August 7, 2024 • 32 mins
The 1985 NBA Draft was one of the most controversial in NBA history. How did The New York Knicks land first pick and get Patrick Ewing? Was it rigged? Sports Illustrated writer Chris Ballard might know the answer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are some bodies buried, so to speak, not actual ones,
but you know, there's a body buried in the Rise
of the NBA, and he was ruthless and he wielded
his power. So certainly a person who would have conceived
of this not a question.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
living undercover all around the world.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
created conspiracies.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
In our operations. We got people to believe things that
weren't true.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
news almost every day.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Will break them down for you to determine whether they
could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Welcome to Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
And on sports and espionage. A lot of people don't
realize it, but when John and I were serving abroad,
we're looking for ways to meet other diplomats so we
can assess them and so forth. And one of the
things sometimes we do is we organize sports events. Is
one country where foolishly, we organized a soccer tournament for
all the diplomats that we could get into them, and
(01:12):
we went up against the Egyptians and we got the
first goal and we lost twenty two to one.
Speaker 5 (01:18):
It was never up.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Afterwards, We're like, we're the CIA.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
We should have challenged them to like baseball.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
And they say intelligence is your middle name.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, that's true. I remember my first tour.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
I was in the Scandinavia, an international soccer team that
we tried to get all the diplomats on to play
against the different businesses there and stuff, so we could
get the Russians and the Hungarians and everybody on during
the Cold War, and we had a volleyball tournat where
the American embassy played against the Russians, and yeah, it
is true. We would just get hammered every time. And
I never I played football on lacross and basketball. I
never played soccer, so I had to play goaliecause I
(01:52):
don't even know how to.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
This is really funny, but I do have to say
we did pay a softball tournament because we're all getting older.
And see I didn't run it, but we had a
lot of guys in there. Was allowed us to travel
so farth and it was in Africa. It was in Zimbabwe,
and of course the capital of Zimbabwe is Hurrari and
the name of our team was the Hurrari Krishna's.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
That's very funny, but that was our cover.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I'm impressed you guys can talk this much about sports,
because my impression of both.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Of you is your geeks and you don't know about
so I am a geek and I'm not ashamed of it,
even though you said that in a way that made
me think you thought I should be for some reason.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Correct.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Correct, And I have never had even the slightest interest
in sports, although now because I'm a good father to
a lovely young man named Asher who's twelve and completely obsessed,
particularly with basketball, although any sport. I'm in my mid
fifties and I'm discovering sports for the first time, and
we're Celtic's household and two years wait.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
You're a New Yorker, but you know living in Vermont,
so you've chosen Boston over New York.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
Actually good. So my dad is a sports fanatic. In fact,
he's such a sports fanatic that it helps explain why
I'm not a Spartan at it, and so I grew
up in a Boston household and I just didn't care.
But then Vermont is Celtics country, Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots, Ruins,
and my son is obsessed with all of them. And
I will say, following for the first time in my life,
(03:16):
like the year like the Celtics had quite two years,
but my son gets these conspiracy theories, like he really
will believe like the refs are on the take. There's
no way like they were, even though the next day
you read the papers and they're like, no, the reps
were equally, but it's like they just hate the Celtics.
They're killing. But it just made me realize if the
Celtics had lost. For those of our listeners who like me,
(03:39):
are geeks and don't care that much, the Celtics did
win the NBA Championship to become the winningest team with eighteen.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
All right, all right, move on here to the conspiracy partist.
Speaker 5 (03:48):
But it made me see how I could. It's just
so emotional, you're so invested, and the narrative ends with
them winning, and if they don't win, there has to
be some reason why they didn't win and it can't
be fair. But then you realize there's thirty teams that
have fans who feel that way.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
But I will say very often, CIA guys are the
worst sports fans because we get sent abroad for ten
fifteen years at a time and you're living in Africa
or the Middle East. You're not getting the sports scores
and things like that, and you start losing. It is
none of the people you talk to even know what
baseball is. That's the one like rugby. No, it's the
one like cricket. It's the one like cricket.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
It's like they nowadays you can watch like ESPN and
all kind of stuff. When I first started, when I
first one overseas, yeah, you just got the local television
or radio or whatever. You had none of the stuff
from the US.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
We can sit down and we can talk to a
Burmese kernel till the cows come home. But put us
together with someone who's a Mets fan right from New
York and like, I don't know, I have no idea
what to talk.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Stay away from that fans.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
That's smart. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
So our guest today is Chris Ballard. Chris is a journalist,
author and a recent senior writer at Sports Illustrated for
over twenty three years. He's written books on a variety
of sports subjects and is currently working on a book
for Simon and Schuster. So today you want to speak
with him about an article that he wrote about a
conspiracy surrounding the NBA Draft. Chris, can you outline a
little bit about that story for us?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
The nineteen eighty five NBA Draft went down as one
of the most controversial elements in NBA history. We looked
back on it at Sports Illustrated more than twenty years
later and had seen this continued interest in how it happened,
in how Patrick Ewing ended up with the New York
Knicks at the exact time when New York needed a
dominant big man and despite the odds against them. An
(05:32):
editor I had there assigned me the story and I
started digging into this controversy, assuming I might not get
that far because people had dug into it for about
twenty plus years at this point, and they'd created YouTube
videos and analyzed it like it was a Bruder film.
And in the end I was able to talk to
David Stern, who was the commissioner during this time, he's
(05:55):
now passed away, and I was surprised that he actually
would speak about it. And I'm not sure sure how
much of a definitive answer was possible or will ever be,
but it definitely added its some intrigue to it. The
NBA in nineteen eighty four was in a rough place.
They had not quite yet reached the era of Michael
Jordan and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were in the league,
(06:17):
but they were just coming up and it hadn't created
this great marketing bonanza that it would end up creating.
So at the time, the NBA was trying to gain legitimacy,
which sounds a little bit weird now, but this is
an era when they had come off widespread drug use
problems With the NBA, they were showing their telecasts on
tape delay, They did not have cultural clout, and one
(06:38):
of the issues was that it felt like there was
there was no good sense of parody in the league,
and that lays down to the draft. So at the
end of each season prior to nineteen eighty five, the
worst teams in the league would have the best chance
of getting the best players coming out of college. So
if there was a really impressive college star Rick Berry,
(06:58):
a Luel cinder Bill Russell, whichever NBA team had done
the worst the year before had a very good one
and two chance of getting that player, because the teams
with the two worst records at the end of the
year would flip a coin, and whoever on the coin
flip got the number one pick in the draft, and
whoever lost the coin flip got the number two pick
in the draft. So, if you knew a really good
(07:20):
player was about to graduate college and enter the NBA,
and during this era, you could intentionally lose games, and
this is something that teams were doing. And so this
happened for a few years in a row. And what
occurred is David Stern, who is then the new commissioner
of the NBA, realized he had a legitimacy problem. People
saw the NBA as a league where teams were intentionally
(07:40):
losing games to try to game the system. And so
what he did is he instituted the first draft lottery,
which meant that rather than a coin flip where you
had a one and two chance of getting the first pick,
instead the teams with these seven worst records would all
have an equal chance at that worst pick, So you're
going from fifty percent to fourteen percent, and they would
(08:02):
be decided by a random drawing, in this case from
a giant bubble. Now we're familiar with it for pink
punk balls, and this is going it HAPs to be
going into a draft when the most valuable and well
known NBA draft prospect in that era was coming out,
Patrick Ewing, seven foot one center from Georgetown, one of
(08:22):
the most famous athletes in the country at the time.
