Pushkin. His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting 14 jump shots from the right side. That's John McPhee, now 93 years old, the grand master of literary non-fiction. He's reading for us from the first book he ever published, back in 1965. 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 Brad had never been in before. He stopped, looked discomforted, 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 11 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 hoop in my bedroom to recreate the upcoming 1972 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. 'New York Knicks down by one, five seconds left, Bradley in heavy traffic, Bradley dribbles left, Bradley shoots, it's good! Bradley got away from McMillian, Jackson knocked it in.' I'm a little madman with a private obsession. After each game I sit down and listen to my two hours of tape to create box scores, to see how well Bill Bradley did, even though I had just done it. This is how I really begin as a sports fan, with emulation. I want to be like Bill Bradley, which is why I bothered to find a whole book about him and read it.
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 11 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 that 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 9 feet 10 and 7/8 inches above the floor, or 1 and 1/8 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, 11-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, or father bring a daughter, 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, you want to be like the father. You don't want to be like Bradley, but 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.
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, we toured Oxford, and I walked into Christ Church quad and looked around and thought to myself, 'I've 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. I had so-called low College Board scores, and I certainly had no reference for French or biology, which were the two 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 1965 draft. Bradley thanked them politely, then left for Oxford to study for years. Even back then, people who didn't know Bill Bradley would hear about him and say, 'Oh, it must be an act.' But if it is an act, it's an act he's going to play his entire life. He totally embodies the values he talks about: sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, resilience. 'He's never going to lose,' his Princeton adviser says about him. 'Do you know just how hard it is to defeat a 16th-century Puritan?'
Late in his second year as a Rhodes Scholar, Bill Bradley realizes how much he misses basketball. And so he calls the Knicks and he tells them that after he's done with the scholarship and a stint in the Air Force, he's coming back to New York to play. And Knicks fans go crazy. But his first year on the team, he bombs. He's really just no good. He's paying a price for those two years in an Oxford library. For the first time in Bradley's life, the fans turn on him. They boo him, they holler insults. One day, a fan actually spits on him. But because he's Bill Bradley, he turns the other cheek, works his ass off, and improves. Over the next six years, he helps the Knicks win two NBA championships, and the fans love him all over again. Now, including me.
When Bradley's done, they retire his jersey and hang it from the rafters of Madison Square Garden. Did fans in any way enter your imagination as a player?
They entered your imagination by the noise. I loved the roar of the crowd. And it wasn't a fan, it was 20,000 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 somehow 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 booed. And I asked afterwards, I asked the trainer, 'Why were they booing? We won by eight points, not six points.' He said, 'Oh, well, those were 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 1977 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 probably in eighth grade, through high school, you know, just betting the parlay cards. A buddy of mine used to bring in these green parlay sheets where you'd have to pick a three-for-three, four-for-four, five-for-five. You know, you'd bet five, ten bucks.
His real name is Gunnar Kollus, 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 that might have won, and you know, he'd win like, you know, 50, 60 bucks, whatever. But most people lost. And then I started realizing, 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 celebrate, we'd have dinner, then we'd whip out the cards and we'd 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. This is my allowance and everything. 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 gambled, and 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 20-to-1 odds if you say pick the winner of five different NFL games, and pay you nothing if you only get four right. Parlay cards, they would have been illegal, yeah, when you were in high school?
And so there's an illegal bookie in Hoboken?
And so he is using what, like some high school kid as a sort of a salesman, as a runner?
And these things are getting distributed in your school, and nobody stops it?
Nobody. Not only is nobody stopping it, you know, and I'm not going to name names, obviously, but you know, there would be teachers that would fill out parlay cards and hand them in. You know what I mean? 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 just what we did.
You're getting a different kind of education than I got.
Absolutely, from people that really weren't supposed to be teaching us stuff, but 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, and the customers bet. Spanky then collects all the bets from the barber, but instead of handing them all to the bookie, he keeps some for himself. Which is to say that by high school, Spanky was a bookie. He wasn't stealing the bookie's money, he was stealing their business.
I don't wake up in the morning, 'I can't wait to break the law today.' But, you know, the money's the money. I figured with gambling and with bookmaking, it's really not that bad. You know, it's not like I'm putting a gun to somebody's head, I'm saying you got to bet. You know, they're the ones that are asking me, 'Hey, you got the sheets yet? Are the sheets ready this week?' It was just, you know, like selling crack to a crack addict. It was just so easy.
At the same time that Spanky's raking it in in the high school cafeteria, New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley is rising to political prominence. He sponsored bills on health care and gun control and 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 it, 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 betting 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 betting 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 and Amateur Sports Protection Act passes in 1992 with hardly a peep of protest or anything else. Once the senators from Nevada are assured that they can keep doing whatever they want to do inside their state, opposition inside the US Senate totally vanishes. Outside of Nevada, it's illegal to be a bookie. It's okay to place a bet with a friend, but it's against the law to run a sports book. And America appears to be simply pleased to have Bill Bradley's values embedded in its laws.
I thought this was very quiet. I mean, I thought, okay, I passed the law, it's now illegal, not the law of the land. A few New Jersey casino people were pissed, but there are a couple of 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 swing between virtue and vice, between freedom and repression, between fear and greed. Sports gambling is a good example of it. Gambling's always been a part of American history. George Washington bet on cockfights. David Hill is a writer who grew up in Arkansas, like Spanky, 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.
Sport 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 racetracks 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 bookie needed a way to attract interest in both teams before the game, even if one team was obviously a lot better than the other. Enter an underrated American genius named Charles McNeil.
He created this idea of the point spread, where you would give the favorite a certain number of points that they would have to lay 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 as 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 and during 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 sort of thing a lot less likely to happen. But one thing the law didn't accomplish: to stop the betting, to stop Spanky, or likely anyone else in New Jersey who operated in the illegal markets.
A bookmaker needs to meet you on a corner of 46th and 7th and hand you a bag full of cash, and that's kind of what got my wife nervous, what my mom nervous.
