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April 2, 2019 37 mins

Rage at referees is all the rage in professional sports. Michael Lewis visits a replay center that’s trying to do the impossible: adjudicate fairness.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. So we're walking across a parking lot in Secaucus,
New Jersey. We're surrounded by concrete, nothing green. It took
a lot to get me to this place. Their chain
hotel and motels in someone's idea of the wall. But

(00:37):
I have a hunch, a suspicion about the crisis that
we find ourselves in. It's filled with cheap chain restaurants
and we're surrounded on all sides by freeways. It's like
what people think about when they tell jokes about New Jersey.
I think you can see what's going on right here

(00:58):
in Secaucus, and we're approaching a four story rectangular, otherwise
nondescript concrete building. There's a discreete little sign here that
says NBA and shows a logo with a basketball player
inside a recent concession to the world. We live in

(01:19):
the Replay Center, a place where basketball referees review the
calls made by other basketball referees in real time to
minimize referee error. The Replay Center was built to persuade
people that life was fair. I'm Michael Lewis, and this

(01:48):
is against the rules. It's a show about We'll give
me just a minute to get to that it doesn't
get beji or doesn't. It's like this is a place
where brown is an exciting color and the door is locked.

(02:12):
All right now for me, this story really begins not
in Secaucus, but in Berkeley, California, with my eleven year
old son. His name's Walker, Walker Lewis. He plays on

(02:35):
a basketball team run if you can believe it, by
a Japanese Buddhist temple. My son isn't a Buddhist. The
most of the time you could pass for one. He
has no conflict with his teachers, or his classmates, or
his Japanese Buddhist teammates. I wouldn't say his mind is
exactly pure, but usually it's calm. The exception is when

(02:57):
he deals with reffs, even Buddhist reffs. Anytime a reff
blows the whistle on him, he throws up his arms
in astonishment, and he jumps up and down with his
little fist balled up in his mouth clenched tight. Everyone
knows just how much injustice he's suffering. Then he marches
off with a scowl, and he doesn't get over it.

(03:17):
After a game this season, he gets into the car
and starts bitching and moaning, all over again. How did
it make you feel when the ref made those calls?
Very mad? Do you feel any better now? No, tell
me how it feels. It feels like someone keeps poking
you in the back of the shoulder and then saying, foul, foul, foul, foul.

(03:43):
Have you ever fouled out in your career? No? Did
you know that you were a risk of felling out? Guess?
But I also knew if I did, it would be
unfair because I knew that he was calling the stupidest fouls.
He'll look back and say, oh, I was being huge asshole.

(04:03):
Clay with the steel playing a full race? How's he
trying to catch him? Be cast? Play with him very degree.
The thing is, I know why my son does what
he does. He thinks he's Clay Thompson, the all star
shooting guard of the Golden State Warriors. They research back
the tops of three potters. When Clay hits a three,

(04:23):
Clay pounds his chest and points to the sky. And
so when Walker Lewis hits at three, he too pounds
his chest and points to the sky. I think we
got a technical foul as well, Clay. It's very unusual
when Clay's called for a fowl, he scowls and throws
up his arms in astonishment, and sometimes even says something

(04:47):
to the ref that gets him slapped with the technicals owl.
He only had one regular season, and Clay's the famously
most laid back All Star in the entire National Basketball Association.
Something has happened in the relationship between referees and players
over the last I guess year or two. That's Ramona Shelburne.

(05:07):
She's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN.
It's been quite frankly ugly. This year. One of the
Warriors headbutted a reth another chucked his disgusting mouthguard off
a ref's chest. Raymond Careful, who's already has a technical game,

(05:27):
and some of the stuff I've seen, I mean, when
Draymond Green is getting fined for calling Laurena holecap and
can we cuss on your podcast? I think we already
have you know, a fucking bitch, like like when when
he is saying that to a female referee and getting
fined and suspended for that, man, that's next level and

(05:47):
I haven't seen that before this season. It's the Stars
now who are really pushing the issue, right, it's Kevin
Durant getting thrown out of games, it's Steph Curry getting
thrown out. Warriors completely unraveled. In a single season. Bad
behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of ten

(06:10):
different basketball games. Kevin Durant, their best player, tie a
league record by getting tossed from five games, all by himself.
The men who coached the Stars aren't much better. Even
Steve Kerr, the Warriors famously decent, civic minded coach, I
can snap, I can completely lose it if you back
away from the Golden State Warriors. I mean, they are

(06:33):
exemplars of the way people should behave, especially your stars.
They're like impeccably behave people. I'm so pleased to have
my son emulating your players. The only time they have
problems really is with referees. Yeah, I can't imagine you
in your life have another relationship like you have with referees. No,

(06:53):
you're right, You're right. I would never say the things
that I do to referees to a person in normal life.
It happens two or three times a year, and I've
been caught on camera. You know, amfing a ref and
you know my daughter will send me a text like that,
what are you doing? It's all over Twitter. I can
read your lips. This is embarrassed and I'm embarrassed. So

(07:14):
why is that? You know? It's a sense of right
or wrong, you know, and I feel like there's like
this personal offense, like something unfair is happening, which brings
me to my hunch it has to do with referees,
and not just basketball referees. The people everywhere charged not

(07:34):
just with enforcing rules, but with preserving a sense of
fairness on Wall Street, in the news, in courts of law,
in the many little disputes that pock mark everyday life.
There are many different kinds of refs, and most of
them are into some kind of attack. So maybe it's
not that surprising that Americans one day woke up and

(07:56):
thrilled to the message that life was unfair. You know,
the system is rigged, sged acmom, banking system is rigged,
and ystem. There's a lot of things that are rigged
in this world of ours, not to fairness that we
grew up believing that a miracle was about, which brings

(08:17):
me to what this show is about the people whose
job it is to maximize fairness, not just in sports,
but most everywhere. What's happening to them tells us a
lot about what's happening to us. You have to listen closely,

(08:40):
but you can hear that same chant in a lot
of American life. Ref you suck. Here we go back

(09:11):
at the NBA's offices in Secaucus, New Jersey. Someone eventually
came and unlocked the door, and then they led me
down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff,
jerseys and bobble heads and basketballs and posters of Michael Jordan.
The Replay Center was the ultimate man cave. It's also

(09:32):
the latest weapon in the battle for fairness. So this place,
just on first of you, is amazing. It's wall to
wall screens, one hundred and ten of them. What's on
them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in
twenty nine NBA arenas across the country. This isn't the
broadcast video with commercials and commentary. The screens here don't

(09:53):
even have the scores of the games on them were
the names of the teams playing. And they're muted. Which
you hear is referees staring at basketball games, which you
see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts. Nobody's
on a walk in here and walk down and said
this polaby sucks. And I'm not going to say it
sucks either. That's Joe Borgia, who designed the center back

(10:16):
in twenty fourteen and now runs it. Before he volunteered
for a secaucus duty, he refereed NBA games. His father
was an NBA ref before him, with a break in
the late sixties. A. Borgia has been reffing professional basketball
games since nineteen forty six. If you went back to
your dad at the beginning of his career and said

(10:37):
this is what it's going to look like. What do
you think he'd have said? If I told him we
would have replay? He turnover and it is great. Forget
about a replay center. Is that right? Oh? Absolutely? You see,
the refs used to insist on their authority at any rate.
Everyone agreed that there was no better way to ensure
the fairness of the game than to let the ref
play God. The replay center is an admission the ref

(10:59):
is not God, that he makes mistakes. I think the
mention of replay. None of us liked it when we
first heard it. It's unnecessary, evil, it's necessary. You have
to have it today. Everything's tape. Now everyone pays more
attention to the referee's mistakes, so the NBA has to

(11:19):
as well. Now, when a ref thinks he might have
screwed up some call or didn't get a good look
at the action, he twirls his fingers in the air.
That's the signal to the ref and the replay center,
who goes to work reviewing the tape looking for the
best angle to figure out what actually happened. That's the

(11:39):
thing is everybody can see it now exactly. You can't
have them be in a better position to judge the
game than the referees. The replay centers what allows refs
on a basketball court to change their calls. A lot
of those calls are subjective, like whether one player fouled another.
The rests on the court still make most of those
calls themselves. The exception is when the foul is flagranting. Sure, duke,

(12:02):
we're gonna give me two good angles. That's the first one.
The other one's going to give you. There's blood on
the screws. Kevin Love's front tooth got knocked in. Love
plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the question is did
the guy who popped him in the mouth do it intentionally?
It's a sebasketball point, Kevin Lug happens to move into
where the guy's elbow was going on. The refs need

(12:25):
to decide if the violence was not just excessive but unsportsmanlike,
which sounds our keg because we sort of lost the concept.
So the blood doesn't sweat the decision. Huh. Listen, there's
a lot of contacts, a lot of its acres that
the players all stand around scratching themselves while the refs

(12:45):
put on headsets and talked to the replay center. We're
looking for the unnatchural. Did he throw his elbow out?
So the fo the fouls on cavil up correct. I
thought he was outside his move. He was moving. Its late,
Come on, you gotta be quick. One days stuck on
the blood coming out of his mouth. Yeah, it's the
whole thing. Only takes thirty seconds, thirty seconds in which players, fans,

(13:06):
coaches get even more pissed off at the rest for
taking so long. The only thing stopping the replay center
from checking every decision is that it slows the game down.
Here in Secaucus is still trying to figure out how
they might talk to the refs as they run up
and down the court, because if they could do that,
they could just fix every call on the fly. The
Special Forces we found that we actually used a chip

(13:30):
over the bowler that worked off the vibration of the bone.
Believe or not. Wead that we got a handful of
Gene League referees molded and we tested that to wear
a chip over their molar. But it wasn't good enough
because they didn't know where the voice was coming from.
It was just a voice in their heads. They didn't

(13:52):
know where it was. This is actually insane the time
and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what,
after all, is just a basketball game. A jillion miles
a fiber optic cable connect this room directly to the
NBA arenas around the country, all for two calls again
at two goals a game. Fifteen million dollars to build

(14:12):
this room to get two goals right the game. But
you gotta do it, You gotta do it. Can I
just pause here a moment just to consider what the
NBA has done in the past few years to improve
the calls. For example, they brought in serious managers to
hire and train the refs. Joe Borgia calls his boss

(14:33):
the general because she's actually a general and an Air
Force pilot. Her name is Michelle Johnson, and before she
supervised NBA refs, she ran the Air Force Academy. It
sounds like overkill to use a general to make sure
a basketball games are well reft, but the NBA thought
it needed overkill, or at least Adam Silver, the NBA Commissioner, did,

(14:56):
if people don't believe that the league office is unbiased
and that the officials are unbiased, you're gonna have a problem,
regardless of the accuracy of the calls. Silver took over
in twenty fourteen and also hired Joe Borge to create
the Replay Center. Since then, the NBA Commission has taken
a ridiculous amount of grief for trying to improve justice

(15:16):
in basketball. There are a group of people who think
that without the sort of transparency that we see in
this day and age, that it enabled certain officials and
maybe with a touch of frontier justice, to overall create
more of a fair environment. Even if that were true,
and I'm not sure it is, those days are over,

(15:36):
and I think it's whether it's in sports or other
walks of life that you cannot turn the clock back
on transparency. So here's what else Silver has done. He's
broad in the pool of people from which refs are selected.
They used to be mostly white men, mostly from the
same background. At one point fifteen years ago, four NBA
refs came from the same high school. He's hired more

(15:59):
black refs and female refs. He's insisted that referees be
physically fit so they can get into position to see
all the plays. While everyone else in AMA is getting fatter,
the rests are getting buff. They're also now getting new
feedback on all their bad calls. Silver decided to publish
the mistakes made by every reff in the last two

(16:20):
minutes of every game so everyone could see them. He
gives the teams and the refs a private document listing
every refereeing mistake. All this new data on refs means
that we and they know all sorts of strange things
about their minds. For instance, we now know that their
calls have tended to favor whichever team's losing. Their calls

(16:40):
also favor the home team. Some large part of home
court advantage is just the refs. The analytics department of
the Houston Rockets has even done a study that shows
that the home team that gets the best calls is
the Utah Jazz. Why Utah? Who knows? But you can
be sure that someone will figure that out. There's now
basically a small army of geeks analyzing all this new data. Look,

(17:04):
I don't really like writing papers about sports. I'm pre
feder write them about the economy. That's Justin Wolfers, a
behavioral economist at the University of Michigan and the co
author of a paper about NBA refs. But the thing is,
this is a domain where the NBA referees have tremendous
incentives not to make the wrong call. Every era they

(17:24):
make is tracked. Those eras determine whether they get more games.
Those games determine how much they get paid. This is
arguably the most analyzed workforce in the country. Basketball referees
are now picked apart in ways that not long ago
would have seemed preposterous, not just for the fairness of
their calls, but for their unconscious behavior. Wolfers took years

(17:44):
of data from every NBA game. Then he set out
to look for evidence of the reff's racial bias. The
question here isn't whether people are anti black or anti white,
but whether there's an in group bias. So, if a
predominantly black team is playing and the refereeing crew is
predominantly white, they're more fouls called against them than on

(18:06):
nights when the same team is playing with the dominantly
blank refereeing crew. And it turns out the answers yes.
Wolfers wrote his paper back in two thousand and seven,
before this new age of referee transparency. Well, it was
a bit of a lesson for me. You can probably
tell by my accident, Michael. I'm an Australian, you know.
I thought it was an interesting piece of social science.

(18:26):
It turned out the New York Times put it on
the front page and the NBA wasn't happy. The commissioner
at the time attacked the study and embarrassed the league
by trying and failing to refute its findings. This morning
we'll hear from the NBA Commissioner, David Stern. Our referees
are the most reviewed, most ranked, and most rated, and

(18:46):
that's why we take exception to what the Times did here.
That's Stern on NPR in two thousand and seven. The
result of all this coverage, every single referee was made
aware of his unconscious bias. When the dust settled, Justin
Wolfers was curious to know if his paper had had
any effect. He made another study of referees after the
controversy he'd created, and guess what demonstration study that we

(19:11):
did seems to suggest that that form of racial bias
is gone away. He has no idea why. Maybe simply
making the refs aware of the problem was enough to
correct it. But in the end this became a case
study not in ref ineptitude but ref reform. NBA refs
have achieved what police forces can only dream of, race blindness.

(19:33):
The refs have no choice. The world's now too good
at seeing their mistakes. Look, there's no way any basketball
referee is going to be perfect. But there's also no
way these refs or anything but more accurate than they've
ever been. I mean, even home court advantage means less
than it used to, and yet these refs are treated
as if they're trying to rig the games. Does the

(20:02):
sound of those eighteen thousand people screaming at you, are
booing you, does it sound any different than it sounded
when you started in nineteen ninety one. Yeah, there's there's
a little more anger involved, and you know it used
to be sort of the garden variety. You're terrible, you
suck any of those kinds of terms. That's Monte McCutcheon,
who recently quit reffing NBA games to serve as a

(20:24):
kind of life coach to the other NBA refs to
talk them through their problems. Now, you know, people do
their research. They things are out there on the internet.
They know your record with their team. They they've done
all there's all these sights on all these different they
know personal things about you. Oh sure, of course, some
death threats are made from time to time in playoff series,

(20:46):
and you'll get security all the way to both the
hotel and then the hotel the next morning out to
the airport. They security to the hotel not every night,
but when those threats are are a known factor that
has happened in my career, security to your car is
mandatory every night. Yep. These days refs need bodyguards to
escape after the game. Here are people who are mostly

(21:09):
just trying to do these extremely difficult jobs as well
as they can, and at some point you feel this
question rising up in you, in me. It rose up
while I was talking to Ramona Shelburne, the ESPN reporter.
Why would anybody want to be a ref Seriously? I
wonder that too. Man. You know, they're not allowed to
say anything. They're not allowed to explain themselves, they're not