Is back when college basketball was more popular in many
ways in the NBA. So whoever won this prize, whoever
got Patrick Ewing, would immediately become not only a potential
contender or at least a very good team, and then
probably for a decade after, but would sell tickets, they
would sell merchandise, they would get buzz and just so
(08:44):
happens that New York, the biggest media market in the country,
finally has a down season that year, and just so
happens that New York ends up winning this fourteen percent chance,
and so Patrick Ewing goes to New York, which is
where David Stern, the commissioner, is from. So when this happens,
there was and immediately a lot of pushback, and people
were saying, how is it that Patrick Ewing ends up
(09:04):
in New York. They've watched this televised draft lottery and
they start coming up with theories. The very corner of
the envelope of the Knicks when they were drawn from
this quote random drawing, it's creased, so obviously David Stern
knew that he was picking the Nick's envelope, or they
had put the envelope in a freezer prior to putting
it in this drum. So David Stern put his hand
(09:26):
in and just reached for the frozen envelope, and thus
was born a controversy, a conspiracy theory that has continued
still to this day about whether or not the NBA
rigged the nineteen eighty five draft lottery to ensure the
best player went to the biggest media market.
Speaker 6 (09:43):
We're back at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, sitting
in a starlight roof, and David de Busher is here
with a number one pick in the draft, and you said,
you still you can he believe it.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
It's just a wonderful thing having the number one pick.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
And obviously I think everybody knows who are number one
pick is going to be and we're very delighted.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
I think you knew it too.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Show the show what you got in your hand.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
He has number thirty three all printed up here ready
up to this confidence for you. So you will make a.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Call to you, Chris.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Wouldn't that be bad sportsmanship? Wouldn't that be be cheating?
Wouldn't that be a conspiracy? Chris?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Where do you come out on this?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I think probably going into my reporting, I leaned slightly
towards they pulled this off. The league pulled it off,
and they were able to get eing to New York.
By the time I was done reporting and talking to people,
I realized just how fly by night and a little
bit haphazard this whole process was, and probably how hard
(10:40):
it would have been for them to actually rig it.
So by the end of my reporting I came down
on it probably was not rigged, but I wouldn't put
it past David Stern.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
But there's a few things that I wonder on New
York wasn't the worst team, right, so they weren't in
the old system, weren't going to get the top picked.
But do the dates match up of when the idea
for the lottery came up. Was it clear that New
York would be one of those seven teams. We can
talk about what happened at the actual lottery, but even
the lead up to the lottery, when they decided through
the lottery, with the next part of that process, how
(11:09):
could they know where the Knicks were going to end
up in because they weren't the worst team.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So this is when David Stern proposes with his league
execs this draft lottery and they choose seven teams, and
it just so happens the Knicks have the seventh worst record,
so they barely make this cut to be one of
these seven teams. And you could say that was done intentionally.
You could say seven teams is about where you should
make the cutoff. But there was a direct reaction in
(11:34):
this time to what Houston and the Los Angeles Clippers
have been doing, and they had been essentially taking a
race to the bottom to see who could lose more games,
playing Elvin Hayes at thirty eight for fifty two minutes
a game just to make sure they fell on an
important contest. So that impulse was correct, and it needed
(11:56):
to be done to ensure there was legitimacy to the League.
But if that cut off of seven in the year
the Knicks happened to be bad, that led people down
this road.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Let's take a break. We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
So, Chris, if CIA were given the mission to do this,
we would probably we'd look at it in two ways.
We'd look at it like the equipment freezing the envelope,
and then we look at the people who would we
recruit to do that. But then how to keep it quiet,
which would also be important for this, And it's basically
how to keep people from blabbing afterwards and twenty years
after this happens, and in CIA or the US government,
(12:39):
we keep it quiet by threatening to throw people into
prison who like talk out of school, John and I
are still under an obligation not to spill certain secrets.
What would be the incentive not to like, make lots
of money by spilling the beans on this right? If
this was to say this is how we did it
twenty years later, or to million dollars for a book
(13:00):
or a pullitzerprise for pulling this off.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Exactly, and I think that's probably the best rationale for
why it wasn't rigged, because at this point David Stern
missis twenty twenty four. Him Stern has passed away, and
he definitely governed the league through a little bit of
intimidation and fear. So you can understand to a certain
extent how when he was still commissioner and even when retired,
(13:23):
why people might have been hesitant to say a thing
about it. But now you'd assume something would come out
and it hasn't come out. And secondarily, you can look
at the amount of people that were involved in this,
from Pat O'Brien who was doing the broadcast, to the
people doing the TV trucks, to everyone who helped set
up the Waldorf which is where this was held. And
(13:43):
to pull this off. It couldn't have been a one
person job. Obviously, you know the counter argument to that
might be, and just to engage in that, and I'll
go a little bit of a tangent, but you'll see I'll.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Give us the Grassy Knoll version.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yes is you know, recently, as NBA fans will be aware,
a year and a year and a half ago this point,
during a pre season workout, Draymond Green of the Golden
State Warriors got upset with Jordan Poole, who was then
one of their guards, a young brash guard, and Draymond
Green punches him in practice. And you know, twenty years earlier,
(14:21):
this kind of thing was sort of the norm, not norm,
but it was part of NBA culture. You know, Michael
Jordan got in a fist fight in practice. These things happened.
But in today's era, the Warriors tried to keep this quiet,
and they succeeded in keeping it in house for a
very short amount of time until someone in the best
guesses it's probably someone in the video office took the
(14:45):
feed from up in the arena which showed this happening
and sold that video and then you know, probably disappeared
to Brazil or wherever. But so today, no way, you know,
no way you're pulling this off in such a physical fashion.
But I do think that in nineteen eighty four at least,
that probably wasn't what everyone was thinking about, and probably
(15:06):
the majority of people that were just hoping the NBA
would survive at this point and this would be successful
and this production would work out.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
The question is, in his remaining decades after that, is
there anything else that David Stern seemed to get involved with.
It would suggest that perhaps this earlier conspiracy was just
part of a pattern.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Sure, you know, if you talk to enough people who
covered the league for a long time, I mean you
could say, if David Stern had gotten nailed for this,
it would not be the least of but it would
be one of the things he did that was more understandable.
