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© Ben Cohen 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008285296

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008285319

Version 2020-01-29

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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008285296

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Introduction

One ON FIRE

“Boomshakalaka.”

Two THE LAW OF THE HOT HAND

“Unhappy fortune!”

Three SHUFFLE

“It’s just random.”

Four BET THE FARM

“Principles over patterns.”

Five WHEEL OF FORTUNE

“It’s my life.”

Six THE FOG

“Be true to the data.”

Seven THE VAN GOGH IN THE ATTIC

“Aha, aha, aha!”

Epilogue

An Author’s Note on Sources

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

List of Searchable Terms

About the Publisher

DEDICATION

For my parents, and for Stephanie

INTRODUCTION

1.

One of the most enchanting moments of my life happened in a meaningless basketball game that nobody else would have any reason to remember. On that day I felt something magical that I have never forgotten. But it would take many years to figure out why. It was all because of a phenomenon that I did not understand, could not have explained, and was not supposed to be real. This book is the story of that seductive idea.

I went to a small high school that barely had enough kids for a varsity basketball team, let alone a junior varsity team. I was on the junior varsity. I started that game on the bench because I started every game on the bench. On this drab winter afternoon, our team walked into a cramped gym, and I went through my normal pregame routine of missing a whole lot more shots than I made. But exactly what happened next I can’t really tell you. The sad truth is that I recall almost none of the other material details about this game. The final score, for example. I have no clue. I couldn’t tell you which team won, either. The only certainty in my mind is that I must have removed my warm-ups at some point and walked onto the court, because what I’m about to describe couldn’t have happened otherwise. It hadn’t happened to me before, and it hasn’t happened to me since, which is why I still think about it all these years later.

I had the hot hand.

This odd series of events started when I checked into the game after halftime and managed to swish my first shot of the third quarter. I felt good. I swished my next shot. I felt better. I felt like I wanted to shoot again. It was at that point that I swished another shot, and it began to dawn on me that I was going to make any shot I dared to take.

As it turned out, contrary to every piece of prior evidence from my pathetic basketball career, the other team was coming to the same bizarre conclusion, and I found myself double-teamed when I touched the ball. I had tricked the other players into believing that I had talent. It was around this time when all the hours I had spent watching basketball on television came in useful. I thought about what someone who was actually good at shooting might do. The next time the ball was in my hands, I pretended I was one of those people. I faked a shot with a surprising amount of confidence for someone who never had a reason to attempt this move before. And it worked! The two defenders flew past me in what seemed like slow motion. Those poor suckers left me enough time to sip espresso before I sent the ball arcing toward the basket and swished one last shot. The whole thing was nothing short of astonishing. In one quarter of one game, I scored more points than I had in my entire life.

I quit playing basketball not long after that game. It was mostly because I was awful. But it was at least partly because I knew that I had already peaked. I would never again experience the rush of having the hot hand.

To have the hot hand is to achieve some elevated state of ability in which you feel briefly superhuman. There is no more pleasurable sensation for humans. Even if you’re unfamiliar with basketball, you’re probably familiar with this ethereal feeling. The hot hand exists in nearly every industry and touches nearly every person on earth.

What does it mean to have the hot hand in basketball? It’s when you’ve made a few shots in a row, the hoop looks as big as a helipad, and you believe you’re more likely to sink your next shot because you’ve made those previous shots. It’s those glorious moments when you can’t miss that stick with you. But there doesn’t have to be a singular definition of the hot hand. You can simply tell when players are hot when you see them ablaze.

I know what that feels like. As much as I watched basketball, I usually found playing basketball to be as enjoyable as driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. But on that night, when I had the hot hand, I was ecstatic. There was no part of me that entertained the silly notion of passing the ball to a teammate. The buzzkill known as “regression to the mean” failed to cross my mind. I was going to shoot almost as soon as I touched the ball, and there was nothing that anybody could have done to stop me. I was hot. For this sublime period of time, I felt like I was defying probability. It would have been totally irrational if not for the fact that everyone on the court believed it was rational. They had seen it before. I had seen it, too. It just had never happened to me.

My brush with the hot hand lingered with me long after my basketball career was over. I was still thinking about it when I began doing what so many people do when they can no longer play sports: write about sports. I’m the NBA reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and I have written hundreds of stories about basketball, taking advantage of my press credential to gain access to the inner sanctums of the league’s thirty teams. It’s now my job to watch others catch the hot hand. But one day, while minding my own business and looking for story ideas by reading the latest academic research, I bumped into a ghost from my past. It turned out there were hundreds of scholarly papers about this notion of the hot hand.

I couldn’t stop reading these studies. I read them more carefully than I read the lease to my apartment. I found them to be so fascinating because the hot hand was a scientific topic that I didn’t have to read a textbook to comprehend. Or at least that’s what I thought. I read one paper, then another, and then one more. I was on a hot streak of reading studies about hot streaks. I kept reading and reading until I had plowed through decades of work by economists, psychologists, and statisticians, and there was nothing left for me to read.

Only when I was done reading did I realize why so many people had written so many papers about the hot hand: because there was no such thing as the hot hand.

2.

Pine City, Minnesota, is an obscure speck on the map smack in the middle between Minneapolis and Duluth. I drove to this rural town on a wintry afternoon not too long ago to figure out how the small high school there had become the nation’s unlikeliest laboratory of sports innovation. I went to watch the Pine City Dragons hack basketball.

The coach of the Pine City High School basketball team was a history, government, politics, geography, and economics teacher with big eyes and a thick, dark beard named Kyle Allen. When he came to Pine City, the school was known for excellence in the arts, insomuch as it was known for anything at all. Most of his players also played musical instruments. Many of his players were in the choir that sang the national anthem before games. One of his players quit to perform in the winter musical. That player happened to be the team’s star player. So there was almost nothing outwardly impressive about the Pine City Dragons.

But they won. They won a lot. They won a lot more than they had any right to win.

It was the way they won, though, that had me curious. I flew to Minnesota, drove to Pine City, and walked back into high school, where I found Allen’s players in a classroom inhaling the nutritional benefits of cheese curds and cookies. The same kids busy eating junk food would soon transform into a mighty basketball machine.

The first thing that Kyle Allen did when he moved to Pine City for his first coaching job was blow his entire budget. He was one of thousands of coaches who splurged on technology that created the sort of useful statistics that were previously available only to NBA teams. Pine City’s players soon had access to personalized metrics, customized video clips, and more numbers than they saw in their math classes. That profusion of data was the guiding force behind Allen’s coaching philosophy. He’d come to Pine City at a peculiar time in the history of sports. The seminal Michael Lewis book Moneyball was published when he was still in high school, which put him squarely in the age demographic that straddled a generational divide that was about to roil sports. At issue were the origins of athletic dominance. Kyle Allen understood why he should ground his decisions in data before the data that was relevant to him existed. But once reality caught up, he pounced. He wanted more data. He wanted bigger data. He wanted better data.

For his entire life until that point, basketball teams had known precious little about themselves. And not just small high schools in Minnesota. Even teams at the highest levels of the sport were flying blind. There were primitive statistics—basic metrics like points per game—that could give you a sense of value. But there was nothing much deeper than dividing the number of points by the number of games.

That was about to change. Allen spent just about every penny that Pine City’s basketball team had as part of his mission to find some value in the numbers. He wanted his team to play smart, and it was quickly becoming clear across basketball that playing smart meant differentiating between the good shots with more value and the bad shots with less value. That simple insight was a breakthrough decades in the making. The good shots were layups and three-pointers. The bad shots were everything in between. The Pine City Dragons became the team that almost never took bad shots.

Their entire strategy was based on maximizing their number of good shots. A typical game for Kyle Allen’s merry band of basketball rebels was one in which they took about eighty-five good shots and a few bad shots. In a perfect game, they would take only those shots, and they were closer to perfect than every team in basketball. The bad shots accounted for less than 5 percent of their attempts—lower than any NBA team, any college team, and any known high school team. “In all honesty,” Allen said, “that’s even higher than we want it to be.”

He became a glutton for data after getting his first taste of it. Soon he began the process of quantifying his basketball team. Before long the Pine City Dragons were number one, two, and three in the state record books in one statistical category: most three-pointers in a season. They recorded their stats on iPads, in traditional scorebooks, and on whiteboards in a locker room that carried the unfortunate aroma of teenage boys. They counted the collective number of hours they spent in the gym that summer. They even hired managers to track how much they talked to one another in practice. “Basically,” Allen said, as if there were anything basic about it, “everything needs to come down to a number for us.”

