep his win safe, but still Interesting, in the Chinese sense of the word, which is ominous.
“Interesting” is Fun, but it is the wrong way to bet, for any gambler who wants to stay afloat in these times of Risk and Confusion. The wor
ld is getting weirder and weirder. Huge things are happening at speeds too high to measure, or even fathom, in the brain of a normal human. We are like moths in a blizzard.
—April 9, 2001
NBA and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness
A spiral that goes straight Down at unholy speed is called a Vortex, I think, and a spiral that whirls straight Up is called a Tornado. They might appear to be different, but among scholars of Physics and Quantum Science, they are both the same thing.
They can both kill you instantly. The only sure difference between being sucked down a bottomless sinkhole and getting sucked up in the air while strapped into your car and then dropped like a bomb on a schoolhouse 12 miles away is that your scrambled remains will be easily identified if you fall from the sky on a schoolhouse—your family will be disgraced and their auto insurance will be canceled for unexplained reasons.
“These things are always Genetic,” they’ll say. “And his Grandfather was hit by Lightning two or three times, and his Uncle got killed by a tractor. That whole Family is doomed, sure as hell.”
The upside of being sucked like a roach down a hole in the earth is that your body will disappear forever. Any Coroner’s Jury will have problems with That one.… “It was like he got flushed down a toilet,” said one witness. “And that was the last time I saw him.”
All spirals will get out of control now and then: witness the horrible fate of Dan Marino in his final game against Jacksonville. (He went 11 for 25, as I recall, with two interceptions and a fumble.) Not even Joe Montana was smart and sharp every Sunday.
But wait! Don’t touch that dial! Stay tuned for the Point of this story—which is the downward Spiral of Dumbness that threatens to drag all of us down in the Mother of all killer whirlpools. It is the natural law of any Market economy that a rising tide lifts all boats (for 12 hours)—and unless the moon gets blown off its axis by some Pentagon dingbat who wants to “teach China a lesson,” the same law applies with Low Tides.
It is the Freak tides that lead to disasters. And this eerie phenomenon of a guaranteed high-yield Economy that has made even Dumb people richer and richer for the last 20 years is a decidedly freakish tide.… It is also a law of nature that when too many dumb people get rich all at once, they will naturally rise to the top and be making more and more Executive decisions that will affect the lives of more and more people.
George W. Bush is an obvious example of the spiral of dumbness in action. But he is not alone. Other hideous examples are all around us from Mad Cow disease and the stock market plunge to the shutdown of Hollywood and the loss of TV from our lives. We live in times of diminishing expectations.
The golden success of the “Be Like Mike” league has gone up in a foul cloud of smoke. The game goes on, yet nobody has faith in its future.… The level of desperation has sunk to the spreading of shameless (grasping at) rumors of a “comeback” by Michael Jordan, which not even sportswriters pretend to take seriously.
It is far worse than dumb, for instance, to think for more than 10 seconds that a return to the days of Zone Defense will speed up the game or make it more exciting on TV. The Zone will add about as much speed and excitement to the NBA game as would the return of the dreaded Four-Corners offense or the elimination of the 3-point shot. Its return is the work of fools and bunglers who got caught in the Spiral of Dumbness.
—April 16, 2001
Bad Craziness at Owl Farm
It was Saturday night in the mountains, and a heavy blizzard was falling. Six inches in six hours.
It happened so fast that my bright red, hot rod convertible was disappearing right in front of my eyes. The top was beginning to sag from the weight of the soggy spring snow. I knew it was futile to try to put it back in the barn. It would sink in the mush and be trapped in the blizzard all night. I must have been crazy to bring it out in the weather so soon.
But so what? I thought. The Shark has seen snow before. Let it Be.… I cranked up the fire and ate a few crab legs. I brought out a wad of small bills. The XFL championship game was about to start, and the last NBA play-off game of the day was about to end. The gambling would begin soon enough.
We had just settled down to drink whiskey and bet when the night was shattered and ripped by a sudden explosion just in front of the house—a crashing of metal and fire and wild screams of animals. I ran out on the porch with a shotgun and a huge police spotlight, just in time to be knocked back by another explosion and a wall of flame on the road. Chickens squawked and peacocks screeched in the treetops. It was like a bomb that had been dropped on a jungle. Flaming chickens fell out of the sky and hissed as they died in the snow.…
Then we saw a fiery human figure stagger into my driveway and fall in a heap on the ground. The Sheriff grabbed a fire extinguisher out of his car and quickly doused the burning man with a blast of steaming chemicals.