(21:30):
allowed to defend themselves. Look, obviously, they get paid. They
started one hundred and fifty grand a year, and if
they're great at their job and work extra games, they
can make as much as five hundred. But there are
lots of ways to get paid without spending half your
life in hotel rooms and the other half being insulted
by arenas filled with crazy people. Do you think the
refereeing has gotten worse or better? I actually think it's

(21:52):
gotten better. Of course it's gotten better. How could it
not have. The mystery is why the stars and the
coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse.
I have a hundred about that too, which you'll hear
in a minute. Okay, So Sacramentals checking in right sore

(22:19):
ten Oclos on an hour before Clippers. So Golden Stag
will check in and the Clippers will check in about
the nine thirty I'm back with Joe Borgia in the
replay center. The refs here sit dressed in black, staring
at screens, waiting for a signal from somewhere in America.

(22:40):
The end of games is when they get most involved,
because that's when fans and coaches and players are most
likely to accuse some ref of having made the mistake
that change the outcome. Of course, a mistake at the
beginning has just as much effect on a game as
a mistake at the end. But the end is what
people notice and get outraged about, so the justice at

(23:01):
the end of the game must be more exact than
it is at the beginning. These replay center refs have
video technicians with them who can freeze a moment on screen,
then zoom out or zoom in so that the entire
screen contains only a player's fingertips or his toes. Here
you just scroll through tiny slivers of the game, not
the game itself, the slivers where injustices might occur. I mean, goodness, graces.

(23:25):
If you don't have slow motion in here or freeze frame,
it's very difficult. Of course, in slow motion you can
see things that the naked eye misses. Magicians sometimes perform
during halftimes of the NBA games. When Joe Borgi slows
it down, he can see how they do their tricks.
It's kind of the same thing with the players, exactly,
I can go with sixtieth of a second at a time.

(23:48):
He's going to pick a lot of little things. So
what these players are getting good at is creating optical illusions.
And then it comes to sort the sort of things
that a magician does well. Isn't flopping an optical illusion.
Flopping is what they call it when a player pretends
to have been knocked over by another player. Tricking the
refs into making bad calls is now considered a skill. Okay,
replay sing on gimma, so you just hit a game?

(24:09):
Ref in Houston twirls his fingers in the air. Some
players hit a three point shot at the buzzer or
has he The Houston reff wants to know if the
player's toe was on the three point line and if
he got off the shot before the buzzer. It's just
now that Joe says I can work the equipment, can I?
Just the truth is, I'm not a big equipment guy.

(24:36):
My first step when something needs to be assembled or
operated is to call someone and say I'll pay whatever
it costs. I start twisting dials just to see what happens.
They appear to cause the picture to zoom in and out.
Watch the referee on the bottom of the screen. There's
your SI. Yeah, you got to see that. You have
to see the referee doing that? Are you? Someone may

(24:58):
say something. There's a lot of subjectivity in refee, but
a whole bunch of the questions that arise on a
basketball court have objective answers, like who touched the ball
last before it went out of bounds? Or was there
still time on the clock before the shot left the
player's hands. This is one of those. Did the player's

(25:18):
foot touch the three point line when he leapt for
his shot? Did the ball leave his fingertips before the
buzzer sounded one of the dials, or maybe it's actually
a joystick. Lets me choose which angle of the court
I see. I need to find one still frame with
the shooter's foot in it and another with the clock
in it. Then I need to freeze the picture in

(25:41):
the one sixtieth of a second that the ball left
the shooter's fingertips just then I realized I have no
idea who the player is. I don't even know which
team he's on. All I know is he's in Houston.
Can I get it here? All the same, it's pretty
much yeah, Houston still waiting on me. I didn't. I

(26:05):
think it occurred to me at that moment that they
were possibly actually using what I was doing, and that
because it was a little bit of anxiety. The coaches
get to stop the game with pointless timeouts. The advertisers
get to stop the game to sell beer. But when
a ref stops a game to make it more fair,
the crowd booze and the announcers launch attacks on them.