There was something familiar about the scene inside the Pine City gym on a weeknight that made me unexpectedly nostalgic. I had been in gyms like this one before. I had played in gyms like this one before. It was in a gym like this one where I had the hot hand. I should have been able to relate to Kyle Allen’s players.

But to watch the Pine City Dragons was to see the future of basketball. They were reinventing the sport into something unrecognizable right in front of me. It felt like being told the sky was green and the grass was blue. I couldn’t relate to these kids because I had never thought about which shots had the most value. The only thing I valued was getting home for dinner without embarrassing myself. And it wasn’t only because I was a terrible basketball player that I wasn’t thinking about this stuff. It was because nobody was. And now everybody was.

The kids in Pine City were simply accumulating ideas that had smitten other high school, college, and NBA teams and taking them to a surreal extreme. This counterintuitive strategy to shoot when they were right next to the basket or very far away from the basket but never in between was drilled into their heads until it became intuition. The players no longer needed to be told by their coach to shoot only the good shots. All they had to do was look down at their court. The paint area and land beyond the three-point line were the color of hardwood. The area in between—the section of the court that might as well have been swimming with piranhas—was emerald green. The dreaded part of the floor actually looked different in Pine City. It was yet another reminder of how they wanted to play.

“That’s how you should play!” one NBA coach said when I told him about this eccentric team I was slightly obsessed with. “Are they better than what they would be?”

They were. The Pine City Dragons had become one of the most fearsome basketball teams in the state of Minnesota. They were harnessing new data, new technology, and new and exciting ways of thinking to reach striking new conclusions about ideas that had long ago been agreed upon. It had been only a decade since I’d mostly humiliated myself in a gym like this one. But in one generation, the game had changed. Everything I thought to be true was very clearly not.

3.

I believed it was serendipity that I had stumbled across the hot hand in my favorite sport. It wasn’t. The history of the hot hand has always been rooted in basketball. And so basketball is in this book because it has to be. There is no intellectually honest way to write about the hot hand without writing about basketball. The very smart people who have studied the hot hand for a very long time understood that basketball happens to be a wonderful excuse to explore the rest of the world.

But the stories that have always resonated with me are the ones that are not quite about sports, and there are genius scholars and Nobel Prize winners who have devoted their attention to the hot hand in basketball because they weren’t just studying basketball. When you start looking for the hot hand, in fact, it becomes hard not to see it everywhere.

That’s why I had to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind when I read the first scholarly paper about the hot hand that was published in 1985. What made it such a classic work of psychology was its startling conclusion that the hot hand did not exist. This seemed too crazy to be true. As I would soon discover, I was not alone in my shock. The paper was a widely discussed sensation in part because nobody believed it.

We’d all seen the hot hand. We’d all felt the hot hand. The hot hand was burned into our memories. And the appeal of this enticing paper was that it challenged something we all thought to be true. It was a study with a digestible takeaway that forced us to reckon with an eternal question of the human condition: How much should we believe what we see and feel?

The world’s brightest academics have been searching for hard evidence of the hot hand ever since. By obsessively looking for proof of something they couldn’t find, these people inadvertently turned the hot hand into the Bigfoot of basketball. But those decades of crumpled papers, broken pencils, and deleted spreadsheets only strengthened the case of the original paper. It became clear over time that it was foolish to believe in the hot hand.

Or was it?

That is the mystery at the heart of this book.

We were just beginning to listen to our scientific luminaries and accept that our collective belief in the hot hand may be wrong. And then something incredible happened. It turned out we might have been right to believe in the hot hand after all.

By now you’re probably wondering: Is the hot hand real? Yes. But also no. It’s complicated. (You might have guessed as much, considering you’re about to read an entire book about it.) There are certain situations in which you can take advantage of the hot hand, and there are other scenarios in which allowing the hot hand to guide your behavior can be disastrous. It can be just as costly to indulge the hot hand as it is to ignore the hot hand.

But we’ll get there. The story you’re about to read is this quest for the hot hand from beginning to end. This is not a book about basketball, but you will have a front-row seat to the most important game of NBA superstar Stephen Curry’s career. It’s not a book about finance, but you will hear the secrets of a billionaire investor who made his fortune betting against streaks. It’s not a book about art or war, but you will meet those who uncovered a long-lost Van Gogh painting and pursued a missing hero of the Holocaust. It’s not a book about music, but you will hear from a fabulous composer forgotten by history. It’s not a book about literature or medicine, but you will read more than you might have wanted to read about Shakespeare and the plague. It’s not a book about technology, but you might think twice before listening to your next Spotify playlist. It’s not a book about travel, but you will take a trip to the jungles of the Amazon and to my favorite sugar beet farm on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota.

It’s not a book about any of those things. It’s a book about all of those things. This is a book about the awesome power of the hot hand. And it begins with man and fire.

One

ON FIRE

“Boomshakalaka.”

1.

Mark Turmell was a remarkably odd teenager who became an enormously successful adult for two reasons. The first was that he recognized from a young age what he wanted to do for the rest of his life and never strayed from his ambition. The second explanation for his phenomenal success was that he was a pyromaniac.

When he was a kid in the 1970s, he strolled around his Bay City, Michigan, neighborhood lighting matches along the gutters, walking away, and turning around for a peek, which provided him with the little thrills required to survive childhood. In that fleeting moment when he looked behind him, the unpredictability was so overwhelming that it felt to him like anything was possible. Sometimes there was nothing. Sometimes there was smoldering. And sometimes there was a raging fire. Mark Turmell loved when there was fire.

Turmell managed to keep himself occupied between his infernos by fiddling with computers. He had a friend whose father was a professor at the local community college, and every so often he let the boys play with the computer terminal in his office. Turmell quickly became obsessed with computers. To be more specific, he became obsessed with the video games on computers. He loved them more than he loved fire. Turmell began to sense that he was meant to make video games. He was so confident about his future line of work that he once told his algebra teacher that he didn’t need to study for her class because he wouldn’t need algebra when he was designing video games. The most amazing part of his pathetic excuse for not doing his homework was that he was actually right.

He was soon going to high school in the morning, taking computer science classes at that local community college in the afternoon, and staying on campus in the computer lab all night. “The only problem with having someone like Mark,” one of his professors said, “is that they never want to go home.” He was so maniacal about his craft by the time he was fifteen years old that he’d stopped playing his favorite sport, basketball, even though he had the advantage of being one of the taller kids in town, because any time on the basketball court was time that could’ve been spent playing with computers.

When he decided to buy his own computer, he pooled the money that he’d saved mowing lawns to purchase a brand-new Apple II. Turmell’s investment paid off almost immediately. All it took for him to spin a profit was some borderline criminal behavior. Turmell used his Apple II to hack into the community college’s network and poke around the sensitive information that schools pay large sums of money to keep private. Once he confessed to his intrusion, the college hired Turmell. It became his job to make sure no one else did what he’d already done. As word of his skills got around town, business got even better for Mark Turmell. Bay City’s engineers were so desperate for the expertise of a computer geek that at one point they put software for the local sewage system in the hands of this teenager who didn’t have a driver’s license yet.

While he was quickly becoming the richest kid in the neighborhood, Turmell wasn’t satisfied with his oversight of critical infrastructure. He dreamed of doing bigger things than cleaning the poop of Bay City. He still wanted to make video games, and now there was nothing stopping him. He’d bought the right computer, subscribed to the right magazines, and taught himself the right programming languages. The raw, teenage energy raging in his body kept Turmell awake late at night in his childhood bedroom tinkering on his Apple II. “I kept plugging away waiting for some roadblock that I couldn’t surpass,” he says. “The roadblock never came.”

Turmell’s innate talent revealed itself in 1981 with the very first game he made. Anyone who played his shoot-’em-up called Sneakers could see it was the work of someone who knew precisely what he was doing, even if what he was supposed to be doing was studying algebra. Turmell shipped a copy of Sneakers using a new service called Federal Express to the company that made his favorite games, Sirius Software, not knowing if he would ever hear back. His phone rang a few days later. Sirius wanted to buy his game and guarantee him monthly royalty checks of $10,000. “My dad opened an account, bought some mutual funds, and poured some money in,” he says. “I had no idea what was happening.” When the most respected Apple II magazine named Sneakers one of its most popular releases of the year, the critical and surprising commercial success of Turmell’s first game only deepened his resolve. Sirius called again to dangle his dream job: a full-time position making video games. There was no longer any need for school. He moved to California to be with his people.

