The Ewing Ploy

The early-to-mid 80s wasn’t a great time for the NBA. The league had an image problem—specifically a drug problem—and the new NBA commissioner, David Stern, was intent on turning things around and putting the focus on more positive aspects of the game. Many people believed a key to this could be Patrick Ewing, a rookie player from Georgetown, since he was entering the league with a ton of fanfare. If the NBA could be assured of him going to a team in a high profile market, then that could potentially be a big boost for that market and, in turn, the NBA in general.

One of the things David Stern created to generate some positive buzz around the NBA was a lottery system to see who would get the first pick. In prior years, the way the NBA draft worked was that the two worst teams in the league would flip a coin to see who would get the first pick in the draft. This often lead to teams “tanking,” meaning, if a team knew it had no realistic shot of doing anything worthwhile in a given season, they would play as bad as possible in order to lose as many games as possible to have a good shot of getting the first pick in the draft. In 1985, David Stern changed the rules for the NBA draft so that the bottom seven teams in the league would have a shot of nabbing the top draft pick. The idea being that if you have a 50/50 shot of getting the top draft pick, then maybe it might be worth blowing up your season and playing like shit. But if there’s less of a chance of getting that top pick, then the reward might not be worth the risk of playing like garbage and alienating your fanbase.

So the way the 1985 NBA draft worked is that seven needlessly large envelopes were placed in a clear plastic ball and spun around and one was drawn at random and that team got the first pick.

And the team that ended up getting the first pick just happened to be the New York Knicks. A struggling team in a huge market that would benefit greatly by the addition of Patrick Ewing. Well, any team would have benefitted from the addition of Ewing. But it was thought that the league as a whole would benefit the most if New York was a better franchise with a star player.

So, because things worked out this way, conspiracy theories started to form.

One of theories said that (as you can see in the GIF above) one of the envelopes was hit against the side of the clear ball, and that was the Knicks envelope and that bent the corner so David Stern could find it when pulling out the envelope. Yes, they’re saying the envelope was corner crimped.

Another piece of “evidence” people point to is that David Stern puffs out his cheeks and exhales deeply before picking the winning envelope. This, they suggest, is clear evidence of his guilty conscience that he was about to rig the draft.

This may be the least compelling evidence of anything in the history of all humankind, but if you want to believe in a conspiracy theory, you’ll take whatever you can get.

There is one other way people say the draft was rigged, and it’s my favorite explanation. The truth is, the corners of the envelopes were likely to get banged up while spinning around in that drum. So bending a corner probably wouldn’t be the best way to mark an envelope. It would be like crimping a card and then hoping to find it after the deck had been tossed in a dryer set to tumble. So how else could they mark the envelope invisibly in a way that would seem to be instantly discernible?

They froze it.

Well, that’s the rumor anyway. The Knicks’ envelope was in the freezer until right before the televised draft. Then all David Stern had to do was feel for the cold envelope.

Is this feasible? I have no clue. People who have tried it out say that paper envelopes don’t really stay cold for too long after being taken out of a freezer. But we can’t know the exact make-up of the envelope. You’d probably have to try out different types of paper or paper-like material to really know if it was doable.

Has this method ever been used in magic? It seems like it must have. My initial thought is maybe you introduce a coin as your lucky coin. You say you found it 20 years ago on a particularly lucky day and you haven’t been without it since. And to sort of “prove” the connection you have with the coin, you put a mark on it, drop it a cloth bag with a bunch of other coins, have the spectator shake them up, then reach in with a clearly empty hand and remove the coin. (Or you could force a date and pull out the one quarter with that date on it from a bag of quarters or something like that.)

I’ve had a quarter in the freezer for an hour. I’m going to go try this and see if it works…

Okay, I think the answer is that it wouldn’t be that reliable. I initially took the coin right out of the freezer and put it in with a large handful of change and couldn’t find it in the bag just moments later. And then when removing the coins and going through them one by one, there was one coin that felt just slightly cooler. Maybe I should have froze it longer. I don’t know. I think if I froze it longer and used just a dozen other coins, then it probably would be a workable method. Actually, let me try that. I’ll go freeze the coin for the better part of the day. I don’t know how much of a difference that makes. I don’t really know the limit to which a quarter can get cold. At some point, once something is in the freezer long enough, it’s about as cold as it’s going to get. You’re never like, “Oh my god. This ice must have been in the back of the freezer for years. It’s really cold.”

