I met Peter O’Connell in his Back Bay condo, a yawning cavern filled with only a square of living room furniture, a TV like an obsidian window, and a titanium couch-side refrigerator, stocked entirely with energy drinks and Michelob ULTRA. Peter was young, only a few years older than me, with the fair skin and crisp, red-brown hair of unspoiled Irish ancestry. The blue of his eyes gave me a vivid recollection of the Fuller Park Pool in Ann Arbor where my father tried to force swimming lessons on me, only to learn I could scream effectively for the duration of the lesson. Behind Peter, a pool table attempted to add presence, but it looked stranded, an abandoned felt island. Peter seemed to know very little about the project for which he would potentially serve as the source of financing. He had many frivolous questions.
“You’re a hoops superfan, right? So who was your favorite player as a rugrat?”
“I wouldn’t say I had one. It’s the analytics that have always interested me. As a child, I kept notebooks of statistics. One of the first variables I studied was Scottie Pippen’s perimeter defense on the opposing team’s best wing player, which was likely as responsible for the Bulls’ success as Michael Jordan’s scoring prowess. That made the game fun, though it likely began as a way of attempting to be close to my father, with whom I had some difficulty relating.”
After a pause, Peter raised his hand: “Damn. Didn’t know we were going that deep, bro, but literal same!”
Peter O’Connell came from relative means. His family owned a concrete business in western Massachusetts, and during an unimpressive stint at the University of Massachusetts he’d used some of his allowance to gamble on his favorite pastime. Peter explained that he made a veritable fortune by exploiting an edge dealing with how bookmakers calculated their halftime totals. For two NBA seasons his winning percentage was:
“Unholy as fuck. Like Vegas must have thought someone finally managed to sell their soul to the devil.”
His method was far more clever than I would have expected given his personality. However, he’d merely stumbled into the tail end of a fad as bookmakers caught on and adjusted their method for allocating points each half. Peter’s edge became useless. He experienced the simplest rule in statistical probability: Whenever a variable is affected by stable factors a few random samples prove nothing; the variable will soon regress to the mean. In the following two years, he lost $4 million. He’d been living in Las Vegas in the fashion you’d expect from a twenty-two-year-old male who suddenly comes into such wealth. Yet one does not get into MIT without understanding that if you find gambling exciting, you are doing it wrong. As was the case with Peter, who began betting more subjectively. He explained that this was called:
“Being on tilt. Finally, I started to read a lot about APBRmetrics and modeling and all that shit. I mean, I didn’t even know about the Kelly growth criterion, but c’mon, bro, they’re not teaching that in high school algebra.”
I’d reached out to several other high-profile sports gamblers but found that Peter was already searching for what I was proposing: a modeling system, a proprietary black box, to create a new edge. It was at this point that I realized Peter thought he was interviewing me. I allowed him to continue to believe this.
“I can’t pay you hedge fund money,” said Peter, extending his hand. “But this shit’ll be way more fun. We’re gonna build Biff’s fucking Sports Almanac from bee-too-tee-eff-too.”
It took many more months of conversation before I understood that Peter was referring to the film Back to the Future II, and it did not help that he’d invent nicknames for our modeling system spontaneously and with decreasing sense. The black box was all at once: “the Sports Almanac,” “Biff,” “Biff Tannen,” “BT,” and then he began referring to it after his favorite basketball player, Larry Bird, as in: “Larry Legend,” “Larry,” “LB,” “Birdman,” and finally and most inexplicably, “Birdman Tannen.”
My primary concern was not the humble working salary of $68,800, which was more than adequate for my post-collegiate needs, and it was not the challenge. At MIT, I’d worked under Dr. Sri Thankankur and Dr. Jane Tufariello on Earth System Models, weighing various scenarios for greenhouse gas accumulation in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, which required far more complicated interactions of variables than basketball. My primary concern was in fact my parents, who of course viewed gambling as haram. My earliest memories are of my preschool in Ann Arbor where I’d walk in circles around the perimeter of the jungle gym because I had no idea what these other children wanted from me. I learned how to be by myself in some safe corner, arranging wood chips in ascending order of quality. My sole interest might still be those wood chips were it not for the Chicago Bulls. The lonesomeness of my own mind made school difficult and mosque impossible. Though my mother would often repeat that I suffered from no disability, that I simply thought differently, this was not the way she treated me in practice. When the Bulls began the second run of their dynasty, however, my father enjoyed tuning in to the games. Soon, the dynamic interactions playing out on our television captured my attention as well, and I began keeping track of basic statistics in my notebooks. My father was clearly overjoyed that I watched with him, and his cues of approval meant a great deal to me.
Still, a career in gambling was in no way acceptable, and at first I kept this from my family. They knew Peter had hired me to work on sports analytics but did not know it was about wagering money. When I began working with Peter, I thought he was familiar: a protozoan high school jock turned college fraternity brother turned entrepreneur wishing to live out a twentysomething playboy fantasy any way he could, the type of individual who had long filled me with gruesome purple dread. Yet Peter was not what I expected. He treated our partnership seriously, taking notes and asking questions. I wondered if he was lonely, but that explanation felt inadequate. He had plenty of friends, a family so sprawling that I could never keep it ordered despite my exceptional recall, and a very pretty girlfriend, Rachel Franklin, who with her pert looks and urbane manner reminded me of the portrayal of young women on television sitcoms. Yet during the 2013–2014 season, he kept inviting me to watch the games as if they were social occasions rather than the raw data I was using to develop the model. He enjoyed conversation immensely and took no issue that I frequently recorded our interactions in a pocket pad notebook.
Peter employs a self-effacing jocularity. He is an individual who should be entrenched in his entitlement, and yet my experience of these three years has been quite the opposite. Peter is without artifice. Even when he uses the word bro, which he does with hyper-frequency, each bro has built within it a statement about the preposterousness of his own subculture. It took me perhaps too long to understand that Peter’s insistence that I make the short T ride from my apartment in Cambridge to his Back Bay condo went beyond my work on the black box. It dawned on me that his perpetual motion machine of conversation was not transactional. He simply enjoyed my company. Outside of the members of my family—who I often thought were pretending anyway—I’d never met anyone who did.
As children, my younger sister, Haniya, once asked what it felt like to be me. I’d recently caused some conflict between us, spoiling her tenth birthday party because I could not bear the sound of her and her friends talking over each other, so I began screaming for it to stop. I was thirteen at the time and mortified by my own outburst. Unlike most adults, Haniya had no interest in the arbitrary mores that made it inappropriate to explore issues of neurodiversity. When I attempted an apology the next day she said: