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Games
01:16:17
A good game--whether it's a pro football playoff, or a family showdown on the kitchen table--can make you feel, at least for a little while, like your whole life hangs in the balance. This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert wonder why we get so invested in something so trivial. What is it about games that make them feel so pivotal?
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You'll also find all the machines, tools and notions you need with top brands like Singer Brother and Pellon, plus Essential Thread and Floss. It's all new at Michaels. At Lowe's, loyalty is royalty. With Christmas right around the corner, treat yourself for less during the holiday season. Rewards members get early online only access to Black Friday doorbuster deals on Thanksgiving Day. Like the Hisense side by side fridge. Just $799. Not a member. Join for free Today Lowe's, we help you save battle 1127 only on lowe's.com, member only. Doorbusters and midnight Eastern loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. See lowe's.com terms for details. Subject to change. Wait. You're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to radio from WNYC and npr. Okay. Three, two, one. Hello. This show we are about to do, it began. Hey, guys, how's it going with a conversation that we had with a friend of ours, Eric Simmons, and he told us about this moment that was kind of strange. This is the San Jose Sharks, actually. Who is this? A. This is a hockey team or a. Yeah, hockey team. Okay. And, like, I'm pretty strongly identified with hockey to begin with. Like, I play hockey. My dad has played hockey his entire life. And the Sharks started in the Bay Area, like, when I was 10 years old. Sharks are my favorite, favorite creature by a long ways. And so I've rooted for them forever. And for like, the last, like, six years, they've been really good. Every year they're picked at the beginning of the year, to go to the Stanley cup, maybe to win the Stanley Cup. And. And every year, they fall short. And so in 2007, they were in the playoffs. The Sharks are the top seed. They're playing the eight seed, which also is Anaheim, which is probably their biggest rival, and they lose. And I remember driving home from the ice rink, it was probably about midnight, and it was a really pretty night out. Like, the city lights, and they're, like, shimmering on the water, and there's always these tankers out parked in the bay, and there's, like, the silhouettes of the boats and the Oakland coastline and the San Francisco shoreline. And, like, this is everything that makes me happy in the world. Eric says usually when he sees that view, no matter how he's feeling, he's like, okay, everything's gonna be good. It's gonna be fine. Cause that is one beautiful city. But that night, I was so angry that I remember noticing this beautiful scene and thinking, burn. I hate this. I hate everything about it. Burn down in flames. Like, that's embarrassing. The fact that these guys that I don't know, lost a hockey game in Dallas, that has the power to override everything I think I like about myself and just turn me into this, like, drooling, savage, angry beast. And I don't like that. You know what I love about that story, by the way? You know, Eric is so taken with this subject that he's writing a book about it at the moment. Anyway, go ahead. But what I love about that story is it's so typical. You know, almost every sports fan has had a moment where you're like, I cannot believe my own emotions right now. Are you a burner? I mean, do you watch sports? I'm not, no. I mean, I watch sports, but I don't get into that. I don't get into a darkness. I do. There have definitely been times I've wanted to burn down New York. Have you ever asked yourself, like, why? Well, that's the question, right? Yeah. For this hour, anyway. Like, why is it that something as trivial as a hockey game can feel like life or death? Which probably doesn't happen to a lot of public radio people, but, hey, well, it could. I shouldn't think that. Yeah. All right. And if you widen. If you widened the category a little bit and just said games, well, then you'd include everybody. All right, games, everybody. So then what is it about a game that makes it more than a game? Yeah. Well, let's find out. This is Radiolab. I'm Robert Crowich. I'M Jad Abumrad. Stay with us. Sports, to me as a kid were vital. Sports were like if everything else on the planet had disappeared except for sports. I would have been fine if the church had gone away, if school had gone away, even if all my brothers and sisters had gone away. I like them fine, but sports was the only thing that I really loved as a kid. Can you introduce yourself? My name is Stephen Dubner, and Steven is the author of Freakonomics. Freakonomics, the books, the blog, and I've got my own ISDN line. It's kind of an inside joke. It's a fancy piece of studio equipment. Because now Freakonomics is also a radio show. Are we talking to you, like, in your living room? And the reason we called Stephen up, and this is the honest truth, is that Soren Wheeler, one of our producers, overheard Steven telling this story in the men's room. That's where I do most of my research for the show. Actually, Soren is where I look for friends. In any case, Soren overheard Stephen in the stall, got him to come into the studio and tell to us. Cause this is a story about a boy, a hero, and a dad, and how those three things can get a little intertwined. I don't really know what happened. What I know is that when I came into being in 1963, I was the last of eight kids. And Steven says, already at that point, sports was family law. In fact, when it came to baseball, no two people in the family, including my mother and father, so there were 10 of us. No two people rooted for the same team. And as it turned out, there was even a rule. No two people were allowed to root for the same team. Now, he says his dad actually assigned each of the family members their own baseball team and told them, this is your team, only you get to root for this team. So my dad was a Mets fan. My mom, I don't remember, but I had a sister who was a Red Sox fan. There was a Cardinals fan, a Sandwich Francisco Giants fan. He was an LA Dodgers fan. That was my brother Peter. And I have no recollection of a time before I was a Baltimore Orioles fan. So I think what happened is Stevie was born. Here's another kid. We need another team. Who does he get? How about the Orioles? Was this like the tooth fairy sticking a dollar under your pillow? Yeah. How did he assign the Orioles to you? Okay, so first of all, I should just say, like, a lot of things in life, as a very young, very obedient Catholic boy, I Accepted this mystery without question. But here's my hunch. My father, I think, felt that it was a shame that he couldn't give more to his children materially more and even more of himself. And so in my mind, the greatest gift he could give to each of us was our own baseball team. But this is ultimately a story about more than just baseball. My parents were both Brooklyn born Jews, kind of typical second generation American, who before they met each other, while they were in their twenties, they both converted to Roman Catholicism. What was the reaction from their parents? Oh, that was bad. That was bad. The way that my grandfather discovered that my father had converted was when some rosary beads slipped out of his pocket and fell onto the floor. So it was like my grandfather basically threw my father out of the house, literally declared him dead. Wow. Set Shiva for him. And so he says when his dad met his mom, who was another Jewish convert to Catholicism, they were like two refugees who'd found each other. Exactly. Together they left Brooklyn, went upstate, spent all their money on an old farmhouse in the country, leaving behind a past that was toxic. But then when they got upstate, they, they found themselves a little out of place. We were these kind of farmer Jewish Brooklyn, Jewish city people who were now upstate Catholic farmer survivor types. We had no money, a lot of kids, and my dad, he said his dad would often be upstairs, quote, lying down for hours and hours, which didn't make a whole lot of sense to him at the time. He thought, come on, why isn't he down here with us? But now as an adult, he understands that his dad was not well. In fact, he was depressed, really depressed. And how much did you know about your parents backstory when you were growing up on the farm? Can my knowledge be measured in negative terms? But it was plain to me that my father was a kind of diminished man, that he wasn't capable of doing all the things that other men were capable of doing. So Steven says he would go outside to the backyard and he'd spend time by himself, pretending to be the Orioles, recreating the games that had been played the day before in New York life. And here comes Frank Robinson. He's still spearheading the Orioles. You know, one game could last me six, eight hours, and I would literally, I would literally play 162 game seasons. I would be every batter on both teams and the announcers. Brooks Robinson completes his home run trot. And you know, this thing about ownership. And whether my dad did that on purpose or not, he did make me feel like if they fail, then they needed me to boost them up. And that kept him busy for a while. But then the play happens and everything changes. To explain, somewhere along the way, when he was 10, Stephen discovers football. Football. Was considered barbaric. Worst of all, it was played on the Sabbath. But regardless, he fell in love with it. I love the brute force of it, the fact that all these guys wore helmets that made them look kind of like. Kind of like knights. And almost immediately, he latched onto a particular running back from the Pittsburgh Steelers, and that was Franco Harris. Come on, Frank Burton. Come on, Franco. I discovered Franco Harris in his rookie season, read about him in Sports Illustrated, and from the beginning, everything about him just made sense. I came from a big Catholic family. He came from a big Catholic family. His family was kind of mixed. So was Franco's. His dad was black, his mom was Italian. He was a very unusual guy, very kind of thoughtful and quiet. And I became a big Steelers fan because of him. Which brings us back to the play. Saturday, December 23rd, almost Christmas 1972. The Steelers were about to lose to the Raiders. The Oakland Raiders have taken a 76 lead. 40 seconds left on the clock. We had the ball on something like our own 35. Fourth down and 10 yards to go. Last gas. Hang on to your hats. Here come the Steelers out of the huddle. Gary Bradshaw at the control. Bradshaw drops back to pass. Bradshaw running out of the pocket, looking for somebody to throw to, fires it downfield. Bradshaw throws, and just as the receiver is about to catch it, he gets crushed. The ball pops up, goes falling through the air, And right before the ball hits the ground, Frank Ojares. His guy zooms into the frame out of nowhere and catches it in full stride at his shoe tops. It's caught out of the air. The ball is pulled in. I fight. Go, Harris. Harris is going for it. Touchdown for Pittsburgh. Franco runs 60 yards into the end zone. Time runs out. The Steelers win. Shortly thereafter, this play was dubbed the Immaculate Reception. You talk about Christmas miracles. Here's a miracle of all miracles for me as a kid watching it, where my team won and my guy, it was like I was sealed for life. In fact, this guy was so much his guy that when Steve would write his homework papers, he began signing the papers. Franco Dubner. Wow. And I thought of myself as Franco Dubner, which, I mean, I know it sounds funny now, but it's very natural. Like, we were all named for saints to start with. I mean, my oldest brother was named Joseph. My oldest sister was named Mary. So you're named for Saints. Plainly, Franco was my saint. The following Thanksgiving, Stephen's parents drove off to a prayer meeting. Was part of this religious offshoot that they participated in called the Charismatic Christian Renewal. Very fervent group. Lots of speaking in tongues. It was strange and a little scary to me to see my parents speaking in tongues. Stephen would sometimes go, but this time he didn't. So his parents drove off to the meeting in Albany, kind of far from our house. And a few hours later, only his mother returned. My mother comes home and tells us dad had an attack. She told him in the middle of the meeting. He just fell over. He was in the hospital now, but he would be out of the hospital in time for Christmas. So that's all I heard. I was a 10 year old kid. It's like, oh, my dad's coming home for Christmas. Cool. Great. And the football playoffs are coming up month later. It was the 21st of December, almost exactly a year after the Immaculate Reception. It was the last day of school before Christmas break. It was a half day. We had grab bag Christmas gift exchange at school. Steven Race is home from school, pretty excited. Playoffs are coming up and my dad's coming home. And then my mother comes in and says, dad died. I'm gonna go upstairs to lie down. And that. That is when the dream began. Now he's not exactly sure if it was that night or maybe the next, but when he went to bed and closed his eyes, this is what would happen. I would go to the VFW hall in Albany. This is a place his dad had taken him where Frank Oharas was giving a talk. And I would invite him to come back to my house, way out in the boondocks for spaghetti and meatballs. And in my dream, he would come back, he would eat the spaghetti. It wasn't terrible. Then I would say, hey, you want to go out in the yard and play some football? And we would go out and it's dark and it's just me and him. We're the stealers against some other mythical team in the darkness. And we're playing on our field in our backyard, and I'm kind of embarrassed because our backyard is all lumpy with frozen cow hoof prints. Because sometimes we'd stake the cow back there and on the second to the last play of the game, it's like we're behind by three points. Franco would turn his ankle in one of these cow hoof prints and then he'd hand the ball to me and he'd say, kid, you, you have to take it from here yourself. What was the look on his face when he'd hand you the ball and give you the kids speech? You know, Jesus on the cross face Jesus on the cross. Cause he's in pain, he's got a beard, he's kind of sweating and dripping and crying a little bit. And then I'd have to run it in for the winning touch. And the dream. But the dream would always fade there. I never knew if I made it or not. And he says the next night he had the same dream. Exactly the same. And the next night the same. And the next night the same. And the next night. Almost every night for about three or four years. And the next night. So, you know, I had that dream several hundred or maybe a thousand times. Yeah. And every time you woke up from that dream, I'm just curious, how did you feel? What I remember feeling is that Franco Harris came to see me and that he couldn't win the game for me, but that he was on my side and he wanted me to win, kind of period. So if we were to stop this story right now, this would be a story like many others you've heard. Boy falls in love with athlete, dreams of athlete, grows up, leaves athlete behind. But this is a different one. Eventually, after a few years, Steven stopped having the dream. He moved out of his house, went off to school, got married, became an adult. Pretty much forgot about Franco. But then something happens. Purely by accident, living in New York maybe, I don't know, 15, 18 years ago, I caught sight of him on the COVID of Black Enterprise magazine. Franco had become a very successful small businessman. And my heart just started to thump like it had when I was a kid. And I thought, I gotta. I gotta get to know Franco. So he tracked down Franco's address, wrote him letters, then more letters. And to make a long story short, one day the phone rang and it was him. He did agree to meet with me. I told him I'd like to write a book about a boy getting to know his childhood hero and trying to figure out what that person is like in reality. And I was also interested in. I was very careful in my mind that first day that I met him in Pittsburgh. Say, don't tell him the dream, don't tell him the dream, because he will think that you were a frickin lunatic. Right that first day. I told him the dream. Of course I couldn't. It's like, what was his reaction? Was he horrified? He doesn't show horror. He's a very interesting fellow. He's got a really he's got a really interesting manner, very low key. They did end up meeting a few times as Steven wrote his book. But he says Franco was always really careful to keep him at arm's length, I would say. And anytime they kind of got close, Franco would sort of disappear a little bit. And in fact, toward the end of the book project, they make an appointment to meet. I get to Pittsburgh a couple days early. Typical. And Franco's not there. Actually, Steven ends up standing in a parking lot waiting for him and waiting and waiting and waiting. And then eventually he heads back to New York. And I guess I thought that somehow he had a lot to teach me, you know, about being a man, being a real grownup, being a father. And he was polite and just not really that interested. And it was around this point that Steven decided maybe that's what he was trying to tell me in the dream and in real life, too, that no one can save you but yourself. Part of his messiah job was to persuade me that, you know, everybody's gotta be their own messiah. That was the message. But isn't that disappointing to you? This guy was your hero. You want him to be all these things, and he didn't want to be those things back. I mean, that must have hurt a little, you know, look, Frank o' Harris didn't fall in love with me. He didn't want to be my best friend. But that. That aside, he is an exemplary human being. He's a really. He's a good human being. I think you can easily go too far. I think you can put too much of your emotional life in the hands of people who have, you know, who don't know you and have no responsibility for you. But I think sports fandom is a fantastic gift with almost immeasurable value. And my. Wait, but why? I mean, really. I mean, I love sports, but, I mean, he's just a running back. He's not a saint. What exactly about sports? It makes. It gives it an immeasurable value. Yeah, it's a proxy for real life, but better. You know, it renews itself. It's constantly happening in real time. There are conflicts that seem to carry real consequences, but at the end of the day, don't. It's war where nobody dies. It's a proxy for all our emotions and desires and hopes. I mean, heck, we. What's not to like about sports? There you go. You just sort of. You just wrapped it all up in a little bow right there. That was awesome. Stephen Dubner is the author of Confessions of a Hero Worshipper. And he. He is the host of the public radio show Freakonomics. Check them out@freakonomicsradio.com we will move on to other heroes, other sports and other puzzles in just a moment. Hey guys, this is Eric Simmons. This is Stephen Dubner. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information About Sloan@www.radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a d disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now, you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab we're talking about. Well, what are we talking about? We're talking sports. Games. Games. Yeah. You know what, what we're really talking about is a fundamental behavior of everyone on earth, including, like wolves and cats. Wolves and cats. That was you broadening more than I would broaden. But that's, you know, go with it. Well, come on. Like, what do little wolves do? They don't play football. No. But they tussle. Yes. Do you mean like they play? Yes. Like human babies. Yeah. Okay. Babies and young children spend almost all of their time playing. Seems so natural. We don't even think about it. So let's just go with that thought. This is Allison Gopnik. She's a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. Big sports fan? Yeah. Baseball. Oakland fan. Professionally, though, she studies kids and she's got an interesting idea. She says if you look at kids, how they play over time. Yes. You see that at the center of their play, there's this really interesting tension that exists. Tension of what kind? Well, you can actually hear it. So we'll get back to Allison in just one moment. Here's a four year old girl named Rosa Pink is in here. Yes. Listen to her describe her imaginary friend to her dad. And how does Hermione know Antarctica? She was in the Antarctic for a bit before she moved to the moon. What was she doing in the Antarctica? In Antarctica? Do you know how she. What? She used to keep wine to keep what? Warm? Warm. You know what? No. She got, she got leopard seal skin and fur to make a coat and I put buttons on. And what prompted her to move from Antarctica to the moon? Cause you wanted a place higher. But now she's thinking she wants to move back to Antarctica. In preschool children, you start seeing this wonderful flowering of pretend play. The children are becoming ninjas and princesses and superheroes. And at first, says Allison, this is what play is all about. Inventing, making up crazy psychedelic connections. Complete improv. You get this period to just explore, just innovate, to jump from planet to planet. What did you eat on the moon? House mice. House mice. House mice. Housewives, of course. But if you fast forward just a couple of years, so not four anymore, but six, six year olds, the vibe totally changes because now it's all about rules. The person who wants to be it is the freezer. If the freezer tags you, you're frozen. But then if somebody else tags you, you're. You're unfrozen. And. And like these two are bases. Okay, so let's play she dead and she freezes. Freeze. That's how I play freeze tag with 6 year olds. It just sounds really different. You hear a lot of this, a lot of yelling about what's allowed, what isn't allowed. I start out with it, I start out with last time you start out with a ball. In some ways I think the school age children are practicing being in a society. They're practicing having laws, they're practicing having rules. Nigel, no you don't, not anymore. They're sort of developing a theory of sociology. So you got these two modes of play. You got the three year old inventor who's like, okay, I'm just gonna make this happen. I'm going to create something new in the world. Then you've got this six year old enforcer who's like, how fair. You can't just create what you want. The world is bigger than we are. We need rules. And one of the things that's really interesting about the games that seem to stick is that the greatest games, like baseball, are games that let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. In other words, like a good game is a kind of weird, constantly shifting war between the three year old and us and the six year old. I think she's probably correct because there are games which suffer from a lack of the tension she's describing. There's one game in particular, I don't know whether you've played it lately, but we heard about it from this guy, Brian Christian, a writer. Yeah. He was on a recent show talking about robots, but he also mentioned this little moment. Yes, it's a moment. So. Yeah. At the World Checkers Championship in Glasgow, Scotland in 1863, it is James Wiley against Robert Martins, the two best checker players in the world. Wiley, Wiley, playing a 40 game series. All 40 games opened with the same three or four moves and all 40 games were draws. Really? Yes. Not only that, 21 of the 40 games are the exact same game. Meaning that move for move for move, they were precise duplicates of each other, start to finish. Every single move was the same. Yeah. You know, can you imagine? It's like a month of checkers. How exactly does that happen? Well, see, these guys were professional checkers players. Yes. So they studied moves that other competitors had made. They would write them down, memorize them, and they became a kind of catalog. So at a certain point, every move you saw on the checkerboard, you'd think, oh yeah, that one. Checkers had hit this point where the conventional wisdom about what was the proper move to play had gotten to this point where there was now basically a perfect game of checkers. And with the world title on the line, both players played that perfect game over and over. They stuck to the script. So this was really rock bottom for the checkers community. I mean, it is. Yeah. So there you go. That's why no one plays checkers anymore. Well, some people play checkers. I play checkers. What? No, you don't. Checkers is fine as long as you don't play it for too long or too well. I mean, if you're a lame checker player, you could play checkers forever. Well, then what's the point? I mean, why would you play a game that's been gobbled up instead? By the way, this thing that you just said killed checkers. Yeah. This concept has a name. It's called, called the Book. The Book. The danger is that the entire game stays in book the whole time. And that danger, says Brian, is not specifically Confined to checkers occasionally. Very rarely in the chess world, you'll see two grandmasters play the exact same game that another pair of grandmasters played, you know, a year before, and they'll get boos and jeers all over the Internet as a result. Now, chess. Let me talk about chess, okay? The book in chess is huge. It started in the 16th century, and for hundreds of years, players were keeping track of moves and counter moves and counter, counter, counter, counter moves, until by the 1950s, it was like a library. It actually was a library in the Moscow Central Chess Club. And who is this? This is Fred Friedel. He's a chess analyst and one of the few non Russians to have seen this room. Yes, a huge, musty room. All these shelves, and there were little boxes, and the boxes contained little cards, index cards, and each of these cards documented a particular game of chess from the past. And for a while, this was all a secret. There were about three or four players in the world, all Russian, who had access to. When one of these guys had a big game, they would go to this library and say, all right, I've got this opponent. He's a Polish guy, Pris Bjorka something or other. Give me all his game. And suddenly you have a few hundred cards which you and your team could study. This is how they prepared, by memorizing literally thousands of moves. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. But where Fred comes in is in the 80s, he convinced the Russian Federation to put this online, where anyone could study it and add to it, and suddenly this book explodes, Which is, for some people, distressing. People tend to boo me sometimes. When I come into the chess tournament today, they will point to me and say, that's Herm Frederick, the man who ruined chess. Because here's the modern game. When two players sit down at one of these tournaments to face off, they've already consulted Frederick's database, which he's named Fritz. The chess players all call it Fritzi now. And because of Fritzi, they walk into these games with so much of the book in their heads that whole portions of the game are very checkers, like, very rote. You'll see this if you watch grandmasters play speed chess. That's Brian Christian again. They'll just hammer out the first dozen or so moves. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. With barely any thought out of memory. It used to be 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 moves. No big deal. Nowadays it is 16 moves, 20 moves. There does seem to be a kind of creep that's Happening. The book is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But inevitably, in every chess game, there is a moment which puts the book in its place. And if you watch a game, is there a chess tournament coming up, like a big one? Yes, next Thursday. I'm going to Romania where some of the top players are playing. If you watch a game, as I was able to do, because you can watch these games online. Okay, yeah, we're gonna watch a chess tournament online. You will see that moment. Chess. And it's not like, you know, Jordan scoring 40 points while he has a fever. It's not like that. But if you know what to look for, it's quite profound. Okay. It's 8:30am I'm here with my little man. Say hi. And somewhere in Romania, two grand masters are about to sit down at a table. Table to do battle. And I will watch it. Virtually the match I watched was Magnus Carlsen, the world's top player, versus Hikuru Nakamura, the US Champ. I call up Frederick. Hello. What's Frederick. To give me the play by play, because I actually don't know much about chess. Okay. Well, his program, Fris, can tell you how many times each move has occurred in the entire recorded history of chess. What does that mean? It's like his computer can look at the board and say, yeah, that move you just made, that has happened before. And I will tell you exactly how many times before it started. Here we go. Move one, white moves. It's d4 to d5. White pawn, two squares forward. My database tells me that there are 1,775,000 games in which this occurred. Then move two black counters with its pawn going forward from c4 to e6. Now we've got two pawns facing each other, middle of the board. And according to Fred's database, this exact configuration has occurred in 514,518 games. So a million and a half down to half a million. Smaller. Yes. Move 3. White moves another pawn. 335,000. Black. Another pawn. 149,000. Even smaller. Yep. White moves its knight. 114,000. Black moves its bishop. 9. 21,000. Less again. White pawn takes a black pawn. Just have our first casualty, people. 24. 28 games. What was that again? 2,400. Oh, the black pawn responds. 2613 games. White bishop flies across the board. 2,125 games. Black moves another pawn up 1200. White queen does a little thing. 381 games. 381. Getting lower. Yes. Black bishop retreat. 19 games. 191 9. White moves another pawn, which has occurred in 11 games. Okay. Black bishop retreats. White bishop advances. We're down to 10 games. 10. Woo. Black Bishop falls back even further, and we have nine games. Black bishop takes white bishop. White pawn retaliates, taking black bishop. And then white rook and white king switch places. Now there are no more games. You have a position which has never occurred before in the universe. Ever? No. In the universe. Not in the history of this universe. And this is what is known as the novelty. The novelty. The novelty. And in chess notes, if you read chess notes, you will see that shortly after this move, the annotator writes out of book. Out of book. Book. Yeah, out of book. Bye, bye, book. Which means no more book. Both sides now are on their own. And everyone we talked to who plays chess told us that when you get to that moment, you feel you're alive in a way that you're not normally. That's Frank Brady. He's an author and a professor at St. John's an international arbiter of the World Chess Federation. You're totally in it. Your mind is, in some ways, not even operating. It's like you're back to being three again. What are you saying? I'm saying this is one of the reasons we watch sports, for these kinds of zero moments. A position which has never occurred in the universe at the same time. The 0 is happening inside all of these rules, which are like our lives. And this is what Allison was saying. Games let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. For example, here's one. 1999 Knicks Pacers. Larry Johnson has the ball. Knicks are down by three. Final seconds. He has no shot. Best you think he could do is tie. But he has no shot. And then somehow he twists, he shimmies, he moves to the left, throws it up. Johnson is fouled and hit. That was like, what? What? I mean, that's in the rules, but nobody could have imagined that. A position which has never occurred in the universe. I don't know about never, but you want to know mine? Sure. This is a hockey moment. It's Wayne Gretzky, early 90s. He's playing, shoots for the goal. The puck hits something, somebody that starts flying through the air like a tennis ball. Wayne Gretzky turns around and whacks the flying pup out of the air and up in the air. Gretzky scores. What a shot by Wayne Gretzky. Just smacked it out of the air. Yep. The universe would have to be extremely old to have a previous version of that. Frank do you have a number one favorite novelty in chess? Well, my number one favorite would be Bobby Fischer's game of the century. And when did that happen? We're jumping to 1956. Bobby is 13 years old. And is he the Bobby Fischer of legend at this point or just a 13 year old? 13 year old kid? He got invited to this tournament. It was an all adult invitational tournament. And Frank says all the world's best were there. And this was kind of Bobby Fischer's first official match in the big leagues, so to speak. Exactly. And to set the scene, it was October, warm Indian summer. We're at the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, which is this big stodgy brownstone with lots of mahogany. And Bobby Fischer in his T shirt sits down to play a fellow named Donald Byrne, a guy who looked the part, very urbane, sophisticated jacket, bow tie. He always had a cigarette between two fingers. I imagine it would have been hard for him to take this kid seriously. Yeah, and he was not doing all that well. From the beginning. Bobby Fischer was making what looked like dumb errors. He was losing. For example, midway through the game, Bobby made this move where he moved his knight to the rim of the board, which is usually, strategically speaking, is not the greatest place to move your knight because you know, if your knight's shoved against the edge, it's boxed in and the knight could be taken. And people said, what? What is it? Did he blunder? Come on, kid. Yeah, this is crazy. But then Bobby Fischer does something truly crazy. What? He leaps so far out of the book in a fence that people are still talking about this move 50 years later. On the 18th move, he allowed Byrne to take his queen. He just said, here, take my queen. Now in chess that's like crazy. Yeah, in chess it's almost impossible to win a game if you lose your queen. It's like, what? That's gotta be wrong. There must have been a stupid blunder. It seemed like maybe he was throwing in the towel. So a crowd gathered, scrum of people hanging around to watch this kid get put in his place. And Byrne did what anyone would do in that situation. He took the queen. But maybe four moves later, just at the moment, you would think he would have Bobby Fischer in a stranglehold. Bobby started checking the king. He was chasing Byrne all over the board. People began to see that there was some combination, but it was a long combination and, you know, 20 moves later, Byrne was done. Nothing he could do. He was checkmated. And Frank says, if you analyze the game, you see that it all Began and in a way, ended when he sacrificed his queen. It was a lost game from that moment. If Byrne didn't take the queen, he was lost. If Byrne took the queen, he was lost. Wait, are you saying he essentially checkmated him 20 moves ahead of time? Yes. It was unstoppable. It was forceful. So it's like he wrote a new book. He stuck the guy in his book. I love that. So it's kind of interesting. Like you can start the game in book, so to speak, and you're kind of locked into a set of moves. The game ends kind of the same way. Same way. That's destiny. But then in the middle, you just get a peek at something. Infinite. Infinite. Although we were wondering, like, is that middle space really infinite? I mean, we asked Frederick, if people play chess for hundreds and hundreds of years, inventing new moves into that empty space, would they ever fill it up? And he said no, because the number of chess games that are possible is vastly more than the number of atoms in the universe. That is a silly little number compared to the number of chess games. What kind of a number is that? How many atoms are there in the universe? 