Physicists from the FOM Foundation and the University of Amsterdam have discovered that the ancient Egyptians used a clever trick to make it easier to transport heavy pyramid stones by sledge. The Egyptians moistened the sand over which the sledge moved. By using the right quantity of water they could halve the number of workers needed. The researchers published this discovery online on 29 April 2014 in Physical Review Letters.
For the construction of the pyramids, the ancient Egyptians had to transport heavy blocks of stone and large statues across the desert. The Egyptians therefore placed the heavy objects on a sledge that workers pulled over the sand. Research from the University of Amsterdam has now revealed that the Egyptians probably made the desert sand in front of the sledge wet. Experiments have demonstrated that the correct amount of dampness in the sand halves the pulling force required.
Firm sand
The physicists placed a laboratory version of the Egyptian sledge in a tray of sand. They determined both the required pulling force and the stiffness of the sand as a function of the quantity of water in the sand. To determine the stiffness they used a rheometer, which shows how much force is needed to deform a certain volume of sand.
Experiments revealed that the required pulling force decreased proportional to the stiffness of the sand. Capillary bridges arise when water is added to the sand. These are small water droplets that bind the sand grains together. In the presence of the correct quantity of water, wet desert sand is about twice as stiff as dry sand. A sledge glides far more easily over firm desert sand simply because the sand does not pile up in front of the sledge as it does in the case of dry sand.
A large statue is being transported by sledge. A person standing on the front of the sledge wets the sand. Source: Al-Ahram Weekly, 5-11 August 2004, issue 702. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)
Wall painting
The Egyptians were probably aware of this handy trick. A wall painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep clearly shows a person standing on the front of the pulled sledge and pouring water over the sand just in front of it.
Besides revealing something about the ancient Egyptians, the results are also interesting for modern-day applications. We still do not fully understand the behaviour of granular material like sand. Granular materials are, however, very common. Other examples are asphalt, concrete and coal. The research results could therefore be useful for examining how to optimise the transport and processing of granular material, which at present accounts for about ten percent of the worldwide energy consumption.
The research was supervised by FOM group leader professor Daniel Bonn and is part of the FOM programme 'Fundamental aspects of friction'.
A patent drawing for the Range Keeper, Hannibal Ford's analog fire control computer.
The history of information technology has a way of repeating itself. Every era's corporate competitors elbow each other for success, try to better the other's ideas, and sometimes just plain steal from one another. In that light, it's no surprise that the battles of today’s technology giants may have been foretold by another wave of innovatorsâ€"those at the turn of the 20th century, when electricity was new and computing was done with real machines. Think the kind with gears, cams, and shafts.
The startup culture created by the electrification and communications booms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries produced a generation of engineers looking for the next big thing. But their similarities with today's tech leaders go beyond the fact that "a generation of engineers looking for the next big thing" could just as easily describe anyone at Google, Facebook, or maybe even SnapChat. While researching the recent Ars report on Naval analog computers, parallels immediately revealed themselves. The behavior of the men who pioneered this analog computing eerily mimics actions we're more familiar with from Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the rest of today’s tech pantheon. These early engineers were, if you’ll pardon the phrase, the Pirates of Analog Alley.
Enlarge/ Lord Kelvin's "harmonic analyzer," with disk integrators.
While Charles Babbage may be the “father of computing,†the father of fire control computing (and of modern analog computing) was William Thompson, also known as Lord Kelvin. As detailed in Harold Sharlin's biography Lord Kelvin-The Dynamic Victorian, Kelvin was like a one-man equivalent of PARC or the Bell Labs of the latter half of the 20th centuryâ€"a fountain of great ideas. Some of those ideas, he cashed in on; some, he let others steal.
Kelvin figured out a number of things about long-distance telecommunications. He developed a model for the bandwidth capacity of undersea cables and invented equipment to automatically send and record messages. Enriched by (and knighted for) his success with trans-Atlantic telegraph cables and equipment, Kelvin was perpetually tinkering. In 1871, he perfected a little project his older brother had been working on: the “integrating machine,†or differential analyzer.
This device would be the basis of Kelvin’s machine to calculate tide tables. Nearly 60 years later, the same principles would be used at MIT to create the first machine called a differential analyzer, which is used for calculating complex differential equations. The integrating engine would be in the back of Kelvin’s mind 15 years later when, as a board member for Linotype & Machinery Co. Ltd., he had a conversation with the company’s managing director, Arthur Pollen.
As recounted by his son Anthony Pollen in the book The Great Gunnery Scandal: The Mystery of Jutland, Pollen traveled to Malta in 1900, where he was invited aboard a Royal Navy ship to witness gunnery exercises. When he returned to England, he told Kelvin how horrifically inaccurate the ships' big guns were. In the course of the conversation, Lord Kelvin mentioned an analog computer he had worked on and how it could probably be used to do the ballistic calculations required to make the guns hit their targets.
Pollen took the idea and ran with it. With a singular passion rivaling Steve Jobs', Pollen spent the next eight years developing what he would call the Argo Aim Correction System. Its integrating core concept was passed from Kelvin's brother to Kelvin and now finally to Pollen.
A 3D model of the Argo Clock, the heart of Arthur Pollen's fire control system.
Pollen’s Argo was supposed to provide a totally integrated system. It would use electromechanical mechanisms to transmit range and bearing data to a computer, then send the proper elevation and bearing orders back to the gunners’ mates in a similar way. If an enemy ship disappeared from view because of fog or a smoke screen, gunners would still have a good idea of where to aim. And the centerpiece of Pollen’s system was the Argo Clockâ€"the world’s first electrically powered analog computer, which continuously analyzed the relative motion between the ship it was aboard and the target.
One of the Argo system’s major innovations was its use of gyroscopes, both for calculating directional information and as a “stable verticalÂÂÂ," sensing the ship’s pitch and yaw and adding that to the calculations. Pollen spent a great deal of development effort on his own gyroscope systemsâ€"based on early torpedo stabilizer systemsâ€"to create the stabilizing element that handled movement in the vertical plane. But unfortunately for Pollen, he became a groundbreaker in computing in another wayâ€"having his operating system ripped off.
Sir Frederic Charles Dreyer recognized the best parts of Pollen's Argo system and copied them off for his own.
In 1906, as Pollen was coming close to his goal, he met with a Royal Navy officer to present his work. That officer, Lt. Frederic Dreyer, was the assistant to then-Rear Admiral John Rushworth Jellicoe, the Royal Navy’s Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes (DNO). Dreyer was an up-and-comer, according to most accounts (including Anthony Pollen's), and he had a few ideas about fire control of his own. Dreyer would essentially become the Bill Gates to Pollen's Jobs. While the Royal Navy continued to buy systems from Pollen to test, Dreyer went off and designed his own fire control computer. That system, called the Dreyer Fire Control Table, had the benefit of Dreyer’s experience as a gunnery officer as well as his ongoing experience dealing with Pollen.
Originally, according to Norman Friedman's book Naval Firepower, Dreyer saw his system as something for individual turrets to help them stay on targetâ€"essentially an add-on to the Argo system. But the more time he spent with Pollen, the more he started to believe his system could be competitive with it. He took his design to his own personal Paul Allen-like figure: Keith Elphinstone, the chief designer and director at the naval instrument manufacturer Elliot Brothers. The two worked in the Argo's system of automatically transmitting bearing and range data from a stabilized rangefinder.
As much as the Dreyer Table borrowed from the Argo, it was also less integrated than Pollen’s system and more open to tinkering and hacking, since it was essentially a bunch of hardware bolted onto an open metal table. It was the Windows PC to Pollen’s carefully crafted Macintosh-like concept for the Argo. Dreyer's creation also preserved a place for human skill, and it was the product of an insiderâ€"as opposed to that of some upstart entrepreneur.
Dreyer still worked for the DNO as the officer responsible for fire control systems. He was able to stack the deck some against Pollenâ€"though Pollen did enough of that himself, according to John Brooks' account in the book Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland. Equipped with his own reality distortion field, Pollen claimed that his system was accurate "to 1/10 of one percent"â€"an accuracy that would have required the information from the spotting system to be transmitted and turned into gun orders in milliseconds. Pollen was slow in delivering and combative in negotiations on price, plus much of his early hardware was, to put it kindly, idiosyncratic. For example, there was one feature of the Argo Clock that wasn't borrowed by the Dreyer Table: the Argo system couldn't automatically track a target while the ship it was on was turning.
So while Pollen sold a number of his full systems for installation on Russian warships and sold parts of systems to the Royal Navy, Dreyer’s hack of Pollen’s system became the standard for the British fleet just before the start of World War I. And as it became more and more apparent how badly he had been screwed by Dreyer, the tenor of Pollen’s relationship with the Navy soured. He was denied a special relationship with the Navy and was relegated to the same treatment as other inventors. Pollen's passion, pushiness, and eventual rage saw to it that he was eventually pulled from the approved contractor list all together. It led to a patent dispute that would be the gunnery equivalent of Apple vs. Microsoft.
The official guidelines we receive, printed on a single side of A4 paper, tell us that the closing ceremony will be at 1 p.m., exactly fours hours after the start of the race. This will take place in the 50,000-seat Kim Il-Sung Stadium, which will also be the marathon’s start and end points. Since finishing is very much what I have in mind, I figure I’ll need to clock in at under four hours or risk not finishing at all.
After our arrival, I pepper our guides with questions about sports in North Korea. “Our leader is focusing on getting our people to play sport and keep healthy. That’s why foreigners have been invited to the marathon this year,†Single Kim explains. On our way from the airport, we drive past vast sport centers, built in elaborate geometric Soviet styles that have recently been refurbished for badminton, taekwondo, and swimming. Earlier this year, the opening of a ski resort in the northern part of the country made news in the West, and during my stay I see many young men and women playing volleyball, soccer, even rollerblading in newly built concrete skate parks across Pyongyang. As for why this year’s marathon was opened to more tourists (previously, only professional runners had been allowed to compete), no one really knew, although some suspect it’s part of a broader campaign to boost tourism and bolster the country’s tarnished image.
There is no element of “fun†in this run
Having previously run marathons in London and Shanghai, I’m curious to see how Pyongyang’s will be different. One obvious difference is that although both have elite races for professionals (Pyongyang has been attracting a handful of professional foreign runners for many years), the major Western marathons are also fun runs, open to athletes of all abilities.  Pyongyang is different. There is no element of “fun†in this run. All the North Korean runners are here to compete, and I suspect many belong to athletic clubs or teams. For North Korean runners, I suspect, a good result at the Mangyongdae Prize could have life-changing consequences; it might mean acceptance into a better club or school, which could in turn could lead to a place at a university, and a brighter future for them and their families. When I contemplate the pressure they must be feeling, my four-hour hang-up seems trivial.
