It Takes Two

by Jonathan Scott

  *Strange,’cause they always came to my magic performances.

  Because they were hoping to finally witness your disappearance.

  What they also didn’t do was pretend that just showing up was the same as breaking a sweat, or that your best was the best as long as you tried. Participation leagues may have good intentions in declaring everyone a winner, but they end up teaching kids it’s not alright to fail. Sometimes people are afraid to fail, and we all lose if smart, creative minds aren’t encouraged to take risks. I remember when we had Track and Field Day in the eighth grade, and the teacher was signing everybody up for different events.

  “Who wants to do the 100-meter dash?” he asked.

  Most everybody’s hand shot up, including Jonathan’s, which I thought was strange because he hated running. The teacher picked the first kid he saw.

  “The 200-meter?”

  Everybody who didn’t get on the 100-meter list tried again, but only one was picked.

  By the time it came to the 400-meter, enthusiasm had dwindled and only the avid racers were still volunteering at this point . . . oh, and Jonathan.

  “Okay, who wants to run the 1,500-meter?”

  Then, as if the jogging gods were dishing out hilarious retribution for me, Jonathan’s was the only hand that went up.

  The teacher put his name down before he had a chance to re-evaluate the critical error he had made. And in this class, once your name was down, you couldn’t take it back.

  Running wasn’t Jonathan’s thing. If it had been hurdles or any jumping event, I wouldn’t have been surprised: One of our favorite pastimes at home was to set up high jumps in one of the fields by putting poles between trash cans. We piled up sleeping bags to use as a landing mat. Dad’s good Arctic one designed to withstand the cold at 40-below was nice and thick, and since we’d never known him to set off for the tundra to spend the winter hunting polar bears, we were pretty sure he wouldn’t notice it was missing. We actually ranked in the top five in high school for high jump, and in the top ten district-wide. Why Jonathan thought his ability to jump like a kangaroo counted as training to run a mile is baffling, but then again, a lot of what Jonathan thinks and does falls into that category.*

  *I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle. And plaid.

  Jonathan approached his medium-distance race the same as a sprint, assuming, since he had no training whatsoever for the event, that you just take off and keep running as fast as you can to the finish line. As he failed to pace himself, what started off strong quickly began to falter, as one by one every other racer passed him. He came in dead last, lungs burning and muscles screaming. Our teacher gave him a hero’s welcome at the finish line. “It was a GREAT try, Jonathan! You did GREAT! Next time will be even better!” Dad was waiting at the finish line, too. He looked at the overly optimistic teacher and said with his typical deadpan, understated honesty:

  “You came in last.”*

  *Hey! Everybody knows I came in 8th. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

  Not when there are only 8 people in the race!

  Dad was a straight-shooting cowboy, and he didn’t see how building false pride was going to build character. It wasn’t meant to be cruel; it was just a little dose of brutal honesty, which is much funnier to recant now than it was to experience then. If you’re going to have a competition, then the kudos belong to whoever proves himself or herself best. We were raised to respect that simple fact of life, and it didn’t make us feel worthless if we didn’t happen to merit the gold medal or blue ribbon that day. Envious, maybe, but it was a good hunger to have.

  One of the biggest differences between Jonathan and me is that I probably would have treated that 1,500-meter loss as a gauntlet thrown and knocked myself out for the next year trying to become Usain Bolt. Jonathan didn’t spend that kind of energy just to see how good he could get at something he didn’t care passionately enough about in the first place.

  Our karate dojo was always looking for ways to raise money for trips and tournaments, and one time, our sensei decided that we should sell butchered cuts of meat.*

  *It felt like we were hustling for cattle rustlers, selling chuck roast door-to-door.

  As incentive, the sensei announced that whoever raised the most money for the fundraiser would get a very special prize: two authentic Japanese swords. A Katana and a Samurai, with watermarked blades. “Swords?” Jonathan and I did a Scooby-Doo impersonation in unison. We already had a sword addiction, and these two beauties belonged in our collection! We needed to sit down and strategize.

  “Okay,” I told Jonathan, “there are two of us, but we share the same market, so we should pool whatever we make under one name instead of splitting up.” We didn’t know it then, but “divide and conquer” would become a critical key to our success one day. For now, it was just the best shot at getting our hands on those swords.

  We hit the ground running. We may have been kids, but we were seasoned pros at sales already from our hanger business and the infamous Kimo Blasters. We charmed, pressured, and outright begged every relative and family friend we could to stock their freezers with a side of beef. We rang bells and were happily surprised by how many people were willing to buy frozen veal chops from some random kid on their doorstep. We wanted those swords so bad, we would have started selling whole cows door-to-door if we could. Anything to increase revenue.

  When the fundraiser was over, we won by a landslide. We were ecstatic. We already had the spot picked out on our bedroom wall to display the swords. Then the sensei said that since our dad was an assistant instructor, our family was part of the dojo, so the prize was given to one of the other kids! We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. The amount of money we had brought in was so far over and above the runner-up, we could have divided it by the two of us and we still would have clearly been on top. We were devastated. Dad was furious and volunteered himself to defend our honor. He marched down to the dojo and confronted the master. Our sensei didn’t realize how important this was to us and what was an innocent mistake was quickly rectified when he bought a second set of swords to award to us. There was balance in the universe again and we were over the moon.

