The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  And so, on August 24, he dropped his hint about Fisher and Schwartz on Bridge Winners, then went live two days later with Bridge Cheaters, where he pulled no punches, calling Fisher a “Con Man” and laying out his evidence.

  Incriminating as Brogeland’s claims might have seemed to non-experts, experienced cheating investigators were underwhelmed. Kit Woolsey—an owlish 72-year-old with a master’s in mathematics—is a top American bridge and backgammon professional, and the investigator who had conducted, for the ACBL, the statistical analysis that implicated the “coughing doctors.” On Bridge Winners, Woolsey voiced doubts about Brogeland’s evidence. “His example hands are certainly interesting, and an indication of possible wrongdoing,” Woolsey wrote. “But I do not believe that by themselves they are any kind of proof of anything, or even any real reason to believe that there were signals being given.” Woolsey, a statistician, thought the sample size wasn’t complete and thus skewed the evidence against the pair. Barry Goren, a U.S. professional (and no relation to the revered Charles Goren, who, in the 1950s, inherited Ely Culbertson’s title of “Mr. Bridge”), slammed Brogeland for conducting a “mad crusade” against Fisher and Schwartz over the Spingold loss and excoriated him for publicly accusing the pair without due process. “Personally,” Goren wrote on Bridge Winners, “I think Boye should be thrown out of Bridge for the way this was handled.”

  As if in tacit acknowledgment of how his failure to uncover actual signaling by Fisher and Schwartz weakened his case, Brogeland had included links to three YouTube videos of the pair in match play. (The videotaping of full bridge tournaments and their posting online had occurred for the first time only a year earlier, at the 2014 European championship, in Croatia.) Brogeland and his wife had spent hours squinting at the videos, scrutinizing Fisher and Schwartz’s every twitch and cough, but had been unable to detect any definitive signaling. Brogeland resorted to asking viewers, in a caption to one of the videos, “What do you think was Fisher’s reason to lead a heart?” Seventy-two hours after the site went up, no one had any good theories.

  Then, on August 30, Brogeland’s friend and fellow bridge professional Per-Ola Cullin, at home in Stockholm, watched one of the posted videos—the one with Fisher’s suspicious heart lead. Cullin noticed that at the start of the hand Schwartz—a plodding player with a round, prematurely balding head pasted with tendrils of sweaty-looking hair who seemed, to many, the perfect patsy co-conspirator—placed on the table the small slotted board that holds the cards. This was normal. But he didn’t place the board in the center of the table, its usual position. Instead he slid it a few inches to the right, to one side of the opening in the trapdoor of the anti-cheating screen. “It really struck me as weird,” Cullin says. He decided to watch the previous hand. The board had been placed in the same peculiar spot—but this time by Fisher. As with the succeeding hand, the team led hearts. “My adrenaline started pumping,” Cullin says. “I started watching all the matches from the European championships.”

  After several hours, Cullin was convinced he had cracked the code. The board’s placement seemed to signal what suit the partner should lead with: if put in the center, play a diamond; if pushed through the trapdoor to the partner’s side of the table, a spade; if to one side of the trapdoor, a heart; if to the other, a club. Cullin tested the hypothesis on his girlfriend, who doesn’t play cards. According to him, she was able to guess the pair’s actions every time. “It was ridiculous,” says Cullin, a former criminal judge. “I’ve sent people to jail on much less convincing evidence.”

  At a little after three in the morning, he texted Brogeland: “Boye. I broke the lead signal code. 100%. Do you allready [sic] know it?” An hour later, Brogeland texted back: “Awake?” The two men got on the phone. The next day, Brogeland forwarded the information to analyst Kit Woolsey.

  Three days later, Woolsey posted to Bridge Winners an essay, “The Videos Speak,” confirming Cullin’s hypothesis and urging readers to continue scouring videos of the pair pending an official investigation by the game’s governing bodies. “We must build an airtight case here,” Woolsey wrote, and added, “Boye has gotten the ball rolling, and it is our job to complete his work.” Shortly after that, Jimmy Cayne released a statement saying (“with heavy heart”) that Fisher and Schwartz were off his team, unless ultimately cleared of all charges, and he offered to forfeit the 2015 Spingold trophy that he had won with the pair. Fisher and Schwartz were suspended by the Israel Bridge Federation and the ACBL and placed under investigation by those bodies and the EBL.