Leave it to San Francisco to turn one of the simplest â€" and cheapest â€" dishes into the trendy snack du jour.
We're talking about toast.
"Artisanal" toast is made from inch-thick, snow-white or grainy slices, lathered in butter and cinnamon or peanut butter and honey, then wrapped individually in wax paper.
And you think that latte is expensive. Each one of these slices will set you back at least $3.50.
The toast craze started at an unlikely location: a modest coffee shop, called Trouble, about four blocks from San Francisco's sleepy Ocean Beach.
There, Giulietta Carrelli started selling the thick slices seven years ago. Now the "$4 toast," as the critics label it, is a featured item in bakeries, cafes and restaurants in San Francisco and beyond. Some even have a toast menu that changes daily.
Aficionados say it's the truest comfort food. And made well, toast will bring out the ultimate crumbiness and caramel notes of bread.
All the talk of toast got us feeling creative.
And the more we thought about it, we realized there might actually be further potential in toast to unleash. Forget the ordinary toaster. We decided to combine two hot trends, artisanal toast and DIY. Call it TIY.
hide captionPost toast results
Alastair Bland, Eliza Barclay and Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR
Post toast results
Alastair Bland, Eliza Barclay and Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR
We began with a bag of Trader Joe's white bread. Then we divided and conquered the art of toasting, the primitive way â€" with fire â€" all the way to the laptop. Yes, we tried to make toast with computer-generated heat and air. We also used a blowtorch, a pan of butter, a food dehydrator, a dryer and a coffee maker.
Our findings might surprise you.
hide captionFire-roasted toast will satisfy the smoke fiends at the breakfast table.
Eliza Barclay/NPR
Fire-roasted toast will satisfy the smoke fiends at the breakfast table.
Eliza Barclay/NPR
Paleo toast:
Paleo is everywhere these days, so we had to give paleo toast a try. Glossing over the details of paleo bread-making, we went straight to the fire and a stick.
We drove a slender stick through our slice of bread, which made a long, jagged hole. Our first attempt at caveman toast failed after 30 seconds, when the toast fell straight into the fire. Unfortunately, it turns out that bread doesn't hold up quite as well to an open flame as denser foods with small surface areas, like marshmallows and hot dogs.
Our second attempt fared better. Gripping our stick carefully so as not to drop more bread in the fire, we tried to get the bread as close to the flame as possible without picking up any ash or soot from nearby logs. This was hard.
After a couple of minutes, we decided that our piece of unevenly charred bread would have to do. But it's the perfect piece for the eater who wants a little bit of everything: a gold patch, a burnt patch, a barely toasted patch.
Fire-roasted toast also boasts deep, smoky flavor. And with a little butter, it's quite a nice variation on a quotidian breakfast.
hide captionWe recommend pan-frying to get as much butter as possible into a piece of toast.
Eliza Barclay/NPR
We recommend pan-frying to get as much butter as possible into a piece of toast.
Eliza Barclay/NPR
Pan-fried toast:
Our next aim was to create toast with the perfect ratio of butter to crumb. Why not practically saturate the bread in this most flavorful of fats and fry until crisp?
We cranked up the stove to high and dropped 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter into a saucepan. Once the butter started to froth and brown, we gently lowered in the slice. After letting it sizzle furiously for about 15 seconds, we flipped it, discovering that the other side had turned gorgeously golden.
Under the light, our toast glittered with tiny shards of butter clinging to the surface. Far from being wet and sticky, the toast was crisp, and almost dry to touch. The taste? Gloriously rich, with delicate crunch and depth. If you want the most calorific way to make toast, this is it. And this method guarantees a perfectly even distribution of butter.
hide captionEnjoy your toast pale and crispy? Then the dehydrator is the appliance for you.
Alastair Bland for NPR
Enjoy your toast pale and crispy? Then the dehydrator is the appliance for you.
Alastair Bland for NPR
Dehydrated toast:
You could say that dehydrated bread is the Slow Food of toast. The plastic plug-in countertop dehydrator is commonly used for turning pieces of fruit into leathery slabs and fresh mushrooms into crispy-dried chips. But we thought it might produce an interesting version of toast, too.
Dehydrating bread into something toast-like takes two days, as a coil of heated metal warms the air, pulls out moisture and sends it upward and out through the ventilation slats at the top.
Like your toast pale and crispy? Good. Because a soft slice of white bread comes out brittle as a matzo cracker after two days in the food dehydrator. In fact, we found the dehydrated bread shattered easily when subjected to the force of a butter knife.
Our conclusion from this experiment: If you want Melba toast the slow way, by all means, plug in that dehydrator. But if you want the sugar in your bread to caramelize, seek out some heat.
Blowtorched toast:
We wondered how we could make the most evenly browned toast with the fluffiest center. How about a blowtorch, that star of the modernist chef's kitchen? We headed down to Dad's workroom. The plan was to coax every square inch of the bread to caramelized perfection with the intense propane flame of a blowtorch. Seemed like it could be a slam dunk.
Trouble is, the flame of a blowtorch can be too hot, charring the surface of the bread before the interior warms. The flame is so concentrated that the bread cannot be thoroughly heated â€" as one corner is torched, the opposite corner is cooling down. Check out our video at the top of the page.
In the end, blowtorched toast was evenly browned and looked quite nice, with the unburned imprint of the tongs embedded in the bread. But it wasn't warm enough to melt butter on the surface. The toast had a singed flavor, fortunately without any hints of propane.
hide captionOnce again, the coffee maker proves it can do way more than brew a cup of Joe.
Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR
Once again, the coffee maker proves it can do way more than brew a cup of Joe.
Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR
Now, there's no doubt that blowtorching your breakfast will impress guests. And we wouldn't be surprised if professional toast makers begin applying a touch of blowtorch flame to finish their product before their customers. It could be the gateway to $8 toast.
Coffee maker toast:
After our success with the blowtorch, we decided to test out other appliances that aren't exactly made for cooking. Since the dishwasher clearly doesn't create the dry heat needed for toast, our next thought was the tried-and-true coffee maker.
A few months ago, we made an entire lunch in Mr. Coffee. Surely, we could toast a slice of bread on the appliance's burner, right?
The answer is a resounding yes. Once again, the coffee maker proves it can do way more than brew a cup of Joe.
But you can't be in a rush when making coffee-maker toast. Creating a brown, crunchy layer on the bread's surface takes about 20 minutes.
And we had to put something heavy on top of the bread to press it against the coffee maker's burner. We used an apple, but a coffee mug works, as well. Just make sure whatever you choose doesn't crush your soft slice of bread.
hide captionNo dryer sheets were used in this experiment, so at least the toast didn't have a floral flavor.
Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR
No dryer sheets were used in this experiment, so at least the toast didn't have a floral flavor.
Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR
Alas, coffee maker toast isn't perfect. The top side gets a bit squashed. And when we tried to flip it over, it stuck to the burner. So not our top choice, but it'll make some passable toast.
Laptop and clothes dryer toast:
Next, we really started thinking outside the box. Why not try a few appliances that aren't even found in the kitchen?
The first item we turned to? A laptop.
We sat the bread next to the laptop's fan. And waited. Like a day or two. And the results were disappointing. Nothing happened. Literally.
The fans on modern-day laptops don't emit enough heat or air to dry out the toast.
The job required a bigger, hotter fan. Hair dryer? Too labor-intensive. How about the clothes dryer? We put the bread right next to the machine's vent and started a 50-minute cycle to dry Sunday night's laundry.
Alas, we were hindered by energy efficiency. The air coming out of the vent was too cool. It barely dried out the toast. And there was definitely no browning or crisping going on. (Note: We didn't use a dryer sheet. So at least the toast didn't pick up a floral flavor.)
The TIY Verdict
If you're looking for a delicious treat â€" and a few extra calories â€" try pan-fried toast. To impress your friends, pull out the blowtorch. And when you're stuck in a motel room and get a hankering for toast, the coffee maker should do the trick.
Or just wait for a toastery to open up in your neighborhood.
If more and more people are living past 100, how much older can we survive to, in theory, asks Frank Swain. And what would it take to achieve this in practice?
On the Art of Prolonging Life was penned by a Dr Huseland (“one of the soundest minds in Germanyâ€) in 1797, concluding eight years of study on the topic. He identified among the many factors associated with long life: a moderate diet that was rich in vegetables and short on meat and sweetened pastries; an active lifestyle; good care of your teeth; weekly bathing in lukewarm water with soap; good sleep; clean air; and being born to parents who themselves lived long lives. Toward the end of his essay, translated for the American Review, the doctor wistfully speculated that “human life may be prolonged to double the extent of what is supposed to be its present limits, without losing activity and usefulness.â€
By Huseland’s estimates, half of all children born would die before their tenth birthday, an alarmingly high mortality rate. However, if the child could run the gauntlet of youth fraught with smallpox, measles, rubella, and other childhood diseases, they stood a fair chance of making it all the way to their mid-thirties. In ideal circumstances, Huseland thought it possible that a lifetime could stretch for two hundred years.
Is there more to these claims than the fanciful imagination of an 18th century doctor? James Vaupel doesn’t think it’s out of the question. “Life expectancy is increasing two-and-a-half years every decade,†he says. “That’s twenty five years every century.†As director of the Laboratory of Survival and Longevity at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, Vaupel studies longevity and survival in human and animal populations. He tells me that the pattern of improvements to mortality has shifted greatly in the past 100 years. Before 1950, most of the gains in life expectancy were made by combating the high infant mortality that Huseland noted. Since then, however, it’s been the over-60s and most recently the over-80s who’ve seen the greatest decreases in mortality.
In other words, we are not just surviving childhood in greater numbers, we’re living longer â€" a lot longer.
Age complex
Worldwide, the number of centenarians â€" people over the age of 100 â€" is predicted to increase 10-fold between 2010 and 2050. As Huseland testified, a strong component in whether you’ll live to see this milestone lies in the age of your parents; that is, there is a genetic component to long life. But the rise in centenarians can’t be explained by genetics alone, which clearly haven’t changed much in the last couple of centuries. Rather, it’s a host of improvements to our lives that cumulatively improve our chances of living longer and stronger, many of which echo the factors identified by Huseland. The reasons include better healthcare, improving medical treatments, public health measures like cleaner water and air, better education, and improved standards of living such as houses that are warm and dry. “Mostly it’s down to having more medicine and money,†says Vaupel.
