Speaker 1: There are some bodies buried, so to speak, not actual ones,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's a body buried in the Rise
Speaker 1: of the NBA, and he was ruthless and he wielded
Speaker 1: his power. So certainly a person who would have conceived
Speaker 1: of this not a question.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 3: I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
Speaker 3: living undercover all around the world.
Speaker 4: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 4: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 3: created conspiracies.
Speaker 4: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 4: weren't true.
Speaker 3: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 3: news almost every day.
Speaker 4: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 4: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4: And on sports and espionage. A lot of people don't
Speaker 4: realize it, but when John and I were serving abroad,
Speaker 4: we're looking for ways to meet other diplomats so we
Speaker 4: can assess them and so forth. And one of the
Speaker 4: things sometimes we do is we organize sports events. Is
Speaker 4: one country where foolishly, we organized a soccer tournament for
Speaker 4: all the diplomats that we could get into them, and
Speaker 4: we went up against the Egyptians and we got the
Speaker 4: first goal and we lost twenty two to one.
Speaker 5: It was never up.
Speaker 2: Afterwards, We're like, we're the CIA.
Speaker 4: We should have challenged them to like baseball.
Speaker 5: And they say intelligence is your middle name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true. I remember my first tour.
Speaker 3: I was in the Scandinavia, an international soccer team that
Speaker 3: we tried to get all the diplomats on to play
Speaker 3: against the different businesses there and stuff, so we could
Speaker 3: get the Russians and the Hungarians and everybody on during
Speaker 3: the Cold War, and we had a volleyball tournat where
Speaker 3: the American embassy played against the Russians, and yeah, it
Speaker 3: is true. We would just get hammered every time. And
Speaker 3: I never I played football on lacross and basketball. I
Speaker 3: never played soccer, so I had to play goaliecause I
Speaker 3: don't even know how to.
Speaker 4: This is really funny, but I do have to say
Speaker 4: we did pay a softball tournament because we're all getting older.
Speaker 4: And see I didn't run it, but we had a
Speaker 4: lot of guys in there. Was allowed us to travel
Speaker 4: so farth and it was in Africa. It was in Zimbabwe,
Speaker 4: and of course the capital of Zimbabwe is Hurrari and
Speaker 4: the name of our team was the Hurrari Krishna's.
Speaker 5: That's very funny, but that was our cover.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: I'm impressed you guys can talk this much about sports,
Speaker 3: because my impression of both.
Speaker 5: Of you is your geeks and you don't know about
Speaker 5: so I am a geek and I'm not ashamed of it,
Speaker 5: even though you said that in a way that made
Speaker 5: me think you thought I should be for some reason.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 5: Correct, And I have never had even the slightest interest
Speaker 5: in sports, although now because I'm a good father to
Speaker 5: a lovely young man named Asher who's twelve and completely obsessed,
Speaker 5: particularly with basketball, although any sport. I'm in my mid
Speaker 5: fifties and I'm discovering sports for the first time, and
Speaker 5: we're Celtic's household and two years wait.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Speaker 3: You're a New Yorker, but you know living in Vermont,
Speaker 3: so you've chosen Boston over New York.
Speaker 5: Actually good. So my dad is a sports fanatic. In fact,
Speaker 5: he's such a sports fanatic that it helps explain why
Speaker 5: I'm not a Spartan at it, and so I grew
Speaker 5: up in a Boston household and I just didn't care.
Speaker 5: But then Vermont is Celtics country, Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots, Ruins,
Speaker 5: and my son is obsessed with all of them. And
Speaker 5: I will say, following for the first time in my life,
Speaker 5: like the year like the Celtics had quite two years,
Speaker 5: but my son gets these conspiracy theories, like he really
Speaker 5: will believe like the refs are on the take. There's
Speaker 5: no way like they were, even though the next day
Speaker 5: you read the papers and they're like, no, the reps
Speaker 5: were equally, but it's like they just hate the Celtics.
Speaker 5: They're killing. But it just made me realize if the
Speaker 5: Celtics had lost. For those of our listeners who like me,
Speaker 5: are geeks and don't care that much, the Celtics did
Speaker 5: win the NBA Championship to become the winningest team with eighteen.
Speaker 3: All right, all right, move on here to the conspiracy partist.
Speaker 5: But it made me see how I could. It's just
Speaker 5: so emotional, you're so invested, and the narrative ends with
Speaker 5: them winning, and if they don't win, there has to
Speaker 5: be some reason why they didn't win and it can't
Speaker 5: be fair. But then you realize there's thirty teams that
Speaker 5: have fans who feel that way.