I mean, he definitely ruled with an iron fist. There
are some bodies buried, so to speak, not actual ones,
(15:43):
but you know, there's a body buried in the rise
of the NBA, and he was ruthless and he wielded
his power. So certainly a person who would have conceived
of this not a question. And I think to a
certain extent Stern enjoyed in the years after being thought
to be someone who might have pulled this off, because
it's furnished his legacy either way, like it worked out
for them. More people watch the draft lottery every year,
(16:04):
more people talked about the league. He created this mythology,
so he sort of enjoyed going back and forth between
denying it and jokingly not denying it to help keep
that question alive.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
Sports have always had conspiracies and conspiracy theories around them,
often due to to betting you know in the wider world,
like in nineteen sixty nine a war started between Honduras
and Al Salvador, like four thousand people were killed, three
hundred thousand people were made refugees over conspiracies over whether
(16:36):
this soccer match was fixed. And maybe if I could
just take you there for a second to talk about
maybe baseball's biggest one arguably the nineteen nineteen Black Sox
World Series issue right where Julis Joe Jackson was thrown
out of baseball forever after he signed this legal confession
(16:58):
even though he couldn't read or write. Court found an
innocent and this almost blew up baseball as well.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And it's always a matter of the power level, right,
So if the athlete, and it's really worked for college
basketball players, if the athlete could make more money, if
it was financially worthwhile for them, if they weren't going
to make the NBA, there's no pot of goal professionally
for them to take this side bet or to throw
a game, then they'd consider it. Now, the majority of
athletes would not go down that road, obviously, we hope,
(17:25):
but enough did. And you see that in the same
way that when it came the steroid era in baseball,
the financial payout and staying in the league was worth
it to the hundreds of players who decided to use steroids.
I think why it becomes less and less prevalent now
is because the amount of money that athletes in most
of these sports are making, it really doesn't make sense
(17:47):
get involved in throwing a game. But coming up and
especially like in nineteen eighty four, there was a lot
of a lot of impetus for someone to consider those routes,
and I think in this case, the impetus was not
necessarily for a individual player. It was for the league. Okay,
we'll get we're gonna gamble with our reputation because our
reputation already sucks, right, so we're going to gamble with
(18:09):
it a bit here for the payout of getting you
in this media market and getting people to talk about it.
So anytime that gamble was worth it for an athlete,
I think is when you would see the betting.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Going back to the eighty five draft, let's talk a
little bit about if it was a conspiracy pulling it off.
And so some of the theories were, like you already
mentioned the bent corner, the frozen envelope, how do those
stack up?
Speaker 1 (18:33):
The bent corner concept, which is that when David Stern
is putting the envelopes, and they're these unnaturally large envelopes,
and they designed them so that when you pulled out
the placard in the envelope, it would have the logo
of the team, so it was the Clippers or if
it was the Knicks, and then you place that logo
up on a shelf with the other logos and David
(18:56):
Stern would hold it up that on a twenty inch
TV of the era that the logo would pop. So
that was their explanation for why they needed these oversized envelopes.
But because they were oversized envelopes and not say ping
pong ball, because there was this large envelope, you could
in fact probably bend a corner if you wanted to.
And when you watch Stern put the envelopes in and
he puts in that envelope, it looks a little.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
You could read into it.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
It looks a little intentional that he drops it on
the side of this big plastic sphere, which is what
they're quote tumbling. It's really hard to tumble envelopes, but
that's what they had never to do, and so he
drops on the side and you see that corner bend.
You can also see a film of the draft of
Stern doing this. You can see that he fumbles a
bit when grabbing the envelopes, so conceivably he's feeling for
(19:41):
that bent corner.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
Thank you.
Speaker 7 (19:46):
The drum will now be turned to further mix the envelopes,
and then I will conduct the drawing.
Speaker 6 (19:54):
That is Jack Joyce, he's the head of security for
the NBA. Spinning the drums. There's about six turns.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
The team whose logo is in this envelope will have
the first pick in the NBA draft.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
So that one definitely holds water. As far as would
it work, you know, the concept of the frozen envelopes,
to my mind a little harder to believe because you
would have had to get this thing out of the
freezer theoretically get it in there, and it would have
to still retain a coolness. I've never really tried freezing paper,
but I can't imagine it would retain the coolness for
(20:33):
long enough to be a fail safe way for Stern
to make sure he got the right envelope.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
But this is also being done right in front of
the executives of the losing teams here too, right, So
if you're going to pull us off, you can't pull
it off so that the Golden State Warriors executive sitting
there could say, oh my god, there's a bent corner
on that envelope.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
And it's being broadcast live. There's already questions about this
draft that it happens to work out that the Knicks
are going to be in it, and you're going live
for the first time with this new conceit, which is
that you're going to show the draft process on live
TV at the halftime of an existing game. So Ale
Adols could have very easily thrown a fit right there
on the spot on live TV. So there's a lot
(21:13):
of variables that could have gone wrong for the NBA.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
I assume people have recreated this, right.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
There was a writer, Patrick Ruby into an eleven who
watched this film with a professional magician and asked, and
there's always no one can say for sure one way
or the other, or no one has at this point,
like they're bizarre enough theories that you were like, I
don't know they could pull that off, But at the
same time they are plausible theories to the point, you're like,
I don't. I can't say they didn't pull that off.
(21:40):
And that's what you've heard from any expert who has
been consulted on this.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
And in this case, actually you could argue that the
losers all benefit of the NBA, all those other teams
that maybe didn't get Patrick Ewing, the NBA became this
cash call for everybody. Conceivably David Start could have gone
around dead, but he say, listen, this is going to
benefit all of us if you just play a lot.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
If it happened today, there would be a different response,
But in nineteen eighty five, in that era, there was
You're right, the rising tide lifts all ships because of
the TV contracts that came on the heels of it.
The TV contracts, the international, the global work that Stern
did were the values of each of these franchises, and
(22:20):
the salaries of everyone involved on that day just exponentially
grew over the next ten years. I mean, as opposed
to the other great conspiracy of the NBA is that
Michael Jordan was banned from the NBA and that's why
he went to play baseball. And that's one where I
think if you had polled most people involved in the league.
They would have said that was bad for us. It
(22:41):
was good for baseball, but it was bad for the
NBA when Jordan was out of the league.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and boom,
we're back. Are there any other sports conspiracies that you're
interested in or that you feel rise to the level.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
There definitely remained questions about the reffing and NBA and
Sports Illustrated. We had a writer who spent nine months
at one point, Thomas Lake, very talented writer, looking into
the Kings Lakers series, and there reffing in it. And
this was the era where the Kings were ascended. This
is in the early two thousands, Chris Weber, Paisiaestoyakovic, and
(23:21):
it looked like they're on the verge of becoming a
dominant team in the NBA. And there's this crazy Game
seven that the Lakers with Shaquille and Eland, Kobe Bryant
once again major media market eke out. And if you
go back and you retroactively interviewed all these people involved
in it, that one smelled bad. Weirdly enough, we never
ran the story. So maybe that's another conspiracy theory right there.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
One place where the world of intelligence, where intelligence and
sports and conspiracies and conspiracy theories all genuinely overlap of
courses in the Olympics, and was at Sochi in twenty sixteen.
