The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (54 page)

The stakes were set at $50. The position was entered into a computer, and players crowded around the screen.

“Oh, the move is right!” Falafel called out. “You owe me!”

“Wait, where is the move right?” Mattig said.

“Right here,” Falafel said. “It's significant. It's like
1 percent.”

Falafel called Kageyama over, showed him the position, and asked him what he would do. Kageyama gave the same answer that Mattig had, and Falafel nodded, smiled, and told him, “That's a mistake.”

 

Falafel was slowly making his way upward in the brackets. He had an easy time against Gary Oleson, a Walgreens pharmacist, who had come dressed in a black nylon shirt featuring a dragon strangling a tiger. While Falafel was up, 2–1, it was announced that the tournament would break for dinner. He stood and stretched, which emphasized his hemispherical belly.

“So is it true you have a bet to lose weight?” O'Laughlin asked him.

“Yeah,” Falafel said.

At any given time, Falafel has more bets going than he can keep track of. He has bet on his abilities at tennis, on his dancing skills, on whether he can win an argument about Islam. (Many bets are for $1,000—a “ruble,” in Falafel's lexicon—or much more.) When he was 38, Falafel bet five rubles that he would be married in two years. (He lost.) In San Antonio, he told Perry Gartner that he had a long-standing bet: for every day he did not have a child before turning 50 he owed someone $5. Gartner, perplexed, asked how that was even a bet. “Right,” Falafel said. “My downside is unlimited. But it is going to happen.” Lately, it seems, Falafel has been trying to bend a vice into a virtue—and no bet has more potential in this regard than his weight bet.

“So what is it?” O'Laughlin asked. “A lot of money?”

A woman walking by answered: “It's for a
ton
of money!”

“Thanks,” Falafel said.

“Well, what is it?” O'Laughlin said. “A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?”

Falafel, who has a gambler's habit of speaking evasively, cradled his belly. “It's for money,” he said.

The weight bet originated last October, when Falafel flew to Tokyo to play in the Japanese Open. One night, he and several other backgammon players were crammed into Sushi Saito, a three-star Michelin restaurant that seats only seven people. A question was posed: could Falafel and his ex-roommate Genius achieve the same weight in a year's time? By then, Falafel, who was enduring a difficult stretch of sports betting, had reached 310 pounds. Genius, who has a slight frame and is four inches shorter, weighed only 138. The question began to take on the contours of a wager, and the next day a taker emerged willing to give them 50-to-1 odds. The taker is a legendary backgammon hustler, perhaps the must successful in the game's history. He hustled me into referring to him only as Mr. Joseph—even though anyone on the backgammon circuit will immediately recognize him. He has played Saudi royalty, and he claims to have won as much as $300,000 in a match. He once told another gambler, “I used to say I'd like to have a $100,000 day. I've had those, both winning and losing, many times since then. Now I say I want a million-dollar
losing
day, which means I am wealthy enough to have a million-dollar winning day.” His bet with Falafel might help him lose tremendously. No one involved is keen to see its magnitude documented, so just imagine the contents of a large armored suitcase in a James Bond movie.

Mr. Joseph was in San Antonio too. An enormous man, he was dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, and, when Falafel and The Bone walked over, he and Genius were playing a variant of backgammon involving only three checkers, for $500 a point. He told Falafel, “You never win in tournaments. The Bone wins. He knows how to win. You find a way to lose to the worst players.”

“I want to win too,” Falafel said. “But sometimes I get into a spot.”

The Bone interjected, “It's going to change now that he is losing weight.”

“I play better if I am in better shape,” Falafel said. Since Sushi Saito, he had lost about 60 pounds, and Genius had gained 20. Just about any time I ran into Genius, he was eating a J.J. Gargantuan Unwich sandwich (739 calories), from Jimmy John's. Mr. Joseph was unconcerned; he seemed to take pleasure in the bet's manipulative aspects. In 1996, he told another player, Brian Zembic, that he would give him $100,000 if he got breast implants and kept them in for a year. Months later, Zembic got them, size 38C, and, to everyone's surprise, he liked them. They helped him meet women, and he ended up marrying one of them. A year came and went—and $100,000 was wired to a Swiss bank account—but still he kept the implants in. Once, when Falafel came to visit, Zembic unbuttoned his shirt and danced. Falafel smiled and blushed.