Speaker 4: But I will say very often, CIA guys are the
Speaker 4: worst sports fans because we get sent abroad for ten
Speaker 4: fifteen years at a time and you're living in Africa
Speaker 4: or the Middle East. You're not getting the sports scores
Speaker 4: and things like that, and you start losing. It is
Speaker 4: none of the people you talk to even know what
Speaker 4: baseball is. That's the one like rugby. No, it's the
Speaker 4: one like cricket. It's the one like cricket.
Speaker 3: It's like they nowadays you can watch like ESPN and
Speaker 3: all kind of stuff. When I first started, when I
Speaker 3: first one overseas, yeah, you just got the local television
Speaker 3: or radio or whatever. You had none of the stuff
Speaker 3: from the US.
Speaker 4: We can sit down and we can talk to a
Speaker 4: Burmese kernel till the cows come home. But put us
Speaker 4: together with someone who's a Mets fan right from New
Speaker 4: York and like, I don't know, I have no idea
Speaker 4: what to talk.
Speaker 3: Stay away from that fans.
Speaker 2: That's smart. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So our guest today is Chris Ballard. Chris is a journalist,
Speaker 3: author and a recent senior writer at Sports Illustrated for
Speaker 3: over twenty three years. He's written books on a variety
Speaker 3: of sports subjects and is currently working on a book
Speaker 3: for Simon and Schuster. So today you want to speak
Speaker 3: with him about an article that he wrote about a
Speaker 3: conspiracy surrounding the NBA Draft. Chris, can you outline a
Speaker 3: little bit about that story for us?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighty five NBA Draft went down as one
Speaker 1: of the most controversial elements in NBA history. We looked
Speaker 1: back on it at Sports Illustrated more than twenty years
Speaker 1: later and had seen this continued interest in how it happened,
Speaker 1: in how Patrick Ewing ended up with the New York
Speaker 1: Knicks at the exact time when New York needed a
Speaker 1: dominant big man and despite the odds against them. An
Speaker 1: editor I had there assigned me the story and I
Speaker 1: started digging into this controversy, assuming I might not get
Speaker 1: that far because people had dug into it for about
Speaker 1: twenty plus years at this point, and they'd created YouTube
Speaker 1: videos and analyzed it like it was a Bruder film.
Speaker 1: And in the end I was able to talk to
Speaker 1: David Stern, who was the commissioner during this time, he's
Speaker 1: now passed away, and I was surprised that he actually
Speaker 1: would speak about it. And I'm not sure sure how
Speaker 1: much of a definitive answer was possible or will ever be,
Speaker 1: but it definitely added its some intrigue to it. The
Speaker 1: NBA in nineteen eighty four was in a rough place.
Speaker 1: They had not quite yet reached the era of Michael
Speaker 1: Jordan and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were in the league,
Speaker 1: but they were just coming up and it hadn't created
Speaker 1: this great marketing bonanza that it would end up creating.
Speaker 1: So at the time, the NBA was trying to gain legitimacy,
Speaker 1: which sounds a little bit weird now, but this is
Speaker 1: an era when they had come off widespread drug use
Speaker 1: problems With the NBA, they were showing their telecasts on
Speaker 1: tape delay, They did not have cultural clout, and one
Speaker 1: of the issues was that it felt like there was
Speaker 1: there was no good sense of parody in the league,
Speaker 1: and that lays down to the draft. So at the
Speaker 1: end of each season prior to nineteen eighty five, the
Speaker 1: worst teams in the league would have the best chance
Speaker 1: of getting the best players coming out of college. So
Speaker 1: if there was a really impressive college star Rick Berry,
Speaker 1: a Luel cinder Bill Russell, whichever NBA team had done
Speaker 1: the worst the year before had a very good one
Speaker 1: and two chance of getting that player, because the teams
Speaker 1: with the two worst records at the end of the
Speaker 1: year would flip a coin, and whoever on the coin
Speaker 1: flip got the number one pick in the draft, and
Speaker 1: whoever lost the coin flip got the number two pick
Speaker 1: in the draft. So, if you knew a really good
Speaker 1: player was about to graduate college and enter the NBA,
Speaker 1: and during this era, you could intentionally lose games, and
Speaker 1: this is something that teams were doing. And so this
Speaker 1: happened for a few years in a row. And what
Speaker 1: occurred is David Stern, who is then the new commissioner
Speaker 1: of the NBA, realized he had a legitimacy problem. People
Speaker 1: saw the NBA as a league where teams were intentionally
Speaker 1: losing games to try to game the system. And so
Speaker 1: what he did is he instituted the first draft lottery,
Speaker 1: which meant that rather than a coin flip where you
Speaker 1: had a one and two chance of getting the first pick,
Speaker 1: instead the teams with these seven worst records would all
Speaker 1: have an equal chance at that worst pick, So you're
Speaker 1: going from fifty percent to fourteen percent, and they would
Speaker 1: be decided by a random drawing, in this case from
Speaker 1: a giant bubble. Now we're familiar with it for pink
Speaker 1: punk balls, and this is going it HAPs to be
Speaker 1: going into a draft when the most valuable and well
Speaker 1: known NBA draft prospect in that era was coming out,
Speaker 1: Patrick Ewing, seven foot one center from Georgetown, one of
Speaker 1: the most famous athletes in the country at the time.