  When you’re an identical twin, it’s only natural to want to distinguish yourself somehow, and for me, sports was the surefire way to do that. I dominated in all of them save for wrestling (no technique, I just picked opponents up and slammed them down like Bamm-Bamm from The Flintstones) and tetherball (Jonathan forgot to remind me* about the tournament).

  *Did Frazier remind Ali?

  And Ping-Pong.

  I was good at Ping-Pong. Very good, even. But Jonathan was unbeatable, and it drove me fifty shades of crazy that no matter how good my game got, it never improved enough to win consistently against him. Did the Peter Principle apply to Ping-Pong? Had I risen to the level of my incompetence smashing a tiny ball over a 6-inch net? Jonathan probably had some advantage I couldn’t figure out up his magic sleeve. I’d fallen victim to his sleight of hand in Monopoly marathons before (“How did my race car suddenly turn into an iron again?”) I needed to confront this Ping-Pong paradox like the baller I was. It was time to call in the big guns little paddles.

  I did some research and found William, a Ping-Pong ninja from Toronto, to coach me. He was my Miyagi, and graciously agreed to take on my sad case. I would play and learn several times a week with him. For the first couple of months, he wanted to break my years of bad habits. It was the Karate Kid equivalent of painting fences. He clearly was not grasping how urgent this was. I needed to beat Jonathan now, not at the senior center when we were 80. William decided to spend the next couple of months training me on patience. AHHHHH! I didn’t have time for that. But William’s philosophy did have merit. He said the goal in table tennis is to play defense and wait for the perfect set-up, or for your opponent to mess up. That was the beginning of my real training and what transfo
rmed my whole game. After six grueling months, I was finally trusted with my first secret weapon. The spin!! Jonathan would have no choice but to bow before me—I was ready to pull off a Ping-Pong coup and overthrow the champ. Jonathan and I set the time and a date that it would all go down. We did up a UFC-worthy graphic and distributed it to our friends. We did everything except sell tickets (which, in hindsight, would have been a great revenue opportunity).

  I had practiced with William for what seemed like an eternity. This was the moment I had been waiting for all these months. It was the culmination of all that hard work, countless late nights, and a massive investment in pro gear. We stepped up to the table, gave each other a nod, and the first ball dropped.

  The first game took less than five minutes, and in some bizarro turn of events, Jonathan destroyed me, 11–6. What the holy hell?!!! I quickly learned I had been training with a pro who knew how he was supposed to return the ball. Jonathan knew nothing—he was the idiot savant of Ping-Pong—and it was messing with my mojo!

  “Best two out of three,” I declared. And though I won the second game, Jonathan rebounded for the third and hence maintained his title.

  I wanted to break my custom paddle, but I had paid $280 for it and had grown quite fond of it. I took a sabbatical from the circuit and went back to training. After the rematch six months later, it was official . . . I was unbeatable, as long as I had my good paddle.

  Friends who know us both well cite my personal Ping-Pong trainer as proof that I can’t bear to lose and am uber-competitive about everything.* While I wouldn’t dispute that entirely, I have to say at the end of the day that it’s more about challenging myself than Jonathan. We push each other to do better, not to get out of the way. It’s funny, but we’ve never established a clear-cut twin hierarchy; we’re both alpha personalities, and we just sort of instinctively pass the baton back and forth for the leadership role at any given time. Flashback to toddlerhood when Mom said we did the exact same thing. Maybe old habits die . . . old? And it’s not like we have matured much after all these years.

  *Drew insists on keeping score even in mini-golf. I change the numbers just to mess with him.

  We both have our perfectionist tendencies, but mine runs so deep I try to perfect my perfectionism. I always like to be doing something; if we’re at the beach, I want to be playing volleyball or jet-skiing or trying some new sport. I can’t just lie in the sand.* I’m always up for a new activity, but I don’t want to be bad at it. I like taking lessons because my philosophy is, “Why reinforce bad habits when you can learn to do it right?” It’s true, I’m sort of a lesson-holic. The list is long, but for starters, besides Ping-Pong, I’ve taken guitar, singing, voice, hip-hop dancing, volleyball, golf, parkour, cooking, trapeze, and Spanish. I was better at trapeze than Spanish, but I haven’t given up on the latter. I would get better faster if they awarded vintage Toledo swords for conjugating irregular verbs.

  *Mmm, big fan of a beachside lounge and a nap.

  We had been doing Property Brothers for a couple of years when HGTV realized there was gold in pushing our competitive buttons, so we created a series pitting us head-to-head against each other in the ultimate flipping showdown. For the first two seasons of Brother vs. Brother, we each mentored a team of five people who wanted to be the next big thing in design/construction. The weakest contestant would be eliminated challenge by challenge until we declared a winner. Since our primary role was just to guide our teams, I knew going in that I had the advantage over Jonathan—I’d originally aspired to be a PE teacher and had done a ton of coaching while in high school and college. Jonathan couldn’t even teach Stewie where the doggie door was when he was a puppy; Gracie, the older pooch, finally got exasperated with Stewie’s yapping and did Jonathan’s job for him. I easily won* the first two seasons of BvB.