The Russian intelligence services were at the center of the
doping scandal, and Russian intelligence services were putting their fingers
(24:05):
on the scale to make sure that Putin won medals
and cheating was massive, factory level, with secret rooms and
whole teams of scientists to hide yurn and blood samples.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, that's a place where there's almost you assume if
you were to look at the last sixty years of
Olympic sports, and especially say, for example, like the Russian
team or the German team over the years, you would assist, Yes,
in particular, Yeah, you would assume more often than not
that there had been some mechanics at play there.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
I have to share a story real quick, so you know,
I spent a lot of time in Germany, and when
East Germany and West Germany, when they united West Germany,
the United Germany took over all of East Germany's like
debts and things that it had to fulfill, and it
turns out one of them was the East German athletes
who had been regularly beating the entire world and beating
(25:01):
the West Germans. All their athletes, especially their women, had
been like fully doped. And so these athletes who would
won all their gold medals, Yeah, I know, surprise, they're
now suffering from these terrible medical conditions because the East
Germans forced them to dope, or they agreed to it,
but they sued the West German government for medical malprek
because they took over there. They took over everything that
(25:23):
these Germans did. So the West German athletes are like
a they cheated. I didn't get a medal. They did,
and now now their health is all fucked up because
of all the drugs, and now they're suing. I got
my taxes who've got to pay for their medical care.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
That's not okay.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I didn't see the movie with Matt Damon and Victus
about South Africa re entering the world of rugby after
apartheip was coming down, but there was an interesting story
that came out afterwards of a conspiracy. Theory is that
the New Zealanders who lost to the South Africans, who
were the great favorites, the night before the game, they
(26:00):
all came down with diarrhea. They all come down with
they all got sick, and there was this mysterious waitress
who served them the food, called Susie, and they never
saw her again and she could never be found. Although
the New Zealand team swears they all know who she
is and they could identify her. The South Africans couldn't
produce her. And later this guy Stein, one of Nelson
(26:23):
and Dala's bodyguards, came out and said it was the
South African Intelligence Service. They needed South Africa to have
a good feeling, They needed it to win. They wanted
to keep civil war at bay in South Africa because
apart I hadn't quite come down yet and they needed
this win.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I can remember years ago when they thought was that
they not poisoned, but it had given Michael Jordan bad
food or something before one of the playoff games.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, and maybe every player should have a taster.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Now, Chris is a fascinating story. What is it your
book that you're writing now about That.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
One's totally different. That's sports and jacent I would say
it's the concept of ice swimming and how it has
this roots back in Europe, going back four hundred five
hundred years, and then how it's now being looked at
as a way of cold exposure. So there's a whole
science to a science and history, and I'm doing a
narrative exploration of it.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
My first overseas assignment was to Finland, and I lived
right on the Baltic and I lived right next to
the Finish Sauna Society, And they in the Baltic under
the water had this little bubble machine that would continue
all year long, so it would create this big hole
in the ice over the winter, and the ice could
get is eight to ten feet or more thick, and
(27:35):
you'd go swim in there after you took a sauna
and swim into the ice and stuff. The fact that
sauna was so central a part of the culture in
a place like Finland, and the fact that everybody goes
in there naked, it was a great opportunity to steal
stuff from people's wallets and clothes and car keys and
other things while you were in the sauna, or at
least copy them so that you could use them later
to perhaps break into their place and steal secrets.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Wow, I'm going to be more careful when I go
to the beach.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
There you go. As long as you're not a KGB spy,
it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Well, Chris, this is really great. Thank you for talking
to us. Fascinating stuff and I really enjoyed your story.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, yeah, no problem. Good luck with the podcast.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
So now that we've had someone who really knows what
they're talking about, let's switch to the other side and
bring in John and Adam.
Speaker 5 (28:20):
Hey, guys, I don't.
Speaker 8 (28:21):
Know a lot about sports, but I do know about
scientific experiments, because what I did was I tested the
theory that you could freeze an envelope and then feel
the temperature differential. So I froze a bunch of different
envelopes for different periods of times, brought them out, did
a blind field test between them and one that hasn't
been frozen, and after about fifteen seconds, they all felt
(28:46):
the same. So I frozen for longer. Same thing. My
son said, try spraying them with water and the water
will hold the temperature longer, and he was right for
about thirty seconds. If you really wanted to make it noticeable,
I think you'd have to do something physical to it.
Different texture, different shape than in the corner. Significantly. I
(29:06):
know all of these were discussed, so I tested these
as well, and it is really hard to tell the difference.
I think the way to do it would be to
have a different texture of paper. But this all goes
back to, well, how many people have to be involved
in this. You don't just get to go in yourself
and replace the envelope, but you have to feel up
the different envelopes, right, you got to feel this one.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
Oh, that's not it. And then he's got to know
did they show him?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Like, yeah, you can see him what he does, and
I don't see that there's.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
Any It's all how you see it.
Speaker 8 (29:34):
Some people say they see that video and it looks
like he's feeling around.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
If you guys got the technical branch of the CIA,
couldn't you could solve this?
Speaker 4 (29:42):
Right?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yes, yeah we could have.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Usually the first thing to do is to think there's
probably an easier way around all this. Professionals who do
this type of thing could probably come up with a
way to do it. But again, you're talking about stuff
that you have to bring in.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
You know, there are ways of palming things and having
it up your sleeve, pulling rabbits out of hats and
shit like that, but that's not saying that like any
schmoke can just like quick go do it. Penn and
Teller could pull it off.
Speaker 5 (30:06):
When I think about the is it called the technical branch.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
What's it called technical services?
Speaker 5 (30:11):
Office of technical Did you have cool things that they like?
Weird problems that they solved?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah? Tell me what first?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
In the whole disguise thing, they had actually people who
had worked in Hollywood and had done masks and done
things for Hollywood. There's all kinds of technical gear that
we could use. In fact, I remember when I was
in Moscow and we were under surveillance all the time,
we actually did hire a magician to try to work
with us, to think about sleight of hand as we
being watched, trying to get away with things and that
type of thing. So it's an ongoing process and it's
(30:40):
part of understanding what you're up against and how you
can defeat it, either technically or visually or what have you?
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Did?
Speaker 5 (30:48):
It was it kind of Willy Wonka ish like fun
to go down there? Or is just an office with
a bunch of it?
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Was fun? I remember when I got did you ever
go do the fancy disguise stuff done?
Speaker 4 (30:56):
Yeah? I did, and I did the ots thing, like,
we have places abroad where we do them, and I
visited some of those and they've got like carpentry and
working on cars, and yeah, disguises and yeah they do
some pretty but most of them are pretty straightforward, like
how to hide something or how to trick something out.
It's not Penn and Teller stuff. We're not hiding tigers
or anything like that.
Speaker 5 (31:18):
You've never hired.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
But if we had hired a tiger, tiger, you tie
the fuck out of it.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Although you never know what that tiger's going off turn
on you either.
Speaker 5 (31:29):
But yeah, so I will say, like, hearing about this
whole case, it does make me think of a point
that some economists made to me once, which is the
general assumption should be if there is money to be
made by breaking the rules, they will be broken to
the extent that they can be broken. Like that, you
should just assume that if there's an incentive, people are
(31:52):
going to work to break it.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
All right, next time, let's talk about stuff that you
guys do know about. Residan sports. I think you made
a You guys tried really hard, and I'm impressed by that.