Speaker 1: Is back when college basketball was more popular in many
Speaker 1: ways in the NBA. So whoever won this prize, whoever
Speaker 1: got Patrick Ewing, would immediately become not only a potential
Speaker 1: contender or at least a very good team, and then
Speaker 1: probably for a decade after, but would sell tickets, they
Speaker 1: would sell merchandise, they would get buzz and just so
Speaker 1: happens that New York, the biggest media market in the country,
Speaker 1: finally has a down season that year, and just so
Speaker 1: happens that New York ends up winning this fourteen percent chance,
Speaker 1: and so Patrick Ewing goes to New York, which is
Speaker 1: where David Stern, the commissioner, is from. So when this happens,
Speaker 1: there was and immediately a lot of pushback, and people
Speaker 1: were saying, how is it that Patrick Ewing ends up
Speaker 1: in New York. They've watched this televised draft lottery and
Speaker 1: they start coming up with theories. The very corner of
Speaker 1: the envelope of the Knicks when they were drawn from
Speaker 1: this quote random drawing, it's creased, so obviously David Stern
Speaker 1: knew that he was picking the Nick's envelope, or they
Speaker 1: had put the envelope in a freezer prior to putting
Speaker 1: it in this drum. So David Stern put his hand
Speaker 1: in and just reached for the frozen envelope, and thus
Speaker 1: was born a controversy, a conspiracy theory that has continued
Speaker 1: still to this day about whether or not the NBA
Speaker 1: rigged the nineteen eighty five draft lottery to ensure the
Speaker 1: best player went to the biggest media market.
Speaker 6: We're back at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, sitting
Speaker 6: in a starlight roof, and David de Busher is here
Speaker 6: with a number one pick in the draft, and you said,
Speaker 6: you still you can he believe it.
Speaker 3: It's just a wonderful thing having the number one pick.
Speaker 5: And obviously I think everybody knows who are number one
Speaker 5: pick is going to be and we're very delighted.
Speaker 1: I think you knew it too.
Speaker 4: Show the show what you got in your hand.
Speaker 6: He has number thirty three all printed up here ready
Speaker 6: up to this confidence for you. So you will make a.
Speaker 2: Call to you, Chris.
Speaker 4: Wouldn't that be bad sportsmanship? Wouldn't that be be cheating?
Speaker 4: Wouldn't that be a conspiracy? Chris?
Speaker 2: Where do you come out on this?
Speaker 1: I think probably going into my reporting, I leaned slightly
Speaker 1: towards they pulled this off. The league pulled it off,
Speaker 1: and they were able to get eing to New York.
Speaker 1: By the time I was done reporting and talking to people,
Speaker 1: I realized just how fly by night and a little
Speaker 1: bit haphazard this whole process was, and probably how hard
Speaker 1: it would have been for them to actually rig it.
Speaker 1: So by the end of my reporting I came down
Speaker 1: on it probably was not rigged, but I wouldn't put
Speaker 1: it past David Stern.
Speaker 3: But there's a few things that I wonder on New
Speaker 3: York wasn't the worst team, right, so they weren't in
Speaker 3: the old system, weren't going to get the top picked.
Speaker 3: But do the dates match up of when the idea
Speaker 3: for the lottery came up. Was it clear that New
Speaker 3: York would be one of those seven teams. We can
Speaker 3: talk about what happened at the actual lottery, but even
Speaker 3: the lead up to the lottery, when they decided through
Speaker 3: the lottery, with the next part of that process, how
Speaker 3: could they know where the Knicks were going to end
Speaker 3: up in because they weren't the worst team.
Speaker 1: So this is when David Stern proposes with his league
Speaker 1: execs this draft lottery and they choose seven teams, and
Speaker 1: it just so happens the Knicks have the seventh worst record,
Speaker 1: so they barely make this cut to be one of
Speaker 1: these seven teams. And you could say that was done intentionally.
Speaker 1: You could say seven teams is about where you should
Speaker 1: make the cutoff. But there was a direct reaction in
Speaker 1: this time to what Houston and the Los Angeles Clippers
Speaker 1: have been doing, and they had been essentially taking a
Speaker 1: race to the bottom to see who could lose more games,
Speaker 1: playing Elvin Hayes at thirty eight for fifty two minutes
Speaker 1: a game just to make sure they fell on an
Speaker 1: important contest. So that impulse was correct, and it needed
Speaker 1: to be done to ensure there was legitimacy to the League.
Speaker 1: But if that cut off of seven in the year
Speaker 1: the Knicks happened to be bad, that led people down
Speaker 1: this road.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break. We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4: So, Chris, if CIA were given the mission to do this,
Speaker 4: we would probably we'd look at it in two ways.
Speaker 4: We'd look at it like the equipment freezing the envelope,
Speaker 4: and then we look at the people who would we
Speaker 4: recruit to do that. But then how to keep it quiet,
Speaker 4: which would also be important for this, And it's basically
Speaker 4: how to keep people from blabbing afterwards and twenty years
Speaker 4: after this happens, and in CIA or the US government,
Speaker 4: we keep it quiet by threatening to throw people into
Speaker 4: prison who like talk out of school, John and I
Speaker 4: are still under an obligation not to spill certain secrets.
Speaker 4: What would be the incentive not to like, make lots
Speaker 4: of money by spilling the beans on this right? If
Speaker 4: this was to say this is how we did it
Speaker 4: twenty years later, or to million dollars for a book
Speaker 4: or a pullitzerprise for pulling this off.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that's probably the best rationale for
Speaker 1: why it wasn't rigged, because at this point David Stern
Speaker 1: missis twenty twenty four. Him Stern has passed away, and
Speaker 1: he definitely governed the league through a little bit of
Speaker 1: intimidation and fear. So you can understand to a certain
Speaker 1: extent how when he was still commissioner and even when retired,
Speaker 1: why people might have been hesitant to say a thing
Speaker 1: about it. But now you'd assume something would come out
Speaker 1: and it hasn't come out. And secondarily, you can look
Speaker 1: at the amount of people that were involved in this,
Speaker 1: from Pat O'Brien who was doing the broadcast, to the
Speaker 1: people doing the TV trucks, to everyone who helped set
Speaker 1: up the Waldorf which is where this was held. And
Speaker 1: to pull this off. It couldn't have been a one
Speaker 1: person job. Obviously, you know the counter argument to that
Speaker 1: might be, and just to engage in that, and I'll
Speaker 1: go a little bit of a tangent, but you'll see I'll.
Speaker 2: Give us the Grassy Knoll version.
Speaker 1: Yes is you know, recently, as NBA fans will be aware,
Speaker 1: a year and a year and a half ago this point,
Speaker 1: during a pre season workout, Draymond Green of the Golden
Speaker 1: State Warriors got upset with Jordan Poole, who was then
Speaker 1: one of their guards, a young brash guard, and Draymond
Speaker 1: Green punches him in practice. And you know, twenty years earlier,
Speaker 1: this kind of thing was sort of the norm, not norm,
Speaker 1: but it was part of NBA culture. You know, Michael
Speaker 1: Jordan got in a fist fight in practice. These things happened.
Speaker 1: But in today's era, the Warriors tried to keep this quiet,
Speaker 1: and they succeeded in keeping it in house for a
Speaker 1: very short amount of time until someone in the best
Speaker 1: guesses it's probably someone in the video office took the
Speaker 1: feed from up in the arena which showed this happening
Speaker 1: and sold that video and then you know, probably disappeared
Speaker 1: to Brazil or wherever. But so today, no way, you know,
Speaker 1: no way you're pulling this off in such a physical fashion.
Speaker 1: But I do think that in nineteen eighty four at least,
Speaker 1: that probably wasn't what everyone was thinking about, and probably
Speaker 1: the majority of people that were just hoping the NBA
Speaker 1: would survive at this point and this would be successful
Speaker 1: and this production would work out.
Speaker 3: The question is, in his remaining decades after that, is
Speaker 3: there anything else that David Stern seemed to get involved with.
Speaker 3: It would suggest that perhaps this earlier conspiracy was just
Speaker 3: part of a pattern.
Speaker 1: Sure, you know, if you talk to enough people who
Speaker 1: covered the league for a long time, I mean you
Speaker 1: could say, if David Stern had gotten nailed for this,
Speaker 1: it would not be the least of but it would
Speaker 1: be one of the things he did that was more understandable.
Speaker 1: I mean, he definitely ruled with an iron fist. There
Speaker 1: are some bodies buried, so to speak, not actual ones,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's a body buried in the rise
Speaker 1: of the NBA, and he was ruthless and he wielded
Speaker 1: his power. So certainly a person who would have conceived
Speaker 1: of this not a question. And I think to a
Speaker 1: certain extent Stern enjoyed in the years after being thought
Speaker 1: to be someone who might have pulled this off, because
Speaker 1: it's furnished his legacy either way, like it worked out
Speaker 1: for them. More people watch the draft lottery every year,
Speaker 1: more people talked about the league. He created this mythology,
Speaker 1: so he sort of enjoyed going back and forth between
Speaker 1: denying it and jokingly not denying it to help keep
Speaker 1: that question alive.
Speaker 4: Sports have always had conspiracies and conspiracy theories around them,
Speaker 4: often due to to betting you know in the wider world,
Speaker 4: like in nineteen sixty nine a war started between Honduras
Speaker 4: and Al Salvador, like four thousand people were killed, three
Speaker 4: hundred thousand people were made refugees over conspiracies over whether
Speaker 4: this soccer match was fixed. And maybe if I could
Speaker 4: just take you there for a second to talk about
Speaker 4: maybe baseball's biggest one arguably the nineteen nineteen Black Sox
Speaker 4: World Series issue right where Julis Joe Jackson was thrown
Speaker 4: out of baseball forever after he signed this legal confession
Speaker 4: even though he couldn't read or write. Court found an
Speaker 4: innocent and this almost blew up baseball as well.
Speaker 1: And it's always a matter of the power level, right,
Speaker 1: So if the athlete, and it's really worked for college
Speaker 1: basketball players, if the athlete could make more money, if
Speaker 1: it was financially worthwhile for them, if they weren't going
Speaker 1: to make the NBA, there's no pot of goal professionally
Speaker 1: for them to take this side bet or to throw
Speaker 1: a game, then they'd consider it. Now, the majority of
Speaker 1: athletes would not go down that road, obviously, we hope,
Speaker 1: but enough did. And you see that in the same
Speaker 1: way that when it came the steroid era in baseball,
Speaker 1: the financial payout and staying in the league was worth
Speaker 1: it to the hundreds of players who decided to use steroids.
Speaker 1: I think why it becomes less and less prevalent now
Speaker 1: is because the amount of money that athletes in most
Speaker 1: of these sports are making, it really doesn't make sense
Speaker 1: get involved in throwing a game. But coming up and
Speaker 1: especially like in nineteen eighty four, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of impetus for someone to consider those routes,
Speaker 1: and I think in this case, the impetus was not
Speaker 1: necessarily for a individual player. It was for the league. Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll get we're gonna gamble with our reputation because our
Speaker 1: reputation already sucks, right, so we're going to gamble with
Speaker 1: it a bit here for the payout of getting you
Speaker 1: in this media market and getting people to talk about it.
Speaker 1: So anytime that gamble was worth it for an athlete,
Speaker 1: I think is when you would see the betting.
Speaker 3: Going back to the eighty five draft, let's talk a
Speaker 3: little bit about if it was a conspiracy pulling it off.
Speaker 3: And so some of the theories were, like you already
Speaker 3: mentioned the bent corner, the frozen envelope, how do those
Speaker 3: stack up?
Speaker 1: The bent corner concept, which is that when David Stern
Speaker 1: is putting the envelopes, and they're these unnaturally large envelopes,
Speaker 1: and they designed them so that when you pulled out
Speaker 1: the placard in the envelope, it would have the logo
Speaker 1: of the team, so it was the Clippers or if
Speaker 1: it was the Knicks, and then you place that logo
Speaker 1: up on a shelf with the other logos and David
Speaker 1: Stern would hold it up that on a twenty inch
Speaker 1: TV of the era that the logo would pop. So
Speaker 1: that was their explanation for why they needed these oversized envelopes.
Speaker 1: But because they were oversized envelopes and not say ping
Speaker 1: pong ball, because there was this large envelope, you could
Speaker 1: in fact probably bend a corner if you wanted to.
Speaker 1: And when you watch Stern put the envelopes in and
Speaker 1: he puts in that envelope, it looks a little.
Speaker 2: You could read into it.
Speaker 1: It looks a little intentional that he drops it on
Speaker 1: the side of this big plastic sphere, which is what
Speaker 1: they're quote tumbling. It's really hard to tumble envelopes, but
Speaker 1: that's what they had never to do, and so he
Speaker 1: drops on the side and you see that corner bend.
Speaker 1: You can also see a film of the draft of
Speaker 1: Stern doing this. You can see that he fumbles a
Speaker 1: bit when grabbing the envelopes, so conceivably he's feeling for
Speaker 1: that bent corner.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 7: The drum will now be turned to further mix the envelopes,
Speaker 7: and then I will conduct the drawing.
Speaker 6: That is Jack Joyce, he's the head of security for
Speaker 6: the NBA. Spinning the drums. There's about six turns.
Speaker 7: The team whose logo is in this envelope will have
Speaker 7: the first pick in the NBA draft.
Speaker 1: So that one definitely holds water. As far as would
Speaker 1: it work, you know, the concept of the frozen envelopes,
Speaker 1: to my mind a little harder to believe because you
Speaker 1: would have had to get this thing out of the
Speaker 1: freezer theoretically get it in there, and it would have
Speaker 1: to still retain a coolness. I've never really tried freezing paper,
Speaker 1: but I can't imagine it would retain the coolness for
Speaker 1: long enough to be a fail safe way for Stern
Speaker 1: to make sure he got the right envelope.
Speaker 3: But this is also being done right in front of
Speaker 3: the executives of the losing teams here too, right, So
Speaker 3: if you're going to pull us off, you can't pull
Speaker 3: it off so that the Golden State Warriors executive sitting
Speaker 3: there could say, oh my god, there's a bent corner
Speaker 3: on that envelope.
Speaker 1: And it's being broadcast live. There's already questions about this
Speaker 1: draft that it happens to work out that the Knicks
Speaker 1: are going to be in it, and you're going live
Speaker 1: for the first time with this new conceit, which is
Speaker 1: that you're going to show the draft process on live
Speaker 1: TV at the halftime of an existing game. So Ale
Speaker 1: Adols could have very easily thrown a fit right there
Speaker 1: on the spot on live TV. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of variables that could have gone wrong for the NBA.
Speaker 4: I assume people have recreated this, right.
Speaker 1: There was a writer, Patrick Ruby into an eleven who
Speaker 1: watched this film with a professional magician and asked, and
Speaker 1: there's always no one can say for sure one way
Speaker 1: or the other, or no one has at this point,
Speaker 1: like they're bizarre enough theories that you were like, I
Speaker 1: don't know they could pull that off, But at the
Speaker 1: same time they are plausible theories to the point, you're like,
Speaker 1: I don't. I can't say they didn't pull that off.
Speaker 1: And that's what you've heard from any expert who has
Speaker 1: been consulted on this.
Speaker 3: And in this case, actually you could argue that the
Speaker 3: losers all benefit of the NBA, all those other teams
Speaker 3: that maybe didn't get Patrick Ewing, the NBA became this
Speaker 3: cash call for everybody. Conceivably David Start could have gone
Speaker 3: around dead, but he say, listen, this is going to
Speaker 3: benefit all of us if you just play a lot.
Speaker 1: If it happened today, there would be a different response,
Speaker 1: But in nineteen eighty five, in that era, there was
Speaker 1: You're right, the rising tide lifts all ships because of
Speaker 1: the TV contracts that came on the heels of it.
Speaker 1: The TV contracts, the international, the global work that Stern
Speaker 1: did were the values of each of these franchises, and
Speaker 1: the salaries of everyone involved on that day just exponentially
Speaker 1: grew over the next ten years. I mean, as opposed
Speaker 1: to the other great conspiracy of the NBA is that
Speaker 1: Michael Jordan was banned from the NBA and that's why
Speaker 1: he went to play baseball. And that's one where I
Speaker 1: think if you had polled most people involved in the league.
Speaker 1: They would have said that was bad for us. It
Speaker 1: was good for baseball, but it was bad for the
Speaker 1: NBA when Jordan was out of the league.
Speaker 3: Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and boom,
Speaker 3: we're back. Are there any other sports conspiracies that you're
Speaker 3: interested in or that you feel rise to the level.
Speaker 1: There definitely remained questions about the reffing and NBA and
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrated. We had a writer who spent nine months
Speaker 1: at one point, Thomas Lake, very talented writer, looking into
Speaker 1: the Kings Lakers series, and there reffing in it. And
Speaker 1: this was the era where the Kings were ascended. This
Speaker 1: is in the early two thousands, Chris Weber, Paisiaestoyakovic, and
Speaker 1: it looked like they're on the verge of becoming a
Speaker 1: dominant team in the NBA. And there's this crazy Game
Speaker 1: seven that the Lakers with Shaquille and Eland, Kobe Bryant
Speaker 1: once again major media market eke out. And if you
Speaker 1: go back and you retroactively interviewed all these people involved
Speaker 1: in it, that one smelled bad. Weirdly enough, we never
Speaker 1: ran the story. So maybe that's another conspiracy theory right there.
Speaker 4: One place where the world of intelligence, where intelligence and
Speaker 4: sports and conspiracies and conspiracy theories all genuinely overlap of
Speaker 4: courses in the Olympics, and was at Sochi in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: The Russian intelligence services were at the center of the
Speaker 4: doping scandal, and Russian intelligence services were putting their fingers
Speaker 4: on the scale to make sure that Putin won medals
Speaker 4: and cheating was massive, factory level, with secret rooms and
Speaker 4: whole teams of scientists to hide yurn and blood samples.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a place where there's almost you assume if
Speaker 1: you were to look at the last sixty years of
Speaker 1: Olympic sports, and especially say, for example, like the Russian
Speaker 1: team or the German team over the years, you would assist, Yes,
Speaker 1: in particular, Yeah, you would assume more often than not
Speaker 1: that there had been some mechanics at play there.