Recent decades have seen significant improvements in life expectancy for the elderly (Thinkstock)
Nonetheless, the gains offered by better healthcare and living conditions still leave many people dissatisfied, and the appetite for life-extension therapies shows no sign of abating. One popular approach is caloric restriction. In the 1930s, researchers noticed that mice fed on a near-starvation diet lived far longer than those allowed to eat until full. A subsequent study on rhesus monkeys also showed this, but this was contradicted by a 20-year-long study by the US National Institute on Ageing, which found that although rhesus monkeys kept on a calorie-restricted diet developed age-related diseases slightly later than controls, they did not live longer on average. The authors noted that though caloric restriction in long-lived animals conferred some benefits, these were subject to a complex interplay of genetics, nutrition and environmental factors.
Another great hope is resveratrol, a chemical produced naturally by plants, notably in the skin of grapes. Whether vineyards can be said to hide the fountain of youth, however, remains doubtful. The chemical has been noted to produce similar health benefits to caloric restriction in animal models, but as yet, no study has shown that taking resveratrol can increase human lifespan.
No limits
But why do we age at all? “Every day we suffer damage and don’t perfectly repair it,†explains Vaupel, “and this accumulation of unrepaired damage is what causes age-related disease.†It’s not a trait that is shared by all living organisms. Hydra for example â€" a group of simple, jellyfish-like creatures â€" are able to repair almost all the damage they suffer, and readily slough cells that are too injured to heal. In humans, it’s damaged cells like these that can give rise to cancerous tumours.
“Hydras allocate resources primarily toward repair, rather than reproduction,†says Vaupel. “Humans, by contrast, primarily direct resources toward reproduction, it’s a different survival strategy at a species level.†Humans may live fast and die young, but our prodigious fertility allows us to overcome these high mortality rates. Now that infant mortality is so low, there’s really no need to channel so many resources into reproduction, says Vaupel. “The trick is to up-regulate repair instead of diverting that energy into getting fat. In theory that should be possible, though nobody has any idea about how to do it.†If the steady accretion of damage to our cells can be arrested â€" so-called negligible senescence â€" then perhaps we won’t have an upper age limit. If that’s the case, there isn’t any reason why we should have to die at all.
Hydra can repair almost all its damaged cells, shedding any that are too injured to heal (Science Photo Library)
“It would be wonderful to get to a world where all death is optional. Right now, essentially all of us are sentenced to the death penalty, even though most of us have done nothing to deserve it.†So says Gennady Stolyarov, transhumanist philosopher and author of Death Is Wrong, a controversial children’s book that encourages young minds to reject the fatalist notion that death is inevitable. Stolyarov is fervently opposed to what he sees is simply a technological challenge waiting for the appropriate level of money and manpower to solve it.
Agents of change
One focus for technological intervention are telomeres. These caps on chromosomes shorten every time your cells divide, putting a hard limit on the number of times your cells can reproduce themselves. Not all animals experience this telomere shortening, the hydra being one of them. However, there are good reasons to have these limitations in place. Occasional mutations can allow cells to divide without shortening their telomeres, giving rise to “immortal†cell lines. However, in an uncontrolled situation, these immortal cells would be very bad news for the person they are in, bloating into cancerous tumours.
“One hundred and fifty thousand people in the world die each day, two thirds of those die from causes related to senescence,†Stolyarov tells me. “So even if we can hasten the arrival of these technologies to achieve negligible senescence by one day, we will have saved a hundred thousand lives.†The author quotes geronotology theoretician Aubrey de Grey â€" something of a celebrity in the world of life extension â€" as stating that there is a 50% chance of achieving negligible senescence in the next 25 years. “There’s a good chance that it will happen in our lifetimes, before we experience the most deleterious effects of senescence,†says Stolyarov.
“Achieving negligible human senescence in 25 years is possible,†says Vaupel, “but highly unlikely.†He concedes that it might be possible to rapidly accelerate life expectancy through medical breakthroughs. But he warns that equally, there may be difficulties in the future that we don’t anticipate. “Disease, economic crisis, and climate change might cause increases in mortality,†he says.
Telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, are linked to ageing of cells (Science Photo Library)
Stolyarov is hoping to kindle a small spark of hope into an eternal flame. “What I think is necessary right now is a determined push to dramatically accelerate the pace of technological progress,†he says. “We have a fighting chance right now, but in order to make it happen we have to be the agents of change.â€
For now, readers will have to take comfort in the knowledge that there are well-documented ways to try to avoid the Western world’s two biggest killers â€" heart disease and cancer â€" through a combination of exercise, healthy eating, and moderation when it comes to alcohol and red meat. Very few of us actually manage to live by these criteria, perhaps because we think a shorter life filled with rich food and wine is a worthy trade. Which leads to the conundrum â€" if eternal life was possible, would you be willing to pay the price?
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Even the NSA leaker’s closest advisers now say his appearance on a Kremlin call-in show, which touched off yet another international firestorm, was a mistake.
“It certainly didn’t go as he would’ve hoped,†one of these sources said. “I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that he made an error in judgment.â€
“He basically viewed the question as his first foray into criticizing Russia. He was genuinely surprised that in reasonable corridors it was seen as the opposite,†added Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who serves as one of Snowden’s closest advisers.
According to Wizner and others, Snowden hadn’t realized how much last week’s Q&Aâ€"with Putin blithely assuring Snowden that Moscow had no such eavesdropping programsâ€"would appear to be a Kremlin propaganda victory to Western eyes. And so the leaker quickly decided to write an op-ed for the Guardian to explain his actions and to all but label Putin a liar for his televised response.
Ever since Snowden landed in Moscow under the watchful eye of the Russian surveillance state, he’s been represented in Russia by a man deeply connected to the Kremlin in addition to his American counsel. It’s one of many reasons why critics have accused the leaker of being a Putin patsy. That criticism has been accompanied by a whisper campaign from both the American and Russian governments alleging that Snowden was under the thumb of Putin’s intelligence services, a claim Snowden and his camp have strongly denied.
The talk rubbed Snowden the wrong way, his associates say. For months, he had been “looking for a situation to prove his critics wrong,†said one of his confidantsâ€"a chance to “convey to the public that he feels the same way about mass surveillance in Russia as he did about mass surveillance in the U.S.â€
But it wasn’t easy in Russia, where the press is controlled so tightly by the regime. Last month, the Kremlin silenced many of the last remaining critical news outlets in the country. “In Russia, you just can’tâ€"obviously, there’s not as much dissent as in the U.S.,†a source close to Snowden said. The Putin television program seemed to be “a high-profile opportunity†to correct the record.
Snowden’s camp wouldn’t get into the specifics of how his question made it onto the live broadcast on Russian state television. But it is worth noting that Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s Russian lawyer, has deep Kremlin ties and sits on the board that oversees the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Getting on state television wouldn’t have been much trouble.
With several of his key advisers offline, Snowden crafted his question for Putin. The leaker was aware that a frontal assault on the Russian leader likely wouldn’t make it past the Kremlin’s publicists. (“How do you succeed in lifting the taboo on state surveillance without being censored by state screeners?†Wizner asked.) So Snowden spent the first half of his pre-taped question talking about the ills of American surveillance. Then he said:
“Does Russia intercept, store, or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals? And do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement agencies can justify placing societies, rather than subjects, under surveillance? Thank you.â€
“It was the strongest possible question that could possibly get through [Putin’s propagandists],†one source close to Snowden said. Which is to say: not very strong at all.
Snowden may have thought he could catch Putin in a lie; Russia, in fact, has one of the world’s most pervasive systems for state surveillance. Snowden may have crafted the question to mirror Sen. Ron Wyden’s questioning under oath of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as Snowden later claimed in his Guardian op-ed. (Clapper wound up spouting, as he later put it, the “least untruthful†statement he could about the NSA’s domestic spying.) But that assumes Putinâ€"or Russiaâ€"cares about such untruths in the same way America or its leaders do. “Trapping Putin in a lie is not the same as trapping Obama or Clapper,†one of Snowden’s advisers sighed.
“I know this is hard to believe. I know if I was just watching from afar, I’d think, ‘Wow, the Kremlin forced him [Snowden] to do this.’ But it’s not true. He just fucking did it.â€
Putin’s answer was predictable. “Of course, we know that criminals and terrorists use technology for their criminal acts and of course the special services have to use technical means to respond to their crimes,†he said. “But we don’t have a mass-scale, uncontrollable efforts like that…Our special services…are strictly controlled by the society and the law, and are regulated by the law.â€
The response in the West was immediate, and overwhelmingly negative. “Snowden’s appearance on Russian television yesterday in a highly scripted propaganda stunt for Vladimir Putin does not settle the question of whether he was originally an FSB tool. But it sure does settle the questionâ€"at least in my mindâ€"of his role now,†wrote Benjamin Wittes, a defender of the NSA and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. (Full disclosure: I’m a non-resident fellow there, as well.)
“The best you can say about this is he may have thought he was trying to broaden the conversation to talk about Russian surveillance. If that is the case, this is probably a naïve way to go about it,†Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a major NSA critic, told The Daily Beast.
Some in Snowden’s corner mocked the criticism. (“Snowden should storm the Kremlin,†tweeted Glenn Greenwald, the recipient of many a Snowden leak.) But even Jesselyn Radack, one of Snowden's American lawyers, instantly acknowledged that the interchange was a misstep. “Unfortunately, it can play into the incorrect meme that he is somehow being controlled by Russia,†she said to The Daily Beast.
Wizner said he understood the revulsion: The interchange looked like cheap agitprop. “I know this is hard to believe. I know if I was just watching from afar, I’d think, ‘Wow, they forced him [Snowden] to do this,’†the ACLU attorney added. “But it’s not true. He just fucking did it.â€
Snowden was mortified by the reaction, said Wizner and others. Within hours, the leaker decided to write an op-ed to clarify his position. Snowden decided to run it with the Guardian because of his long-standing relationship with the paperâ€"which ran his first leakâ€"and because he knew it would publish the piece instantly.
“Putin’s response appears to be the strongest denial of involvement in mass surveillance ever given by a Russian leaderâ€"a denial that is, generously speaking, likely to be revisited by journalists,†Snowden wrote. “I understand the concerns of critics, but there is a more obvious explanation for my question than a secret desire to defend the kind of policies I sacrificed a comfortable life to challenge: if we are to test the truth of officials’ claims, we must first give them an opportunity to make those claims.â€
After nearly 10 months as a guest of the Kremlin, it was the closest Snowden had come to directly criticizing his hosts in Moscow. Some in his circle are concerned about what might happen next. “I’m worried about his safety now,†one adviser said. Such a frontal attack seems unlikely; even before last week’s interchange, Snowden had proved to be an invaluable, if perhaps unintentional, weapon in the Kremlin’s propaganda war with the West. But it is worth noting that Snowden’s temporary asylum expires in August, and he has few places he can go without risking arrest.