His reputation on the West Coast preceded him. One of the many people who knew Mark Turmell’s name before they met him was the guy who happened to be responsible for his computer. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak’s company had recently gone public and made him a millionaire, and he decided to celebrate by asking his girlfriend to marry him. Wozniak had recently earned his pilot’s license and purchased a single-engine plane, and he thought it would be fun to fly down the coast to San Diego to visit her uncle, a jeweler who could help design their rings. But they never made it there. His plane crashed upon takeoff into the parking lot of a nearby skating rink. Wozniak was badly injured and spent the next few months battling a type of amnesia that prevented him from making new memories. He remembered everything that happened before he reached for the throttle and nothing in the five weeks afterward. Only later did he learn that he spent a significant chunk of that time playing Apple II games. When he recovered and felt well enough to finally get married, Wozniak sent a wedding invitation to the man who made one of his favorite Apple II games, a nifty little thing called Sneakers. It was the least he could do. Mark Turmell had restored his sanity.

Turmell was something of a celebrity at Wozniak’s wedding. At one point he was approached by another young geek.

“Mark Turmell!” he said. “We love your games.”

This stranger eventually got around to introducing himself. He had recently founded a software company near Seattle, and he wanted Turmell to come work for him. Would he be interested? “No, man!” Turmell said. He was too busy making video games.

And that was how Mark Turmell blew off Bill Gates. But only in retrospect was turning down the opportunity to be one of the first employees at Microsoft an unfortunate decision. The early 1980s were a great time to be the same brand of geeky as Turmell. He drove a red Porsche convertible. He was profiled in People magazine. He received hundreds of fan letters and even some marriage proposals in the mail. Teenage boys wanted to be Mark Turmell. Teenage girls wanted to be with Mark Turmell. By virtue of his talent making video games, he’d turned himself into a bona fide celebrity. He could have worked anywhere he wanted.

The only place anyone who could’ve worked anywhere he would’ve wanted to work was Midway. Midway’s office was the industry’s epicenter of innovation. The companies that worked together in this one Chicago building were responsible for creating or distributing a staggering number of iconic video games: Ms. Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, Galaga, and so many others that it would be silly to keep listing them because that would mean omitting even more. It’s safe to assume that any American arcade game that gobbled your quarters was almost certainly launched by the Midway crew—which soon included the guy who had invented Sneakers.

Turmell was so highly valued at Midway that when the company president would walk into his cramped office to ask when his latest game might be done, “I would be able to literally say, ‘It’ll be done when it’s done. And get out of my office,’” Turmell recalls. He could tell his boss to scram because they both understood the harsh reality of their business: Midway sold games to distributors, the distributors sold games to arcades, and the arcades told the distributors how a game was performing. The distributors bought truckloads of that game from Midway if and only if that game was performing well. “There was no amount of marketing, hype, or promotion that could inflect sales,” Turmell says. “It was all about cashbox. Nothing else mattered. It had to make cash.” And Turmell’s gift was for making games that made cash.

The creation of games at Midway followed a meticulous process. Before they were ready to be unleashed on people who would hopefully feed trillions of quarters into the machines, Midway’s employees spent hours and hours playing and tweaking these games. Only when Turmell’s games had been poked and prodded and probed every which way did they make it to the world outside the Midway office. They didn’t travel very far. Their next stop was one of the experimental arcades nearby.

“You don’t know what you have in terms of a success or failure until you get it in front of a test audience,” Turmell says. “So we’d go sit there and watch.”

Mark Turmell was an expert at sitting there and watching. He’d been sitting there and watching for so long that he could predict within a matter of minutes whether one of his games would be a hit. When he visited Midway’s favorite test arcade one night in 1992, he realized that his latest creation was going to be the biggest hit of his career. The name of this game was NBA Jam.

2.

There is nowhere the world’s most talented basketball players would rather come to work than Madison Square Garden. This arena smack in the middle of New York City has been the site of so many divine individual performances over the years that it’s amazing it also happens to be the home court of the moribund New York Knicks. But for all those majestic feats in the long history of the game’s most hallowed arena, there were three games that stood apart. Three players had returned to the visitors’ locker room having scored the most points in the arena’s history: Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. The list of people who had conquered the Garden was an exclusive club of all-time NBA greats.

There was nothing to suggest that Wardell Stephen Curry would join their ranks when he walked into the Garden on February 27, 2013, as the evening commuters flooded Penn Station below. But it was strangely appropriate that no one was expecting much from Curry that night. He’d been very good at proving people very wrong for his entire life. Curry went to a small private high school and wasn’t supposed to be a big-time college player. When he became a big-time college player, he wasn’t supposed to be a good NBA player. When he became a good NBA player, he wasn’t supposed to be a great NBA player. He was baby-faced, unassuming, and about as intimidating as a cockapoo.

But there was one thing that Stephen Curry could do better than anybody who had come before him: shoot the basketball. While everyone in the NBA could shoot, no one in the NBA could shoot like him. The most dominant players had always been the ones who made extraordinary things look ordinary. Stephen Curry’s genius was making ordinary things look extraordinary.

As he trudged into the Garden that night, Curry was approaching an inflection point in his career. His bum ankles had sidelined him for most of the previous season, and his potential to change the game was still hiding somewhere inside of him. If you think of being a professional basketball player as a normal day job, which in many ways it is and in many more ways it is not, then Curry was similar to most twenty-four-year-olds who’d held the same job at the same company since college. His bosses had given him more responsibilities, and his annual raises and yearly bonuses paid him enough that he didn’t bother looking around for better opportunities. In the alternate universe where he sat behind a desk every day, Curry’s performance reviews would’ve been excellent, his recommendations for business school would’ve been glowing, and his adoring colleagues would’ve invited him to their weddings. He would’ve been the ideal corporate employee: highly competent, quietly confident, and extremely useful on the company softball team. He had come closer to working that sort of job than you might think.

When Curry was a college sophomore, his parents bumped into an NBA general manager after one of his games. His mother couldn’t help but indulge her curiosity. “Do you think Steph can make it in the NBA?” Sonya Curry asked. There was a reason that not even she could be sure that his future was in basketball. For all the genetic and socioeconomic advantages he’d inherited as the son of an NBA player, there was one severe disadvantage that he couldn’t overcome. “On every team he ever played on,” says Dell Curry, his father, “he was the smallest guy.”

The only way he could hold his own with bigger and better players, especially as they got even bigger and even better, was by changing the way he shot the basketball. This put Stephen Curry in a deeply ironic predicament. His shot had been his one great skill ever since he’d toyed around with the Fisher-Price baskets in his childhood home. But now someone was telling him that it wasn’t good enough. He listened only because that person was his father.

Dell Curry knew that Stephen’s strength would soon be his weakness. He could see that his son’s low release point meant that anyone taller than him would be able to block his shot. He could also see that everyone was taller than him. Dell took the drastic measure of making Stephen take a break from competitive basketball for a while. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, when other kids his age were juggling college scholarship offers, Stephen was busy teaching himself to shoot again. By lifting the ball above his head and releasing as he ascended, he was essentially making himself taller. But his learning curve was steep. He took hundreds of shots every day on the court outside his family’s stucco two-car garage, where crepe myrtle trees prevented the ball from bouncing into the pool when he missed, and he missed so often that he began to hate shooting. It was a brutal summer that made him miserable. He almost quit basketball altogether.

But that painful summer produced a weapon that Curry would have for the rest of his life. In that summer he became the best shooter the sport of basketball had ever seen. It was that summer that made him a college star and then an NBA player.

He was still in for another rude awakening once he got to the pros. He was good. He wasn’t great. When the Warriors played the Knicks in his rookie season, his first time in the Garden as an NBA player, Curry found himself planted firmly on the bench. He could have resigned himself to the fact that he would never be valued properly by the NBA and nobody would have blamed him.

Curry’s weapon was the slingshot of basketball. There was an obvious reward for anyone who could wield it: his shots were worth three points instead of two. And not since a biblical shepherd boy named David had the slingshot been used to such a devastating effect. But the slingshot wasn’t a bazooka. He still had to be selective about when he shot, where he shot, and why he shot. He couldn’t shoot too early in the twenty-four-second shot clock. He couldn’t shoot too far behind the three-point line. And he couldn’t shoot too much. That restriction was the one constant of his entire career until that February night in Madison Square Garden. Stephen Curry couldn’t shoot as much as it made sense for him to shoot.

But what if he could?

3.

