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Patrick Ewing and the Frozen Envelope
28 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of "What the Conspiracy?" Josh tells M about the NBA, the NBA Draft, and Patrick Ewing and the Frozen Envelope!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Humor with Grabavoy Codes
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's up? You look... pained? Constipated? Do you need an emergency enema? I've got my hose and inflatable bag right here. No, no, I'm just trying to remember my Grabavoy code for success in podcasting. I think it's 1013-105910, but it might also be 1111-050-510, or even 10011-06010.
00:00:27
Speaker
Sounds like number weighing. No, it's real science, radionics, the science of numbers, accessing the very operating system of our universe. How does that work? Well, you center yourself and access the mental machinery that links you with the universe. Then, after you state your activation code and sync yourself with reality, you focus on the numerical sequence, and hey presto, reality shifts in favor of me.
00:00:54
Speaker
I dunno. Sounds kinda pseudoscientific to me. Hold on. 3 1 0 1 1 0 2 0 1 0. What? 3 1 0 1 1 0 2 0 1 0. Repeat that after me. 3 1 0 1 1 0 2 0 1 0.
00:01:17
Speaker
3-1-0-1-1-0-2-0-1-0 Brilliant! That's the Grab-a-Boy code to make you believe in Grab-a-Boy codes! You mean people don't believe in Grab-a-Boy codes? Precisely! Hmm... 2-3-0-1-6-0-2-0-1-0 What's that? The code to start the episode, of course!
Meet the Hosts: Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth
00:01:49
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:58
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison, day with a spectacular pop of the cork there. Dr. M. Denteth, we are both in Auckland, New Zealand, in separate locations at this particular time, but not because of COVID wackiness, just because of commitments on my part.
00:02:18
Speaker
Not even sickness on my cards, so... Committing yourself, Joshua, to things that aren't the podcast. Committing yourself to your partner. Committing yourself to your children. Committing yourself to your family, your state. I mean, really, where do your loyalties actually lie?
Navigating Personal Commitments and Podcast Loyalties
00:02:37
Speaker
Well... You don't have an answer to that, do you? You cannot answer where you're lying. You are a traitor. A traitor to this podcast.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's probably true. What was I gonna say? Oh, I'm not sick at least. So I don't know. You won't have to put up with me sneezing and starting this episode. You're not sick in the sense of you're not physically ill. But I do think your loyalties indicate that you are mentally unwell. Possibly more. Sorry, she got very sinister.
00:03:12
Speaker
a little bit yeah maybe we should bring this back we have a new patron that's that's exciting and positive tell me about our new patron no don't take a sip of your your filthy alcohol tell me about our new patron oh they're not one of those patrons that we mention uh but we mention we just don't tell them tell you their name i think but anyway we have one and thank you very much
00:03:32
Speaker
now patrons are legion and their names are immaterial they simply are the backbone of the very workplaces and homes that our listeners live in you could be living with a patron right now and you may not be aware of it in fact some of you might even be patrons without being aware that you're patrons
00:04:04
Speaker
quite sure that that's true, but it sounds good.
Unveiling a Hitchhiker's Guide Conspiracy Theory
00:04:07
Speaker
Now, this week, it's time for me to tell him about a podcast. But, but for some reason, you're going to tell me about a podcast, you're going to tell me about a conspiracy. If your conspiracy is also a podcast, then all the ones on this one, surely. So I'm going to tell him about a conspiracy. But first, he was going to tell me about a conspiracy because the world's gone topsy tovy, apparently.
00:04:33
Speaker
Well it's been it's been 20 years since Douglas Adams died so it's actually been topsy turvy for two decades now because Douglas Adams died on the 11th May 2001 I believe he was in the UK although I actually don't know why I think he died in good old Blighty
00:04:50
Speaker
as opposed to the US where he often did spend his time. But of course, the 11th of May is of course the 12th of May here. So we are actually talking about this almost two years to the day that Douglas Adams had a heart attack after using a treadmill for too long, given his bad state of health and being a chronic smoker.
00:05:12
Speaker
Arguably, he wasn't doing the right thing at the time, but that's kind of immaterial because we're a conspiracy theory podcast and I've got a Douglas Adams conspiracy theory for you.
00:05:24
Speaker
Let me have it then. Okay, so there has been a rumor going around in literary circles for a while now that one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books wasn't actually written by Douglas Adams at all, but was in fact ghost-written by his long-term friend and collaborator Michael Bywater.
00:05:46
Speaker
Now Bywater was the inspiration for the Dirk Gently character, and one of his notable claims to fame was that as a satirist in Punch magazine in the UK, he once took Burberry for task for not making trench coats as good as the ones they made in the Great War, World War I, and so Burberry actually made him a custom trench coat according to the 1950 design.