  *Are you taking credit for a contestant’s victory?

  In the third season, we took Brother vs. Brother in-house and began to produce it ourselves. The original format had been costly to produce, and because it was an elimination challenge, the show didn’t have an afterlife in reruns. We scrapped the idea of mentoring teams of amateurs and turned the show into a head-to-head competition in flipping. We would each be responsible for buying, renovating, and selling a fixer-upper. I did my own design and oversaw my own construction so there was no way Jonathan could contest future losses. When the houses were done, we listed them, and the brother who made the most profit in the end would win. Jonathan won Season 3, so I came into Season 4 determined to reclaim my title. Jonathan won again.

  That meant that Season 5 would be the tiebreaker. We went to Galveston, Texas, and boiled down dozens of houses with potential to our top contenders. We each had a budget of $600,000. I got a run-down house on a canal for $335,000, but so many major structural problems were uncovered during inspection, I was able to negotiate it down to $275,000, which left me $325,000 for the renovation. I was likely to need every penny. The house was going to be a beast to flip, but I purposely chose the worst one I saw. I was tired of losing to Jonathan, and I knew I needed to go big or go home.

  I know I can make a house pretty, and I know Jonathan can make a house pretty, so I was going to have to be very strategic in how I played this.

  One of the biggest misconceptions people have is that I’m strictly a real estate agent who never gets his hands dirty. But I started designing, renovating, and flipping houses in the mid-1990s—right out of high school, same as Jonathan. I may not have the construction and design education or experience that Jonathan has today, and unlike him, I definitely hate getting unidentifiable sludge under my nails. But because I work every day buying and selling homes, I know what adds value, I know where to spend money so it counts, and I know exactly what buyers want. Jonathan can’t claim that.

  I’m also very calculating. For BvB Season 5, I spoke with HOAs, other real estate agents, and people who lived in the area to figure out what type of buyers were coming to Galveston. I quickly realized the large majority were investors looking for rental properties. That meant my potential buyers would want “heads in beds,” meaning I had to fit as many beds as comfortably possible in this place so the investor-owners could ask for higher rents.

  Right smack in the middle of the already cramped kitchen was a tiki hut straight out of Gilligan’s Island. Taking that tiki hut down turned out to be a maddening chore: It looked like one good puff of air would blow the whole palm-fronded thing down, but no such luck. Even harder to get rid of was the indoor rock-climbing wall that stood strong against the sledgehammer assault for an impressive amount of time. Then there was a huge, ugly, ten-person hot tub upstairs in the master bedroom, which left me wondering what kind of parties they were having in this place. Outside, a big pergola was going to get demolished, too. Every one of the eyesores proved surprisingly resilient. I had the feeling the whole sagging house could fall down, but that damn rock wall and tiki hut would still be standing in the ruins.

  The house was held up by stilts, and on a day with a particularly low water level, I happened to be looking down at the shallow canal and noticed one of the pilings looked rotted almost all the way through. It turned out that there was some bug that eats away at the wood underwater—a termite in scuba gear, apparently—and every piling had been nibbled away to practically nothing. They were all going to have to be replaced, but doing so would take a feat of engineering that was definitely outside my wheelhouse and commandeered a big chunk out of my cash reserve. I was beginning to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. At least I had been able to carve two extra bedrooms out of the unwieldy master closet and an equally cavernous laundry room. I now had a five-bedroom house on the water. More beds for more heads. I sent a drone up the canal to spy on Jonathan and see what his house was looking like. In real-time I could see he had installed a beautiful window wall across the entire south side of the living room. He must have stolen my idea, as I wanted to do
the same thing but didn’t have the budget. But structural repairs had cost me a fortune already, and I knew Jonathan didn’t have nearly as bad a hand as I’d dealt myself.

  But I stood by my philosophy that I had to be bold. This was Texas, and I had to go big. As my budget ballooned and my profit margin shrank, I maintained my game face, even though inside I was absolutely dying. If by some chance Jonathan pulled off the holy trinity of home-flipping wins, I would be crushed for good. This was the proverbial straw that would break this camo-print-wearing agent’s back. Renovations complete, the houses were listed and my fate was officially in the hands of the buyer. It was touch-and-go until the very end.

  I finally won, and it was a landslide.

  That was a spin shot Jonathan never saw coming.

  The grand dreams and underhanded schemes you see on Brother vs. Brother are nothing compared to family game night in our living room. Here’s how to turn an innocent board game into a marathon death match.

  Strategy

  Drew: Make sure you control the bank. Start slow, buy a couple of choice properties, and invest in putting up hotels until you’ve recreated the Las Vegas Strip on a single lot.

  Jonathan: Get in the market fast and buy up all of the cheapest properties until you dominate an entire half of the board. The up-front cost is huge, but you can take out a second mortgage later.

  Downfall

  Drew: My magical nemesis is so predictable, and always ends up broke or in jail, where he’s stuck with empty rooms he can’t collect rent on while I wander in circles by myself, waiting for him to post bail or roll out.