In his own way, Falafel wanted to be transformed too. He wanted to be healthier, more mindful, more purposeful. “My life, I just got into a situation,” he said. “Some of the hardships I endured, I did so without realizing that they were hardships. I should have a family. That is a big missing part of my own puzzle.”

Once, in an airport, Falafel sat next to a rabbi, and asked him for his thoughts about gambling. The rabbi said that it was not prohibited, but that a life of gambling was unsanctioned by God. Falafel told me, “I see religion for what it really is: just a bluff,” but he couldn't get the interpretation out of his head. One evening, outside a casino bathroom, I saw him stop a young bearded man in a yarmulke and say, “I have a question for you: do you know what Jewish law says about gambling?” The man was taken aback. It didn't matter—Falafel was already answering. “I think it is that you can gamble, but that you can't earn a living from gambling. Is that it?”

At the Menger, Mr. Joseph had rented the Presidential Suite, and on Super Bowl Sunday he filled it with food and with backgammon players. By then, the tournament was over. The mood was relaxed. Falafel had lost in the semifinals, to a longtime player from Texas, and he had been upset. But now, in Mr. Joseph's suite, the loss was easily forgotten. There was the Super Bowl to distract him—he had bet many rubles on the Baltimore Ravens. And there was his weight. He stood near an elaborate buffet that Mr. Joseph had arranged. “You can eat this,” a player from Germany said, pointing to a tin of celery. Falafel already had a stalk in his mouth. He took a few carrots and a bottle of mineral water and walked over to a couch. A plate of cheesecakes was set down in front of him. “Those pies,” Mr. Joseph said, casually. “Have one of those pies.”

“No,” Falafel said, cradling his belly. “I can't.”

“I'll give you 50 bucks right now to eat one of those pies,” Mr. Joseph said, pulling out a crisp bill.

“How many calories?” Falafel said.

“Thirty,” Mr. Joseph said.

“Bullshit!” The Bone said.

Falafel looked at the money and hesitated. “Jeez,” he said. “You're giving me a 50?” But he held his ground.

 

It used to be that tournaments were the center of big-money side games, but these days the few players who make their living from backgammon must look in deeper waters for big fish. Before leaving the Menger, one top player told me in hushed tones that he was going to see a billionaire who puts him up in a hotel near his house so that they can play all-night games for $1,000 a point. The billionaire is so obsessive that he can play for 15 hours uninterrupted; the player told me he had to bring a friend to cover for him during bathroom breaks.

From Texas, Falafel and The Bone headed for Los Angeles, where they rented a business suite at a Manhattan Beach hotel. Word had been quietly circulating about a group of wealthy amateurs playing for enormous stakes. Not merely fish—a pod of whales. Who would they be? Ted Turner? Carl Icahn? George and Barbara Bush host a private tournament at Kennebunkport. One of the most-read books in the Bush family is
Backgammon for Blood
, a handbook from the 1970s. (“Unfortunately, that's one of the worst books,” a mathematician told me. “It was written under a pseudonym, and some people say it was intentionally bad so that people reading it would play worse.”) Falafel thought he could find a way into the action from the West Coast, but he was fanatically secretive about what he knew. The money was too big—too important to his future. “This is a fantasy,” he told me, by which he meant that the games were just an ephemeral opportunity, a blinding spark.

Falafel's hotel was a favorite of Jersey Jim's, who had also come, with his wife, Patty. Every day, they went across the street to a gym the size of an LAX hangar. Falafel was relying on them to help him lose weight. But he did not want to lift, or run, or exert himself intensively. Instead, he decided to restrict his diet to 1,000 calories per day, and to walk. Jersey Jim and Patty worked on him until he agreed, at least, to climb the Manhattan Beach dune: a steep, 270-foot incline near an Army Reserve facility, where athletes like Kobe Bryant come to work out.