00:06:15
Speaker
which seems like a very unusual thing to do in this day and age. I can't imagine a journalist contacting a closed manufacturer saying, your coats aren't as good as they used to be. And then go, oh, we will make you one of those coats. So just laugh at you. But no, the story is that the manuscript for Mostly Harmless, the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurate trilogy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books was so behind schedule
00:06:44
Speaker
that the publisher basically bade Douglas Adams to bring in a ghost writer to finish off the task of the book. Now no one's entirely sure how much of the book according to this rumour Michael Bywater wrote, whether he simply finished off a manuscript
00:07:02
Speaker
or whether Adams, who was notoriously bad with deadlines, hadn't even started the book, so Bywater wrote all of it, say maybe using a plot outline that Adams had provided. Bywater is credited in Adams' official biography as contributing to the writing,
00:07:21
Speaker
But this conspiracy theory goes that there is documentary evidence in amongst the papers of the Adam's estate that shows definitively that if you were to apportion responsibility for the writing of Mostly Harmless, you would take by water to be the primary author, and the estate, which is notoriously precious,
00:07:43
Speaker
about what's unpublished in the Adam's archive will not allow any information to come out indicating that maybe Adam's isn't completely responsible for all aspects of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Mostly harmless was the rubbish one. Mostly harmless was the really dark one.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, I just thought it was when Douglas Adams wrote it when he was in a really bad mood and had said, yeah, I should probably write another one to actually fix it all up because I was in such a foul state of mind that it came out all dark and depressing. I just kind of pretend it doesn't exist, frankly, and the whole series stops it so long. Thanks for all the fish.
00:08:26
Speaker
Well, I mean, many people would say that is the right place to end things, but unfortunately, Mostly Harmless came out and then ends with killing off all the major characters.
Douglas Adams vs. Terry Pratchett: Footnote Frenzy
00:08:36
Speaker
And then you've got the Ian Colfer book, which continues the story, which actually manages to be somewhat worse than Mostly Harmless by simply being a really, really banal book.
00:08:47
Speaker
Hmm. And of course, this is because this podcast is named after the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Well, it is you're about to say, you're about to say argue. I mean, they do they argue on the internet all the time.
00:08:59
Speaker
One of the things I argue about is the order that you should read the Terry Pratchett books in. A lot of people say you shouldn't just read them in the order they were published. You shouldn't start with The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. My personal view is that the correct order to read the Terry Pratchett books in is starting with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
00:09:18
Speaker
and reading them and then when you start at the colour of magic and the light fantastic you realise that those earliest books Terry Pratchett was just doing Douglas Adams in a fantasy context instead of a science fiction one and then as you read past that you get to see him develop his own voice and it's all good. That's my opinion. I agree with you entirely. I mean I've I've always been all the firm opinion that Terry Pratchett got his love of footnotes from Douglas Adams.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, there aren't that many fiction books out there, particularly satirical comedic fiction books, which use footnotes. Footnotes are not really part of fiction writing, and Douglas Adams used them a lot to do asides from The Guide.
Conspiracy Game Tease: Want the Conspiracy
00:10:02
Speaker
throughout his books and Pratchett in the first few books is almost doing exactly the same by going, oh, I'm going to explain this weird bit of dwarf physiology, which obviously doesn't fit the narrative flow, but I really want to tell you about it. So here's a footnote.
00:10:18
Speaker
Anyway, we've got a little bit off topic before the episodes even started, so maybe we should just wrench things back and I should start telling you about a conspiracy that hopefully, fingers crossed, you've not already heard of.
1985 NBA Draft: Was It Rigged?
00:10:34
Speaker
It's time to play Want the Conspiracy.
00:10:46
Speaker
Righty-ho, have I got a conspiracy theory for you? Yes, is the answer to that question. Now, I guess we should do the thing that we've been doing. Where you guess where this conspiracy occurred, when it occurred, I don't want to spoil it, but it did occur in the past. So it's not a speculative one from the future that's been backwards to me. And what do you think this conspiracy theory is about?
00:11:16
Speaker
Okay, so the where, I'm going to go for Eastern Europe. I think you're going to surprise me and try and get me with a Romanian or adjacent conspiracy. Maybe you might be that bold. Well, you know, sometimes people like to get really close to the bone to see if they can slip one pass me. And thus I'm going to assume it's going to be
00:11:42
Speaker
18th or 19th century, because there's probably a lot of really good examples of conspiracies from that period of time. And I'm going to assume it's political intrigue and murder. Right, well, that's fantastically wrong. So I guess I'm off on a good... And all x-things? Really? Wow. Yeah. This conspiracy theory takes place in the year of our Lord 1985.
00:12:11
Speaker
It occurs in the United States of America and it's about sports.
00:12:22
Speaker
I mean, I'm almost already out because that was the thing. That's we're not exactly. I did a pub quiz last night. Our team did spectacularly and then totally tanked the sports round and came like fourth in the end. We got full marks on the one that was our bonus round. And I got extra points because I knew the names and last names of all the mystery ink characters apart from Scooby Doo. But that's not important right now. What's important right now? You didn't know the name of Scooby Doo.
00:12:52
Speaker
know, we didn't have to the question was apart from Scooby Doo, knowing all the mystery in characters names and not knowing the name of the most famous dog would be yes, you've got Daphne, you've got valve Velma, you've got Fred, you've got scrappy do. And then there's that dog. Now what what's the dog from the scoot Scooby Doo stories called? Is it? Oh, is it
00:13:17
Speaker
Fido? Fido? Is it scruffy? Silence. Silence to not mock my pub quiz flamflamory. No, okay, let's get into this. I'm going to tell you a story. It's the story of Patrick Ewing. Are you going to turn my world upside down? No, I'm not. I'm going to tell you the story about Patrick Ewing and the frozen envelope.
00:13:42
Speaker
Now, actually, Ewing, is he is he the brother or son of Bobby Ewing from Dallas? Not in any way. No. Now tell me, are you familiar with the concept of the NBA draft? Actually, sorry. Are you familiar with the concept of the NBA, the National Basketball Association? Actually, let me back up. Are you familiar with basketball, the team sport where two teams try to score? Actually, let me back up. Are you familiar with sport?
00:14:11
Speaker
The mental activity that people take part in for fun and exercise. How can I put this? Have you seen the 1992 odd couple sports comedy drama film White Men Can't Jump with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson? No, I have not. Have you seen Space Jam? I've seen Spaced. Right. This could get a little bit longer. I'm talking about basketball, basketball conspiracy theory.
00:14:39
Speaker
This story concerns the 1985 NBA draft. Now, if you know anything about the NBA, you've probably heard the story before, because from what I gather, it's kind of a big one. But if, like the two of us, you are fairly sports illiterate, there's a bit of background to get through to explain it all. So the NBA draft, like the drafts in various other sports leagues,
00:15:02
Speaker
It is the annual event where the NBA teams get together to draft players from the year's pool of eligible players, which are usually players who are coming up from college basketball, having played amateur basketball and college. Also, I think foreign players coming into America wanting to join the NBA can be added to the pool as well.
00:15:24
Speaker
And it's a big deal. All the drafts these days tend to be. It's a big deal for the teams in the NBA who can potentially turn their fortunes around by snagging a good player. It's a big deal for the players, obviously, who have a spot of
00:15:42
Speaker
you know, getting a starting a professional career and getting paid those those big pro NDA dollars. And of course, the fans are very interested in it because the fans of particular teams want to see if their teams can do well and what plays they're going to get and
00:15:57
Speaker
that maybe they've been following these players, these up and comers through their college basketball careers and want to see them do well and so on. I don't know a hell of a lot about basketball, but apparently, from what I've read, it's possible, more so than in a lot of the other team sports, it is actually possible for a single star player to actually make quite a difference to a team's fortunes. It is possible to sort of build a team around one or two good players.
00:16:25
Speaker
And so this is what the draft is for. Now, at this point, I kind of have to apologize to our American listeners, perhaps, because when I read about how the draft works, I was genuinely surprised to see that it was quite sort of egalitarian and fair.
00:16:41
Speaker
I had just assumed that in the land of unfettered capitalism, the richest teams would get the best players and that would be how it works. Maybe that's true how it works in the rest of the NBA for the existing pro players, but fortunately for all of us, I guess,
00:17:02
Speaker
The folks who run the NBA are a bit more thought-thinking capitalists who want as many people as possible watching their games and buying tickets to see their games. And they realize that a league where a handful of wealthy teams always have the best players and always get the most wins wouldn't actually be that much fun to watch.
00:17:21
Speaker
Well, I was trying to remember, did we talk a while ago about an Australian sports team that everybody hated because they always did that? I'm sure it came up ages ago, but I could not remember when. I don't know. I think it was. I don't know anything about sport. And that might be because I've learned about sports in the past.
00:17:41
Speaker
And I've deliberately got, nope, I am not remembering a single bit of it, which is a skill that Sherlock Holmes had in the original stories, was the idea you could tell Holmes things. He would go, I don't think that's useful for solving crimes. So I'm just not going to remember it, which is why Watson is so astounded by the fact that Holmes doesn't know the Earth revolves around the sun.
00:18:06
Speaker
So, probably not too relevant for what we're talking about now. The point is that in order to actually give a bit of equilibrium and in order to sort of even things out a bit, the way the draft works is that the teams who have been performing the worst get the first pick at the pool of players.
00:18:24
Speaker
And so therefore the best shot at getting a good player to maybe turn things around for them. So from its earliest days, the NBA draft work by simply teams got to pick players in reverse order of their win-loss record for that year with a few little exceptions around sort of like you could get a first pick at players who are from the same territory as you, but you're sacrificed to pick later. I can't remember, but essentially,
00:18:54
Speaker
Whoever did the worst got the best pick. Now can you see a potential problem with that system? I mean, well first of all, as you say, it sounds incredibly egalitarian, but at the same time, if my team was, say, a middling team, so it wasn't a really high-tier team,
00:19:14
Speaker
but I also wasn't a really low tier team. I might start throwing games in order to slip down the ranks dramatically in order to get myself another really good player.
Patrick Ewing and the Knicks: A Perfect Match?
00:19:29
Speaker
And given that I was actually a middling team to begin with, suddenly I'm going to be at the very top of the game due to the addition of my basketball player with plus two dexterity.