Speaker 4: I have to share a story real quick, so you know,
Speaker 4: I spent a lot of time in Germany, and when
Speaker 4: East Germany and West Germany, when they united West Germany,
Speaker 4: the United Germany took over all of East Germany's like
Speaker 4: debts and things that it had to fulfill, and it
Speaker 4: turns out one of them was the East German athletes
Speaker 4: who had been regularly beating the entire world and beating
Speaker 4: the West Germans. All their athletes, especially their women, had
Speaker 4: been like fully doped. And so these athletes who would
Speaker 4: won all their gold medals, Yeah, I know, surprise, they're
Speaker 4: now suffering from these terrible medical conditions because the East
Speaker 4: Germans forced them to dope, or they agreed to it,
Speaker 4: but they sued the West German government for medical malprek
Speaker 4: because they took over there. They took over everything that
Speaker 4: these Germans did. So the West German athletes are like
Speaker 4: a they cheated. I didn't get a medal. They did,
Speaker 4: and now now their health is all fucked up because
Speaker 4: of all the drugs, and now they're suing. I got
Speaker 4: my taxes who've got to pay for their medical care.
Speaker 2: That's not okay.
Speaker 4: I didn't see the movie with Matt Damon and Victus
Speaker 4: about South Africa re entering the world of rugby after
Speaker 4: apartheip was coming down, but there was an interesting story
Speaker 4: that came out afterwards of a conspiracy. Theory is that
Speaker 4: the New Zealanders who lost to the South Africans, who
Speaker 4: were the great favorites, the night before the game, they
Speaker 4: all came down with diarrhea. They all come down with
Speaker 4: they all got sick, and there was this mysterious waitress
Speaker 4: who served them the food, called Susie, and they never
Speaker 4: saw her again and she could never be found. Although
Speaker 4: the New Zealand team swears they all know who she
Speaker 4: is and they could identify her. The South Africans couldn't
Speaker 4: produce her. And later this guy Stein, one of Nelson
Speaker 4: and Dala's bodyguards, came out and said it was the
Speaker 4: South African Intelligence Service. They needed South Africa to have
Speaker 4: a good feeling, They needed it to win. They wanted
Speaker 4: to keep civil war at bay in South Africa because
Speaker 4: apart I hadn't quite come down yet and they needed
Speaker 4: this win.
Speaker 3: I can remember years ago when they thought was that
Speaker 3: they not poisoned, but it had given Michael Jordan bad
Speaker 3: food or something before one of the playoff games.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and maybe every player should have a taster.
Speaker 3: Now, Chris is a fascinating story. What is it your
Speaker 3: book that you're writing now about That.
Speaker 1: One's totally different. That's sports and jacent I would say
Speaker 1: it's the concept of ice swimming and how it has
Speaker 1: this roots back in Europe, going back four hundred five
Speaker 1: hundred years, and then how it's now being looked at
Speaker 1: as a way of cold exposure. So there's a whole
Speaker 1: science to a science and history, and I'm doing a
Speaker 1: narrative exploration of it.
Speaker 3: My first overseas assignment was to Finland, and I lived
Speaker 3: right on the Baltic and I lived right next to
Speaker 3: the Finish Sauna Society, And they in the Baltic under
Speaker 3: the water had this little bubble machine that would continue
Speaker 3: all year long, so it would create this big hole
Speaker 3: in the ice over the winter, and the ice could
Speaker 3: get is eight to ten feet or more thick, and
Speaker 3: you'd go swim in there after you took a sauna
Speaker 3: and swim into the ice and stuff. The fact that
Speaker 3: sauna was so central a part of the culture in
Speaker 3: a place like Finland, and the fact that everybody goes
Speaker 3: in there naked, it was a great opportunity to steal
Speaker 3: stuff from people's wallets and clothes and car keys and
Speaker 3: other things while you were in the sauna, or at
Speaker 3: least copy them so that you could use them later
Speaker 3: to perhaps break into their place and steal secrets.
Speaker 1: Wow, I'm going to be more careful when I go
Speaker 1: to the beach.
Speaker 2: There you go. As long as you're not a KGB spy,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: Well, Chris, this is really great. Thank you for talking
Speaker 3: to us. Fascinating stuff and I really enjoyed your story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no problem. Good luck with the podcast.
Speaker 4: So now that we've had someone who really knows what
Speaker 4: they're talking about, let's switch to the other side and
Speaker 4: bring in John and Adam.
Speaker 5: Hey, guys, I don't.