Wizner said he hopes that the Guardian op-ed silences those “Snowden-Putin truthers†who are convinced that the Russian security services are behind the leaker’s every move. But Wizner isn’t holding his breath. “If Snowden demanded Putin’s resignation, they’d see it as another piece of evidence that he’s Putin’s pawn,†the lawyer added.
The bigger question, however, is whether Snowden can restore his reputation among the much larger group of people who viewed his initial leaks as admirable, and his appearance with Putin as risible. The answer to that question is, at this point, unknown.
There’s a great scene in North Dallas Forty, from all the way back in 1979, when the owner of a fictional football team is watching practice with business associates. He worries aloud about his team’s playoff chances, so one of them responds, “Christ, you make more with your manufacturing division in one week than you do on this goddamned football team in the whole year, even if they DO win.â€
And the owner laughs and says, “That’s true … but my manufacturing division never got the cover of Time magazine.â€
That says everything you ever wanted to know about owning a sports franchise. Every winter, Forbes diligently determines the “value†of every NBA team using common-sense variables, only we’re dealing in a world without common sense. As I predicted on Friday, hedge-fund billionaires Marc Lasry and Wes Edens agreed to purchase the Milwaukee Bucks for $550 million on Wednesday. Forbes recently pegged the Bucks at $405 million, so the magazine was off by 36 percent. Thirty-six percent! That probably goes for every evaluation on that list.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee made history Wednesday by breaking the NBA purchase-price record while also serving as our new floor for “here’s the lowest number anyone is getting for a 2014 NBA franchise.†What did Lasry and Edens agree to purchase? A small-market team, no franchise star, no state-of-the-art arena, a 25-year legacy of losing (save for 2001), apathetic and tortured fans, Larry Sanders’s entire TMZ archive, O.J. Mayo’s buffet bills, black-sheep brother status in the local sports scene … I mean, they basically landed the Greek Freak, a top-three lottery pick, some revenue-sharing money and a chance to tell people they own an NBA team while secretly hoping they don’t ask “Which one?â€
But you can’t rationally assess the “value†of anything when ego is involved. What’s the value of sitting courtside as everyone watches YOUR team? What’s the value of having an NBA superstar laughing at your jokes, treating you like you’re the president and pretending you’re his buddy? What’s the value of walking into a restaurant in Italy and telling the maître d’, “I’m the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, I’d like a table� What’s the value of having a potential business partner say to you, “Hey, I heard you own the NBA team that has Durant and Westbrook�
What’s the value of having a real chance of being handed the Larry O’Brien Trophy â€" as you’re being watched by 20 million people, as you’re surrounded by famous athletes, as you’re about to be covered in champagne â€" before you begin screaming in delight and waving the trophy in the air?
What’s the value of walking down the street, having a fan nervously approach you … and then watching tears well in his eyes as he graciously thanks you for saving his team?
So that was the conundrum: NBA teams are clearly ego purchases, but rich guys hate losing money … and that’s about ego, too. In 2010 and 2011, six NBA franchises sold or changed hands, and another four were practically thrown on Craigslist. That’s one-third of the league. A steady stream of billionaires crunched numbers and came to the same conclusion: Unless it’s a killer market, the NBA isn’t a good investment. During 2011’s lockout, Philly sold for a measly $280 million as the league frantically looked for a New Orleans buyer (and didn’t find one).
Everything flipped in December of that year, after the NBA negotiated an owner-favorable collective bargaining agreement (and then some) that included a 50-50 revenue split, shorter long-term deals and a more punitive luxury tax system, as well as a pay-per-view event in which David Stern and Adam Silver poured Dom Perignon on each other’s heads and danced over the ruins of Billy Hunter’s career. Fine, I made that last one up. From there, everything kept breaking the NBA’s way. In no particular order …
• The economy rebounded (at least in rich guy circles).
• LeBron became the league’s most famous and talented superstar since MJ, right as we suddenly had the deepest pool of under-27 stars in 20-plus years.
• The 2013 Finals went down as one of the greatest Finals ever, followed by a LeBron-Durant rivalry emerging that could and should carry the rest of the decade.
• Americans stopped caring about PEDs and started worrying about concussions right when everyone should have started worrying about PEDs in basketball (a sport that rarely has any concussions).
• The YouTube/broadband/iPad/GIF/Instagram/Twitter era turned basketball into a 24/7 fan experience â€" just the ideal sport for the Internet era, the kind of league in which your buddies email you a bizarre Kobe Bryant tweet, an endearing Spurs team selfie and a ridiculous Blake Griffin dunk GIF in the span of three hours (and by the way, that happened to me yesterday).
• A new multimedia rights deal is coming soon … and it’s going to easily double the current deal.
(Repeat: easily double it.)
And I didn’t even mention basketball grabbing the no. 2 spot behind soccer as the world’s most popular sport. I’m not sure when it happened, but it happened. Buy an NBA franchise in 2014 and deep down, you’re thinking about stuff like, I wonder if fans from 250 countries will be paying for League Pass 20 years from now? Throw in the other breaks and that’s how you end up climbing from here …
June 2011: Detroit, $325 million October 2011: Philly, $280 million June 2012: New Orleans, $338 million October 2012: Memphis, $377 million
To here …
May 2013: Sacramento, $534 million April 2014: Milwaukee, $550 million
Even if the NBA didn’t always favor leaguewide democracy like the NFL does, it’s definitely heading that way. Just look at Oklahoma City, one of the league’s tiniest markets. Fans around the world buy Durant’s Thunder jersey, follow his tweets, click on his Instagram photos and watch his 40-point explosions … and it wouldn’t matter if he were playing for Oklahoma City, New York or East Bumfart. Every time OKC plays in Los Angeles, I find myself astounded by the number of Durant and Westbrook jerseys floating around. Kids in Southern California wearing Oklahoma City jerseys??? What???
The SuperSonics’ still-indefensible Oklahoma City move inadvertently changed the business of basketball, proving the right star (or stars) could transform a team in the smallest market into a marquee juggernaut. We wondered if that was true during LeBron’s aborted prime in Cleveland, but Durant and Westbrook eliminated any and all doubts. It doesn’t really matter where they play, just like it doesn’t really matter where Anthony Davis plays, and it doesn’t really matter who drafts Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker.
The OKC hijacking also created the league’s first extortion city â€" Seattle, the NBA’s version of L.A.’s Potemkin NFL franchise. These days, the mere threat of Sonics 2.0 can get a state-of-the-art arena built in other markets and bump up bidding wars by $100 millionâ€"$125 million. It’s hard to call multibillionaires “tragic†figures, but frustrated kajillionaires Steve Ballmer and Chris Hansen are the greatest owners the NBA never had. They made a shockingly lavish offer for the Kings (nearly $800 million if you added everything up) and the biggest offer for the Bucks (more than $600 million, from what I heard). Two committed billionaires desperately trying to bring the NBA back to a passionate market, willing to spend their own money on an arena and knowing they can fill every suite and courtside seat … and they can’t get a team? Incredible.
Ballmer and Hansen deserve praise for resisting the temptation to pull an OKC â€" in other words, they could have pretended to save the Bucks, waited a year or two, then stabbed Milwaukee in the back like Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon shanked Seattle. Maybe they knew Herb Kohl, a former politician who has spent his life dealing with chicanery, would sniff that ploy out. Senator Kohl never wanted to be remembered as The Guy Who Killed Basketball in Milwaukee. Instead, he’ll be remembered for the following things other than, you know, being a senator:
A. Buying the Bucks for $18 million in 1985, then selling them for a record $550 million only 29 years later. That’s incredible.
B. Presiding over a 26-year run from 1989 to 2004 in which the Bucks had only ONE memorable team and may have even left the league for a couple of years without anyone noticing. Also incredible.
C. Heroically keeping the Bucks in Milwaukee … even though they were a threat to leave Milwaukee because he did such a poor job owning them, but still.
D. Generously donating $100 million to the city of Milwaukee on his way out, either for a new arena or as an apology for his last 39 free-agent signings (it’s unclear).
Did you ever think the Bucks sale would turn into a feel-good story? Remember, 30 months ago nobody on the planet wanted New Orleans. This month, we had multiple bidders chasing the league’s worst team â€" as many as six, according to my sources â€" with the winners prevailing thanks to deep pockets and a pledge to keep the Bucks in Milwaukee (even earmarking an extra $100 million towards a new arena). So the league flipped its supply-and-demand situation: Right now, it has a slew of potential buyers and nobody for sale. This has never, ever, EVER happened before.
In general, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots seems to be closing fast. Milwaukee fetched $100 million more than Golden State four years ago. The belatedly appreciated Spurs drew a 10.4 rating for 2013’s Finals against Miami, comparable to Lakers-Celtics in 2010 (10.6) and nearly 150 percent higher than Cavs-Spurs in 2007. And what about Dwight Howard jumping from the Lakers to the Rockets? Would that have ever happened 10 years ago? It doesn’t matter where you play anymore. Stars are more likely to gravitate toward great owners and great situations than great cities. That’s a good thing.
So, are 30 franchises enough? The NBA could command $800 million easily for Seattle’s expansion team â€" awarding about $27 million to each owner â€" but there’s concern within Adam Silver’s circles that there isn’t quite enough talent to support a 31st team. Did you follow Tankapalooza 2014? If you watched the Lakers defend pick-and-rolls with Bob Sacre and Kendall Marshall, or you ever uttered the words, “I kind of like Henry Sims,†you know what I mean. We don’t need MORE basketball teams, at least anytime soon. That means Seattle will remain Extortion Ground Zero for the foreseeable future.
Speaking of Silver, I liked how he handled a legitimately complicated situation. Within two weeks of becoming commissioner, Silver pressured the Bucks to settle its arena situation by 2017. But these weren’t the same life-or-death stakes like in Sacramento: Without the Kings, Sacramento would have transformed into Just Another City In California; without the Bucks, everyone in Milwaukee would move on to the Packers, Brewers and Marquette basketball without blinking. That’s a big difference. Silver also had the Seattle kajillionaires lurking, and he never knew if the 79-year-old Kohl might change his mind. Remember, Kohl splurged for O.J. Mayo, Zaza Pachulia and Gary Neal last summer. All bets are off with that guy.
At some point, Lasry and Edens entered the picture. Lasry is the CEO of Avenue Capital; Edens is the cofounder of Fortress Investment Group. They kept everything eerily quiet; even on Thursday night, one day before I wrote that they were probably getting the team, there wasn’t a single Google result about them pursuing any sports franchises. (Believe me, I looked.) Personally, I enjoyed these guys because their names make them sound like lead singers of a soft rock band from the early ’80s that definitely would have toured with Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross. Kohl liked them, too. You know the rest.