(26:26):
It's not enough to be right, You've got to be fast.
Borgia tracks the average response time of the replay refs.
It's between twenty and thirty seconds. Okay, the replay under
official confirmed successful. Three point you got it right? The
problems dealt with I think it is, But right away
another one comes up on a bunch of screens showing

(26:48):
one arena. All these people are jumping around and hollering
at refs. The ruckets appears to be confined to Cleveland,
but in here it feels like the entire universe is disturbed.
It turns out Lebron James is upset. He's arguing there,
he goes roun is going from ref to ref. He
seems to know which refs to are with. Yeah, they're

(27:10):
talking about goalten, so they're talking about they're talking about it.
I think they might change that James is James. Any
other guy had the best angle? Do you think that
Lebron James has any effect doing that? The ref in
Cleveland is not twirling his finger. There's no signal to
us to do anything in the replay center. Lebron's drama,

(27:34):
strictly speaking, is pointless. It's strange the way these players argue.
They must think that if they make life unpleasant enough
for the ref, he'll think twice before the next call.
It's then that it occurs to me, just looking around
the room at one hundred and ten TV screens, I've

(27:54):
had a hard time following the games, never mind the scores.
I sometimes don't even know which teams are playing. But
every time a player gets up into a referees phase,
I've recognized the player. And I actually don't know that
many NBA players, but I know all the ones who
pitch these hissy fits because the only players getting up
into the faces of the refs are the famous players

(28:15):
or the coaches who protect them. Ramona Shelburne put her
finger on it. The more aggressive behavior towards reffs isn't
coming from every player, It's coming from the stars. So

(28:42):
we just got really interested in a very simple question
of does this sense of being privileged make you disobey
the rules of the road or the laws of the land.
That's Daker Keltner. He's a professor of psychology at cal
Berkeley and someone who wonders about the effect inequality has
on people's behavior. It experience I had at Berkeley whereas

(29:03):
riding my bike up this hill and I got to
the four away stop sign and I was halfway through
this Fouraway stops sign and this guy in a black
Mercedes rolled through the stop sign. Is halfway there is
a foot away from me, about to take me out,
and he's on a cell phone. And I looked at him.

(29:23):
I was ready to take him on, like all right, buddy,
this is it. And what was most telling about this
whole experience was he looked at me as if I
was in the wrong and I should get out of
his way, and you know, even though I'd made it
through the stop sign first. So Daker in a colleague
dreamed up this weird experiment. They hid two Berkeley undergraduates

(29:44):
in the bushes near four way stop signs. The undergrads
noted the makes of all cars coming through the intersection
assigned them numbers one to five according to their market value.
A new Mercedes was a five, a Honda was a three,
and an old Pacer was a one. We positioned a
Berkeley undergrad by a pedestrian zone, and we make sure

(30:05):
they look like they want to cross the street right,
and they're sort of leaning into the pedest zone where
it's required by California law to stop. It's a game
of one on one at the California crosswalk, one car
versus one pedestrian, and zero percent of the drivers of
poor cars zoom through the pedestrian zone. They all stop,

(30:27):
and forty some odd percent, forty five percent of the
drivers of the fives of rich cars blaze through the
pedestrian zone and just say the rules don't apply to me.
I'll carry on. This one study led to a bunch
of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior.

(30:48):
Another experiment, we bring people to the lab and as
they're leaving, there's this big bowl of candy and it's
like and it says on it for the children of
the Institute of Human Development on the bowl, and we say, oh,
you gonna take a candy or two if as you're leaving,
and well to we count up how many candies they
take after they leave the experiment. Privileged people grab a

(31:10):
big handful of candy compared to poorer people. So let's
turn the conversation something much more important. Basketball, most important
of all. In the last five or six years, the
NBA has embarked on essentially a dramatic reform of refereing.
At the same time, the friction between the players and
some of the owners and some of the coaches and

(31:32):
the refs is going through the roof. The source of
the outrage is the star players. The people are getting
thrown out of games, or Kevin Durant and Steph Curry
and James Harden and the Warriors, the most famous team
ever to walk on the court, are the chief culprits
exhibit a and bad behavior towards refs. So you got
this weird combination. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, I still
remember being a Lakers fan, you know, the great Magic