On the morning that Falafel and The Bone arrived, a lean man with bleached dreadlocks, shirtless and deeply tanned, was doing yoga on a blanket at the base of the dune. Falafel looked a little intimidated. He watched as The Bone began striding up the incline and then slowed down. “Gee,” he said. “The Bone, he's realizing that it takes a lot of energy.”

Patty turned to Falafel. “This is how you lose weight,” she said.

“Yeah, for sure,” Falafel said. He gazed at the hill uncertainly. At his last weigh-in, he was 245 pounds. But things were looking up. He had won on the Super Bowl. He was flying back to Israel to attend a wedding, and to spend some time near his childhood home. Then he was off to Copenhagen, for the Nordic Open, to participate in a tournament known as “Denmark vs. the World.” Falafel, who was captaining “the World,” was putting together an international team, and hoped to bring in Genius and Abe the Snake. The whales seemed increasingly within reach. Squinting in the bright Los Angeles sun, Falafel pushed his feet into the hot sand. Slowly, he began to climb.

FROM GQ

 

O
N A COOL, DRIZZLY
February night in 2003, at one-thirty or so in the morning, a police officer cruising down Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica spotted flames shooting horizontally out a window of the Simply Sofas furniture showroom. From overhead he could hear popping sounds as the fire leapt up to eat at the power lines in the street outside. Inside, the blaze spread quickly, engulfing upholstery and wood, roaring up through the roof and melting the metal skin right off the loading dock door.

The fire was almost immediately deemed suspicious. Firefighters reported the strong smell of gasoline, and when investigators were able to get inside the building the next day, they found three “firebombs”—five-gallon plastic water jugs cut off at the neck, stuffed with paper and filled with gasoline. The evidence was gathered and sent to the lab.

Five months later, Sergeant Robert Almada, the police investigator for Santa Monica's Arson Squad Task Force, walked into the interview room at the police station on Main Street with every reason to believe things were going his way. He had motive—revenge—and he had the kind of physical evidence almost never left behind in a fire: 30 pieces of gasoline-soaked mail, each addressed to the suspect or his wife. (In the heat of the blaze, the firebombs had caved in on themselves, preserving the magazines and catalogs and envelopes inside.) That suspect, one Anthony Smith, six feet four inches and over 320 pounds, a 36-year-old former defensive end for the LA/Oakland Raiders, dwarfed the little table in the room.

“Okeydoke,” Almada said as he settled himself into a chair and opened his case file. Almada was blue-eyed and brown-haired, with bland, boyish good looks. His eagerness (the whole case was ready to tumble into place; it was
right there
at his fingertips) and the slight discomfort he felt in the presence of Smith were camouflaged by an overly casual manner. He confirmed some phone numbers he had for Smith; he asked if he preferred the interview-room door open or closed. It was all cordial enough, Almada in control . . . so how did it happen that within minutes the sergeant was floundering, struggling for a foothold while his suspect was coldly telling him his case was a pile of shit?

“You know how stupid this is. This is stupid, this is stupid,” Smith said. How would he even have the time to set a fire? “I'm a very busy man. I don't have time for that crap.”

Who the hell was
this
guy? A half-hour earlier, Almada would testify, while both men were sitting in the kitchen of Smith's condo in Marina del Rey, the sergeant had confronted him with the physical evidence and Smith had broken down and cried. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,” he'd said, weeping with his head in his hands. As Almada saw it, Smith was more or less confessing to the arson. (He and the store's owner had argued over money two weeks before the fire.) When Smith's wife, Teresa, had hurried into the kitchen, asking what was wrong, Smith had wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her body.

Now
that
broken guy, whoever he was, had morphed into this deadpan, assured guy . . . whoever
he
was.

Almada thought he'd try a side attack. He took a paper from his file—a record of Smith's gun ownership. “It says you own a .45 pistol, a .22 pistol, a .357 revolver, .44 revolver, .44 Desert Eagle, .44 Colt, Olympic .223, another .223 pistol from Rocky Mountain Arms, and a .22 derringer,” Almada said.

“That's it?” Smith asked.

“What do you mean, ‘That's it'? That's a lot of guns for one guy.”

“You ran that list and that's what you came up with?”

“That's what's listed in the Automated Firearms System, yes,” Almada said.

“I only own shotguns,” Smith stated flatly.