There is no getting around it. NBA Jam was a spectacularly bizarre rendition of basketball. The characters had cartoonish heads that were bigger than their entire bodies. It was perfectly legal for them to shove, elbow, or pummel the players on the other team. They swished full-court shots and somersaulted above the basket for breathtaking slam dunks. Mark Turmell’s creation defied the conventions of sports games because it wasn’t supposed to be like existing sports games. His inspiration was a sci-fi game called Primal Rage. This video game about basketball was modeled after dinosaurs fighting in a postapocalyptic society.

But from the very beginning, Turmell thought NBA Jam had the potential to be a big hit. His careful process for making video games started with turning his colleagues at Midway into guinea pigs, and his test subjects played his games so often they soon needed incentives to keep playing. So they bet. They became compulsive gamblers when they beta tested his games. They usually wagered candy bars. But when it was time for them to troubleshoot NBA Jam, their showdowns were unusually competitive. The developers chose a different form of currency for their bets: cold, hard cash. That was interesting, Turmell thought.

It wasn’t long after NBA Jam migrated to a local arcade called Dennis’ Place for Games that Turmell started hearing that something was wrong with his new game. The NBA Jam machine was malfunctioning. Turmell went to the arcade to check for himself. He quickly deduced the problem. It was true that the machine couldn’t take any more quarters, but not because the machine was broken. It was because the coin boxes were stuffed. The kids in Dennis’ Place for Games were feeding quarters into NBA Jam at such a furious pace that employees had to empty the machine every hour so they could keep playing. That was even more interesting, Turmell thought.

The usage statistics as they continued testing the game were off the charts. Every shred of data suggested that NBA Jam would be a sensation unlike any video game ever created. But Midway’s executives didn’t believe the data at first. “We thought the numbers that came back were screwy,” said Neil Nicastro, the president of Midway at its peak. “We hadn’t yet tested anything that had made that much money.”

For a game to be successful in the summer of 1993, it had to earn about $600 per week in the test arcade. There was a thin line between groundbreaking hit and epic flop. If a game made $150, it was a bust. If a game made $1,500, it was a smash. NBA Jam made $2,468 in a week when no other game at Dennis’ earned more than $750. That number was so ludicrous that Turmell saved a physical copy of the earning report as proof. “Do the math,” he says. “It takes ten minutes to play a game. The arcade’s open for twelve hours. For that kind of revenue, you have to be playing almost nonstop every day.”

The commotion inside Dennis’ Place for Games was a preview of the delirium that would infect arcades across the country. Midway needed to sell about two thousand machines to make the game financially worthwhile, and NBA Jam would have blown away expectations with ten thousand sales. NBA Jam wound up selling more than twenty thousand machines. The mania surrounding Turmell’s game was neatly encapsulated by a nasty letter that one out-of-stock distributor wrote to Midway. “Your programmers have created a monster,” he wrote.

NBA Jam was too successful. It turned out to be one of the most lucrative video games ever made. In less than a year, NBA Jam earned $1 billion in quarters.

But why?

There was nothing obvious about NBA Jam’s success. The suits who had been skeptical of the numbers never could have imagined that even NBA players would play NBA Jam. It wasn’t because of the abnormal body types or the acrobatic dunks or even because it felt rebellious and a little bit cool to exhibit such a blatant disregard for the rules of basketball. They became obsessed with NBA Jam because of a subtle quirk in the game mechanics.

It was critical to Mark Turmell that each of his games included a goal other than beating the computer. There had to be an elevated state of ability that would compel people to keep stuffing coins into the cashbox. But the inherent problem with sports games was that they were difficult to gamify. They were already games. It was satisfying to win a basketball game, but so what? It wasn’t a superpower. Turmell was noodling on this problem one day when he went to Burger King for lunch. He ordered a chicken sandwich with cheese and only cheese. Turmell was always working, even when he was at lunch, and he mentioned his dilemma to another Midway developer named Jamie Rivett. “We need some kind of mode,” Turmell said.

By the time Turmell’s chicken sandwich with cheese was ready, Rivett had suggested an idea they both knew immediately was brilliant: on-fire mode. They sketched out the details over lunch, walked back to the Midway office, and implemented on-fire mode that afternoon. If a player made two shots in a row, they decided, then he would be heating up. If he made three shots in a row, then he would almost certainly make his next shot. It didn’t matter what kind of shot it was. The ball would burst into flames. He would be on fire!

This is why Mark Turmell’s arcade game was so addicting. Our minds are programmed to search for patterns. He simply programmed a tendency of the human brain that already existed into NBA Jam. We see one, two, three shots in a row and intuitively seek out the fourth. We crave order in chaos. Turmell made sure there was a reward for that behavior. He turned the hot hand into NBA Jam’s superpower.

Not long after that working lunch at Burger King, Turmell offered the voice-over role for his game to a local comedian named Tim Kitzrow. The script for the gig was two pages. It was exactly the sort of job that no one should have known about. But the test audiences in Dennis’ Place for Games became infatuated with Kitzrow’s voice. They kept feeding quarters into the NBA Jam machines because they wanted to hear a few of the game’s catchphrases.

“Boomshakalaka!”

“He’s heating up!”

And what they really wanted Kitzrow to bellow were the three words that came next.

“He’s on fire!”

Mark Turmell could relate. When he was the age of those kids in the arcade, he had a soft spot for NBA players who caught fire, the ones who made one, two, three shots in a row and everyone in the building knew they were making a fourth. His favorite player was the Detroit Pistons guard Vinnie Johnson, and his nickname was “the Microwave” because he heated up instantly. It wasn’t surprising that Turmell idolized Johnson, given his three childhood loves. The first was playing with computers. The second was playing basketball. But it was his third childhood love that explains why he insisted his basketball explode into a fireball when a player was hot. He would have been captivated by NBA Jam if he hadn’t invented it first.

NBA Jam became unavoidable for boys and girls of a certain age. They played so much that it was as if Mark Turmell had brainwashed a generation of young, impressionable minds into believing the concept of the hot hand. It was systematically drilled into them that anyone who made three shots in a row was almost certainly going to make the fourth. And there was one person who would never be convinced otherwise. This child had an excuse to play NBA Jam because his dad was in the game, and he could even pretend to play as himself since they technically shared a name. But nobody called this kid Wardell Curry.

They called him Steph.

4.

The Golden State Warriors were late. There were three buses leaving for Madison Square Garden for their game against the New York Knicks, and Stephen Curry was supposed to be on the second bus. He was always on the second bus. But on this night, for some reason he can’t remember, Curry took the third bus. “Which I never do,” he tells me a few years later. He regretted the decision almost immediately. The third bus took an illegal turn out of the hotel, and the Warriors were pulled over by unsuspecting traffic cops.

When the bus finally chugged into the bowels of the arena, the players were tired and cranky, and this wasn’t entirely the bus driver’s fault. The night before had been a rough one for the Warriors. They had lost to the Indiana Pacers in a game that was spoiled by a nasty brawl. They boarded a plane, landed at some ungodly hour, and woke to the news that one of their teammates had been suspended and Curry had been fined for their roles in the fight.

So it had been a lousy day even before Curry found himself stuck on the third bus, dealing with the New York Police Department. But there was nothing he could do about that now. It was time for him to begin his warm-up routine in the Garden. This would be his escape. He started close to the basket, and he kept moving farther and farther back. Finally, as the fans took their seats, he was shooting from several feet behind the three-point line, the strip of paint on every court that was about to redefine the way the game was played.

The three-point line had been introduced to the NBA decades earlier because the biggest people in basketball were too dominant. The sport had become unfair. It discriminated against players like Curry on the basis of their height. With fans tuning out and the game desperate for a jolt, the most democratic solution the NBA could muster was simple math. They slapped a line on the court twenty-three feet, nine inches from the hoop for no reason other than it seemed like the right distance. Any shot within this line would be worth two points. Any shot behind this line would be worth three points.

There is another way of thinking about this radical shift in how basketball was played. The people responsible for the overall health of the NBA were tweaking the algorithm. The word “algorithm” today brings to mind geeks in front of computer screens writing the code that has come to govern our lives. But really an algorithm is a set of rules for solving a problem. When the NBA had a problem, the NBA rewrote the algorithm. The league changed the rules to make the game more exciting and to give players an incentive to stay behind the three-point line—the first in a series of unconnected events that allowed for the hot hand of Stephen Curry.

But the players didn’t respond to that incentive right away. In the 1979–1980 season, 3 percent of their shots were three-pointers. Only when their curiosity outweighed their suspicion did NBA players begin to recognize the three-point line as something other than a silly gimmick, and the proportion of three-pointers inched higher until it had reached 22 percent of the total shots in a season by the late 2000s. And then something funny happened. After nearly three decades of steady growth, the percentage of three-point attempts held steady for the next five years. It flatlined. NBA teams were behaving as if they had determined basketball’s optimal ratio. The sport had found its equilibrium.