Speaker 8: Know a lot about sports, but I do know about
Speaker 8: scientific experiments, because what I did was I tested the
Speaker 8: theory that you could freeze an envelope and then feel
Speaker 8: the temperature differential. So I froze a bunch of different
Speaker 8: envelopes for different periods of times, brought them out, did
Speaker 8: a blind field test between them and one that hasn't
Speaker 8: been frozen, and after about fifteen seconds, they all felt
Speaker 8: the same. So I frozen for longer. Same thing. My
Speaker 8: son said, try spraying them with water and the water
Speaker 8: will hold the temperature longer, and he was right for
Speaker 8: about thirty seconds. If you really wanted to make it noticeable,
Speaker 8: I think you'd have to do something physical to it.
Speaker 8: Different texture, different shape than in the corner. Significantly. I
Speaker 8: know all of these were discussed, so I tested these
Speaker 8: as well, and it is really hard to tell the difference.
Speaker 8: I think the way to do it would be to
Speaker 8: have a different texture of paper. But this all goes
Speaker 8: back to, well, how many people have to be involved
Speaker 8: in this. You don't just get to go in yourself
Speaker 8: and replace the envelope, but you have to feel up
Speaker 8: the different envelopes, right, you got to feel this one.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's not it. And then he's got to know
Speaker 4: did they show him?
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, you can see him what he does, and
Speaker 3: I don't see that there's.
Speaker 4: Any It's all how you see it.
Speaker 8: Some people say they see that video and it looks
Speaker 8: like he's feeling around.
Speaker 5: If you guys got the technical branch of the CIA,
Speaker 5: couldn't you could solve this?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah we could have.
Speaker 3: Usually the first thing to do is to think there's
Speaker 3: probably an easier way around all this. Professionals who do
Speaker 3: this type of thing could probably come up with a
Speaker 3: way to do it. But again, you're talking about stuff
Speaker 3: that you have to bring in.
Speaker 4: You know, there are ways of palming things and having
Speaker 4: it up your sleeve, pulling rabbits out of hats and
Speaker 4: shit like that, but that's not saying that like any
Speaker 4: schmoke can just like quick go do it. Penn and
Speaker 4: Teller could pull it off.
Speaker 5: When I think about the is it called the technical branch.
Speaker 3: What's it called technical services?
Speaker 5: Office of technical Did you have cool things that they like?
Speaker 5: Weird problems that they solved?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Tell me what first?
Speaker 3: In the whole disguise thing, they had actually people who
Speaker 3: had worked in Hollywood and had done masks and done
Speaker 3: things for Hollywood. There's all kinds of technical gear that
Speaker 3: we could use. In fact, I remember when I was
Speaker 3: in Moscow and we were under surveillance all the time,
Speaker 3: we actually did hire a magician to try to work
Speaker 3: with us, to think about sleight of hand as we
Speaker 3: being watched, trying to get away with things and that
Speaker 3: type of thing. So it's an ongoing process and it's
Speaker 3: part of understanding what you're up against and how you
Speaker 3: can defeat it, either technically or visually or what have you?
Speaker 2: Did?
Speaker 5: It was it kind of Willy Wonka ish like fun
Speaker 5: to go down there? Or is just an office with
Speaker 5: a bunch of it?
Speaker 3: Was fun? I remember when I got did you ever
Speaker 3: go do the fancy disguise stuff done?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I did, and I did the ots thing, like,
Speaker 4: we have places abroad where we do them, and I
Speaker 4: visited some of those and they've got like carpentry and
Speaker 4: working on cars, and yeah, disguises and yeah they do
Speaker 4: some pretty but most of them are pretty straightforward, like
Speaker 4: how to hide something or how to trick something out.
Speaker 4: It's not Penn and Teller stuff. We're not hiding tigers
Speaker 4: or anything like that.
Speaker 5: You've never hired.
Speaker 3: But if we had hired a tiger, tiger, you tie
Speaker 3: the fuck out of it.
Speaker 2: Although you never know what that tiger's going off turn
Speaker 2: on you either.
Speaker 5: But yeah, so I will say, like, hearing about this
Speaker 5: whole case, it does make me think of a point
Speaker 5: that some economists made to me once, which is the
Speaker 5: general assumption should be if there is money to be
Speaker 5: made by breaking the rules, they will be broken to
Speaker 5: the extent that they can be broken. Like that, you
Speaker 5: should just assume that if there's an incentive, people are
Speaker 5: going to work to break it.
Speaker 3: All right, next time, let's talk about stuff that you
Speaker 3: guys do know about. Residan sports. I think you made
Speaker 3: a You guys tried really hard, and I'm impressed by that.
Speaker 5: I have been to more sports events I've watched more
Speaker 5: sports in the last like fourteen months than in my
Speaker 5: entire life, and I'm enjoying the time with my kid.
Speaker 5: We'll see you next time.
Speaker 8: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher,
Speaker 8: and Jonathan Sterner.
Speaker 2: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8: Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable
Speaker 8: pictures for iHeart Podcasts.