00:19:41
Speaker
Precisely, you've hit to the nail on the head there, yes. So, under that system... I mean, they hit a lot of nails on heads in basketball, don't they? I mean, that's how the game is played. You go over the hammer and some nails and you nail baskets to balls. That's why it's called basketball. That's carpentry, you're thinking of. There isn't much competitive carpentry, though. I'm fairly sure I'm talking about basketball.
00:20:04
Speaker
Well, you're staggeringly wrong there, but you're completely right in that the draft system, as it was, gave an incentive to players to just to start tanking, to start throwing games if they weren't doing well, to make sure they finished.
00:20:19
Speaker
as close to the bottom of the league as possible so they get as high a pick as possible in the next draft. In the early 80s, the San Diego Clippers, apparently, managed by a man called Donald Sterling, had been doing a bit of this. Sterling supposedly at one point said, we've got to bite the bullet. We can win by losing.
00:20:38
Speaker
And the Clippers weren't the only teams doing it. There were several other teams who would sort of seem to be throwing games, so ending up with a bit of a race to the bottom some years. And again, obviously, this isn't fun to watch. Nobody wants to watch a game where one or both of the teams are obviously not actually trying to win the game.
00:21:00
Speaker
they wanted to do something about that. So, for the 1985 draft, the commissioner of the NBA, a man called David Stern, introduced a draft lottery. So, this was actually two reasons for this. One was to try and combat this tanking that had been going on. The other was that in the 1980s, the NBA was having a bit of an image problem, apparently. There was
00:21:23
Speaker
Lots of stories about drug abuse in the NBA. There were estimates that between 40 and 75% of the players in the NBA were using cocaine. And there are various other scandals about some sort of illegal transferring of players, or something I don't quite understand.
00:21:40
Speaker
So the idea was we'd have a lottery where the bottom group of teams would get drawn from a lottery so that the order would be randomized. So that would take away some of this. So being dead last wouldn't actually guarantee you first pick that would become a bit more randomized. And also a lottery
00:21:59
Speaker
They could make that a bit more of a flashy affair. You can put a bit of pomp and circumstance into a lottery. There's a bit of suspense going on, so they could make it more of an event. The drafts, apparently they started televising them in 1980, but it hadn't been that flashy an affair. So the idea was that the 1985 draft would include this lottery to try and prevent tanking that year and in subsequent years, and to provide a bit of spectacle
00:22:29
Speaker
to grab headlines and take some of the attention away from the scandals that were going on. So the idea was that the bottom seven teams in the league, there were 20 something, I think there's 30 teams at the moment, but they weren't that many in 1985. So the bottom seven teams would go into the lottery and be drawn at random to determine the order they got to pick players in.
00:22:56
Speaker
So basically, finishing dead last would only guarantee you seventh pick. You wouldn't be certain that you could do any better than that. So that's the system they came up with. At this point, I think I need to introduce the key players. So there's NBA commissioner, David Stern, we've talked about him. But the man of the moment was a 23-year-old, seven foot tall player by the name of Patrick Ewing.
00:23:25
Speaker
Now, I've read a couple of articles and watched a few videos in researching this topic, and in almost all of them, Patrick Ewing was referred to as a once-in-a-decade talent. During his time playing college basketball for Georgetown University, he was a three-time consensus first-team All-American. I don't know what that means, but it sounds good.
00:23:49
Speaker
He was two-time Big East Player of the Year. He was a national champion in 1984 and the 1985 National College Player of the Year. He had won Olympic gold as a member of the 1984 United States Men's Olympic basketball team and would do so again as part of the Dream Team in 1992. We're not quite up to that yet.
00:24:07
Speaker
But I think the biggest thing if you want an idea of what a what a sensation Patrick Ewing was is that he's referred to as a once in a decade talent in a decade that included the year before a plucky a plucky youngster by the name of Michael Jordan.
00:24:24
Speaker
who had been drafted into the Chicago Bulls in 1984. So I mean, who's in that Fantastic Four film? No, no, the other one, the basket, the greatest basketballer of all time one never heard of him. Okay, well, he said he shared a decade and Ewing is the one they're referring to as a once in a decade talent at the time.
00:24:47
Speaker
So the point of all this is to say that it was a 100% dead certainty that whoever got first pick in the 1985 NBA draft would pick Patrick Ewing. He was the player that absolutely everybody wanted on their team.
Frozen Envelope Theory: Did It Freeze the Draft?
00:25:05
Speaker
Now, the other players in this drama, and players in a more literal sense as well, are the New York Knicks, or to give them their full name, the New York Knickerbockers. That's not a joke. That's actually the name of the team. I kind of thought that was, I had a suspicion that that's what Knicks was short for, but I actually had to look it up to verify for myself that it's true. The New York Knickerbockers. I mean, they should have just been called the New York Fighting Victorians. Okay, so they're weird.
00:25:34
Speaker
That's going to give you the old one-two with the old queenspree rules. Yes, that's how we play basketball. We hammer baskets to balls and then we punch you in the face with the old queenspree rules. That's how the old queenspree rules work.
00:25:50
Speaker
So, in 1985, the Knicks weren't doing particularly well. One of the articles I read said they'd had their worst season in 20 years. They certainly weren't doing very well. I don't know if they actually did last, but they're definitely done poorly enough.