So, if Milwaukee is worth $550 million, then what’s everyone else worth? I spent the past 10 days asking various People Who Know Things that question. The consensus: Both the Lakers and Knicks would fetch Dodgers money (more than $2 billion, easy). It would take something in the $1.7 billion range just to grab Jerry Reinsdorf’s attention for a Chicago conversation, or for Donald Sterling to string you along for the Clippers before turning you down. Mark Cuban (Dallas), Micky Arison (Miami) and Wyc Grousbeck (Boston) aren’t listening unless the conversation starts at $1.3 billion. And Lacob and Harris would double their Warriors and Sixers investments from four years ago. Easily.
You know what’s amazing? Bennett and McClendon could sell Oklahoma City for $850 millionâ€"$900 million right now, if only because they have two of the league’s biggest assets: Jeremy Lamb and Steven Adams. (Sorry, I had to.) But can you put a price on sitting courtside for Thunder games in the Finals as The Guy Who Owns The Team With Durant And Westbrook? Again, what’s that worth? It makes the dynasty-crushing Harden trade and OKC’s refusal to pay the luxury tax even more infuriating â€" on the one hand, they’re pinching pennies, and on the other hand, they could triple their investment tomorrow. God, this makes me ornery. They don’t deserve Durant.
The consensus dark horse for “The Next Team To Quietly Get Shoppedâ€? None other than the Pistons, purchased by Tom Gores just three years ago for the belated steal of $325 million. Gores kept living in Beverly Hills over moving back to Michigan, allowed the Joe Dumars era to degenerate into a debacle, and generally acts like one of those eBay buyers who keeps forgetting to give you feedback. Even if he’s not shopping the Pistons, there’s a general belief that he wouldn’t hate the idea of flipping them, doubling his investment and never thinking about Josh Smith or Brandon Jennings again. If Gores makes John Calipari a Phil Jacksonâ€"type offer to run everything â€" and by the way, don’t rule this out â€" that would be a fancy way of saying, “We’re briefly relevant again. I’m ready to sell!â€
Then again, Gores would be insane to sell right now. In case you missed it, the Bucks and Kings just commanded a combined $1.085 billion on the open market without anyone knowing how high the next media-rights deal might climb.
Here, in all caps: THE BUCKS AND KINGS JUST COMMANDED A COMBINED $1.085 BILLION ON THE OPEN MARKET.
If you pretend the NBA is an exclusive beach on Turks and Caicos, it makes more sense. Let’s say it’s the single best beach in the world, and it can only hold 30 houses. Let’s say some of the houses are bigger and prettier than others, only all of them have the same gorgeous ocean view. And let’s say all 30 owners feel strongly that their investments will keep improving, barring a collapsed stock market or an unforeseen weather catastrophe, of course. Does it really matter if you bought one of the ugliest houses on that beach? Don’t you just want to crack the 30? You can always knock the house down and build a better one … right?
That’s the National Basketball Association in 2014. Who wants to be on the hottest beach? What will you pay? How bad do you want it? Get one of those 30 houses and you can invite your friends down for the weekend, show them around, make them drinks and eventually head out to your deck. And you can look out and watch the sun slowly setting, and you can hear the water splash, and you can hear your friends tell you, “I love the view, it’s spectacular.†Because right now, it is.
Robert Tinney's cover for the April 1981 issue of Byte magazineInternet Archive
If you were passionate about personal computers between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the odds were high that you were a reader of Byte magazine. And if you read Byte, you were surely a fan of Robert Tinney, the artist whose cover paintings were one of the magazine’s signature features for years.
Tinney’s work was imaginative, technically superb (he is a master of the airbrush) and, sometimes, very funny. Byte lost a little bit of its soul when the publication started phasing out his work in favor of standard-issue photos of standard-issue computers.
While rummaging around the web last week looking for something else, I came across his cover for Byte‘s April 1981 issue at the Internet Archive. I immediately shared it on Twitter, where it got about as enthusiastic a response as anything I’ve ever tweeted. There it is at the top of this post, with the artist’s permission.
This is, obviously, an amusing image. The notion that a wrist computer might have a floppy-disk drive, a QWERTY keyboard and a tiny text-based interface was a good joke in 1981, and an even better one when seen through the lens of nostalgia. (If you’re tempted to assume that the image was actually a serious depiction of what a future wrist computer might look likeâ€"well, no. Inside the magazine, which only had a brief editiorial about future computers, the editors pointed out that it wasn’t a coincidence that it happened to be the April issue of Byte.)
First, it reminds us that the smartwatch is not a new idea. Even in 1981, tech companies had been trying to build them for awhile: Tinney’s creation is a pseudo-logical extension of ideas expressed in real devices such as HP’s HP-01, a “personal information assistant†introduced in 1977. (Of course, people have been obssessed with the notion of strapping advanced communications gadgetry to their wrists since at least 1946, when Dick Tracy got his wrist radio.)
Here we are in the 21st century. The tech industry has lately made progress on this smartwatch idea, but it’s still not a problem that anyone’s completely solved, which is why it still isn’t part of everyday life. You could do a “Future Computers†cover today and put a concept smartwatch on it, just as Byte did in 1981.
The Pebble Steel smartwatchPebble
Second, for all the ways technology has radically improved in the past 33 years, the current crop of smartwatches actually have a lot in common with Tinney’s concept. The industry is still struggling with questions of display technology, input and storage, and one of the best efforts so far, the Pebble Steel, even looks eerily like the Tinney watch, sans QWERTY.
But most of all, the Tinney watch is a wonderful visual explanation of why human beingsâ€"most of us, anyhowâ€"aren’t very good at predicting the future of technology. We tend to think that new products will be a lot like the ones we know. We shoehorn existing concepts where they don’t belong. Oftentimes, we don’t dream big enough.
Tinney’s painting is a gag, but it’s not that far removed from what a serious futurist might have predicted in 1981. It’s a PC of the era, downsized to fit the wrist.
Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction. Even though some of the earliest ancestors of modern interfaces existed in laboratories in places such as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, I don’t know if it would have even occurred to anyone to envision them being built into a watch.
And today? Much of the thinking about smartwatches involves devices that look suspiciously like shrunken smartphones. That’s what we know. But I won’t be the least bit surprised if the first transcendently important wearable device of our eraâ€"the iPhone of its categoryâ€"turns out to have only slightly more in common with a 2014 smartphone than it does with a 1981 computer.
I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn't fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch "Blood" Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportunities for them, deals that came undone when they lost. It wasn't as if the winners benefited in any tangible way either. At best their victories brought them smallish short-term bragging rights. Among boxing insiders they were objects of scorn for having won, as incompetent at their jobs as Green, Spinks, and I were at ours.
Writing about boxing sometimes adopts a heroic perspective on the sport. This seems especially common in a certain kind of popular journalism. When a boxer gets into the ring, he's seen as entering a magic theatre of virtue and vice cut off from the rest of the world. For the fight's duration his actions assume a kind of moral transparency, defining him as noble or ignoble. But when it's over and he steps outside the ring, becoming just a person again, the aura sticks. To participate in fight fixing therefore defines him morally not only as a professional fighter, but as a person. Lost in this vision of things is any awareness of the way boxing actually works as a business, and the racially and economically inflected cultures within which that business is transacted.
Why did I fix fights? I fixed fights because it was the smart thing to do.
Blood
I started managing Mitch Green in late 1991, a little more than a year before his loss to Bruce Johnson. He'd been a high-profile contenderâ€"an imposing eccentric who'd famously fought Mike Tyson twice, once in the ring and once on a Harlem street, and who with a little work could be brought back into the title picture. Our first business meeting took place at a gimmicky penthouse restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., that revolved slowly above the city. The first thing Mitch did was rise up from the table, peel down the top of his bright orange jumpsuit, flex his pecs, kiss his biceps, and invite a roomful of sedate diners to "feast your eyes on what a real heavyweight is supposed to look like."
This bit of underground theater made me optimistic: Mitch Green could still work a room. But no sooner had the ink on our contract dried than he got shot. While idling on the corner of 129th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Mitch slapped a man who'd been baiting him about his fights with Mike Tyson. The guy bolted into his apartment and came back blasting. I still have the blood-stained sneaker, complete with bullet hole. I keep it as a kind of macabre reminder, though I'm not sure of what.
Mitch limped six blocks to Harlem Hospital. He was X-rayed, told the bullet had passed through his leg, given a clean bill of health, and sent home. The attending doctor missed the bullet lodged behind Green's knee. By the time Mitch called me a week later, he couldn't walk. His femur, further traumatized by running and jumping rope, had split like a tree branch. I flew him to Boston, picked him up at Logan Airport, and took him straight to Beth Israel Hospital. The Celtics' orthopedic surgeon, Frank Bunch, had him on an operating table within two hours. If he'd waited another day, Mitch probably would have lost his leg.
During the six months of rehab that followed, Mitch lived at a house I owned near Boston. He regularly demanded cash; had two girlfriends flown in from different parts of the country for what turned into a non-consensual threesome that ended only when my terrified downstairs tenants called the police; sent the "salary" he was getting home to his mother, who spent it on bingo trips to Atlantic City, and complained incessantly. I didn't get it: I was knocking myself out for him and he was doing nothing for me, yet he never stopped complaining.
Visions of Don King and Mike Tyson obsessed Mitch Green, along with those of a number of black civic leaders he believed to be in cahoots with them. It was generally assumed he was paranoid, crazy, and dangerous. But consider: When Mitch was a child in Georgia, his father had been shot dead at point-blank range by a man he was simultaneously shooting dead. The men's funerals were held in the same mortuary on the same afternoon, both families sweating through their Sunday best no more than a few feet apart. Or this: As a gang lord, Mitch presided over New York's Black Spades, a gig that required him to maintain an aura of menace while fending off anyone insane enough to challenge him. Or this: As a young man who'd won the New York Golden Gloves heavyweight title four times in a row, he'd been given money, cars, and an assortment of flashy presents by some of boxing's white elite, like Shelly Finkel and Lou Duva.
After sleepwalking in 1986 through a 10-round decision loss to Mike Tyson, held in Madison Square Garden and shown on HBOâ€"for which he received $30,000â€"Green met his nemesis again on the street. Their brief, violent encounter made headlines. Afterward, Green dropped off the boxing map.
My job was to bring him back. Smarter men than I said it was impossible. Signing up Mitch Green even earned me 1993's "Sucker of the Year" award in Boxing Illustrated. The only money Green ever made me came from betting Al Braverman, Don King's director of boxing, that I'd be able to coax him back inside the ring.
I was sure I'd picked the right foil for Green's comeback match. A gangly, knock-kneed cruiserweight, Bruce Johnson came in with a record of 8-22-1. He'd been knocked out 17 times and had never beaten a credible opponent. Johnson always arrived from out of town prepared to lose. His livelihood depended on his career going nowhere.
In the dressing room, Bruce told me he was afraid of Mitch Green, then held me up for $500 more than the price we'd agreed on. All I would have had to say for Mitch Green to win was: "You want five hundred more dollars? Get knocked out by the third round."
I didn't do that. I didn't think I needed to. Mitch Green was going to kill him.
But in a tiny arena in Woodbridge, Va., on a frigid winter night when a blizzard reduced the house to nearly nothing, Mitch Green, angry that he wasn't getting paid enough or being properly respected, got into the ring and refused to throw or block punches. Johnson was never on his radar. Mitch ignored his feeble jabs. He also ignored me, my partners Pat and Tony Petronelli, and everything but the private buzzing in his head, gazing stone-faced over Johnson's shoulder into the middle distance. After several warnings from the referee to start punching or risk having the fight stopped, the plug was pulled in the third round as the handful of spectators hooted. Mitch "Blood" Green had thrown his future away in less than nine minutes.
I wouldn't talk to Mitch Green after that. I'd lost a year of my life and $80,000 on him.
The Foolproof Opponent
I never intended to manage Leon Spinks, the free-wheeling heavyweight who'd upset Muhammad Ali in 1978. I was interested in his sons Darrell and Tommy and their fellow East St. Louisan Freddie Norwood, and that entailed looking out for Leon, too. It wasn't until he lost a decision in North Carolina to Eddie Curry, a dive artist who could fight a little if no one told him not to, that I got roped into actually managing him.
That night Leon and Curry quickly bogged down into a slow grind, their mutual lack of conditioning forcing them to drape themselves over each other in a sodden ring where the temperature was over a hundred. Leon hung in on heart; Eddie, with the dawning realization that he was going to get a win over a former heavyweight champion.
But Spinks caught two lucky breaks: For one thing, Eddie Curry was being paid by the round; for another, I'd done previous business with Bobby Mitchell, the South Carolina commissioner brought in to oversee the card, who also happened to be Curry's manager. After eight rounds, under the impression that he'd gone the distance, Curry demanded that his gloves be cut off. Feeling a sense of responsibility to Leon, who was only fighting to help his sons, I climbed into the ring and told Mitchell the fight had to continue: The fight poster listed the main event as a 10-rounder.
But not even the judges were aware. The decision had already been announced for Curry, and he refused to put his gloves back on.
In the center of the ring, I made some noise: "It's a 10-round fight. You've got one minute before the next bell rings. Better get Eddie's gloves back on."
"The fight's over. The decision's been announced."
"It's been announced to 300 people who'll never check the record book."
Mitchell conferred with Curry.
"Eddie, this is your night. Spinks is an old man."
"No way. I ain't fightin' no more."
I butted in. "Thirty seconds before the next round. Let's go."
"OK, I see what you're doing. Can we talk about this in the office?"
"Absolutely," I said. "I just need it to go into the record books as a win for Spinks. Does Leon win the fight?"
"Shit, yeah. Leon wins the fight. But do we have to take care of it here?"
So Leon Spinks got his win, and I got stuck with Leon Spinks.
I had no idea what to do with him. He couldn't fight. The only interest promoters had in him was as a small notch on some young killer's belt. Then an unlikely offer to fight Larry Holmes in China popped up. It wouldn't pay by the standards of Leon's brief heyday, but it was a hundred times more than he was getting for his current fights. I was sure I could get Holmes to listen to reason. Years earlier, in defense of his heavyweight title, he'd mercifully knocked out a much better Leon Spinks in three easy rounds.
But before the Holmes fight could be madeâ€"even as far away as Chinaâ€"I had to put Leon back in the public eye. That meant a high-profile venue where he could conspicuously knock someone out. I landed him a main event at the Washington D.C. Convention Center.
To get Leon on the cheap, the promoters, a small group of street-smart local hustlers raising money for Marion Barry's re-election, let me bring in my own opponent. But my fall guy came up with a bad CAT scan and the D.C. commission rejected him. I was stuck scrambling for a replacement.
John Carlo had never fought before. No commission would sanction a fight between an ex-champ, however diminished, and a debuting boxer who didn't have the equivalent of an Olympic pedigree. Online records had made it impossible to invent wins and losses in any commissioned state, so I had to falsify Carlo's entire professional career by staging his "fights" in non-sanctioned states. I imagined him as a journeyman with a respectable 13-2 record. For opponents I chose the names of real fighters, habitual losers who often fought in unregulated states. Even they wouldn't remember whether or not they'd lost to a John Carlo. But after these elaborate maneuvers to provide Spinks with a foolproof opponent, I failed to take the one step needed to guarantee the result: I didn't fix the fight.
John himself brought it up. A couple of days before the fight, he asked, "What happens if I win?"
We both laughed about that.
"If you can beat him, beat him. If Leon can't handle a guy who's never been in the ring before, he has no business being there. You'd be doing him a favor."
A few seconds after the bell rang, Leon extended a brotherly right hand to John Carlo, intending to touch gloves. But Carloâ€"intense fear producing the effect opposite of what I'd expectedâ€"was not in a collegial mood, first feinting and soon following through with a viciously professional left hook that felled the former champ as if he'd been nailed by a 10-pound mallet. Spinks dropped straight back, his head bouncing audibly off the canvas. He barely beat a very slow count, and Carlo was on him in a delirium, dropping him again. A minute later the fight was over. So were any thoughts of Larry Holmes, China, or the $175,000 Spinks would have made fighting someone skillful enough not to hurt him.
The Art Of The Fix
No sport is romanticized more than boxing. Heroic writers use boxing to make moral sense of the world. Noble fighters, by their actions, stabilize chaos: Their bravery in the face of untenable circumstances and violent hostility helps to restore value and security to a now-intelligible world, one inhabited by heroic journalists and their readers. Heroic journalism attaches a sentimental narrative to the rise of a title-holder, carving out a cinematic character arc wherein horrific circumstances are overcome through moral probity, grit, hard work, and determination, and climaxing with HBO viewers themselves choking up a little as the victor tearfully accepts his championship belt after winning a brutal encounter at Caesar's Palace.
Winning a world title is definitely hard, time-consuming work, so that kind of arc expresses some truth. What it obscures is the fact that most of the fights designed to get that fighter his title shot are fixed in one way or another. Anybody who spends his own money advancing a fighter and knows what he's doing engages in some form of fight fixing. And, wittingly or not, almost every titleholder has benefited from fixes.
A former president of the Boxing Writers Association of America once said, "When it comes to sports, all a writer needs to know is how wonderful it feels to win, how miserable it feels to lose, and how hard it is to try." If you get paid to write about boxing and believe this, the kindest thing that can be said about you is that you're a sucker.
I see boxing differently now than when I was managing fighters. Starting out, I assumed that an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport as art was all I'd need to handle the careers of professional fighters. I didn't manage opponentsâ€"my clientele was made up of champions, contenders, and prospects. I thought champions should be matched with contenders whom they'd beat, contenders should be matched with tough journeymen whom they'd beat, and prospects should be matched with lesser prospects or former champions or contendersâ€"whom they'd beat.
I could pick the winner of a fight more than 90 percent of the time, and I thought this was a unique talent. I didn't know that nearly everyone in boxing could do it; those who can't, hire someone to do it for them. Boxing's political factions and complex, shifting hierarchies were also largely unknown to me.
In fights that aren't fixed, even well-informed mismatches can go awry. Personal problems, off nights, jealousies, injuries, internecine conflicts, double-crosses, hometown decisions, promotional affiliationsâ€"all can throw a monkey wrench into the most carefully laid of plans.
Despite my careful matchmaking of another fighter, Martin Foster, I watched him go from an undefeated heavyweight whose only real asset was his reliable chin to a sure kayo victim whose knees would sag and whose eyes would roll into the back of his head whenever he was tagged solidly.
This transformation took place over a matter of months. Finally, on a Don King card in Belfast, Ireland, Foster lost in a way that was chilling enough for me that I no longer wanted to be even partially responsible for his further participation in boxing.
Fighting the light-punching Frans Botha in a heavyweight title eliminator, Foster had his nose erased from his face by a bolo punch that everyone in King's Hall but he saw coming. It was such a sucker punch that Botha, who'd wound it up theatrically, started laughing. And then, still laughing, he did it again. And it landed again. As Foster began to sag to the canvas, the referee rushed in to save him. His cornermen, Tony Petronelli and Chuck Bodak, and I half-carried Martin down the ring steps and across the large auditorium to his dressing room. It took Chuck nearly a half hour to get Foster to spit all the blood from his broken nose into a bucket. By the time he was done, the bucket was fuller than it would've seemed possible.
Martin Foster owed me a lot of money at that point. But when we met at the airport the next morning to fly to different parts of the U.S., I told him that I'd forget about the debt if he promised to retire from boxing. He had a wife and two young kids, and I was aware that somewhere down the lineâ€"in five or 10 yearsâ€"they were going to lose some of him even if he never took another punch. I was clear: If I found out that he'd returned to fighting, I would come after him and collect my money.
We shook hands on it, then went to our separate planes. I never saw Martin Foster again. When I got Don King's paycheck for the fight, I kept all of it.
After I stopped managing Martin, he was knocked out 11 times in 12 non-fixed losses, no doubt resulting in much additional damage.
Boxing managers have an obligation to minimize the amount of damage their fighters sustain. By the time any fighter gets a shot at a championshipâ€"usually his first opportunity to make real moneyâ€"he will already have had very hard fights and been banged up in ways that will not yet be outwardly apparent to most people. His career is likely to be halfway over. If he becomes the champion, most of his title defenses during the next few years will be tough ones. If he fails in his title attempt, depending on the nature of his performance, he'll either get more chances or be demoted to the rank of "name" opponent. If he's lucky enough to get more title shots, none of them will be easy. The market demands that they not be: As a known loser, he's no longer entitled to have the path eased for him. Once he's slipped to the role of opponent, he'll get beaten up repeatedly, his purses and his health diminishing with each successive loss. And at this point, the fighter will most likely be looking at a post-career future of neurological impairment. He may have four or five real earning years left to him.
These are hard facts, but they're almost unfailingly representative of what a "successful" fighter can expect. Why should any fighter take the punishment that this profession brings, if not for money?
The most responsible way to develop a new fighter is to combine easily winnable fightsâ€"albeit ones that require some of his attention and skillâ€"with fixed fights that will move him quickly up the ratings. The goal is to earn a fighter as much money as possible without incurring unnecessary wear and tear. He'll have to be in enough tough fights when the time comes.
Fight fixing is such an accepted part of the boxing business that there's a standard way to do it. You call up or visit the gym of any trainer who represents "opponents," and have the following exchange:
"I've got a middleweight who could use a little work." [Read: His fight shouldn't be more than a brisk sparring session.]