(31:54):
Johnson teams and watching Larry Bird do his nine step
layup and I'm like, come on, make the call. You know.
Larry Bird was like Lebron the New Mercedes of his day.
He played with certain assumptions about the rules and how
they apply to him. For most players of his era,
two steps counted as traveling. The inequality on a basketball

(32:15):
court is more found, it's profound, and it's more profound
there wasn't Larry Bird's era. Larry Bird was a millionaire.
Lebron James might be a billionaire, and these guys are
global franchises. Yeah, so you've got, in a funny way,
a microcosm. It's an odd microcosm on a basketball court
of what's going on in the largest society. The NBA

(32:36):
is set out to ref the game more objectively, more accurately,
more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their fans
and coaches. You want to know why, the more objectivity
there is, the less power they have. Objective refs eliminate
some of their privilege. The stars can't get the calls anymore.

(32:56):
Just because they're stars, or anyway not as often. Lebron
James and Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and Clay Thompson,
they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better
than everyone else. They don't need unfairness to win. But
what happens where there are no replay centers, where there's
no hope for pure objectivity or technology to improve calls,

(33:20):
where the refs can no longer defend themselves from the stars.
Welcome to the reason for our show. I think American
life just now has at least one thing in common
with basketball. The authority of its referees is under attack.
And when you have a weak referee, you have a
big problem. Because a weak referee is a referee who

(33:43):
can be bought, or intimidated or just simply ignored. A
situation goes from being more or less well refereed to
more or less not. Then one day you wake up
in a world that seems not just unfair, but actually
sort of rigged. That is, it's incapable of becoming fair

(34:03):
because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the
power to preserve it. Boom, do you do you flip
a switch in one hundred and ten screens go dark.
Um all the law small screens you got to do manually.
The big TVs, we got the remote. For most nights,
Joe Borgia stays at the replay center until almost two

(34:24):
in the morning, just him and a couple of refs,
staring at tiny slivers of basketball games, trying to impose
justice on powerful people who don't want it. I am nuts.
That's another story. Got admit you do. Now you have
to be partially one hundred percent negative business. That's why

(34:47):
my son doesn't want to write that. I don't like
people yelling at me. One day, a young Borgia naturally
becomes a referee, the next he doesn't. One day, most
people think the refs are more or less fair, or
at any rate, they don't spend a lot of time
blaming them for all their problems. The next day they
wake up to radical inequality. The people on top, the elites,

(35:10):
I think they're special. They behave as people do when
they think they're special. Young people emulate them without even
thinking about it. They just assume that's how you act
if you're a star or want to be. My first
question is why when you hit a three point shot,
which you often do. Why in the past have you

(35:30):
pounded your chest and pointed to the sky? I did
it because of people on the MBA and the IMBA
did it? What do you think they're doing? Like? What
does it mean? I don't know? Just like I'm cool.
Do you believe in God? No? I knew it would it?
I mean now I know what it meant, but no,
I don't. So what does it mean? Basically, it's like,

(35:53):
thank you God for hitting a three point shot? Do
you do you think God was responsible when Clay Thompson
hit a three point shot? To be honest, if God
was watching over everybody whenever they hit a three point shot,
I don't think that he would be able to like
actually make them make the shot. So do you have

(36:16):
anything you'd like to say to the referees of the
world before we turn this recording off? Don't pick sides
unless it's my side. Thank you. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks
for listening to Against the Rules. It's our first episode.

(36:37):
We've got a lot more to come. Against the Rules
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced
by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Garedo, with research assistance from
Zoe Oliver Gray. Our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobell
as our executive producer. Our theme was composed by Nick Brittell,
with additional scoring by Seth Samuel, mastering by Jason Gambrel.

(37:03):
Our show was recorded at Northgate Studios in Berkeley by
TOFA Ruth. Special thanks to our founders Jacob Weisberg and
Malcolm Gladwell
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