It was Cromwell, my neighbor from up the road. He’d been caught in the blizzard and was desperately trying to drive home on his motorcycle when he was hit in the face by a 20-pound owl that swooped out of the night and almost took his head off—which caused him to lose control and run his bike off the road and through the wall of a nearby barn that was full of roosters and hay and plastic drums full of gasoline.
The explosion was triggered by the sparks of a red-hot cigar butt that he was smoking at the time, and the flimsy tin barn was now a fiery tomb full of shrieking animals. The blast sent 10 or 12 burning guinea hens up in the air like rockets. One was still clinging to Cromwell’s back as he fell. Another one dropped with a thud on the hood of my red convertible, where it sizzled and steamed until dawn.
Cromwell staggered and babbled as we helped him into the house. He was still in deep shock and seemed to think he was somewhere in Egypt with some good-humored strangers or ski bums, but he was cheerful about it, and he thanked us for giving him gin. We humored him carefully for a while, until he came back to life and seemed almost normal.
He relaxed with a bottle of Tanqueray and talked casually about the tragedy, as if it had happened a long time ago and was a matter of small importance. “I never liked that bike anyway,” he said with a smile. “I’ve taken worse falls than that on Aspen Mountain. And I’ve hated that owl for 10 years.”
The XFL game was long over and nobody cared who won, so we turned our attention to the heavyweight championship fight that was about to start on TV from South Africa.
Lennox Lewis wasn’t the only one to be dazed and confused that Saturday night. On most Saturday nights I would have passed on it—Lennox Lewis was a 15-to-1 favorite to quickly demolish some obscure challenger from Baltimore. The fight had been widely ignored by the ranking elite of the boxing press—but I was, after all, a professional, and I had a column to write. And besides, the 15-to-1 odds were impossible to resist. I didn’t even know who the challenger was.…
But it didn’t matter. I have never forgotten that other widely ignored fight about 10 years ago, in Tokyo, when another heavyweight champion got ambushed and whipped like a chow by some no-name bum who was such a ridiculous underdog that the fight was actually taken off the Board in Las Vegas.… Right. That would be the famous Mike Tyson vs. Buster Douglas upset, which remains near the top of my list of the most incredible heavyweight fights. I still have it on videotape.
Larry Merchant was there, as I recall, so when I saw him at ringside from Johannesburg—along with George Foreman and Jim Lampley—I felt a tingle of rising excitement in my spine. I quickly picked up the phone and called people with professional access.… Why not? I thought. On a night like this I could use a cheap thrill or two. This yokel Hasim Rahman suddenly looked like a wise investment.
It was right about then that we began having trouble with Cromwell. His mood had deteriorated and he was losing his sense of humor. The Sheriff had just made an idle joke about his sworn duty to arrest Cromwell and jail him for killing the owl. “You murdered that beast,” he laughed. “That’s a felony crime in this state. You’ll have to
stand trial for it.” But the joke didn’t work.
“You bastards,” Cromwell yelled. “Stop laughing at me! I can’t stand it. It’s driving me crazy. I’m getting the fear.… I feel weak,” he said hoarsely. “I feel like I’m dying.”
He fell back on the couch, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “Oh, God!” he screamed. “I’m afraid. Something is rolling all over me! It’s the Fear! I have the fear!” His body went tense, then suddenly jerked up in a spasm, twisting wildly back and forth, as if struggling desperately in the grip of some assassin when nobody else could see.
It was Terrifying. We watched helplessly as he grasped and clawed at the top of his head, which was beginning to blister and bleed. The room was heavy with a stench of burning hair.… The situation was getting out of control.
Cromwell was a huge and dangerous man, even when he was happy—but with him in a frenzy of Fear and Rage, we knew it was out of the question to try to deal with him physically.
I saw my friend Curtis trying to wrestle a giant Red fire Extinguisher off a hook on the wall. “No!” I yelled. “Not that!” I knew it was a high-powered A, B, C, & D–type FX that would fill the whole room with a cloud of white glue. So I quickly reached over and gave Cromwell a sharp jolt between the shoulder blades with my 200,000-volt PowerMax cattle prod. And that was that.
He collapsed in a coma and said nothing for 20 minutes. It might have seemed cruel and unusual, but we knew at the time that it had to be done, and he would thank us for it later.
The fight came to an abrupt end with an amazing knockout in round ten. We had a new heavywight champion and my bet would pay off handsomely.… The rest of the night was quiet. Cromwell went home with the Sheriff, and I was soon back to work on my typewriter.
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