00:26:07
Speaker
that they were in the bottom seven and would be included in the draft lottery in the 1985 draft. But the Knicks are an important team because obviously New York City, most populous city in the whole of the States, in other words, the largest potential fan base for a successful team.
00:26:26
Speaker
I was generally thought that a strong Knicks team would be good not just for the Knicks, not just good for New York, but would be good for the NBA just just overall. And this is something that basically everybody agreed on David Stern, the commissioner certainly agreed on that. In the in the lead up to the lottery, there was a New York Times article which said of Patrick Ewing, there is a strong feeling among league officials and television advertising executives that the NBA will benefit most if he winds up in a Knicks uniform.
00:26:56
Speaker
But they're still the lottery. So 18th of June 1985 is the day that the NBA draft lottery occurred. True to his word, David Stern had made sure that this was going to be a big deal. They had a fancy set designed by a man who'd worked on presidential debates.
00:27:17
Speaker
on the 18th floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, they had invited 100 guests and 100 more members of the media, all in attendance, and I assume the players were there as well. And so they had it all worked out. How it was going to go, they had seven big envelopes inside of which, each of which was a foot square piece of cardboard with the logo of one of the seven teams in the lottery.
00:27:47
Speaker
And they had one of those good old-fashioned, rotating, clear plastic drums for lotteries. And the idea was that these envelopes would all go into the drum, get tumbled around. David Stern, being the big Moss Man, would get to draw them out. And they'd be placed up on a big board in the order that they were drawn. And then once they'd all been drawn out, the envelopes would all be opened up, show the logos, and that would establish the order that teams would get to pick their players in.
00:28:15
Speaker
Sounds very game showy. Very game show, yeah. They were definitely going for a very sort of telegenic atmosphere. And so that's basically what happens. So David Stern introduced onto the stage a man called Jack Wagner.
00:28:32
Speaker
I was a partner at the accounting firm, Ernst and Winnie. So like the sort of the big big award ceremonies and what have you that got in a third party firm to sort of handle the handle the envelopes. So he, this fellow Jack Wagner, he walks out envelopes in hand, the drum gets opened up one at a time, he feeds them into the drum.
00:28:54
Speaker
The drum gets shut to the NBA's head of security, takes the handle, turns the drum around a bunch of times, and then David's turn walks over, opens it up, takes a big breath. You can see him on the video, he sort of does the whole, and then goes in and starts drawing, draws out all the envelopes, lines them all up, then they get to the unveiling, it's all, you know, to keep maximum suspense, they start with number seven, work their way up to number one,
00:29:23
Speaker
And the number one spot went to, I'll give you two guesses and I'll be disappointed if you need the second. Was it the New York Fighting Victorians? It was the New York Knicks, yes. The people who everyone had said were the ones who should get first pick and therefore Patrick Ewing, were the ones, exactly the ones who ended up getting them. What are the odds of that?
00:29:50
Speaker
So I'm assuming here the conspiracy is, why are we covering up the psychic powers of sports fans who are able to predict the outcome? Because obviously they all knew he was going to go. And so the cover-up is, why are we denying this obvious evidence for telepathy?
00:30:12
Speaker
Not quite. I say, what are the odds? Obviously, the odds are one in seven, 14.3%. And we've seen, we've talked about this before, events with odds much smaller than that happen on a fairly regular basis. So it's certainly not. Although I don't think
00:30:32
Speaker
NBA drafts using lotteries occur on a day by day basis. So probably because only a year by year thing, it becomes slightly more specifically unlikely. Yes, nevertheless, it's it's certainly not without not outside the bounds of possibility in any way. But the fact that the result that a bunch of people a bunch of wealthy influential people wanted was exactly the result that occurred.
00:30:59
Speaker
made people quite suspicious pretty much immediately. So the conspiracy theory is that the higher ups at the NBA conspired to rig the lottery to make absolutely sure that Patrick Ewing would go to the New York Knicks, which was the best result all around as far as they were concerned.
00:31:20
Speaker
Now, it's all well and good. I mean, you'd kind of expect this, I imagine, you know, when it comes to sports fans and team rivalries and what have you. Whenever things don't go your team's way, people like to say, oh, it's a fix. It's all rigged, who knows? But it's one thing to make those claims. But
00:31:41
Speaker
You want to be able to actually see, first of all, how could it have been rigged? We watched the man come out. He threw them in. It was all tumbled around and randomized. How could you do that? So the story that gets used, that seems to come up the most is the idea that the envelope was frozen. It was a frozen envelope.
00:32:02
Speaker
that Jack Wagner, who must have been in on it, before he came on stage, had kept the one envelope that had the New York Knicks card in it, refrigerated somehow, so that after they all got put in the bin and spun around, the New York Knicks one would be quite obviously cooler to the touch than any of the other envelopes. Have you ever put paper in a freezer? I can honestly say I have not.
00:32:30
Speaker
But presumably you've bought things like confectionery, which has been in a cardboard box in the freezer. Yes, I have done such things. The thing is, when you pull that cardboard box
Bent Corner and Other Draft Theories
00:32:40
Speaker
out to get your ice block or ice cream out of it, it doesn't actually feel that particularly cold, because it's not really the kind of thing which gets cold.
