Data, you will note, clarifies why my dream of basketball stardom was derailed. It was not because I was brought up in the suburbs. It was because I am 5’9” and white (not to mention slow). Also, I am lazy. And I have poor stamina, awful shooting form, and occasionally a panic attack when the ball gets in my hand.
A second reason that boys from tough backgrounds may struggle to make the NBA is that they sometimes lack certain social skills. Using data on thousands of schoolchildren, economists have found that middle-class, two-parent families are on average substantially better at raising kids who are trusting, disciplined, persistent, focused, and organized.
So how do poor social skills derail an otherwise promising basketball career?
Let’s look at the story of Doug Wrenn, one of the most talented basketball prospects in the 1990s. His college coach, Jim Calhoun at the University of Connecticut, who has trained future NBA all-stars, claimed Wrenn jumped the highest of any man he had ever worked with. But Wrenn had a challenging upbringing. He was raised by a single mother in Blood Alley, one of the roughest neighborhoods in Seattle. In Connecticut, he consistently clashed with those around him. He would taunt players, question coaches, and wear loose-fitting clothes in violation of team rules. He also had legal troubles—he stole shoes from a store and snapped at police officers. Calhoun finally had enough and kicked him off the team.
Wrenn got a second chance at the University of Washington. But there, too, an inability to get along with people derailed him. He fought with his coach over playing time and shot selection and was kicked off this team as well. Wrenn went undrafted by the NBA, bounced around lower leagues, moved in with his mother, and was eventually imprisoned for assault. “My career is over,” Wrenn told the Seattle Times in 2009. “My dreams, my aspirations are over. Doug Wrenn is dead. That basketball player, that dude is dead. It’s over.” Wrenn had the talent not just to be an NBA player, but to be a great, even a legendary player. But he never developed the temperament to even stay on a college team. Perhaps if he’d had a stable early life, he could have been the next Michael Jordan.
Michael Jordan, of course, also had an impressive vertical leap. Plus a large ego and intense competitiveness—a personality at times that was not unlike Wrenn’s. Jordan could be a difficult kid. At the age of twelve, he was kicked out of school for fighting. But he had at least one thing that Wrenn lacked: a stable, middle-class upbringing. His father was an equipment supervisor for General Electric, his mother a banker. And they helped him navigate his career.
In fact, Jordan’s life is filled with stories of his family guiding him away from the traps that a great, competitive talent can fall into. After Jordan was kicked out of school, his mother responded by taking him with her to work. He was not allowed to leave the car and instead had to sit there in the parking lot reading books. After he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls, his parents and siblings took turns visiting him to make sure he avoided the temptations that come with fame and money.
Jordan’s career did not end like Wrenn’s, with a little-read quote in the Seattle Times. It ended with a speech upon induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame that was watched by millions of people. In his speech, Jordan said he tried to stay “focused on the good things about life—you know how people perceive you, how you respect them . . . how you are perceived publicly. Take a pause and think about the things that you do. And that all came from my parents.”
The data tells us Jordan is absolutely right to thank his middle-class, married parents. The data tells us that in worse-off families, in worse-off communities, there are NBA-level talents who are not in the NBA. These men had the genes, had the ambition, but never developed the temperament to become basketball superstars.
And no—whatever we might intuit—being in circumstances so desperate that basketball seems “a matter of life or death” does not help. Stories like that of Doug Wrenn can help illustrate this. And data proves it.
In June 2013, LeBron James was interviewed on television after winning his second NBA championship. (He has since won a third.) “I’m LeBron James,” he announced. “From Akron, Ohio. From the inner city. I am not even supposed to be here.” Twitter and other social networks erupted with criticism. How could such a supremely gifted person, identified from an absurdly young age as the future of basketball, claim to be an underdog? In fact, anyone from a difficult environment, no matter his athletic prowess, has the odds stacked against him. James’s accomplishments, in other words, are even more exceptional than they appear to be at first. Data proves that, too.
PART II
THE POWERS OF BIG DATA
2
WAS FREUD RIGHT?
I recently saw a person walking down a street described as a “penistrian.” You caught that, right? A “penistrian” instead of a “pedestrian.” I saw it in a large dataset of typos people make. A person sees someone walking and writes the word “penis.” Has to mean something, right?
I recently learned of a man who dreamed of eating a banana while walking to the altar to marry his wife. I saw it in a large dataset of dreams people record on an app. A man imagines marrying a woman while eating a phallic-shaped food. That also has to mean something, right?
Was Sigmund Freud right? Since his theories first came to public attention, the most honest answer to this question would be a shrug. It was Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher, who made this point clearest. Popper famously claimed that Freud’s theories were not falsifiable. There was no way to test whether they were true or false.
Freud could say the person writing of a “penistrian” was revealing a possibly repressed sexual desire. The person could respond that she wasn’t revealing anything; that she could have just as easily made an innocent typo, such as “pedaltrian.” It would be a he-said, she-said situation. Freud could say the gentleman dreaming of eating a banana on his wedding day was secretly thinking of a penis, revealing his desire to really marry a man rather than a woman. The gentleman could say he just happened to be dreaming of a banana. He could have just as easily been dreaming of eating an apple as he walked to the altar. It would be he-said, he-said. There was no way to put Freud’s theory to a real test.
Until now, that is.