But two things were about to happen that would blow that assumption to bits. The first thing was that Stephen Curry was drafted by a team that he didn’t want to draft him: the Golden State Warriors. They were so putrid and their owner was so reviled that he decided to sell the team not long after Curry fell into his lap. The second thing was that a collection of extremely wealthy people with little experience in basketball paid a record fortune to buy the Warriors. They rebuilt their NBA team around the bold notion that they should ignore every orthodoxy of building an NBA team. The construction process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it could have failed, but the eventual dominance of the Warriors can be traced back to one of the most unusual strategies they embraced. It was the notion that the three-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.

For almost the entire history of basketball, ever since James Naismith slapped a couple of peach baskets on the wall of a gymnasium and created a sport, the most important area of the court had been around those hoops. The best shots in basketball were always the ones closest to the basket. Or at least that’s what people thought. The Warriors weren’t sure anymore. “When you can exploit the three-point line,” their general manager says, “closer is not necessarily better.”

The Warriors came to believe the three-point arc was a boundary in time. Inside the line was the game’s past. But the future of basketball was behind the line.

They were one of the first teams to realize they weren’t taking nearly enough three-pointers. But the great mystery and baffling paradox of modern basketball is what took so long. At the end of the 2009 season, right before Curry’s rookie year, a wonk for ESPN published an article in which he outlined the formula for basketball success: “If you want to exceed expectations, start bombing away from downtown. And if you want to disappoint everyone, stop.” He added, “It’s no wonder the rate of 3-pointers goes up every season . . . and why it’s likely to keep heading in that direction for some time.” Except it didn’t. At least not for a while. ESPN’s basketball expert wasn’t such an expert when it came to predicting the behavior of human beings.

How could a group of sophisticated thinkers be so wrong for so long about something that was so important? Pete Carril never understood it. Carril, the legendary coach of Princeton’s basketball team, was known as Yoda partly because he looked frighteningly similar to the Star Wars character and partly because he was a Jedi master himself. He recognized the value of three-pointers before anyone in his line of work. “I love the three-point shot,” Carril once wrote. “You know why? Because it means they’re giving us three points for the same shot we used to get two for.” It was so obvious that teams should be taking shots that were worth one more point that it was in the name of the shot. That common sense somehow made him a contrarian. But it wasn’t what he was saying as much as when he was saying it. Carril was encouraging his players to take advantage of the three-point line when Curry was still a baby.

The last win of Carril’s career came in the first round of the NCAA tournament in 1996. Princeton beat the defending national champion UCLA in an upset that was about as likely as Carril becoming an underwear model. And the world of college basketball reacted appropriately. It went completely bananas. But overlooked in the aftermath was the statistical omen that explained the shocking outcome: more than half of Princeton’s shot attempts that night were three-pointers.

As the game was ending, the television cameras panned to the UCLA bench and settled on a player stress-eating his shirt. He was exactly what they were looking for: the face of agony. Many years later, that very same player was hired by an NBA front office, and the team he built would shoot a whole bunch of three-pointers.

His name was Bob Myers. He was the general manager of the Golden State Warriors.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Myers was a good high school basketball player who never intended to play college basketball. His plan was to join a crew team. The only reason he was on the bench during that game against Princeton was that he’d come to UCLA a few years earlier looking for the rowing coach. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he could play basketball there. In fact, before a similar visit to an Ivy League university, he’d written to that school’s basketball coach to schedule a meeting. Myers couldn’t even get the courtesy of a response. But as he wandered around the UCLA sports complex, he bumped into a basketball coach, who noticed that he was tall and encouraged Myers to attend a tryout. Myers took him up on the invitation. He made the team as a walk-on. He was on the bench as the Bruins won the national championship, and he soon found himself celebrating on the cover of Sports Illustrated. That was the thing about Bob Myers. He had a knack for being a part of big things as they happened. “We refer to Bob as our Forrest Gump,” his UCLA coach said.

By the time he was a senior, he wasn’t just playing for UCLA. He was starting for UCLA. The same kid who couldn’t get a meeting with an Ivy League university that didn’t offer scholarships was now on scholarship as one of the five best players for a basketball powerhouse. And everybody loved Bob. That was actually the headline of a story about him in the school newspaper: “Everybody Loves Bob.”

He parlayed that experience, his charming personality, and the handy fact that everybody loved him into a successful career as a sports agent once he graduated. He was good at that, too, and he might have been content negotiating contracts forever. But when his local NBA team was sold, Myers asked for a meeting with the Warriors. He was itching to join another basketball team like the one he’d known in college. As he walked out of his meeting with Joe Lacob, the brash Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’d bought the team, Myers was absolutely positive that he would never be hired by the Warriors. For a while, he was right. Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. Myers had the same number of communications with Lacob as he did with that Ivy League coach. And then one day he got an unexpected call.

“Were you serious when you said this might be something you’d be interested in doing?” Lacob said.

Myers quit his job to join the Warriors, and he was quickly promoted to general manager, the top basketball decision-maker for his favorite NBA team. Stephen Curry was one of the foundational pieces of the roster that he inherited. He was the reason Bob Myers would once again be a part of a big thing as it happened.

Myers had always sensed there was a psychological incentive to shoot more three-pointers. He knew from firsthand experience how demoralizing the three-pointer could be for the other team. He was still a little scarred by UCLA losing to Princeton. “I remember viscerally feeling that when you were rooting for a team and the other team hit a three-pointer, it felt like five points,” he says. NBA teams had stopped taking more three-pointers by then. That didn’t make any sense to the Warriors. It seemed like a good idea to take more of the shots that were worth one more point. “There are analytical reasons to do it,” Myers says, “but then I’m not sure many thought it was possible or prudent.” But sometimes the most obvious ideas are the most radical. Every now and then they’re also the most successful. “What’s really interesting in venture capital and doing start-ups is how the whole world can be wrong,” Lacob says. “No one really executed a game plan, a team-building architecture, around the three-pointer. Could you win with that?”

It turned out that you could. But first your best shooter had to stop treating his weapon like a slingshot and start using it like a bazooka.

Only because of something beyond his control did all those loosely connected strands of wisdom braid together for Curry in the game against the Knicks. When the NBA reviewed tape of the brawl with the Pacers the night before, Curry had been one of the first players involved in the fight, when he charged a seven-foot-two, 280-pound giant named Roy Hibbert. The outcome was similar to what might happen if a mosquito attempted to tackle a moose. “I didn’t even feel him,” Hibbert would later say. What saved Curry was his size. He wasn’t big enough to do any damage in a fight involving NBA players. For his entire life, Curry had been smaller than everyone on the basketball court, and it had always been a disadvantage. But for this one night it worked to his improbable advantage. The league decided to fine him $35,000 instead of suspending him.

He was amazingly fortunate to lose so much money. The Warriors needed scoring against the Knicks. They had no choice but to free Curry. He was going to shoot more than ever before, and they could only hope that he got hot.

It took him until the second quarter to make his first three-pointer. But one minute later, he made another, longer three-pointer. He was heating up. The next one came a minute later. By any objective measure, it was a bad shot. Curry stole the ball and sprinted across half-court in a straight line on his way to the rim. But instead of continuing toward the basket, which is what almost everyone who had ever played basketball would have done, Curry stopped. He was choosing to stay behind the three-point line. There were two defenders between Curry and the rim who appeared to be shocked by his audacity. Curry was trying a low-percentage shot when a higher-percentage shot was available. He was taking his chances with three instead of accepting two. When the ball dropped through the net, he could hear Tim Kitzrow shouting the NBA Jam catchphrase.

Stephen Curry was on fire.

He tried another three-pointer one minute later as he was falling away from the rim several feet behind the arc. This shot was as outrageous as it was ridiculous. It didn’t look like it was going in. And then it did. Of course it did! He had the hot hand. “Most locked in I’ve ever been,” he recalls. “Any time I got a glimmer of daylight, I let it go.”

When athletes like Curry get hot, they take a puff of the powerful, legal performance-enhancing drug otherwise known as confidence. In the same way that getting a compliment from your boss makes you work harder, hitting one, two, three shots in basketball makes you want to shoot again. The normal chemistry of your brain gets washed away by a flood of dopamine. The frontal lobe begins to act like it’s temporarily disconnected from the nervous system. Your muscles melt into Jell-O. You stop thinking. You start behaving intuitively.

But you don’t have to be Stephen Curry to be familiar with the feeling of being soaked with adrenaline. One person who could relate to him was Creighton University forward Ethan Wragge. Heavily bearded and slightly overweight, like a lumberjack who got lost on his way to the forest, the closest that Wragge would ever come to an NBA game was buying a ticket. By almost every basketball metric, he was completely mediocre. Except for one. Wragge was a magnificent shooter.

There were practices when he made so many shots in a row that he lost count. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how to defend him. The most important part of the scouting report on Wragge—maybe the only important part of the scouting report on Wragge—was knowing not to let him shoot. But there was one night when Creighton played Villanova University and the ball went to Wragge on Creighton’s opening possession. He swished it. That one shot was all it took for Wragge to feel like he was heating up. He was seeing things in slow motion. It was like everyone around him was staggering drunk and he was dead sober. As soon as he hit one shot, he wanted another shot. Wragge tried a deeper shot the next time Creighton had the ball. Again: swish. So he hunted for a third shot. “I feel like it’s going in no matter what,” he says. He was right. Wragge’s third shot went in. So did his fourth shot. And his fifth shot. And his sixth shot. And even his seventh shot. By the time he finally missed, Wragge had scored twenty-one of his team’s first twenty-seven points, one of the most amazing shooting exhibitions anyone had ever seen. “It was, like, this automatic, unconscious feeling,” he says. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”

The unscientific name for that automatic, unconscious feeling is “the zone.” The zone is a lovely place to be. As it happens, if you needed to describe the zone in two words, you could do worse than “automatic” and “unconscious.” The scientists who have actually bothered studying these “flow states” have begun to recognize that acquiring the hot hand is a result of thinking less, not more. The person who pioneered this line of work is a Hungarian American psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has spent almost sixty years thinking about the flow state. That’s a lot of thinking about flow. What he learned is that being in a flow state is an immensely pleasurable experience. “The way a long-distance swimmer felt when crossing the English Channel was almost identical to the way a chess player felt during a tournament or a climber progressing up a difficult rock face,” he wrote. “What they did to experience enjoyment varied enormously—the elderly Koreans liked to meditate, the teenage Japanese liked to swarm around in motorcycle gangs—but they described how it felt when they enjoyed themselves in almost identical terms.”

The hot hand made them happy. That’s the reason Curry, Wragge, and everyone who has felt the hot hand remembers it so fondly.

That night in the Garden was not Curry’s first experience with flammability. The first that others remember was when he was six years old and played for a team that was actually called the Flames. But the first that he remembers was in the eighth grade. The Currys had moved to Canada, and Stephen and his younger brother, Seth, enrolled at Queensway Christian College. “We were a small little Christian school where everyone who tried out made the team,” says their coach James Lackey. “It was the two of them and a bunch of guys who’d won three games the year before.”

Queensway won every game the year that Stephen Curry arrived. He caught fire so frequently that his coach often shook his head in sheer wonder and thought, What the heck just happened? Curry’s last explosion came in front of an abnormally large crowd for a basketball game between eighth graders. Queensway was playing a team that bullied Curry as if NBA Jam rules were in effect. It worked. Down by six points with one minute remaining, Lackey called time-out. He figured his team had no chance to win. Since this was still nominally a middle school basketball game, he wanted to remind his players to keep their composure after the loss and congratulate their opponents when the game was over. Or at least that’s what he was planning to say. Curry stopped him in the middle of his sportsmanship lecture.

“We’re not losing,” he said. “Give me the ball. I’ll make sure we win.”

“Okay,” Lackey said. “I guess that’s the play from now on.”

They gave Curry the ball. He proceeded to make four three-pointers in the next thirty seconds. Queensway won. Curry’s past is littered with so many of these tales that they begin to seem mythological. Lackey swears this one is true. And there is no reason not to believe him: the guy teaches at a Christian school in Canada.

Why did Curry have the hot hand that day? Why did Curry have the hot hand on any day? Was it physical? Was it mental? Was it some bowl of cereal that he scarfed down that morning or a lucky seat on the bus that got pulled over on the way to the Garden? Curry himself doesn’t know. He can’t predict when he’ll be in the zone. But he knows he must do everything in his power to remain in that flow state for as long as possible.

“Once it happens,” Stephen Curry says, “you have to embrace it.”

Curry missed his next shot against the Knicks. If he were in NBA Jam, he would have returned to his normal ability. In this real NBA game, Curry didn’t take another three-pointer for the rest of the first half. But it wasn’t because he suddenly decided that he was lukewarm. It was because the Knicks understood as well as the Warriors that Curry was still hot. His teammates refused to touch his right hand because they didn’t want to cool him off. “There was nothing anybody could do,” said Carmelo Anthony of the Knicks, “except hope he misses.”

But there was something they could do: not let him shoot. The Knicks sent double-teams at Curry. They trapped him whenever he touched the ball. Their goal was no longer to beat the Warriors. The only thing they cared about was not letting Curry shoot.

Curry knew what it was like to be the sole focus of five other basketball players. When he was a budding star at Davidson College, there was one game when Loyola University Maryland’s coach tried to beat Davidson by not letting Curry shoot. His strategy was to double-team Curry no matter where he was on the court and no matter whether he actually had the ball. This coach would rather his team play three-on-four than five-on-five. Curry realized the folly of the plan, stood by himself in the corner, and dragged two Loyola defenders with him. That meant one of his teammates would always be open. Curry could have been eating nachos with fans in the front row and he still would’ve been helping Davidson. When he noticed that two guys were shadowing him everywhere he went, Curry figured he might as well get to know his babysitters. “Are you guys really double-teaming me the whole game?” he asked them. They didn’t know what to say, so they didn’t say anything. The gimmick would have been interesting if it weren’t such a complete disaster. Curry was college basketball’s leading scorer, and he finished the game against Loyola with zero points. Davidson won in a blowout.

But now the Knicks were more or less going with the Loyola game plan. Curry knew that meant one of his teammates had to be open, and he passed to those open teammates for easy shots. His shooting demanded so much attention that it had become easier for everyone around him to succeed. There’s actually a delicious basketball term for this: “gravity.” Curry always had the gravity to suck a defense close to him. But his gravity when he had the hot hand made Curry more like a black hole. His momentum warped the game around him. Both teams behaved as if Curry was probably going to make his next three-pointer, and their collective belief in the hot hand was as powerful as the hot hand itself. There was no one on the court who didn’t believe in the hot hand. In fact there may not have been anyone in the NBA who didn’t believe in the hot hand. “I haven’t met that person yet,” Curry says.

It wasn’t any easier for him to find open shots when the second half started. The Knicks chased him around the court like they were trying to drench him with a bucket of ice water. But his first shot after halftime was all it took to convince him to keep shooting. As soon as he touched the ball, he reminded himself to remain under control when his defender charged at him. He pump-faked—not unlike my own pump fake when I had the hot hand—and watched that defender fly past him. He centered himself, launched the shot, and took in the supreme beauty of his swish.

Curry hadn’t cooled off. Once he confirmed that he was scorching, he launched three-pointers that would have earned anyone else a permanent spot on the bench. One from three feet behind the line while double-teamed. One from five feet behind the line. One with a gigantic seven-footer in his face as Curry fell on his butt.

There was a certain sound that accompanied these shots. It began as he released the ball and fans drew a collective breath of anticipation. The pitch rose as their lungs filled. It peaked in a hysterical crescendo as the ball traced a parabola toward the rim. But his shots originated from so far away and followed such a high arc that all these fans ran out of oxygen. That was the noise: the Curry note. It was more recognizable as a shriek.

The last Curry note of the night came at the end of the fourth quarter, when he grabbed a rebound and seemed to be running to the other basket before he even had the ball. He took two dribbles to cross the half-court line. He took one more dribble to slow his momentum. And then he shot. In the millisecond it took for him to levitate, the equation of the possession had tilted Curry’s way. His defenders were caught flat-footed. Curry was rising above them. The ball hadn’t even swished through the net before he was backpedaling across the court in celebration. He galloped the length of the floor until he was underneath his own basket again. It was as if Curry were literally on fire and needed to extinguish himself. He was that hot. “I’ve never been to quite that place before,” he said afterward. “Not ever.”

The stunned Knicks fans gave this player from the other team a standing ovation. They didn’t know what else to do. Curry had scored fifty-four points—the most points he’d ever scored in a basketball game. In the history of the NBA, no one had taken so many three-pointers and made as many of them. He’d discovered the sweet spot of volume and efficiency.

The three-pointer was no longer a slingshot. Stephen Curry had made it his bazooka.

What happened in the Garden that night wasn’t an anomaly. It was an epiphany. His performance emboldened Curry to believe that he could shoot more and that he should shoot more. He’d been fully unleashed for the first time, and the results had been astonishing. He’d broken the game.

Curry had the full encouragement of the Warriors’ brass to keep shooting after that night. Their decision was part strategy, part stumbling upon something that worked, and part being smart enough to see that Curry would be at his most effective only if he was permitted to do things that nobody had ever done. In his career before that game, he averaged eighteen points, attempting five three-pointers per game. In his career after that game, Curry averaged twenty-six points, attempting ten three-pointers per game. Curry began shooting as many three-pointers as possible, which was more three-pointers than anyone ever thought possible. There was nowhere on the court that other teams could afford to leave him open. He was a better shooter from thirty to forty feet than the average NBA player was from three to four feet. He turned heaves from near the half-court logo into better shots than slam dunks. He set a record for the most three-pointers in a season, and then he shattered his own record by more than 40 percent. It looked more like a statistical error than a statistical outlier. What he did was almost beyond comprehension. It was the equivalent of Roger Bannister running his four-minute mile in two and a half minutes.

That night in Madison Square Garden when he had the hot hand turned out to be the night that changed Stephen Curry’s life. Within two years he was the most valuable player of the NBA. Within three years he was the first unanimous most valuable player in the history of the league. Within four years he was the most influential basketball player alive. The Warriors became an NBA dynasty built around Curry’s ability to shoot a basketball. At the peak of his popularity, fans were coming to Warriors games hours early to watch his warm-ups. But what they really hoped when they paid to see Curry in person was that it would be a night when he got hot. There was simply nothing in sports more thrilling than watching Stephen Curry get hot.

If you ask him for his career breakthroughs, those transcendent moments when he began to feel that he’d achieved what he could only imagine when he was a child playing NBA Jam, Curry will tell you about three. There was the time he won his first championship. There was the time he was invited by the White House to golf with Barack Obama. But none of this would have been possible if not for the third moment: the time that he was on fire.

5.

The surfers were catching the last waves before sunset as I walked into a beachfront restaurant on a typically perfect evening near San Diego. The sky was pink. The windows sucked in a soft breeze. The air smelled of salt and grass and sweat. And yet I had the nagging feeling that something was off. I finally realized why. It was such a pleasant summer night that no one was playing with their phones. And the only person who had any reason to be upset about that was the person I was meeting for dinner.

Mark Turmell was now in his midfifties. He was still tall enough to be a basketball player, but he was softer in the belly, and his sandy hair was short and spiky, as if it were apologizing for all those years that his perm fell below his shoulders. Turmell sat down and ordered a cheeseburger with only cheese, just the way he liked his Burger King chicken sandwich. He whipped out his iPhone and scrolled through photos of his wife, whom he had met online, which seemed appropriate. Of course he married someone who was in his life because of a computer. Before long he was scrolling through his apps to show me what he was doing at work these days. It was the same thing he’d been doing for almost forty years. Turmell was still making video games.

He was working for Zynga, the company to blame for addictive games like Words with Friends and FarmVille, and it was his job to keep people glued to their computers and phones in a way that felt so natural they didn’t even notice. He was outstanding at his job. Turmell could’ve built an actual farm with the productive hours that people had wasted playing Zynga games.

When he was hired by the company, his bosses had begged him to make a “Ville” game. But once again Turmell had another, more ambitious idea.

The first game he released was called Bubble Safari. It had all the makings of an arcade classic and would’ve fit right into Dennis’ Place for Games. It was also stupendously dumb. The main character was a monkey named Bubbles, and he was on a mission to rescue his girlfriend, who had been captured by poachers. The only way that Bubbles could sustain himself on his chivalrous expedition was by gathering fruit, and the only way he could gather fruit was by matching pieces that popped the protective bubbles around the fruit. And that was basically it. That was the entire game.

Bubble Safari went live in May 2012. It was the fastest-growing game on Facebook by June. It was more popular than FarmVille and Words with Friends by July. It spawned Bubble Safari Ocean—which was like the original but set in an ocean instead of a jungle and with baby crabs instead of monkeys—and by January that game had become equally addictive. There was a time when more than thirty million people were playing Bubble Safari.

That the most popular game on Facebook was about a monkey gathering coconuts and strawberries on his way to rescue another monkey wasn’t as fanciful as it sounded—at least not to Turmell. It reminded him of an experience from earlier in his life. Bubble Safari had a surprising number of things in common with NBA Jam.

“The mechanics are the same,” Turmell says. “The key to being successful in this type of market that’s so saturated is to have innovation, surprise, and delight around every corner.”

NBA Jam had secret characters and crazy dunks. Bubble Safari had sticky bombs, paint splats, and double rainbows. And there was one more thing they had in common.

When a Bubble Safari player made three matches in a row, Bubbles’s ammunition turned the color of a basketball. He was no longer shooting fruit. Now he was spewing flames. Boomshakalaka! Bubbles the monkey was on fire. Turmell swore to himself after the success of NBA Jam that he would use the hot hand in every game he developed for the rest of his life. This childhood pyromaniac was still playing with fire.

Was there more at stake for the Golden State Warriors than the kids inside Dennis’ Place for Games? Of course there was. But the great insight of Mark Turmell was that Stephen Curry and some pimply teenager with a few quarters in his pocket were really chasing the same thing. They both wanted to take advantage of the rules that controlled their environments to transcend their places in the world. The reward for the NBA Jam player was a brief feeling of invincibility and the sound of Tim Kitzrow saying a bunch of funny words. The reward for Curry was an NBA championship.

There was a whole universe of people who had devoted their careers to understanding why NBA players and NBA Jam players behaved in similar ways. Mark Turmell had been too busy making video games to know this. He actually didn’t know much of anything about this idea called the hot hand. And he didn’t know exactly how much he didn’t know.

Two

THE LAW OF THE HOT HAND

“Unhappy fortune!”

1.

It was January 1605, and the queen of England was looking for a good time. When she decided to entertain a foreign visitor with a night at the theater, it seemed like a foolproof plan. The queen was a devoted patron of the arts with a keen appreciation for the playwrights of her day. She was also the queen. One of the perks of being royalty was a seat in the front row of any theater on any night—except for this night.

On this particular evening, there was nothing for her to see. The queen had already seen everything.

There was a reason that even Her Royal Highness was stuck with revivals at this particular moment in British history. It was because the most dependable playwright of her era hadn’t written many plays lately. William Shakespeare was in a rut.

But not for long. His fallow period was about to make way for the single most incredible run of Shakespeare’s life. Within the span of one year, he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Some literary critics believe three of his most enduring plays were released over the course of two short months. Two months! There are juice cleanses that last more than two months. Even if it took him slightly longer, there is no doubt that the period from the beginning of 1605 to the end of 1606 was “a concentrated efflorescence of creative power as strong or stronger than any other in Shakespeare’s career,” as the scholar J. Leeds Barroll wrote.

Or, as Mark Turmell might say, Shakespeare was on fire.

The same queen who couldn’t bear another revival at the beginning of 1605 suddenly had the pleasure of sitting in the front row for not one, not two, but three of Shakespeare’s greatest plays by the end of 1606. It was such a resplendent stretch of unexpected literary success that it was only natural to wonder exactly what changed.

Was it him? Or was it the world around him?

2.

This is a chapter about how you get hot. It happens to different people in different professions for entirely different reasons. But the process of turning a blip of success into a sustained period of success depends on those same questions about Shakespeare. Was it him? Or was it the world around him? It can be one or the other. But ideally it’s both. And that’s because the hot hand is not a random occurrence. It’s the collision of talent, circumstance, and even a little bit of luck.

Rebecca Clarke certainly had the talent. What she couldn’t have known—and what she wouldn’t know until it was too late—was if she would get lucky with her circumstance.

Born in the late 1800s in the suburbs of London, Clarke was a viola player who pursued a career as a composer, a radical decision for a woman at the turn of the century. But she was so obviously precocious that one legendary professor went out of his way to cultivate her talent even though he’d never mentored a female composer. She moved to the United States in 1916, and it wasn’t long before Clarke had the first hit of her fledgling career. On the afternoon of February 13, 1918, she held a recital in New York’s Aeolian Hall. Clarke played three works, including the premiere of a piece for viola and piano called Morpheus by a British composer named Anthony Trent, and two duets for viola and cello that she had written. One critic singled out her chops on viola before raving that “as a composer, the young woman likewise shone.”