00:32:54
Speaker
So a frozen envelope sounds like a concept-y great idea, but unless you've got a large chunk of metal inside that envelope, it doesn't really seem like the kind of thing which, especially when you put it into a kind of lottery-like ball and start tumbling it with energy, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing which is going to stay cold for a significant amount of time.
00:33:18
Speaker
you make a good point. And I would add to that point by adding that there is absolutely no evidence at all whatsoever for this frozen envelope theory. There are, as far as I'm aware, no eyewitness accounts say of Jack Wagner fiddling around with a freezer and no sightings of him drawing things out or putting them into a fridge. No stories of weirdly located
00:33:47
Speaker
mini fridges sitting just backstage where there'd be no reason to have one or anything. There's nothing to actually support this claim at all as far as I can see. It sounds like
00:33:59
Speaker
talking about things afterwards, people said, how could you rig a lottery like that? And someone said, oh, one way you could do it, you could freeze the envelope. So he could tell by touch which one it was. And over time, that's gone from a here's how you could have done it to here's how they actually did it. So all in all, it's not not a particularly good theory. But fortunately, there's another one. Is it they covered the envelope and slime?
00:34:22
Speaker
No, it's it's, did they did they did they make the envelope electric so tingle to the touch? Oh, that could have been even better. But but no, it's it's even that's it's quite quite charmingly low tech, actually.
00:34:38
Speaker
because if you watch the video in detail, and people have watched the video of the NBA draft lottery in detail as though it was a Prudefilm or something, you'll notice that when Jack Wagner comes in and starts feeding the envelopes into the big plastic drum, he throws in the first three,
00:34:58
Speaker
and then pauses briefly, then he throws in the fourth one on a slightly different angle so that it sort of bangs against the side of the drum as it goes in, and then he throws in the remaining three. And in doing that, the one that he threw that hit the side of the drum actually ends up with one of its corners bent.
00:35:16
Speaker
And also, I thought you can say it had a magnet, so it ended up being attached to the side of the drum. And so you might tell Ewing, you know, just, you know, just reach around and find the one which is actually attached. But oh, so it's the old, the old bend the corner on the letter trick, eh? Very sick.
00:35:35
Speaker
If you watch what happens, then he does throw them in. He does bang one against the side of the drum. And you can see that there is one of the envelopes in there does have a bent corner as a result of being banged into the side. When David Stern opens up the drum, he sticks his hand in and he does a good route around there. He doesn't just grab whichever one ended up on top. And when you look, the one he pulled out is one with a bent corner on it.
00:36:02
Speaker
And that was the one he drew first. So it turned out that it was the New York Knicks one that had the bent corner that he picked for the first position.
00:36:14
Speaker
So at this point, it becomes a bit of becomes a coincidence versus conspiracy thing. I mean, it could have could have all been an accident. It's the sort of thing that could have quite easily gone wrong if that was actually the plan. Maybe he didn't throw it hard enough to bang the corner. Maybe he accidentally chucked another one in and bang the corner of that one as well. It seems like something that could go wrong.
00:36:36
Speaker
And yet, you can't dispute the fact that the one envelope that ended up with a slightly distinctive marking on it, and therefore the one that got picked, ended up being exactly the one that they wanted to get picked.
00:36:51
Speaker
And so to get things a little bit more sort of conspiratorial, people point out that at the time in 1985, the New York Knicks were owned by a group called Gulf and Western. Gulf and Western employed as their auditing firm, Ernst and Winnie, the man who Jack Wagner was a partner for.
00:37:11
Speaker
I also saw another video that showed the clip of the draft and where David Stern says, I'd now like to call to the stage, Jack Wagner, who's a partner at Ernst and Winnie, had flashed up, Jack Wagner has never worked for Ernst and Winnie.
00:37:27
Speaker
I haven't seen that claim anywhere else, and I'm not quite sure where they're going at. But supposedly, there are people who sort of tried to bring in stuff to suggest that that was all a bit of a fix and that Wagner was definitely in on it. Other people have liked to point to the reactions of the various people around. So I mentioned Stern's deep breath. He does, you know, he does a real...
00:37:48
Speaker
before he before he reaches in and starts drawing and some people have sort of said yeah that was that that was the sigh of guilt that was him knowing he was about to defraud the the the NBA fan base and he I wouldn't go that sigh of guilt I would have gone that's the sigh of I better get this right exactly I suspect there's an awful lot of money riding on this and I might have a few broken ankles if I don't do this in the right way so
00:38:19
Speaker
Okay, I gotta, gotta really do this. I mean, does he spend a lot of time trying to feel around in there? Or is it handing him out? He really does. No, he definitely, he doesn't just go in and out. He sticks his hand in and doesn't, gives it a good rummage, which you could say is just him being extra thorough and giving them a bit of an extra stir up. Or you could say is proof that he was searching for one particular envelope. If you give that you, you feel the envelope with the bent corner, but you go, I just have a,
00:38:48
Speaker
a little bit of, you know, stagecraft, I'm gonna really mix things up, go, I think I may have unbent the corner. I actually don't know which is the envelope I meant to pull out now. Oh my god, oh my god, the, the, the mafia is in New York. Oh god, this is, this is gonna go really badly.