10 to the power of 82 the last time I counted. No. 17 with 82 zeros. 10 to the power of 78, I think more accurate. And there are more possibilities within a 40 move chess game. 10 to the power of 120, approximately. And he says if he were to try to get all that information into Fritzi, his database, we would have to dismantle an entire solar system just to store the information. And he says you'd have to dismantle another one just to plug it in. And what he says about chess, you could say that about hockey, you could say that about baseball, you could say that about curling, but you cannot say that about checkers. Let's clear. So, checkers aside, every game has this kind of strange thing. It has a field of play, a small little box. Could be a board, it could be a field, whatever. And then you step into it and there's like a. A solar system. Thanks to Allison Gopnik. She wrote the wonderful book the Philosophical Baby. And Frank Brady, who's the author of Endgame, Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall. And also Brian Christian, who wrote the book the Most Human Human. Hey, guys. This is Nathan Sanchez calling from Santa Clara, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about sloan@www.sloan.org thanks guys. Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating and that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system. Designed to help help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busy work and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwood. This is Radiolab. That was the Tarantella opening a little. Hey, that we begin. Oh, was it a little. No, it was fine. Was it good? It was good. It was good. I like the Tanya. I can bring it down. No, no, no, no. We keep going. So we're talking about sports and games and emotions, and we just did a thing on rules and creativity and now it's time to add yet another element to the mix. Because what do you get if you put all those three things together? Robert? You get a Bring it, do it, say it. You're a little energized here. You get a story. Exactly. Really good games are sort of story generating machines. For example, here's Alison Gopnik again talking about a little teeny story that happens dozens of times a game in her favorite sport. One of the great moments in baseball is always that that ball is going out there and the guy is going out there with the glove. And it might end up in the glove and it might not. And he backs up against the stadium wall and he either he gets it or he doesn't. That wouldn't be nearly as much fun if he was just playing catch, right? That's a fantastic human drama. So the question we want to explore now is what kind of drama do you want? What kind of drama to you is most fantastic? I think you want the. I think you want the headphones. The other way around. That's our Producer Soreness Wheeler. How's that? Yeah, something like that. Who is out of the bathroom and seems to have made a new friend. So set that up. Who's that guy? So that's Dan Engberg, senior editor at Slate magazine. And I brought him into the studio because he told me about this thing that had happened to him when I was watching the NCAA tournament, the basketball. Men's college basketball tournament. This was just last year. And I don't know anything about college basketball. It's a. You know, I have two or three sports that I can pay attention to. Some people have 1 or 2 or 0, but college basketball isn't one of them. But there's this tournament on every year. It's kind of exciting. So he watches. Yeah. And what he does, since he doesn't really have any loyalties, he doesn't know who to root for. He just kind of, by default, I just pick whichever team has the lower seed, whichever is the worst team. Why do you do that? I have no idea. And it came to a head when I showed up at a friend's house and they had the game between Butler and Michigan State on. It was the semifinals, and they were both seeded number five. So it's like your little system is right. I have no idea which team to root for. So I just started rooting for whichever team was losing. And it was a close game. So Butler would make a run. Then Michigan comes back. I start feeling sorry. I feel Butler. Every time one would go up, he'd switch to the other. And at a certain point, he's like, wait a second. This strategy guarantees that at the end of the game, when the buzzer goes, I'll have been rooting for the team that lost. Right. I've actually created a situation where I'm guaranteed to be disappointed. You're guaranteed to be disappointed. So Dan decided to figure out, like, what the hell is going on? Why would anyone do this to themselves? Is that something that's actually been studied? Yeah. So there's a small group of psychologists that would be me and who are interested in this question. Underdogs. Tracked a couple of them down. My name is Scott Allison. Nadav Goldschmidt, 2. University of Richmond. University of San Diego, currently. So there are these studies that are just sort of hilariously simple where you take a bunch of undergrads and you put them in a room and we give them scenarios to read, like a paragraph involving, say, two competing teams. And it's. There's almost no information. The teams don't even have names. It's Team A and Team B. Team A is playing Team B in a game. You don't even have to tell them what sport. Team A is considered the better team and is more likely to win. Who are you going to root for? 80% of the students choose the underdog team. 80? Yep. In fact, a lot of times it comes out 90%. Nine out of ten. Yes. In the absence of any reason to choose one or the other, it's almost universal. And you can do this study in all different ways, and the answer always comes out the same. You can describe it as two political figures, you know, running for an election. Or you can talk about two businesses. Mom and Pop's electronics store begins Walmart. Or you can talk about two landscape painters who've painted pictures and are now landscape painters. Yes. We gave participants a painting. Half the participants were told this painting was done by a successful established artist, you know, Sootho, who has a gallery show downtown. And the other half of the participants were told this same painting was done by a starving artist, first year art student who's trying to make it in the art world. Who only has one arm. Yeah, exactly. And people have this very strong bias in favor of the underdog painter. So what else do we have? We got landscape painters, unnamed sports teams, businesses, business, politics. Politics, and my favorite shapes. Shapes, yeah. What would an underdog shape be? It's just a circle about an inch in diameter moving left to right across the computer screen, moving up what could be a hill. Exactly. As the circle moves up, the circle slows down as it goes up the hill, nudging up and then dropping back a little bit, and then nudging up and dropping back a little bit. Quivering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then along comes a second circle that has no trouble getting up that hill, cruises past this low poke circle, zooms right past it, and sure enough, people have a real preference in some way or another. They're really rooting for circle B. The struggler. We get people emotionally reacting to a geometric shape when they're sitting there. Are they like, come on, come on, you can do it. Yes. You're pulling for it. It's gonna be like, Rudy, you know, this is how deeply ingrained the underdog phenomenon is in us at this point. My question is, why exactly? Why do we do this? Well, well, I. Well, I think that there are two different approaches to that. Why question. One of them is this kind of what they call an emotional economics argument. And it goes like this. If you know that you have an underdog and you have A top dog. So the top dog is expected to win. Right. You think of this like the way a gambler would think of it. Like, if you go with the top dog, they're expected to win. So you're not going to get a big payout if they do win. Minimal emotional payoff. But you'll lose a lot of if they lose. Meaning you won't feel too good if they win, but you'll feel really bad if they lose. Yes, but if you go with the underdog, it's the reverse. Right. They're expected to lose. So if they do lose, it's not that big a deal because you kind of figured that was how it was going to go. But if they win, you feel great. Significant emotional payoff. So it's like betting on a long shot horse. You can put in five bucks, you're probably going to lose it. But if you win, you might get back like 100. Exactly. Hmm. I don't. That just does not feel at all like how I watch sports. Well, there's another argument, which is these guys say that maybe it's something about fairness, that deep down we want to live in a fair society where there's an even playing