"I got a good kid. But he ain't been in the gym much lately." [He's out of shape.]
"That's OK. I'm not looking for my guy to go too long." [It's got to be a knockout win.]
"My kid can give him maybe three good rounds."
And that's it. Your fighter's next bout will go into the record books as a third-round knockout victory.
Your guarantee that you'll get the result you want is simple: Guys who deliver opponents have to earn a living. If their fighters win, they won't be able to do that. On occasions when an opponent realizes victory is within his grasp, his trainer reminds him that getting fresh will prevent him from being paid. If this doesn't work, the trainer stops the fight in the corner after the agreed-upon round. "I have to watch out for my kid," he laments. "He was taking too much punishment" or "His leg cramped up" or "Jeez, I can't explain it. The kid just quit on me. And he was doin' so good." He shakes his head sadly.
I've arranged for countless such endings. I've bought off referees and commissioners. I've simultaneously managed fighters from both corners. I've picked up the tab for entire fight cards, effectively guaranteeing that the judges were in my pocket. While standing a foot from ringside, I've had kayoed opponents wink at me as they were being counted out.
Unfixed
There was even an occasion where what was supposed to be a fixed fight turned into a real one. It was 1994. I was looking to bring former WBO cruiserweight champ Tyrone Booze back into contention as a heavyweight. To do this required his scoring a series of quick knockouts. I had a deal going in Raleigh, N.C., where every couple of months I would fly down with the winning half of the fight card. The local matchmaker would provide the homegrown losing half or I could bring one of my own.
This time around, Booze's intended victim was Marc Machain, a keg-shaped brawler from the trailer parks of rural Vermont. "The Rutland Bull" stood 5-foot-7 and weighed 220 poundsâ€"only a few of them fat. Machain was a sentimental, happy-go-lucky guy who loved to fight, whether he was landing or taking punches. His favorite type of fight was when he got to do both. In the past he'd worked for me as sparring partner; I knew he'd never beat Tyrone Booze in a legitimate fight. But he might take him the distance, with the two guys banging heads and exchanging elbows and low blows for the whole 10 rounds. Even in nothing fights, it's inevitable that heavyweights will do damage. If there's a way to minimize injuries, you're foolish not to use it.
I explained this to Marc Machain. "Have fun in there," I told him. "Give Tyrone five or six rounds, then I'll have Tony stop it in the corner."
The Rutland Bull reluctantly agreed, and we had a deal. I thought we had a deal. At the time we made it, Machain undoubtedly thought so, too. He was an honorable man.
If you hadn't spent time around tough guys, you wouldn't peg Tyrone Booze as one. He had a round head, tiny amphibious eyes, sloping shoulders, and a layer of fat that no amount of training could remove. He smiled often and laughed easily. His voice was deep, but swooped up to a falsetto "whaaat?" when someone's behavior surprised him. When he was tired, he sometimes slurred his words.
Tyrone was an original thinker who knew everything there was to know about the boxing business except how to make money in it. He had spent his career losing competitive and occasionally unjust decisions, one after another, to the animals no one else would fight. He had fought eight world champions, including Evander Holyfield, Dwight Muhammad Qawi, and Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, without having been off his feet against any of them.
Still, I had to be persuaded to manage him. He had too many losses, and he almost never knocked people out. But Floyd Patterson, who trained some of my fighters, thought something could be done with him. And then later, when Booze went to Las Vegas to work as chief sparring partner for Riddick Bowe, I got a surprise phone call from Eddie Futch, asking if he could train him. He'd been impressed with how Tyrone handled himself against the heavyweight champ. Bowe had gotten a little out of line, so Booze had ducked his shoulders, plowed into him, and tossed him over his head onto the canvas. You didn't fuck around with Tyrone Booze.
In his dressing room before the fight, Booze was queasy. His last ring appearance had taken place 17 months earlier in front of over 10,000 people in Hamburg, Germany, where he lost his WBO cruiserweight title to Markus Bott. He'd been characteristically placid before and after the fight. It was nothing to him to fight big-name opponents in hostile territory. When he fought Evander Holyfield on NBC, he'd spent part of the fight laughing at him, waving him on.
But here in Raleigh, fighting in front of 400 people in a dilapidated theater called the Ritz, Tyrone Booze was becoming slightly unhinged. He couldn't settle down. He tried to lie down on the couch, but wound up bolting from the dressing room, walking the hall and back. We couldn't get him to work up a good sweat. He suddenly had chills. His stomach was upset, and he was thought he was going to be sick.
"Man, I don't know why I feel like this. I can't get loose. I mean, I was cool when I fought Bert Cooper. Bert Cooper. Didn't nobody punch like Bert Cooper. And I got to worry about this fat little white boy? He ain't nobody to be afraid of."
Tyrone Booze wasn't afraid of anybody. Or anything. None of this came from fear. Tyrone Booze was unable to process getting back what he'd lost when he'd stepped away from boxing.
More than almost any other activity, boxing forces and keeps you squarely in the center of each moment. To box requires you to be dynamically alive, to be alert to every possibility. Lapse for a moment and you'll get knocked out. Anything less than complete absorption might even get you killed. Once you've grown used to that degree of vitality, it's hard to withdraw from it.
If professional fighters really do fight primarily for moneyâ€"and they doâ€"it would be naïve to dismiss the existential elements that bring them back to the ring once their money is gone. Booze wouldn't have returned to boxing if there hadn't been a promise of big paydays soon, but what was knocking the shit out of his system was the inchoate elation of knowing he was able to get back in the ring.
As a rule, you don't tell the intended winner of a fixed fight that the outcome is rigged. It causes him to fight unnaturally, and the fix is easier to spot. But Booze was an old pro; I felt OK telling him to go easy. And I liked Machain. Durable as he was, I didn't want him to have to take too much of a pounding for his thousand dollars.
I brought in seven of the eight fights on that night's card. Besides Booze, future middleweight champ Keith Holmes and Olympic gold medalist Andrew Maynard got wins: pearls before swine. The Raleigh crowd, mostly drunken rednecks, was a universe away from seeing world-class fighters except when I brought them. They were yahooing with mayhem after a night of emphatic first- and second-round knockouts. For the main event, they were itching for something longer and more punishing; a decisive early knockout wouldn't do. They wanted to see a couple guys beat each other up in a slugfest. Somehow this collective longing found its way up into the ring and imprinted itself on the two fighters waiting for the opening bell. Standing at ringside just below Booze's corner, I had an inkling that things might become unruly.
The fighters tried to do what was expected of them. At least for the first two minutes they followed the script. Then Booze caught Machain walking in and buckled his knees with a right uppercut. I don't think he intended to hit him so hard. It was a combination of training, muscle memory, and a sudden access of adrenaline. I could see Machain was badly rattled. He smiled at Booze. He said something through his mouthpiece; I couldn't make it out. He banged his gloves together. He threw a wild overhand right that missed by a mile. It sent a complex message: I'm still behaving, but don't try that shit again.
But it was more than that. There was an invitation in the punch. I could see it. The bell rang, and that's when I think the two of them decided to fight as hard as they could. They knocked gloves enthusiastically. Machain said something to Booze. Tyrone laughed.
In the second, I could see it was not going to be the sparring session I'd asked for. Marc Machain pressed forward, fighting out of a crouch, trying to come in under Booze's headhunting shots, hoping to bang to the ribs, occasionally throwing haymakers at Tyrone's nicely tucked-in head. He succeeded just enough to keep himself in the fight, and keep the fight exciting.
Meanwhile, Tyrone was having a party. If you were going to make a real fight for him, it would be hard to pick a better opponent than Marc Machain, who constantly waded in with no concern for being hit, his gloves wide apart, his chin jutted defiantly forward. Booze teed off with uppercuts as the crowd oohed and "oh, shit!"-ed. There was now an audible black contingent in the house. I started hearing the word "nigger" coming from both white and black voices, its meaning dependent on who was using it.
The first knockdown, predictably from a right uppercut, came late in round two. Booze placed it perfectly, nailing Machain under the chin as he came in, flooring him suddenly. Machain dropped in a heap at Booze's feet. I thought he was finished. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and worked his jaw.
Then, to my dismay, he got up.
At that point, I might have been able to signal to Tony Petronelli to throw in the towel. People would have bought it. I didn't do that. I looked at Tyrone Booze waiting in the neutral corner. He wanted to fight. Machain signaled to the ref that he was OK. He wanted to fight, too. The crowd wanted them to fightâ€"rednecks and blacks alike. I thought, "Everyone wants the fight. Fuck it, let them fight."
For as long as it lasted it was a good fight, for the crowd. It had the appearance of give-and-take, although it was actually one-sided. Because Machain continued to come forward (except when he was being drilled with uppercuts), he gave untrained viewers hope for a miracle. They were true believers, as was Machain himself, who felt that if he landed just one haymaker, he could end things. Except that Marc Machain didn't actually punch very hard. And Tyrone Booze had absorbed, without flinching, the hardest punches of the hardest punchers of his era.
I settled in at ringside and allowed myself to become entertained by the fight. Booze was working off ring rust, getting his timing back, putting in some rounds. Machain was having the time of his life getting the shit kicked out of him.
Toward the middle of round five my business sense returned. Even though the fight was one sided, it had become predictably rough. Booze hadn't knocked Machain down again, so there hadn't been a "right" time to stop it. I started to worry whether Tyrone could score the knockout he needed.
I was about to walk to Machain's corner to let Tony know his fighter would need to be diagnosed with either a shoulder injury or a broken jaw (either one would require that the fight be stopped) when the end came.
It was the same uppercut that caused the first knockdown. Booze's punch was just as perfect, but no harder. Machain, if anything, took it better than the first one, since he was now warmed up. But he again got dropped hard, and I only had to look over to his corner to get Tony Petronelli started into the ring.
"Oh, no," Machain wailed, "I'm OK, I'm OK." He put his gloves up in fighting stance. Tony was leading him to his corner, pulling out the mouthpiece.
"Aw, Tony, why'd you stop it? I was having fun! Nobody wants it stopped."
He was right. Mostly right. I wanted it stopped.
After it was over, the two fighters sat at a table at a Denny's across from the Ritz. Machain was banged up a little. Not too badly. Booze was fine.
Now ravenously hungry, wolfing down mountains of starchy, sugar-coated, butter- and oil-dripping fast food, Booze and Machain were still giddy from the fight. Effusively complimentary, talking with their mouths full, they relived every detail of what had just taken place.
"I couldn't believe you was gettin' up from them uppercuts, man." Booze shook his head in admiration.
"I couldn't believe how you kept catching me with them."
"That's 'cause you was walkin' straight in. You don't never move your head."
"I got a hard head."
"It's true! It's true. You do got a hard head. But I was timin' you, man."
"I know. You timed me good."
The 89th Second
The best fixer I ever knew was Vin Vecchione. In the 1990s we spent a lot of time together, making big plans, drinking bad coffee in cheap diners, laughing at our friends and enemies, forging boxers' medical records, and getting our fighters wins.
Vin died suddenly in 2009. I'd left boxing and we'd lost touch. But I wanted to see how Peter McNeeley was doing, so I went to the memorial service. The embalmer had done a lousy job: Although still clutching a cigar, wearing his cap, and smiling his secretive half-smile, Vin didn't look like anyone I'd ever known or anyone who'd once been a person.
When I met Vin in 1993, I was managing an undefeated heavyweight I'd brought to Brockton from the Midwest. Vin handled McNeeley, also undefeated. I'd agitated on local radio shows and in newspapers for a showdown. Vecchione called to request a sit-down at a local luncheonette. When I arrived, he draped a hefty arm around my shoulder, walked me to a booth, helped me off with my overcoat, and sat down across from me.
"My fighter ain't never going to fight your fighter. OK, we got that outta the way. Now we might as well get along."
Two years later McNeeley would last 89 seconds against Mike Tyson in what was then the largest grossing event in sports history. The fight ended when Vecchione nonchalantly slipped between the ropes to save his still-standing fighter.
There were two journalistic responses, both outraged. The first was based mainly on a perceived attack on the sanctity of the sport: People had paid big money to witnessâ€"depending on their temperamentâ€"a fight or a slaughter, and had been euchred out of seeing either. McNeeley was still OK when referee Mills Lane waved things off. And though he was in some trouble when the fight had ended, it wasn't a sure thing he was finished. Boxing writers pointed out that McNeeley hadn't "gone out on his shield." Soon after the fight's conclusion, he could be seen walking around the ring with an outsize grin on his face, chatting with reporters, family, and friends, his distress wearing off by the second. Paid nearly a million dollars to serve as a human sacrifice, he'd escaped without a bruise.
The second response didn't show up until the fight narrative had passed through a series of plausibility tests and been green-lit as acceptable. This version featured McNeeley fighting valiantly ("He charged right at Tyson!"), and being inexplicably robbed of glory by Vecchione. As Ferdie Pacheco stammered, "He doesn't belong in boxing if he's going to save his fighter." Vecchione had cheated both Peter and the public.
But Peter McNeeley, if not expertly maneuvered, would never have gotten nearly as far in boxing as he did. Vin earned McNeeley a $700,000 payday, pushing the figure to over a million by parlaying the fight's weird conclusion into two lucrative TV commercials and keeping the door open for Peter's ongoing viability as a high-priced opponent.
Granted, Vecchione wasn't thinking only of his fighter's welfare. Vin's payoff wasn't limited to the fight purse. The real money was in knowing exactly how Peter McNeeley would do fighting Mike Tyson. And Vin knew down to the second how Peter McNeeley would do.
The night before Tyson-McNeeley, someone in Las Vegas placed a million-dollar bet on the fight not going a full 90 seconds. When Vecchione, seemingly unhurried, stepped between the ropes to force an automatic disqualification, 89 seconds had elapsed.
I didn't know it was going to happen. Vin and I had gotten together in the dining room of a Braintree, Mass., hotel just prior to his bringing McNeeley to Vegas and my heading back to my place in Puerto Rico. He'd said then that no one had approached him about having McNeeley take a dive. But later two strange things happened. I got a phone call from someone I didn't know well. This person mentioned that a private million-dollar bet had been made that the fight "wouldn't get past the first round." Soon after the fight, Vin called to ask if I'd come to his house to pick something up. I was still in Puerto Rico, so I asked if I could send someone. Vin said, "Send someone you trust." When my guy met with Vecchione, he was given an envelope that contained enough money to put my son through college (admittedly, an inexpensive one).
I've often thought about the kind of discipline that must have taken, the Zen-like calm of a small-timer who could wait and wait, during the biggest money event in sports history, until there was literally not another second to wait. I've marveled at the ingenuity of Vecchione, planning ahead for years with no budget and no promise of good things to come, slowly and steadily bringing this move to its amazing conclusion.
He'd considered every angle. Vecchione knew that for all its posturing the Nevada State Commission would have to pay him: Tyson was the biggest cash cow in the state's history, and any problem with the fight's outcome would gum up a billion dollars in future casino business. Vin had the state of Nevada, the casinos, the commission, pay-per-view boxing, and Don King by the balls, and he knew it.
A heroic narrative painted Tyson as a savage warrior from the mean streets of Brownsville and McNeeley as a soft white boy from suburban Medfield, Mass., who hadn't earned his shot. But Tyson had been a multimillionaire for his entire adult life. McNeeley and Vecchione were a couple of hungry motherfuckers who didn't have a dime between them. Had McNeeley been a more accomplished fighter, he would have torn apart the easily discouraged Tyson. And Vecchione would have had to figure out some other reason to step into the ring early.
The "What We Gonna Do Now?" Present
Even if they don't agree with it, almost anyone can understand the case for fixing a fight to keep a fighter from being unnecessarily hurt. Fixing one to get him paid might seem like a tougher sell.
According to the heroicizing ethic, boxers should fight only the toughest possible opponents, engage in fair play, maintain the moral integrity of the sport, perform courageously, make sure the fans get their money's worth, and not flaunt their success unduly. From this perspective figures like Roy Jones and Floyd Mayweatherâ€"or before them, Ray Robinson and the pre-hegemonic Muhammad Aliâ€"are seen as agitators who have no business making rules for themselves.
In the same vein there is the argument that boxers choose to participate in their matches, that they're aware of the chances they take every time they step into the ring. Well, yes and no. There's a difference between knowing that you can be maimed or killed in any particular fight and understanding how over a period of time you will in all likelihood sustain irreversible damage. The signs of this damage can be obvious but they can also be subtle, invisible to boxing outsiders. Any punch-drunk professional fighter can still duck under the ropes and kick the shit out of you or me.
For managers, boxing is a business. The meter is running from the moment a fighter's contract is signed, if not sooner. Bankrolling a stable of winning fighters takes deep pockets. The sparring partners, as well as the winners, need to eat. They all need places to live, have families to care for and bills to payâ€"whether or not they have promising futures.
My former business partner Pat Petronelli and his brother Goody became multimillionaires managing middleweight champion Marvin Hagler. Pat ran his stable like a feudal system. Fighters were told whom, when, and where they'd be fighting and what they'd be paid. Pocket cash was doled out in whatever increments he thought best. If a fighter needed to stay in Brockton between fights or while working as a sparring partner for Hagler, Pat would put him up at a rooming house run by Marvin's aunt Herbertine Walker. Herbertine rented out cheap, clean rooms, cooked healthy meals, and provided laundry services. She ran a tight ship; if you stayed at Herbertine's you stayed in line.
Except for the conspicuous presence of crack users and dealers, walking from the gym to Herbertine's boarding house was like being in Birmingham or Mobile during the 1950s. The neighborhood was entirely self-contained. Barbershops, variety stores, bars, barbecue shacks, laundromats, and beauty salons crowded together. It was known to be a dangerous area, but walking through itâ€"hearing talk and laughter, music pulsing from storefronts and boom boxes, smelling the competing scents of fried food wafting from the fast-food jointsâ€"didn't seem oppressive. In neighborhoods like this, where the only victories available are very small ones, victories show up everywhere.
It was as if everyone in the neighborhood were operating under a different existential system than I was. Life was defined by the "What We Gonna Do Now?" present or the "After I Hit My Number Tomorrow" future. Those were the choices. The fighters lived on what some of them called "nigger time," an imprecise measure, a vague approximation of when an event might or might not take place. It was time largely outside the volition of those remanded to it.
Boxing is a business for boxers too.
Boxers are born poor and they usually die poor. For their short spell in the business, they inhabit a place in its professional hierarchy that all but guarantees they'll remain poor even during their active careers. Boxers often can't negotiate or even understand their own contracts. Of course, most contracts are unintelligible except to lawyers, but boxers typically have little education and are often functionally illiterate. Many fighters turn over the exclusive rights to sign their contracts to their managers. I'd never have managed a fighter whose contracts I couldn't sign or whose purse checks couldn't be made out to me.
All in all, it isn't surprising that boxers operate under a different system from the people who make money off of them or who watch and write about them. In the real world, boxers and their managers pre-arranging the outcome of fights, working collusively against a hostile system, makes sense. Fixing fights, even at the expense of the public, isn't just good business. It's a survival strategy for the disenfranchised class in boxing: the fighters themselves.
I got out of the business in the latter part of the 1990s. It would be a good story to say that I had a moral epiphany that lifted the veil from my eyes. That wouldn't be true, though. I got involved with some dangerous people, and some bad things happened. So I left. Over time, I've come to see boxing differently than when I earned my living from it. I've learned that, in boxing, damage isn't just possible or likely; it is nearly inevitable. I continue to love the art of boxing itself. But, nearly 20 years removed from it, I still find the works of the businessâ€"the larceny and the bullshit and the wheeling and dealingâ€"the most difficult and absorbing thing I've done in my life.
Indian Summer
Another thing that happened in the real world, the day after the the Spinks-Carlo fight.
It was an uncharacteristically hot afternoon for D.C. in late October. An Indian summer, I guess. I was sitting in the coffee shop of the Courtyard Marriott, directly across from the convention center, talking to someone I knew. The night before had been a fucked up one for a number of people, myself included. None of us had lost money directly, but what had happened would keep us from making money.
Leon came across the lobby to where we were sitting. He kept himself at a slight distance, making his presence known, but not interrupting.
I said to my acquaintance, "Have you met Leon?"
"No, but I'd like to."
I introduced the two men. They shook hands. Once Leon had been introduced, he felt freer to talk to me.
"Mr. Farrell, I want a rematch. I do better next time. You get me a rematch?"
"No, Leon. No rematch. I'm sorry."
It was uncomfortable. Nobody knew what to say.
Leon, who'd taken a seat after being introduced, got up and started to move away.
"Can I get some money for something to eat?"
"The promotion is picking up the tab for the hotel expenses," I said. "Don't you want to eat in the hotel?"
Leon looked uneasy.
"OK, no problem. How much do you need?"
"I don't know. Can I get five bucks?"
I handed Leon some money and we watched him go outside.
Charles Farrell has spent most of his professional life moving between music and boxing (with a few detours along the way). He has managed five world champion boxers and has 30 CDs listed under his name. Farrell is currently at work on a book of essays about music, boxing, gangsterism, and lowlife culture; a boxing anthology edited by Mike Ezra and Carlo Rotella; and a TV series, Red House, based on events from an earlier part of his life.
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