Speaker 5 (32:02):
I have been to more sports events I've watched more
sports in the last like fourteen months than in my
entire life, and I'm enjoying the time with my kid.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 8 (32:17):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Sterner.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8 (32:26):
Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
There are some bodies buried, so to speak, not actual ones,
but you know, there's a body buried in the Rise
of the NBA, and he was ruthless and he wielded
his power. So certainly a person who would have conceived
of this not a question.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
living undercover all around the world.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
created conspiracies.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
In our operations. We got people to believe things that
weren't true.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
news almost every day.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Will break them down for you to determine whether they
could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Welcome to Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
And on sports and espionage. A lot of people don't
realize it, but when John and I were serving abroad,
we're looking for ways to meet other diplomats so we
can assess them and so forth. And one of the
things sometimes we do is we organize sports events. Is
one country where foolishly, we organized a soccer tournament for
all the diplomats that we could get into them, and
(01:12):
we went up against the Egyptians and we got the
first goal and we lost twenty two to one.
Speaker 5 (01:18):
It was never up.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Afterwards, We're like, we're the CIA.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
We should have challenged them to like baseball.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
And they say intelligence is your middle name.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, that's true. I remember my first tour.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
I was in the Scandinavia, an international soccer team that
we tried to get all the diplomats on to play
against the different businesses there and stuff, so we could
get the Russians and the Hungarians and everybody on during
the Cold War, and we had a volleyball tournat where
the American embassy played against the Russians, and yeah, it
is true. We would just get hammered every time. And
I never I played football on lacross and basketball. I
never played soccer, so I had to play goaliecause I
(01:52):
don't even know how to.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
This is really funny, but I do have to say
we did pay a softball tournament because we're all getting older.
And see I didn't run it, but we had a
lot of guys in there. Was allowed us to travel
so farth and it was in Africa. It was in Zimbabwe,
and of course the capital of Zimbabwe is Hurrari and
the name of our team was the Hurrari Krishna's.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
That's very funny, but that was our cover.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I'm impressed you guys can talk this much about sports,
because my impression of both.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Of you is your geeks and you don't know about
so I am a geek and I'm not ashamed of it,
even though you said that in a way that made
me think you thought I should be for some reason.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Correct.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Correct, And I have never had even the slightest interest
in sports, although now because I'm a good father to
a lovely young man named Asher who's twelve and completely obsessed,
particularly with basketball, although any sport. I'm in my mid
fifties and I'm discovering sports for the first time, and
we're Celtic's household and two years wait.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
You're a New Yorker, but you know living in Vermont,
so you've chosen Boston over New York.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
Actually good. So my dad is a sports fanatic. In fact,
he's such a sports fanatic that it helps explain why
I'm not a Spartan at it, and so I grew
up in a Boston household and I just didn't care.
But then Vermont is Celtics country, Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots, Ruins,
and my son is obsessed with all of them. And
I will say, following for the first time in my life,
(03:16):
like the year like the Celtics had quite two years,
but my son gets these conspiracy theories, like he really
will believe like the refs are on the take. There's
no way like they were, even though the next day
you read the papers and they're like, no, the reps
were equally, but it's like they just hate the Celtics.
They're killing. But it just made me realize if the
Celtics had lost. For those of our listeners who like me,
(03:39):
are geeks and don't care that much, the Celtics did
win the NBA Championship to become the winningest team with eighteen.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
All right, all right, move on here to the conspiracy partist.
Speaker 5 (03:48):
But it made me see how I could. It's just
so emotional, you're so invested, and the narrative ends with
them winning, and if they don't win, there has to
be some reason why they didn't win and it can't
be fair. But then you realize there's thirty teams that
have fans who feel that way.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
But I will say very often, CIA guys are the
worst sports fans because we get sent abroad for ten
fifteen years at a time and you're living in Africa
or the Middle East. You're not getting the sports scores
and things like that, and you start losing. It is
none of the people you talk to even know what
baseball is. That's the one like rugby. No, it's the
one like cricket. It's the one like cricket.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
It's like they nowadays you can watch like ESPN and
all kind of stuff. When I first started, when I
first one overseas, yeah, you just got the local television
or radio or whatever. You had none of the stuff
from the US.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
We can sit down and we can talk to a
Burmese kernel till the cows come home. But put us
together with someone who's a Mets fan right from New
York and like, I don't know, I have no idea
what to talk.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Stay away from that fans.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
That's smart. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
So our guest today is Chris Ballard. Chris is a journalist,
author and a recent senior writer at Sports Illustrated for
over twenty three years. He's written books on a variety
of sports subjects and is currently working on a book
for Simon and Schuster. So today you want to speak
with him about an article that he wrote about a
conspiracy surrounding the NBA Draft. Chris, can you outline a
little bit about that story for us?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
The nineteen eighty five NBA Draft went down as one
of the most controversial elements in NBA history. We looked
back on it at Sports Illustrated more than twenty years
later and had seen this continued interest in how it happened,
in how Patrick Ewing ended up with the New York
Knicks at the exact time when New York needed a
dominant big man and despite the odds against them. An
(05:32):
editor I had there assigned me the story and I
started digging into this controversy, assuming I might not get
that far because people had dug into it for about
twenty plus years at this point, and they'd created YouTube
videos and analyzed it like it was a Bruder film.
And in the end I was able to talk to
David Stern, who was the commissioner during this time, he's
(05:55):
now passed away, and I was surprised that he actually
would speak about it. And I'm not sure sure how
much of a definitive answer was possible or will ever be,
but it definitely added its some intrigue to it. The
NBA in nineteen eighty four was in a rough place.
They had not quite yet reached the era of Michael
Jordan and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were in the league,
(06:17):
but they were just coming up and it hadn't created
this great marketing bonanza that it would end up creating.
So at the time, the NBA was trying to gain legitimacy,
which sounds a little bit weird now, but this is
an era when they had come off widespread drug use
problems With the NBA, they were showing their telecasts on
tape delay, They did not have cultural clout, and one
(06:38):
of the issues was that it felt like there was
there was no good sense of parody in the league,
and that lays down to the draft. So at the
end of each season prior to nineteen eighty five, the
worst teams in the league would have the best chance
of getting the best players coming out of college. So
if there was a really impressive college star Rick Berry,
(06:58):
a Luel cinder Bill Russell, whichever NBA team had done
the worst the year before had a very good one
and two chance of getting that player, because the teams
with the two worst records at the end of the
year would flip a coin, and whoever on the coin
flip got the number one pick in the draft, and
whoever lost the coin flip got the number two pick
in the draft. So, if you knew a really good
(07:20):
player was about to graduate college and enter the NBA,
and during this era, you could intentionally lose games, and
this is something that teams were doing. And so this
happened for a few years in a row. And what
occurred is David Stern, who is then the new commissioner
of the NBA, realized he had a legitimacy problem. People
saw the NBA as a league where teams were intentionally
(07:40):
losing games to try to game the system. And so
what he did is he instituted the first draft lottery,
which meant that rather than a coin flip where you
had a one and two chance of getting the first pick,
instead the teams with these seven worst records would all
have an equal chance at that worst pick, So you're
going from fifty percent to fourteen percent, and they would
(08:02):
be decided by a random drawing, in this case from
a giant bubble. Now we're familiar with it for pink
punk balls, and this is going it HAPs to be
going into a draft when the most valuable and well
known NBA draft prospect in that era was coming out,
Patrick Ewing, seven foot one center from Georgetown, one of
(08:22):
the most famous athletes in the country at the time.
Is back when college basketball was more popular in many
ways in the NBA. So whoever won this prize, whoever
got Patrick Ewing, would immediately become not only a potential
contender or at least a very good team, and then
probably for a decade after, but would sell tickets, they
would sell merchandise, they would get buzz and just so
(08:44):
happens that New York, the biggest media market in the country,
finally has a down season that year, and just so
happens that New York ends up winning this fourteen percent chance,
and so Patrick Ewing goes to New York, which is
where David Stern, the commissioner, is from. So when this happens,
there was and immediately a lot of pushback, and people
were saying, how is it that Patrick Ewing ends up
(09:04):
in New York. They've watched this televised draft lottery and
they start coming up with theories. The very corner of
the envelope of the Knicks when they were drawn from
this quote random drawing, it's creased, so obviously David Stern
knew that he was picking the Nick's envelope, or they
had put the envelope in a freezer prior to putting
it in this drum. So David Stern put his hand
(09:26):
in and just reached for the frozen envelope, and thus
was born a controversy, a conspiracy theory that has continued
still to this day about whether or not the NBA
rigged the nineteen eighty five draft lottery to ensure the
best player went to the biggest media market.
Speaker 6 (09:43):
We're back at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, sitting
in a starlight roof, and David de Busher is here
with a number one pick in the draft, and you said,
you still you can he believe it.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
It's just a wonderful thing having the number one pick.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
And obviously I think everybody knows who are number one
pick is going to be and we're very delighted.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
I think you knew it too.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Show the show what you got in your hand.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
He has number thirty three all printed up here ready
up to this confidence for you. So you will make a.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Call to you, Chris.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Wouldn't that be bad sportsmanship? Wouldn't that be be cheating?
Wouldn't that be a conspiracy? Chris?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Where do you come out on this?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I think probably going into my reporting, I leaned slightly
towards they pulled this off. The league pulled it off,
and they were able to get eing to New York.
By the time I was done reporting and talking to people,
I realized just how fly by night and a little
bit haphazard this whole process was, and probably how hard
(10:40):
it would have been for them to actually rig it.
So by the end of my reporting I came down
on it probably was not rigged, but I wouldn't put
it past David Stern.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
But there's a few things that I wonder on New
York wasn't the worst team, right, so they weren't in
the old system, weren't going to get the top picked.
But do the dates match up of when the idea
for the lottery came up. Was it clear that New
York would be one of those seven teams. We can
talk about what happened at the actual lottery, but even
the lead up to the lottery, when they decided through
the lottery, with the next part of that process, how
(11:09):
could they know where the Knicks were going to end
up in because they weren't the worst team.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So this is when David Stern proposes with his league
execs this draft lottery and they choose seven teams, and
it just so happens the Knicks have the seventh worst record,
so they barely make this cut to be one of
these seven teams. And you could say that was done intentionally.
You could say seven teams is about where you should
make the cutoff. But there was a direct reaction in
(11:34):
this time to what Houston and the Los Angeles Clippers
have been doing, and they had been essentially taking a
race to the bottom to see who could lose more games,
playing Elvin Hayes at thirty eight for fifty two minutes
a game just to make sure they fell on an
important contest. So that impulse was correct, and it needed
(11:56):
to be done to ensure there was legitimacy to the League.
But if that cut off of seven in the year
the Knicks happened to be bad, that led people down
this road.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Let's take a break. We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
So, Chris, if CIA were given the mission to do this,
we would probably we'd look at it in two ways.
We'd look at it like the equipment freezing the envelope,
and then we look at the people who would we
recruit to do that. But then how to keep it quiet,
which would also be important for this, And it's basically
how to keep people from blabbing afterwards and twenty years
after this happens, and in CIA or the US government,
(12:39):
we keep it quiet by threatening to throw people into
prison who like talk out of school, John and I
are still under an obligation not to spill certain secrets.
What would be the incentive not to like, make lots
of money by spilling the beans on this right? If
this was to say this is how we did it
twenty years later, or to million dollars for a book
(13:00):
or a pullitzerprise for pulling this off.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Exactly, and I think that's probably the best rationale for
why it wasn't rigged, because at this point David Stern
missis twenty twenty four. Him Stern has passed away, and
he definitely governed the league through a little bit of
intimidation and fear. So you can understand to a certain
extent how when he was still commissioner and even when retired,
(13:23):
why people might have been hesitant to say a thing
about it. But now you'd assume something would come out
and it hasn't come out. And secondarily, you can look
at the amount of people that were involved in this,
from Pat O'Brien who was doing the broadcast, to the
people doing the TV trucks, to everyone who helped set
up the Waldorf which is where this was held. And
(13:43):
to pull this off. It couldn't have been a one
person job. Obviously, you know the counter argument to that
might be, and just to engage in that, and I'll
go a little bit of a tangent, but you'll see I'll.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Give us the Grassy Knoll version.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yes is you know, recently, as NBA fans will be aware,
a year and a year and a half ago this point,
during a pre season workout, Draymond Green of the Golden
State Warriors got upset with Jordan Poole, who was then
one of their guards, a young brash guard, and Draymond
Green punches him in practice. And you know, twenty years earlier,
(14:21):
this kind of thing was sort of the norm, not norm,
but it was part of NBA culture. You know, Michael
Jordan got in a fist fight in practice. These things happened.
But in today's era, the Warriors tried to keep this quiet,
and they succeeded in keeping it in house for a
very short amount of time until someone in the best
guesses it's probably someone in the video office took the
(14:45):
feed from up in the arena which showed this happening
and sold that video and then you know, probably disappeared
to Brazil or wherever. But so today, no way, you know,
no way you're pulling this off in such a physical fashion.
But I do think that in nineteen eighty four at least,
that probably wasn't what everyone was thinking about, and probably
(15:06):
the majority of people that were just hoping the NBA
would survive at this point and this would be successful
and this production would work out.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
The question is, in his remaining decades after that, is
there anything else that David Stern seemed to get involved with.
It would suggest that perhaps this earlier conspiracy was just
part of a pattern.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Sure, you know, if you talk to enough people who
covered the league for a long time, I mean you
could say, if David Stern had gotten nailed for this,
it would not be the least of but it would
be one of the things he did that was more understandable.