  It was an extraordinary exoneration for Brogeland. But he wasn’t done yet.

  Maaijke Mevius, a 44-year-old mother of two living in Groningen, in the Netherlands, is a physicist specializing in astronomy, and an avid recreational bridge player. Galvanized by news of the allegations against Fisher and Schwartz, she idly wondered if she could spot any illegal signaling in YouTube videos of top players. She recalled an item she’d seen on the website NewInBridge about the game’s reigning pair, Fantoni and Nunes—the bizarre incident in which Nunes claimed to have had his “mental blackout” when playing a highly suspicious lead. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is possibly an interesting pair to look at,’ ” Mevius says.

  Searching for illegal signaling in bridge videos is difficult even for top professional players, but Mevius, although an amateur player, was nevertheless well suited to the task. “From my work as a scientific investigator I know how to distinguish very well between noise and signal,” she says. Five minutes into watching her first video, she saw something. “I said, ‘Hey, these guys are placing the cards in a non-natural way.’ ” When laying their lead card face up on the table, they sometimes placed it vertically, sometimes horizontally. Did it mean something? Mevius spent the next eight hours watching videos of the pair, hand after hand. She took careful notes. She was convinced that Fantoni and Nunes were using the way they placed the card to signal to their partner whether they held any high honor-cards (ace, king, or queen). Placed vertically, they had at least one high honor; horizontally, they didn’t. Mevius emailed the information to Brogeland, whom she had never met. “I think this may be a code,” she wrote. Brogeland forwarded the email to his friend Del’Monte, an expert cheating analyst and a top bridge teacher who has given lessons to Bill Gates. Del’Monte quickly agreed with Mevius’s suspicions.

  Brogeland says that he had never suspected Fantoni and Nunes. Furthermore, he considered them friends. He liked Nunes’s shy, self-effacing manner, but was particularly close to Fantoni, a bear of a man with a friendly disposition—indeed, to some, too friendly. Meckstroth, acerbic and blunt-spoken, says he detected in Fantoni a calculated friendliness. “He was obsequious away from the table,” Meckstroth says. “I mean, nobody is this nice, going out of his way to show people pictures on his iPad. ‘Fantoni the Phony,’ I always called him.” But Brogeland found him genuinely warm; he and his wife, Tonje, had visited with Fantoni and his wife, Iolanda, in Rome. Fantoni and Nunes once secured a spot for Brogeland on a team sponsored by the Italian businessman Francesco Angelini. “These were good friends,” Brogeland says, “people I went to dinner with, I respected, I traveled with. But to me, you don’t cross that line.”

  Brogeland wanted to expose the pair without delay, but Brad Moss, the American player who had helped gather evidence against Fisher and Schwartz, urged caution. “Their sponsor is Pierre Zimmermann,” Moss says, “the most powerful person in bridge. There have been several examples in the past where the rules were—let’s just say—interpreted favorably for Mr. Zimmermann. He’s not a person you took on lightly.” (Zimmermann, in an email, claims the opposite: “I tend to lose bridge appeals in surrealistic rulings.”) Moss and others warned Brogeland that if Zimmermann chose to litigate Brogeland could be ruined. “We begged him, ‘Why don’t we take some time, gather up as much evidence, build up a dossier, and then go after them?’ ” Moss says. “And Boye was like, ‘No. I don’t care. What can they do to me? If I
live in a tent, I live in a tent. It’s now or never—look at the momentum.’ ”

  Before publicly accusing the pair, Brogeland says, he phoned Fantoni and offered an ultimatum. They could confess, and thus hope to gain some sympathy from the governing bodies—who might let them back into the game in a few years—or Brogeland would out them. They had 24 hours to decide. “I said, ‘Fulvio, we have the evidence. Please go out and admit to something. Don’t do like Fisher and Schwartz and deny everything; this is just hopeless.’ ” Fantoni seemed to consider the offer. “He said, ‘I don’t like to fight,’ ” Brogeland recalls. But no announcement came.

  On September 13, Bridge Winners published “The Videos Speak: Fantoni-Nunes.” Using the signaling code Mevius had suggested, Woolsey submitted for analysis some 85 hands played by Fantoni and Nunes. On all but three, Mevius’s code predicted the vertical or horizontal orientation of the opening lead—a statistical impossibility, Woolsey says, unless the players were colluding with a prearranged signal. “If you flip a coin 85 times, what are the chances it’s going to come up heads 82 times?” Woolsey says. “I mean, it’s one over you-don’t-want-to-know-how-many zeros.” The pair, who were suspended by the ACBL and placed under investigation by the body and the EBL, withdrew from competition. In a statement last November, the pair said, “We will not comment on allegations at this time, reserving our right to reply in a more appropriate setting.”

  Disbelief greeted the news. On Bridge Winners, readers posted more than 1,100 comments (where 50 constitutes a robust reaction), the first of which said it all: “Is this the end? Speechless now . . .”

  It wasn’t quite the end. Brogeland soon received an anonymous email tip from someone identifying himself as “No Matter.” The tipster advised taking a look at videos of Germany’s top-ranking pair, Alex Smirnov and Josef Piekarek, and Polish pair Cezary Balicki and Adam Żmudziński. No Matter even pointed out what to look for: illegal signaling based on where the pair placed the special bidding cards in the bidding tray that is passed between the players during the auction part of each hand.

  Astonishingly, when Brogeland checked the videos, he thought the tip seemed valid. Smirnov and Piekarek, told of Brogeland’s discovery, admitted to the violation in a statement: “We regret that in the past as a partnership we committed some ethical violations,” Smirnov wrote. “Josef and I have voluntarily agreed never again to play competitive bridge together and to take two years off . . . We hope that after such a time has elapsed, that we might be welcomed back . . .” Balicki and Żmudziński, who denied the charges, had their credentials for the Bermuda Bowl withdrawn by the World Bridge Federation, and the pair is now under investigation by the EBL.

  Still more astonishing, however, was the person behind the mask of No Matter. It appeared to be the disgraced Lotan Fisher.

  Jack to a King

  Brogeland cannot explain why the man who had issued threats against him was now, anonymously, helping in the quest to root out cheaters—unless Fisher, by helping to expose others, hoped to take the focus off himself and his partner. Fisher, in an email to me, claims that he only helped No Matter and that his motivation was the same as Brogeland’s—to clean up the game. “I love [bridge] more than Boye, Ish or anyone else,” he wrote, adding, “My next step is to prove that me and Ron Schwartz didn’t cheat. NEVER.” Fisher declined to say how he broke the other pairs’ cheating codes, but Brogeland says it’s no mystery. “It takes one to know one,” he says. (Having voluntarily withdrawn from play pending rulings by the European, American, and Israeli federations, Fisher and Schwartz last fall submitted a defense claiming that they did not engage in any collusive cheating.)

  Rulings on the fate of all four pairs, by the game’s governing bodies, are expected this month. Generally, players believe that anyone found to have cheated will face lifetime bans. In the meantime, Brogeland’s actions have already had a permanent effect on the game. Last December, the ACBL held one of bridge’s biggest annual tournaments, the American nationals, at the Sheraton hotel in Denver, which drew 4,372 players from countries around the world. For the first time, the ACBL had installed small video cameras and microphones at the tables to record all quarter-final through final matches—since no one imagines that every dishonest pair has been rooted out. “I don’t know how deep this goes,” says ACBL president Hartman. “Four pairs have been suspended. But are there 20 more behind that? And 20 more behind that? Who really knows? So we’re doing everything we can to see if it does go deeper.” At the end of the tournament, Hartman convened the first meeting of a new anti-cheating task force made up of eight top players, who discussed means for streamlining the process of submitting complaints and investigating them. Fred Gitelman, of Bridge Base Online, unveiled a proposed anti-cheating device, an iPad-like tablet on which players manipulate virtual cards—an innovation that the game’s top players have so far resisted, since card feel is a critical part of their experience at the table. The adoption of such a device, however, seems inevitable in a game where the ease of cheating, and the financial inducements to do so, have dogged the professional game since its inception.

  Players say that all of this has introduced a level of paranoia heretofore absent from tournament play. Steve Weinstein, of Bridge Winners, says that when he competed in the Bermuda Bowl last October, a month after the cheating scandal broke, he was unusually conscious of how he handled the cards. “I was noticing how I was leading,” he says. “Eventually I had to go: ‘I don’t cheat! Stop thinking about this!’ ” Cullin, whose sharp-eyed viewing of YouTube videos helped lead to the suspension of Fisher and Schwartz, says, “I actually went through my own videos at the Europeans to see how I played the cards. It was in all directions—and I was like, ‘Oh, I hope there is no pattern here, because I’m going to be fucked!’ ”

  But for all the watchful unease that now hangs over the game, Brogeland has become its hero, named Bridge Personality of the Year last fall by the International Bridge Press Association. The fears of a reprisal from the game’s powerful sponsors proved unfounded. (Pierre Zimmermann says that he has no plans to sue Brogeland.) He’s been hailed, by Dallas Ace Bob Hamman, as the “sheriff” who cleaned up Dodge. Brogeland prefers to say that he ran a “Bridge Interpol,” since it reflects the collaborative, international effort critical to cleaning up the game.

  In any case, Brogeland has become bridge’s reigning luminary. When he arrived for his first match at the Denver nationals, he had to fight his way through the crowd of hundreds of players and fans who had collected outside the tournament room. “Thank you for your service,” said a bearded man who had stopped Brogeland at the door of the game room.

  “Well, I had to do it,” Brogeland said, shaking the man’s hand and trying to move off.

  “You really put yourself on the line,” the man persisted.

  Brogeland shrugged, smiled. “Bridge deserves it,” he said, and then headed for his table.

  DON VAN NATTA JR.

  Welcome to the Big Time

  from espn: the magazine

  “There’s a game within the game that requires a different set of skills,” actor Edward Norton says in the voice-over as quick-cut video images show young men and women bathing a dog, jogging on the street, sweating in a sauna—all while staring, hyperfocused, into their smartphones. “There’s no off-season. This is a play-as-much-as-you-want, whenever-you-want fantasy league. And we don’t just play—we are players. We train. And we win . . .” Now those men and women are jumping, cheering, fist-pumping—each celebrating mammoth, seven-figure jackpots. “This isn’t fantasy as usual. This is DraftKings. Welcome to the big time.”

  At its peak last summer, a daily fantasy get-rich-now commercial aired every 90 seconds on television. Combined, industry leaders FanDuel and DraftKings plunged more than $750 million into TV commercials, radio spots, digital ads, and other promotions. In the weeks leading up to the 2015 NFL season, the two start-up companies spent more on advertising than the e
ntire American beer industry.

  Daily fantasy’s meteoric rise—breathtaking for its breakneck speed, avalanche of investors’ cash, and ever-spiraling valuations—spurred the two companies’ endlessly annoying, record-shattering arms race for new customers and industry dominance. In only three years, DraftKings zoomed from an idea hatched by three buddies in a Boston barroom into a nearly $2 billion company, replete with comparisons to overnight Silicon Valley unicorns like Uber and Snapchat. FanDuel was right there too. The two companies processed a combined $3 billion in player-entry fees in 2015.

  The companies were everywhere: logos emblazoned in ballparks, on NBA floors and NHL boards, and in ESPN studios. They became the darlings of the major American sports leagues, media companies, dozens of professional teams, and a deep bench of investors—from Comcast and Google to private equity firms and a pair of the NFL’s most influential owners, Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft.

  But as quickly as it boomed, the industry bottomed. One year after their headiest moments, FanDuel and DraftKings are still not profitable. Both privately held companies’ valuations have been sliced—by more than half, according to some estimates. The companies have hemorrhaged tens of millions of dollars in legal and lobbying expenses. (DraftKings’ attorneys’ fees once ran as high as $1 million per week.) And the fog bank of the industry’s uncertain future has made it nearly impossible for either company to raise new money. (FanDuel’s auditors have raised “significant doubts” about the company’s future if more states do not declare daily fantasy sports legal.) Three federal grand juries—in Boston, New York, and Tampa, Florida—have alerted one or both companies that they are under criminal investigation. A merger—once unthinkable to many—is on the table.