field. And there's research that shows that fairness is a pretty deep instinct in us. But I don't know. I mean, like, none of that seems to. I guess the thing is that this whole thing feels like a lot more basic if you look back at, like, the stories we tell. This underdog story is ancient. The Iliad, the Odyssey, great epics from Asia, Africa. It's all the same story. And so Scott says, you know, maybe we love the underdog because we feel like we are the underdog. I mean, in some sense, just to be a living thing is to fight against the odds. Think about newborns. You can't be any more weak and helpless and small, you know, I mean, the baby, I guess that's true, but I don't know. I mean, I don't remember being a baby and feeling like. But I do remember junior high, you know, and I do remember feeling like I would never get a job. And I do remember feeling like there's no way that girl's ever gonna like me. Yeah. You know, we need these stories just to make it through. They're part of who we are as human beings. There's actually a very interesting story about Haruki Murakami, the famous Japanese novelist. He was awarded the Jerusalem Literature Prize. And this was in the midst or immediately after Israel invaded Gaza. And there were more than 1,000 Palestinian dead. In his delivery speech, he said the between a high solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong. Perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a novelist who for whatever reason wrote works standing with the wall of, what value would such works be? Huh? What value would these works be? It's an interesting word. It's almost like he's saying, like a story's job is beyond morality, it's beyond truth. Like its job is somehow to tell you that the world could be a way that we know inherently it never will be. I think that's what he's saying, or maybe he's really saying that I stand with the powerless and the powerful can take care of themselves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little weight to people who have no muscles of their own. I'm going to put a little pebble on the scale. That's the job of the story. And I guess if the scale is always weighted in the wrong direction, then that's why we love this story. Because we need more pebbles. Well, yeah, but there's a question we haven't asked here. Which is what? Well, four out of five of us root for the underdog or the struggling circle. But, but that's not everyone. One out of five people are like, screw that circle. I'm excited about the circle. Yeah, you could probably do some interesting follow up studies on like, who are those psychopaths. Yeah, see, you assume they're psychopaths. I do okay, actually. Oddly, we ended up bumping into a guy who falls into this group. It's Malcolm. Yeah, hi. His name's Malcolm Gladwell. He's a writer. The New Yorker, Max. He's also written a bunch of best selling books. And in the middle of a conversation, unbidden by the way, he suddenly says, oh, I never ever cheer for the underdog. You don't? No. Why? Why not? Because I'm distressed by the. By the injustice of the person who should win, not winning. The injustice of the what? Losing for the favorite. That is the most exquisitely painful situation to be in. So I remember as a kid, the first time I ever ran, I was a huge track and field fan. 76 Olympics. Dwight Stones lost the high jump, even though he was so far and away the greatest high jumper in the world because it rained. His technique required absolutely perfect footwork, and he would slip on the tarmac. And I just remember sitting there as a kid, and I was just devastated because I could feel his pain. Right? And his pain was so much greater than anybody else's. What's wrong with you? It's too painful if they lose. When Dwight Stones loses the high jump, it is literally one of the most painful experiences of my young life. I can't. I thought about it from weeks afterwards. I just couldn't wrap my mind around how he must have felt going home. And ever since then, I was like, there's no way you could not cheer for the overdrive because they will see suffer. Like, I mean, it's the only humane position because you were trying to end human suffering. This is as tortured and twisted the logic as I've ever heard. I mean, I always thought this was some, you know, rare evidence of my empathy that I felt. I was so sorry to have brought you the new exact. No, it's also. You know what it is? There's another part of this, too, and that is that it is that I have a deep distrust and unhappiness with luck. So I do not like it when the outcome turns on an unrepeatable sequence. So Georgetown losing to Villanova in. Is it the 82 NCAA college basketball championships. There is no way you could play that game a hundred thousand times and Villanova would still only win that one time. That just. That game, it did more than upset me. It outraged me. I mean, I just thought, this is not. It's just not right. It is like a. It is a violation of everything. You shouldn't be able to shoot 78% from the floor or whatever the. I'd have forgot what the number was. The preposterous number. They. And I just. You know, if I had been on Georgetown, I would. To this. I would wake up every night in a cold sweat to this day just thinking, this is outrageous. Like, how did this happen? That's so weird, because you're a storyteller by trade. Like, what if Hans Christian Andersen had woken up every morning and said, here I have a great story. There's an ugly duckling. And it just stays ugly because, you know, why should it get lucky and be a swan? It's just an ugly duckling. We're not talking about stories. I understand stories. To me, a game is not a story. To me, a game is. It is a contest between two parties according to certain rules. And when expectations and rules are violated, some part of me takes offense. Well, I'm curious, how do you feel about the. The people who always root for the underdog, which happens to be most people? Do you feel like that's the weaker position morally? Is it weaker morally? I mean, there's a very unflattering interpretation of this, and that is that on some deep level, I think of myself as a favorite, not an underdog. Right. You know, that's. Like I say, that's an unflattering way of interpreting my motives. But, you know, unlike many of my peers, I grew up in a tiny, tiny town and went to a kind of an exceptional high school where everyone left at 16 to go home and milk the cows. So it was like a situation where I did sort of grow up as the. If you had parents who'd gone to college, you were the overdog in my universe growing up. So, you know, I do sort of. When I was in seventh grade and someone got a better grade than me, it was outrageous to me, right? Because no one should get her. Only my friend Bruce should get a better grade than me. You know, he's the only other person in the class whose parents went beyond the ninth grade or who had books at home or who had left the province of Ontario. So maybe there's something. There's something in that, that if you grow up in these impoverished environments where you. You're forced into a particular dominant role, right? You just. You come back to it again and again long after those circumstances have changed. That's Malcolm Gladwell, defender of winners everywhere. I do. I do hate when winners lose. It is true. Now, he may hate it when winners lose, but we have one that will tempt him to go the other way. I mean, it certainly caught our attention. Yes, this is a fantastic story about losers who win. It is actually one of the best stories of that kind that at least I've ever heard of, except for Chariots of Fire. And it comes to us from our producer, Pat Walters. Yeah, you took a trip, sort of set it up for us. Where'd you go? I went to Stevenson, Alabama. It's this tiny town in northeastern Alabama. Tiny? Like as in like one convenience store tiny? Or maybe two? Maybe two, yeah, really small. Anyway, my first stop in this town was this high school. Walking up now to North Jackson High School, because I'd heard this story about a basketball game that happened in this school in the gym here. How many people can fit in here? That'd be 1500, maybe. That is like a miracle. Like a what? It was a one in a Million Night. This is David Smith. He's an ag teacher at the school. Been here since we started the place. And he says that even now he has kids who don't believe it happened. These kids come in every year and they'll say, Mr. Smith, did they too really beat five? I said, yes, they did. If you want me going there and lay my hand on the Bible, I will. And I'll bring them in here and show them that picture on the wall there that you just seen. Behind him, there's this little newspaper clipping from 1992, and it shows these three basketball players. The one in the middle is this tiny white kid who actually doesn't really have too much to do with our story. But on either side of them are the two guys that did this amazing thing. Those two guys could have said, well, you know, it's all over with, and dropped the ball out of bounds or on the left. My name is Robert Lewis Cox is this huge guy. Oh, I was fat. I was fat. And on the other side is like his exact opposite Jaguar. Tiny little guy. I was about five, six, seven, somewhere in there. Yeah. And you could dunk if somebody pitched up to you? Yeah, like somebody, you know, pitched. I jumped ball for us. You jump balled? Yeah. At five, six? Yeah. Five, six, five, seven, I think. Yeah. Cause I was real small, but I could jump real good. Yeah. How did you work on your. So what happened? Okay, let me set it up here. Okay. It's February, February 14th, I think. 