I mean, he definitely ruled with an iron fist. There
are some bodies buried, so to speak, not actual ones,
(15:43):
but you know, there's a body buried in the rise
of the NBA, and he was ruthless and he wielded
his power. So certainly a person who would have conceived
of this not a question. And I think to a
certain extent Stern enjoyed in the years after being thought
to be someone who might have pulled this off, because
it's furnished his legacy either way, like it worked out
for them. More people watch the draft lottery every year,
(16:04):
more people talked about the league. He created this mythology,
so he sort of enjoyed going back and forth between
denying it and jokingly not denying it to help keep
that question alive.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
Sports have always had conspiracies and conspiracy theories around them,
often due to to betting you know in the wider world,
like in nineteen sixty nine a war started between Honduras
and Al Salvador, like four thousand people were killed, three
hundred thousand people were made refugees over conspiracies over whether
(16:36):
this soccer match was fixed. And maybe if I could
just take you there for a second to talk about
maybe baseball's biggest one arguably the nineteen nineteen Black Sox
World Series issue right where Julis Joe Jackson was thrown
out of baseball forever after he signed this legal confession
(16:58):
even though he couldn't read or write. Court found an
innocent and this almost blew up baseball as well.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And it's always a matter of the power level, right,
So if the athlete, and it's really worked for college
basketball players, if the athlete could make more money, if
it was financially worthwhile for them, if they weren't going
to make the NBA, there's no pot of goal professionally
for them to take this side bet or to throw
a game, then they'd consider it. Now, the majority of
athletes would not go down that road, obviously, we hope,
(17:25):
but enough did. And you see that in the same
way that when it came the steroid era in baseball,
the financial payout and staying in the league was worth
it to the hundreds of players who decided to use steroids.
I think why it becomes less and less prevalent now
is because the amount of money that athletes in most
of these sports are making, it really doesn't make sense
(17:47):
get involved in throwing a game. But coming up and
especially like in nineteen eighty four, there was a lot
of a lot of impetus for someone to consider those routes,
and I think in this case, the impetus was not
necessarily for a individual player. It was for the league. Okay,
we'll get we're gonna gamble with our reputation because our
reputation already sucks, right, so we're going to gamble with
(18:09):
it a bit here for the payout of getting you
in this media market and getting people to talk about it.
So anytime that gamble was worth it for an athlete,
I think is when you would see the betting.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Going back to the eighty five draft, let's talk a
little bit about if it was a conspiracy pulling it off.
And so some of the theories were, like you already
mentioned the bent corner, the frozen envelope, how do those
stack up?
Speaker 1 (18:33):
The bent corner concept, which is that when David Stern
is putting the envelopes, and they're these unnaturally large envelopes,
and they designed them so that when you pulled out
the placard in the envelope, it would have the logo
of the team, so it was the Clippers or if
it was the Knicks, and then you place that logo
up on a shelf with the other logos and David
(18:56):
Stern would hold it up that on a twenty inch
TV of the era that the logo would pop. So
that was their explanation for why they needed these oversized envelopes.
But because they were oversized envelopes and not say ping
pong ball, because there was this large envelope, you could
in fact probably bend a corner if you wanted to.
And when you watch Stern put the envelopes in and
he puts in that envelope, it looks a little.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
You could read into it.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
It looks a little intentional that he drops it on
the side of this big plastic sphere, which is what
they're quote tumbling. It's really hard to tumble envelopes, but
that's what they had never to do, and so he
drops on the side and you see that corner bend.
You can also see a film of the draft of
Stern doing this. You can see that he fumbles a
bit when grabbing the envelopes, so conceivably he's feeling for
(19:41):
that bent corner.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
Thank you.
Speaker 7 (19:46):
The drum will now be turned to further mix the envelopes,
and then I will conduct the drawing.
Speaker 6 (19:54):
That is Jack Joyce, he's the head of security for
the NBA. Spinning the drums. There's about six turns.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
The team whose logo is in this envelope will have
the first pick in the NBA draft.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
So that one definitely holds water. As far as would
it work, you know, the concept of the frozen envelopes,
to my mind a little harder to believe because you
would have had to get this thing out of the
freezer theoretically get it in there, and it would have
to still retain a coolness. I've never really tried freezing paper,
but I can't imagine it would retain the coolness for
(20:33):
long enough to be a fail safe way for Stern
to make sure he got the right envelope.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
But this is also being done right in front of
the executives of the losing teams here too, right, So
if you're going to pull us off, you can't pull
it off so that the Golden State Warriors executive sitting
there could say, oh my god, there's a bent corner
on that envelope.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
And it's being broadcast live. There's already questions about this
draft that it happens to work out that the Knicks
are going to be in it, and you're going live
for the first time with this new conceit, which is
that you're going to show the draft process on live
TV at the halftime of an existing game. So Ale
Adols could have very easily thrown a fit right there
on the spot on live TV. So there's a lot
(21:13):
of variables that could have gone wrong for the NBA.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
I assume people have recreated this, right.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
There was a writer, Patrick Ruby into an eleven who
watched this film with a professional magician and asked, and
there's always no one can say for sure one way
or the other, or no one has at this point,
like they're bizarre enough theories that you were like, I
don't know they could pull that off, But at the
same time they are plausible theories to the point, you're like,
I don't. I can't say they didn't pull that off.
(21:40):
And that's what you've heard from any expert who has
been consulted on this.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
And in this case, actually you could argue that the
losers all benefit of the NBA, all those other teams
that maybe didn't get Patrick Ewing, the NBA became this
cash call for everybody. Conceivably David Start could have gone
around dead, but he say, listen, this is going to
benefit all of us if you just play a lot.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
If it happened today, there would be a different response,
But in nineteen eighty five, in that era, there was
You're right, the rising tide lifts all ships because of
the TV contracts that came on the heels of it.
The TV contracts, the international, the global work that Stern
did were the values of each of these franchises, and
(22:20):
the salaries of everyone involved on that day just exponentially
grew over the next ten years. I mean, as opposed
to the other great conspiracy of the NBA is that
Michael Jordan was banned from the NBA and that's why
he went to play baseball. And that's one where I
think if you had polled most people involved in the league.
They would have said that was bad for us. It
(22:41):
was good for baseball, but it was bad for the
NBA when Jordan was out of the league.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and boom,
we're back. Are there any other sports conspiracies that you're
interested in or that you feel rise to the level.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
There definitely remained questions about the reffing and NBA and
Sports Illustrated. We had a writer who spent nine months
at one point, Thomas Lake, very talented writer, looking into
the Kings Lakers series, and there reffing in it. And
this was the era where the Kings were ascended. This
is in the early two thousands, Chris Weber, Paisiaestoyakovic, and
(23:21):
it looked like they're on the verge of becoming a
dominant team in the NBA. And there's this crazy Game
seven that the Lakers with Shaquille and Eland, Kobe Bryant
once again major media market eke out. And if you
go back and you retroactively interviewed all these people involved
in it, that one smelled bad. Weirdly enough, we never
ran the story. So maybe that's another conspiracy theory right there.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
One place where the world of intelligence, where intelligence and
sports and conspiracies and conspiracy theories all genuinely overlap of
courses in the Olympics, and was at Sochi in twenty sixteen.
The Russian intelligence services were at the center of the
doping scandal, and Russian intelligence services were putting their fingers
(24:05):
on the scale to make sure that Putin won medals
and cheating was massive, factory level, with secret rooms and
whole teams of scientists to hide yurn and blood samples.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, that's a place where there's almost you assume if
you were to look at the last sixty years of
Olympic sports, and especially say, for example, like the Russian
team or the German team over the years, you would assist, Yes,
in particular, Yeah, you would assume more often than not
that there had been some mechanics at play there.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
I have to share a story real quick, so you know,
I spent a lot of time in Germany, and when
East Germany and West Germany, when they united West Germany,
the United Germany took over all of East Germany's like
debts and things that it had to fulfill, and it
turns out one of them was the East German athletes
who had been regularly beating the entire world and beating
(25:01):
the West Germans. All their athletes, especially their women, had
been like fully doped. And so these athletes who would
won all their gold medals, Yeah, I know, surprise, they're
now suffering from these terrible medical conditions because the East
Germans forced them to dope, or they agreed to it,
but they sued the West German government for medical malprek
because they took over there. They took over everything that
(25:23):
these Germans did. So the West German athletes are like
a they cheated. I didn't get a medal. They did,
and now now their health is all fucked up because
of all the drugs, and now they're suing. I got
my taxes who've got to pay for their medical care.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
That's not okay.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I didn't see the movie with Matt Damon and Victus
about South Africa re entering the world of rugby after
apartheip was coming down, but there was an interesting story
that came out afterwards of a conspiracy. Theory is that
the New Zealanders who lost to the South Africans, who
were the great favorites, the night before the game, they
(26:00):
all came down with diarrhea. They all come down with
they all got sick, and there was this mysterious waitress
who served them the food, called Susie, and they never
saw her again and she could never be found. Although
the New Zealand team swears they all know who she
is and they could identify her. The South Africans couldn't
produce her. And later this guy Stein, one of Nelson
(26:23):
and Dala's bodyguards, came out and said it was the
South African Intelligence Service. They needed South Africa to have
a good feeling, They needed it to win. They wanted
to keep civil war at bay in South Africa because
apart I hadn't quite come down yet and they needed
this win.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I can remember years ago when they thought was that
they not poisoned, but it had given Michael Jordan bad
food or something before one of the playoff games.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, and maybe every player should have a taster.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Now, Chris is a fascinating story. What is it your
book that you're writing now about That.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
One's totally different. That's sports and jacent I would say
it's the concept of ice swimming and how it has
this roots back in Europe, going back four hundred five
hundred years, and then how it's now being looked at
as a way of cold exposure. So there's a whole
science to a science and history, and I'm doing a
narrative exploration of it.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
My first overseas assignment was to Finland, and I lived
right on the Baltic and I lived right next to
the Finish Sauna Society, And they in the Baltic under
the water had this little bubble machine that would continue
all year long, so it would create this big hole
in the ice over the winter, and the ice could
get is eight to ten feet or more thick, and
(27:35):
you'd go swim in there after you took a sauna
and swim into the ice and stuff. The fact that
sauna was so central a part of the culture in
a place like Finland, and the fact that everybody goes
in there naked, it was a great opportunity to steal
stuff from people's wallets and clothes and car keys and
other things while you were in the sauna, or at
least copy them so that you could use them later
to perhaps break into their place and steal secrets.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Wow, I'm going to be more careful when I go
to the beach.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
There you go. As long as you're not a KGB spy,
it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Well, Chris, this is really great. Thank you for talking
to us. Fascinating stuff and I really enjoyed your story.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, yeah, no problem. Good luck with the podcast.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
So now that we've had someone who really knows what
they're talking about, let's switch to the other side and
bring in John and Adam.
Speaker 5 (28:20):
Hey, guys, I don't.
Speaker 8 (28:21):
Know a lot about sports, but I do know about
scientific experiments, because what I did was I tested the
theory that you could freeze an envelope and then feel
the temperature differential. So I froze a bunch of different
envelopes for different periods of times, brought them out, did
a blind field test between them and one that hasn't
been frozen, and after about fifteen seconds, they all felt
(28:46):
the same. So I frozen for longer. Same thing. My
son said, try spraying them with water and the water
will hold the temperature longer, and he was right for
about thirty seconds. If you really wanted to make it noticeable,
I think you'd have to do something physical to it.
Different texture, different shape than in the corner. Significantly. I
(29:06):
know all of these were discussed, so I tested these
as well, and it is really hard to tell the difference.
I think the way to do it would be to
have a different texture of paper. But this all goes
back to, well, how many people have to be involved
in this. You don't just get to go in yourself
and replace the envelope, but you have to feel up
the different envelopes, right, you got to feel this one.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
Oh, that's not it. And then he's got to know
did they show him?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Like, yeah, you can see him what he does, and
I don't see that there's.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
Any It's all how you see it.
Speaker 8 (29:34):
Some people say they see that video and it looks
like he's feeling around.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
If you guys got the technical branch of the CIA,
couldn't you could solve this?
Speaker 4 (29:42):
Right?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yes, yeah we could have.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Usually the first thing to do is to think there's
probably an easier way around all this. Professionals who do
this type of thing could probably come up with a
way to do it. But again, you're talking about stuff
that you have to bring in.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
You know, there are ways of palming things and having
it up your sleeve, pulling rabbits out of hats and
shit like that, but that's not saying that like any
schmoke can just like quick go do it. Penn and
Teller could pull it off.
Speaker 5 (30:06):
When I think about the is it called the technical branch.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
What's it called technical services?
Speaker 5 (30:11):
Office of technical Did you have cool things that they like?
Weird problems that they solved?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah? Tell me what first?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
In the whole disguise thing, they had actually people who
had worked in Hollywood and had done masks and done
things for Hollywood. There's all kinds of technical gear that
we could use. In fact, I remember when I was
in Moscow and we were under surveillance all the time,
we actually did hire a magician to try to work
with us, to think about sleight of hand as we
being watched, trying to get away with things and that
type of thing. So it's an ongoing process and it's
(30:40):
part of understanding what you're up against and how you
can defeat it, either technically or visually or what have you?
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Did?
Speaker 5 (30:48):
It was it kind of Willy Wonka ish like fun
to go down there? Or is just an office with
a bunch of it?
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Was fun? I remember when I got did you ever
go do the fancy disguise stuff done?
Speaker 4 (30:56):
Yeah? I did, and I did the ots thing, like,
we have places abroad where we do them, and I
visited some of those and they've got like carpentry and
working on cars, and yeah, disguises and yeah they do
some pretty but most of them are pretty straightforward, like
how to hide something or how to trick something out.
It's not Penn and Teller stuff. We're not hiding tigers
or anything like that.
Speaker 5 (31:18):
You've never hired.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
But if we had hired a tiger, tiger, you tie
the fuck out of it.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Although you never know what that tiger's going off turn
on you either.
Speaker 5 (31:29):
But yeah, so I will say, like, hearing about this
whole case, it does make me think of a point
that some economists made to me once, which is the
general assumption should be if there is money to be
made by breaking the rules, they will be broken to
the extent that they can be broken. Like that, you
should just assume that if there's an incentive, people are
(31:52):
going to work to break it.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
All right, next time, let's talk about stuff that you
guys do know about. Residan sports. I think you made
a You guys tried really hard, and I'm impressed by that.
Speaker 5 (32:02):
I have been to more sports events I've watched more
sports in the last like fourteen months than in my
entire life, and I'm enjoying the time with my kid.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 8 (32:17):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Sterner.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8 (32:26):
Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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