Okay, this is crazy. I froze the damn quarter all day. I just now pulled it out and tossed it in a bag with only 12 other quarters. I shook them up for a few seconds and reached in and I could not find the (formerly) frozen quarter at all. It felt the same as all the other coins. I’m not buying the frozen envelope concept anymore.

So perhaps it’s not a valuable method for magicians, but I think there could be value in the story. Maybe you’re sitting around with friends and you see an opportunity to transition into this story (and I think there are more opportunities than you might imagine). “Do you guys know the scandal about the 1985 NBA draft?” You give them a brief background and then begin to slowly turn from reality into fantasy.

“But the truth is, there was no frozen envelope. And no one bent a corner on purpose (it would have been a little bit suspicious if David Stern was feeling around 28 corners for the one bent one). But the draft was fixed.

“And I know this because the president of the NY Knicks at the time was Jack Krumpe. And one of the assistants to Jack Krumpe was someone named David Mishkin. And David’s older brother was a guy named Theodore Mishkin. And there’s three things you should know about Theodore Mishkin. First, he couldn’t keep a secret. Second, Theodore was the last in a long line of psychics of Russian descent. His grandfather was apparently some big-shot in the Soviet Union back in the 50s. And the third thing to know about Theodore Mishkin is that he lived two doors down from me when I was growing up.”

You go on to tell the story of how when you were a kid getting into magic you reached out to your neighbor “Teddy” because you heard he had psychic powers. “I think he was amused by me. There was never a real ‘mentor’ relationship or anything like that. But he did teach me a few basic things. Including the technique he taught David Stern about how to discern which sealed envelope in a group held the thing you wanted. Do you want to see?”

You scrounge up some envelopes and have them write down made-up team names on six pieces of paper and the NY Knicks on the seventh. The envelopes are sealed and mixed around and you’re able to find the one with the Knicks in it.

You may feel that’s a long way to go for a 1 in 7 location, but I think the opposite is. I think because you go all that way, it makes a 1 in 7 location at least somewhat interesting when it might not be otherwise. And you’re certainly free to take it further. “That’s really only a basic psychic concept. David Stern learned it in like 10 days. I’ve been practicing much longer.” And you could do something where you open up 5 of the remaining envelopes and you’re able to match the person with the made-up team name they wrote. And then with the last envelope you’re able to intuit what the final person wrote without even opening the envelope. So a Sneak Thief type routine. I’m not going to get into methods here because there are a bunch of different techniques you could use. And this would be basic to intermediate mentalism methodology so you should already know a method you’d like if you’re considering something like this.

I don’t think this would be a good patter concept for a formal show, but in a casual situation where you’re seemingly jumping from this anecdote to an unplanned demonstration, I think it would work well.

And, as I said above, there are actually more ways to get into this effect than simply waiting around for someone to say, “Hmmm… I wonder what Patrick Ewing is up to these days?” You can basketball, sports, scandals, interesting neighbors, your early days learning magic, and a bunch of other subjects as a way to get you into this.

This would be an example of something I wrote about in the last book in a section called The Cast. The idea is to have some (real or imaginary) characters from your past that you can bring into your presentations from time to time as a way to broaden the scope of your magic. If, 18 months later, you’re having dinner with someone who was there for the Ewing story and you’re like, “Did I ever mention about the Russian psychic who lived near me when I was growing up?… Yeah, that’s right. He was the guy who showed me the envelope thing from the NBA draft. There was something else he always tried to get me to be able to do, but I had no luck until just last week….” You can now tie this spoon-bending thing you want to show them (or whatever) to this other demonstration you did the previous year. And it’s these connections that I think make for a more interesting style of amateur performing (as I explored throughout the last book).

You start with a story from 35 years ago. And it’s real. At least it’s real in the sense that it was an event that really happened and some people believe there was a scandal there. And now decades later you’re bending a spoon for someone. And that’s almost certainly not real, from their perspective. But you’ve built this journey where reality transitions into fantasy and tied all these things together in a way that I find keeps people more engaged in the long-run because there’s more of a story there to get caught up in. (As opposed to a series of disconnected moments performing for people, which—as I think most amateur magicians have experienced—can lead to diminishing returns.) That’s the takeaway here. It’s not really the Ewing story. It’s the idea of creating a connection between yourself and whatever fascinating concept you want to talk about, and then you can reintroduce that connection in the future with other effects to build a bigger story for people with your tricks.