1992, 5pm it's home game. The gym is completely packed. It was people everywhere. About a thousand people in the stands. It was people everywhere. We had a good crowd at that game. That's Vic Griggs, he's the assistant coach. Cause of the rivalry. The game that night was against the Fort Payne Wildcats. And Fort Payne has been a huge rival rivalry. From the very get go, they were the enemy. Football, basketball, baseball, it don't matter. With Fort Payne, we go at it. Fort Payne team had more resources, even had more players. And that year everyone agreed that they were just playing better. Yeah, I think we would have been considered an underdog that night. Everyone pretty much thought the Chiefs were gonna lose. Yeah, Chiefs are our team. Go Chiefs. But the game was really close. And in fact, in the second half, the Chiefs took the lead. Go Chase. Then they lost it. Damn it. Just going back and forth and back and forth. It was a close game. Other than like the refs, man, they was calling some unbelievable stuff. And that's the thing that ultimately would make this game so dramatic is that there was just a crazy number of fouls called. How many, like how many are usually called in like your typical NBA game, there might be 50 fouls, but in this game, with three minutes left, 71 fouls. Well, it was like, man. Yeah, I was gonna ask, was it a rough game or was it that these guys were just like calling a ton of fouls? Yeah, I think they was a little bit of both. They wouldn't let us play for real. Just really play ball. Cause according to Robert, how they used to play, it was like anything goes. Do you remember like the first time that you played basketball? Do you remember how you learned to play? My cousin. Now my aunt used to have a. My great aunt, she used. We used to have like a. We call it dust bowl, you know what I'm saying? Back then there wasn't no gravel, it ain't no concrete, it just dust. Dust coming up everywhere. My cousin, the only one, had a basketball goat. Right down the street, Everybody from the projects, they come down and play. Grown ups mostly. Like every Sunday. Used to watch my uncle, them go out there and play like they get out of church and play in the. The only way for Chad and Robert to get on the court. You know, we played with the older guys, you know what I mean? Go at it hard. We would tear them up because you know, maybe deep down they maybe believed that the game wasn't just a game. You know, we'll go out there and play like we somebody else. You know what I mean? Like what, who, who would you imagine you were? Oh, back then, Dr. J. This fantastic move by the Dr. J and the kids. I said Dr. J. And my dream was that maybe he could also be a professional athlete. Get my daddy out of prison, get mom in a big old house, you know what I'm saying? Take care of my family and everything. Back in the game. 2 seconds left on the clock. Come on, James. We have the ball. And this scrawny little guy named Travis Smith from the end of the bench is on the free throw line. So he's gonna shoot the fouls. Shots. Yeah. Here's what's important though. We're down by two points. Travis has three shots. Oh, he got fouled shooting a three pointer. Exactly. Which means Travis Smith will go for the free throw. Strike. He could win the game right now. Do it, Travis. Jeeves. Jeeves. First one makes it. Woo. Puts up the second one. Makes it. Yes. Puts up the third one. Botches the third one. Oh, so we lose tie game. Oh, It's a tie game. He ties the game and sends it into overtime. And who's that? That's my friend Tom Lake. He's a writer for Sports Illustrate. He told me about the game right here. This is where things just get totally out of hand, right? The Chiefs take the court, everybody's in foul trouble. What does that mean? In basketball, if you get five fouls, you get thrown out of the game. And these guys have, like, close to five fouls. Yeah. The first thing that happens, the officials just blew another one. Travis Smith, the guy who put us into overtime. Oh, Travis Smith. He's out of the game. Fouls out of the game. When Travis fouls out. 59 seconds into overtime, the Chiefs have only five players left, which means no subs. The game keeps going. With a minute 41 left, they lose another guy. Another guy fouls out. There. Now four players, now four against five. Two seconds later, yet another guy fouls out. So there are three, now there's just three. Are you kidding me? Yeah. Can that happen? There's no rule against that. Why would you make a rule against something like this? What are the odds it's ever gonna happen? So minute 39, there are only three chiefs. Chad Cobb, Robert Collier and Chris shelby. So with 59 seconds left in the game, Fort Payne's ahead by three. Fort Payne gets the ball, tries to drive it down the court. North Jackson steals it, passes it to Chad Cobb. Remember that name. Chad Cobb. Takes it down the court, pulls up at the three point line, and he hits it. And we're tied at 67. But then with 17 seconds on the clock, there's a whistle. Oh, no. And Chris Shelby, one of the last three remaining Chiefs on the court, Shelby's out of the game. And now it's five to two. North Jackson only has two players left on the court. Two. Two against five. No. Robert Collier and Jed Tob. Against. Five games tied. 67. 67. And by this time, you know, you're thinking, well, it's all over. It's all over. And the next play, the next play just baffles me. With 17 seconds left on the clock, North Jackson ends up with the ball. There was a timeout called. This is Jay Sanders, the head coach. And they came to the side and you know, what do you tell kids? Yeah, you only have two on the floor. What the hell you going to say? They've got time for one play, one chance to win the game. And I can remember Chad saying, how am I going to get open? You know, just. This is over. Because he knew Robert was throwing it in, and he was only one to catch it. And they got four guys out there. Yeah. They could quadruple team him. So now Chad Cobb will have the pressure on his back. So me and Chad, we went back out there, we played, and Chad, all of the chairs, man, look old school. I know. I just remember Robert was hollering, and we was like, it's backyard. Let's go backyard. You know what I mean? Meaning what? Like a dust bowl. He's like, I throw it into you, you go. You just run, get open. 17 seconds in overtime period. Score is all knotted at 67. They're going to surround shot. But they had one guy on me, two on him and two on back. Chad's got a break free. I ran, like, one way and I faked back, slammed on the brakes and ran straight back to Robert just hoping he'd get through. And he was wide open. I was wide open. And that's when Robert seen me. Robert threw the bounce pass in. The ball comes in to Tom. He runs it down the right sideline and just took out down court. He should dribbling between people, trying to get by guys or whatever. A little guy. Yeah. And fort paints, you know, trying to come up double teaming. Chad's just weaving in and out of these guys. Just out playing backyard ball. Almost everybody was panicking. He may take it all the way in. He will. I went around these guys and I went in and I seen that I had a layup. And Chad takes a shot. He'll put it up. Takes that last. That last shot, and he banks it and it hits the back of the. Hits the backboard, hits the other side of the rim. And falls off. Shot it a little strong. You're thinking, oh, no. And all of a sudden, it hit the rim, just came off the backboard. There's big Robert, and I was in the right spot, the right time, and he grabs it. And of course, there's about three, four paint people, people around him. So I pump fake about twice. When I did everybody jump in my mind, I knew. I said, oh, lord. And when he puts the ball up against the glass, The buzzer goes off. The Chiefs gets the battle. And the Chiefs are going to win. And the Chiefs have won 69. And it was just pandemonium. Cannot believe this. 69 to 67 is Chad Cobb and Robert Collier. Oh, yeah. Everybody come off the. Off the bleachers. I don't even remember walking down to the court, but the next thing I know, I'm being hugged by this woman, a North Jackson fan. And she's slinging me. She is literally just. Just slinging me left and right, left and right. She's got you. And he's swinging you me in a bear hug. And I'm just like a little dish rag. I'm just flopping around. Of course, then I start hugging her and we're bouncing around. And then I