00:39:08
Speaker
And other people have pointed out the looks of smugness all around when it happens, the self-satisfied smile on the face of the manager of the New York Knicks and so on, which I mean,
00:39:23
Speaker
could be happiness that their carefully crafted plan has all gone as planned, or it could just mean he's happy because he got exactly the result he wanted, I don't know. But since then, little anecdotes have turned up, people claiming, or certainly beforehand, there were people who were sort of almost
00:39:49
Speaker
half jokingly sort of saying, you know, you want to fix the NBA's fortunes, it's simple, rig the draft. There is a story, a man called Stan Caston, who was at that time the general manager of the Atlanta Hawks, tells a story where he was attending a college tournament a few months before the lottery and he says,
00:40:12
Speaker
I was sitting with a couple of NBA guys and I remember one high ranking team executive who I will not name was a million percent convinced of what was going to happen. He's going to the Knicks. He kept saying he's going to the Knicks. It's all arranged. I didn't believe him at the time.
00:40:28
Speaker
So the stories have sort of gone around. And at the end of the day, we can't know the intentions of Jack Wagner and David Stern when they did what they did that day.
00:40:43
Speaker
It really just comes down to the fact that people are made very suspicious by the things working out exactly the way a bunch of wealthy, influential people wanted them to work out. Certainly the lottery did
00:41:00
Speaker
did what they wanted it to do. It sure captured a lot of attention, took the heat off some of those scandals. It was doing the job as an anti-tanking measure, I believe. These days, they've sort of fiddled with it around a bit more. These days, there's a weighted lottery. I'm not exactly sure how that works. There's a bit of a random thing, but then they take other factors into it. Certainly worked out for Patrick Ewing. Obviously, the Knicks got first pick, picked Patrick Ewing, immediately signed him to a 10-year, $32 million contract.
00:41:29
Speaker
I'm not quite sure what 32 million dollars equates to in 1985 money today. Kind of depends on how much cocaine he may have taken during the 80s though. I mean it was the era of cocaine.
00:41:41
Speaker
But certainly launched his career. And so there you have it. That is the conspiracy of Patrick Ewing and the frozen envelope. I think it's I think it's interesting in that it's sort of the way it relates to people's suspicion of those in power. When you see the powerful getting their way people people are quite quick to cry conspiracy.
00:42:00
Speaker
So I'm quite curious to know how big or small was this conspiracy? So you obviously got the player and you've got the person kind of organizing the draft. So you've got the player who of course wants to be rewarded by being picked in such a way that they're going to be rewarded the best. You've got the person organizing the draft who is interested in increasing the audience for the NBA.
00:42:28
Speaker
Were the Knickerbockers actually aware of what's going on here? Well, yeah, I mean, I don't think Patrick Ewing himself doesn't need to be into it at all. He was the most sought after player that year, so no matter where he went. Obviously he had to know to pick the envelope in particular. No, it was Stern. Oh, sorry, you're right. Sorry.
00:42:50
Speaker
No, I've got the wrong end of the so yeah, it really is just and Wagner, potentially, unless we Yeah, then but the next obviously, well, not obviously, but you might think the Knicks must have been involved in that you might go it's kind of in our interest and you're playing hard to get or is there no indication that they were involved in the concert? I don't I mean, yeah, I think it's just there was
00:43:19
Speaker
Like I said, what was the quote? Strong feeling among league officials and television advertising executives. I think there was quite a large group of people who make money off of the NBA doing well, and who therefore would want the NBA to do as well as possible and who all agreed that the best thing for the NBA would be for the strongest player to go to the New York Knicks. So while
00:43:46
Speaker
the the actual execution of the conspiracy probably only required a small number of people. You sort of get the it's the whole sort of, you know, cigar filled back room style thing where there was there was a whole class of people who I think all agreed that this is what should happen. And possibly not every single one of them went up to David Stern and said, make sure you and goes to the next or we'll break your knees. But
00:44:11
Speaker
certainly there was a there was just sort of the overall feeling that this is what should probably happen.
Sports Conspiracies: Power and Influence
00:44:17
Speaker
Were there consequences?
00:44:19
Speaker
I mean, no, I mean, obviously the likes of David Stern deny to this day that there was any sort of a fix. It was just a random lottery and that's just the way it happened to go. So there was nothing that could be, you know, there was nothing that a person could be punished for because there was nothing that officially, there was no impropriety that anyone's ever admitted to.
00:44:48
Speaker
And it's just, you know, it was just the one in seven chance that happened to come up, you know, not much, not much less likely than getting the number you want on the roll of a dice. Okay, so this is actually quite interesting. So it is still technically possible that this is just a very, very convenient happenstance. Yep, could be.
00:45:10
Speaker
Interesting. But like I say, the fact that the result that the top folks wanted is the result that occurred just made everybody very, very suspicious. Hmm. Now, because I've been talking. Yeah.
00:45:28
Speaker
I was just going to say, we've talked in the past about how people will be suspicious of governments and what have you, depending on how things go. But it's interesting to see sort of other influential bodies basically having the same suspicions leveled at them.
Cultural References and Awkward Press Tours
00:45:45
Speaker
Now, of course, as we've been talking about sport, I'm going to do my usual thing, which is I'm going to use my special ability to apply the mental diuretic that will then flush all of this conversation out of my head, thus ensuring that I contain no sport information whatsoever. So let me do that now.
00:46:08
Speaker
Okay, so I can't wait to find out what the conspiracy theory you're about to tell me about is, Josh, because it sounds very exciting. What is your conspiracy theory this week? I'm going to give a two hour dissertation on the complexities of the Duckworth Lewis equation, which is the most obscure sporting reference I'm capable of giving, I think.
00:46:31
Speaker
The Duck with Lewis, it's an equation they use in cricket for working out when games get called short, how many runs a team probably would have scored, and therefore who did, and it's notoriously, incredibly arcane, and nobody knows how it works. It's another fact for you too. The mental diuretic to get rid of that sport information, so hold on. Okay, so I can't wait to find out what the conspiracy is about this week. So Josh, what are you going to tell me about?
00:46:57
Speaker
Well, you'll have to wait for another week because it's been and gone and you've had another one of your turns, I'm afraid. Just take my word for it. It was very interesting and you were very impressed. Oh, OK. I suppose I can always listen back, although jokes on me. I never listened back to our podcast.
00:47:17
Speaker
No, why would you? So yes, that's the end of that episode. The story of Patrick Ewing. I kind of almost felt like I should have queued up the Harry Potter theme music anytime I mentioned Patrick Ewing and the Frozen Envelope. It sounds like the plot of a sort of children's magical fantasy novel, but anyway. We shouldn't be giving any credence to JK Rowling. She's a terrible term. Well, yes.
00:47:41
Speaker
she's not she's not the the flavor of the month certainly no no although that has reminded me of the fact that deuces the indiscretions of one Johnny Depp how they're having to get rid of him as playing Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts films
00:48:00
Speaker
which then led me to think of oh yes he also played the murder victim in Murder on the Orient Express which probably is his best role of recent time because he gets to be killed on screen by multiple people just stabbing him endlessly which is kind of the role that Johnny Depp should be playing in everything now and then been reminded that of course
00:48:19
Speaker
As people have been pointing out on Twitter today, the press tour for the new Kenneth Branagh Poirot film is going to be very, very awkward indeed, because it stars Armie Hammer, who of course is now incredibly accused of being both a cannibal and a rapist,
00:48:39
Speaker
One of the side characters is now a prominent British anti-vaxxer, and Gal Gadot is causing ripples at the moment over her stance as to what's happening in Gaza.
Bonus Tease: Grabavoy Numbers and TikTok
00:48:52
Speaker
And people are going, yeah, the press tour is going to be a lot of very awkward questions about the main stars of this film.
00:48:59
Speaker
Or a lot of very, very stringent conditions on interviewers, yeah. Please do not mention at any point the easing of other people's flesh. Or the shelling of the Gaza Strip, yes. Now, less contentious is the fact that after we finish this episode, we're going to do a bonus episode. We are. What are we going to talk about in our bonus episode? Gravaboy numbers.
00:49:26
Speaker
grab a boy numbers grab avoid numbers you want to know what a grab a boy number and I'm gonna end up saying grab a boy I even though I know it's grab a boy or no grab a boy yeah I'm gonna say grab a boy numbers because I just can't help but think of them as grab a boy numbers you want to know more about grab grab a boy no grab a boy numbers yeah it's already happening
00:49:51
Speaker
the term, the term is continued. It needs to be there needs to be a number to teach you how to say, grab a boy number. Well, there will be because there's a number for everything. So if you've got this calculator, there'll be a number to resolve and solve your discount killer. So that would actually allow you to then resolve issues about not being able to use
00:50:13
Speaker
Grabavoy numbers. If you want to know what these numbers are and why they're related to TikTok of all things, you can tune into our bonus episode and you can tune into our bonus episode Josh by doing what?
Become a Patron: Supporting the Podcast
00:50:26
Speaker
By being one of our patrons. Who are the most lovely, the most beautiful, the most luminous people of all.
00:50:33
Speaker
It's lovely and love-ed individuals around. So if you are one of those, then you'll just have access to it. If you'd like to be a patron, you can go to patreon.com and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy and just sign on up there. What are we? We're still a dollar a month.
00:50:53
Speaker
get you everything. $3 to get you talked about on the podcast by name. And there are there are high level things which don't come with much more other than kudos. But we appreciate kudos. We are we do so much.
00:51:10
Speaker
And that, I think, is all we have for you today. So patrons stick around, everybody else. You've heard me talk about sports for around 45 minutes. That's probably a good 40 minutes more than I've ever spoken about sports and other circumstances. So I guess you should count yourselves lucky.
00:51:32
Speaker
And because Josh has mentioned sports again, once again, I must apply the mental diuretics. So I'll be forgetting everything in just a few seconds time. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Denteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
00:51:58
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.