remember looking out at the circle at half court, and I promise you, there was a pile of bodies six feet tall. It was a huge, huge pile of people. And on the bottom of the pile, I couldn't breathe. It was like, oh, my God. There was Chad when I was throwing people out, trying to get up. But the next day when I woke up, it was like, did this just happen? It was just like a dream. And on Monday morning when the boys went to school, oh, man, they were mobbed. It was just. It was just crazy. Everybody was, you know, talking about it, asking us questions. You know what I'm saying? Just asking. I never forget that. How'd y' all do it? So we gotta explain. You know, they said it over to Intercom. He says a few people even asked him, you think y' all gonna be in the world? This book a world record. I don't know, man. And everywhere they went in town, people knew. I mean, everybody knew. Then a few days later, David Smith. Actually, it was Vic Griggs. Yeah, that's right. Went and called the news. Called a reporter in Huntsville, which is the nearest big city. And I was telling him about it, and he said, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did you say you won with two players? I hung up on him. The news, they hung up on him. Just thought he was crazy. But two days later, they ran the story, and as soon as they did. But this was in the Huntsville Times. Huntsville, Alabama. Could you read it to me? This thing just kind of blew up. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Okay. Okay. If they ever film it, they might call it the miracle of North Jackson. That's what many consider the North Jackson Jackson High Chiefs 69, 67 Victory over the Fort Plain Wildcats last Friday night. It was everywhere from Portland, Oregon to Maine. The Associated Press. From the Chicago Tribune, Plains Dealer. It would have as dramatic an inning as Hoosiers USA Today. Ordinarily, there's no way two players can beat five players in a basketball game. They have them like, kind of laminated there. Not unless the two man team is Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan. But North Jackson did. There were messages. Just call this person and that person I just remember, like, it was crazy. ESPN came to the school and talked to us. Sports Illustrated, we're gonna get us a movie deal. And it was just really exciting. So what happens? Chad and Robert are riding this high for months, months and months. You know, somebody said that Leno or Letterman or somebody even kind of mentioned something on one of their shows at the end of a joke. I didn't see it or hear it. It seemed to a lot of people that this would turn into something. I. I was really hoping from this deal that it might help Chad get a little notoriety and might help him get a scholarship, help him get notice, help get his name out there, you know? And I. I don't. I don't know. We never know what. What little piece of the puzzle is going to make that bigger difference, do we? What does that mean? Well, nothing happened. Nothing happened. By the end of the school year, people stopped calling, and the story just kind of faded away. It just. It was over. I mean, it was just. And Robert says the game started to feel like it never even happened. It's been rough on me. I mean, right now, it's been messed up for me. That spring after the game, Robert graduated high school, held it together for a while, but eventually fell in with some shady characters, drinking, smoking weed, you know what I'm saying? And kind of lost control of his life. Really? How? When I went to see him, he was locked up in the Scottsboro County Jail. For what? Lots of different things. And I knew first week I was in here, I cried every night. You know what I mean? Like, why am I here? You know, what did I do? So you said, like, this game happened, and then for a while, you wouldn't think about it because it seemed like it hadn't even really happened. Like it was just a dream. Do you think about it ever? Besides, when somebody comes along and asks you about it again? Not. Not really. Not so much, but said like, man, we got, like, a little basketball go. We made up back there. So that's what we was back here doing when they told me to come up here. No, we was inside. You know, it's like a little box, you know what I mean? We done made a little net and got little bags, like where we put our clothes and, you know, they done cut them out, got, like. For the nets and just like. We just got a lot of socks put together like a ball and play basketball. Hmm. What about the other guy, one of the two ballplayers? Chad. Chad, yeah. Chad stayed in town, too, and he got married and Had a daughter. But about five years after the game, I was just going around on some back roads, around a little curve. It's like a. He got in this motorcycle accident and tore up his knee. My knee bent the opposite way. It was pretty bad. Shortly after that, he runs into his old buddy Travis. Remember him? He was the guy who hit the shot that put the game into overtime. That guy. Yeah. And they got into an argument. It was basically a situation that shouldn't have happened, but it did. The details are a little hazy, but apparently Travis thought Chad was badmouthing him to a girl or something. I don't know what exactly. So as I was going home, he was. He left the gym. But when I was going home, he was following me. And he came and flicking his lights at me to stop or whatever. But I had my daughter with me, Took her home, came back out. So, you know, we're a little small town. We fist fight. And I got out of my car and I was like, I only got one leg. I can barely hold myself up. But if you get close enough to me, you know, I said, we can fight. He never said nothing. I said, see, that's what I thought. I said, you ain't nothing. You know? So I turned around, I put my hurt leg in the car. Cause I was driving. And as soon as I was getting my other leg in the car, I just heard shots. I just seen blood shooting up at the steering wheel. And I was like, man, This is not what the story is. Not what I want the story to do. Yeah, yeah. I thought that this is about, you know, sports in America. It's like a dream factory to some degree. If you have the magic dust, then they try to sell it. So I thought these guys had dust all over them after a night like that. And so someone was going to help them sell it. Well, like, my practical response in my head is like, there's a crappy school for basketball. They probably weren't really that good, like, in the whole scope of basketball players that. Who have the same dreams, like, I don't know. On the other hand. Hi. Hey. Is Chad. Even though it was just that one moment like that, still I feel like should say something about who they are. And when I went to see Chad, I kind of felt like it did. I'm Patrick J. What do you mean? Hi. Hey, man, what's up? Well, the playoffs were on, and Chad was hanging out with his kids. Chanel and Chad Jr. It's Tad. Dad's pulling for the heat, and I'm going for The Mavericks. He just don't like how good LeBron is. I like LeBron, but I'm not just a big LeBron fan. They were joking around, watching LeBron just have this mythically terrible series. LeBron's not playing too good tonight. And, you know, Chad basically raised these two kids on his own. His wife left a few years ago. He gets up very early in the morning, drives an hour and a half to work, works really long hours, drives home. It just seems hard, but he keeps doing it. And this might not sound like the ending you want. No, I might not be in the NBA or whatever, but I just feel like I'm, you know, I'm happy. I mean, I'm happy with my ending. Uh oh, Daddy, Dallas is winning. Got healthy kids. I get to see them every day. If I was to die tomorrow, I'm happy with my ending. Daddy, where LeBron at? It's just like that two on five game. It ain't over. It's over. I said it's over. Look at it. Radio Lab is produced by Jed Abu Morad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Dawn Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Rihanna Farrell, and Lean Levy, with help from. Let me do this again. With help from Douglas Q. Smith, Jessica Gross, Luke Calzonetti, Rose Eveleth, Kristen Clark, and Yana Nahonatan. I'm sure that was not even close. Special thanks to Kim Green, Marjorie Taylor, Elizabeth Curry and the chess team at IS318 in Brooklyn and everyone at PS3 in Manhattan. All right, I'll see you guys later. Hey, crafters. You're invited to visit the new knit and sew shop at Michaels. Find hundreds of fabrics in over 800 stores and over 100,000 styles on michaels.com Shop your favorite yarn brands, including Big Twist, Caron cakes and Bernat in multiple styles and colors. You'll also find all the machines, tools and notions you need with top brands like Singer Brother and Pellon, plus essential thread and floss. It's all new at Michael's Limu Emu. And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds of with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at libertymutual. Com. 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