Rebecca Clarke’s future was clearly bright. But it was even brighter than anyone in Aeolian Hall could have imagined. That was because there was something they didn’t know about her: Rebecca Clarke was also Anthony Trent. She hadn’t composed two pieces for the recital. She’d composed three. “I thought it’s idiotic to have my name down as composer three times on the program,” Clarke said. She chose to invent a pseudonym rather than accept the credit that she deserved.

There was one thing working to Anthony Trent’s advantage that Rebecca Clarke would never get to experience for herself: he was a he. Clarke was not especially proud of the piece that she wrote under a man’s name, which only made the reaction to Morpheus more puzzling to her. “It had much more attention paid to it than the pieces I had written,” she said, “which was rather a joke.” There was even an article in Vogue—a women’s magazine!—that mentioned him as one composer worthy of more recognition. A photo of Clarke clutching her viola appeared in the same Vogue story, which cautioned that “one should not overlook Miss Clarke’s own picturesque compositions.” But she wasn’t photographed because of those picturesque compositions. It was because she had the great honor of performing an original piece by Anthony Trent. Anthony Trent got the benefit of the doubt because he was not a she.

That kind of slap in the face would’ve made anyone in her situation want to crawl into a sinkhole. But there was also something undeniably encouraging about this development for Clarke—even if she could see the silver lining only by squinting. The rapturous applause for Anthony Trent was really a confirmation of her major talent.

Her next success was the result of a fantastic opportunity that should have changed her life forever. Clarke was friendly with Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a generous benefactor of classical music, who held a chamber music festival every year and sponsored a viola sonata composition contest with a grand prize of $1,000. She encouraged Clarke to enter. It would be a blind competition evaluated solely on the merits of the work and not by the sex of the composer. This seemed like it was almost specifically created for someone with Clarke’s musical pedigree. Coolidge was familiar with the inherent disadvantages of being a woman in classical music in the early 1900s. She didn’t want anyone else to be. Clarke hadn’t yet composed a full sonata, but she couldn’t pass on this opportunity, especially not after getting a nudge from Coolidge herself.

The sonata that she wrote was one of seventy-three entries from some of the world’s most accomplished composers. That list was whittled down to two finalists and presented to the judges for voting. The musicians on the jury were split right down the middle, and they asked Coolidge to cast the deciding vote. When the jurors opened the envelope to reveal the winner, they read a familiar name: the famous composer Ernest Bloch. But just when the identity of the second composer would have been lost to history, the judges requested that Coolidge open the second envelope, too. They were curious about this composer whom they had determined to be Bloch’s equal. They wouldn’t have been surprised to see a name like Anthony Trent. What they were not expecting was the name Rebecca Clarke.

“You should have seen their faces when they saw it was by a woman,” Coolidge said.

Clarke soon entered a piano trio into another one of Coolidge’s blind competitions. When she once again placed second, Coolidge was so impressed that she became Clarke’s patron. When circumstance shined on her, her talent had sparkled.

There is no doubt in retrospect that this should have been the tipping point of her career. But after the Anthony Trent piece, the viola sonata, and the piano trio, Rebecca Clarke would never have another hit. She basically stopped writing music altogether. Instead she disappeared from public view and kept busy knitting and playing bridge. “I put my things away in a drawer and I got rather embarrassed at even talking about them,” she said. Clarke would later refer to her towering achievement in Coolidge’s anonymous contest as “that one little whiff of success that I’ve had in my life.”

So what went wrong?

That was more or less the question on Robert Sherman’s mind when he made the trip to Clarke’s apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City in 1976. It had been nearly six decades since her “one little whiff of success.” But if there was anyone who should have known who she was, it was an eminent critic like Sherman, who hosted a radio show that required him to play two hours of classical music every morning. He’d never heard of her.

It was only while putting together a program on a British woman pianist that he learned, to his great shock, that another British woman who had worked with this pianist was still alive and living not too far away. By the time he called Clarke, she was eighty-nine years old and used a walker to get around. She shuffled over to her closet and reached for a program commemorating a performance she’d given with this pianist whom Sherman had come to hear about. He couldn’t help but notice there were pieces on the program written by the woman who was now sitting across from him. He’d known that Clarke was a violist. He hadn’t known that she was a composer, too. “Oh, long ago,” Clarke said. “Nobody remembers.”

Only when he prodded did she proceed to tell Sherman about her forgotten past. He very quickly realized that there was an even better story staring him straight in the face. He scheduled another meeting with Clarke—and this one would be solely about Clarke.

“Why did you stop writing songs?” he said.

“Well, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?” she replied.

Clarke had the talent to be one of the great composers of the twentieth century. But her circumstances never coincided with her talent. Clarke was alive at the wrong time. She wasn’t in an environment that allowed her to capitalize on the hot hand. Her family members resented her line of work and mocked the very creations that would one day be celebrated. “There was a lot of giggling underneath the surface about her music,” said one relative. “In the family, it was considered to be absolutely ridiculous.” But really their objections boiled down to the fact that Rebecca Clarke was a woman, and composing beautiful music was thought to be a frivolous activity for women. She was never able to maintain a singular focus on her work, even with the support of a wealthy patron like Coolidge, because of these detrimental conditions that she encountered. Her career stalled at the moment it should have exploded, and she begrudgingly accepted her circumstances.

“I didn’t—I seemed to lose my interest in—I—” Clarke attempted to explain to Sherman. “I can’t really quite tell you all about it.”

But there was once a time when she could. She even described the enigmatic phenomenon of the hot hand in her unpublished memoir. “Every now and then, in the middle of struggling with some problem, everything would fall into place with a suddenness almost like switching on an electric light,” she wrote. “At these moments, though I had no illusions whatever about the value of my work, I was flooded with a wonderful feeling of potential power. A miracle made anything seem possible. Every composer, or writer, or painter too for that matter, however obscure, is surely familiar with this sensation. It is a glorious one. I know of almost nothing equal to it.”

Clarke was still clinging to that memory decades after she’d felt it for the last time.

“There’s nothing in the world more thrilling,” she told Sherman. “But you can’t do it unless—at least I can’t; maybe that’s where a woman’s different—I can’t do it unless it’s the first thing I think of every morning when I wake and the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep.”

“You need that intensity and that concentration,” he said.

“Yes,” she explained. “I can’t do it otherwise.”

Her feelings of deficiency ran so deep that instead of being revered for her accomplishments she wanted to forget them altogether. What she hadn’t accomplished hurt too much. “Most people don’t even know that I ever did any composing because I didn’t like talking about it,” she said.

Sherman shared Clarke’s story with a violist, pianist, and chamber trio who looked at the scores that she’d fished out of her closet and performed her three known pieces on the radio. When the interview aired on August 30, 1976, it was accompanied by music that almost nobody alive had ever heard. “It was nice, and her friends enjoyed it, but the important thing was that it went beyond,” Sherman says. “It went beyond in a way that none of us could have ever imagined.” The violists and pianists and chamber trios listening at home were astounded. They didn’t know who she was. They didn’t really care, either. Enough time had passed that they were listening to her music with the same lack of bias as the judges in a blind competition. They soon came to a similar conclusion: Rebecca Clarke was an exemplary composer.

The pieces that had been sitting at the bottom of her closet for decades came back into circulation. Soon there were fresh recordings of her sonata and trio. Less than a year after the radio show, Clarke’s viola sonata was performed in Lincoln Center. “Had she not been a woman composer when such phenomena were not taken very seriously, Miss Clarke might be heard more today,” wrote a New York Times critic in a glowing review that called her sonata “a lovely piece full of arresting melodic ideas that often strike a note of genuine passion and originality.” There would eventually be a collection of interviews with her and essays about her called A Rebecca Clarke Reader, edited by a musicologist named Liane Curtis, the president of The Rebecca Clarke Society. What had begun as a good deed for a nice old lady had become a full-blown comeback for a deeply misvalued artist. “Before she died,” Sherman says, “there was a total revival of Rebecca Clarke’s pieces.” The most amazing part of all this was that he’d inadvertently sparked the resurgence of a forgotten composer all because he needed tape to fill a radio show that wasn’t even supposed to be about her.

“It was a confluence of accidents,” he says, “and fortuitous circumstances.”

There’s that word again: “circumstance.” Only right before she died in 1979 did Clarke begin to take her rightful place in the canon. It was through no fault of her own that she wasn’t able to take advantage of her hot hand. Who knows what might’ve happened if conditions had evolved in Clarke’s favor instead of conspiring against her? There are composers who spend their whole lives toiling in obscurity and die without anybody knowing their names or hearing their music. Their lack of circumstances is less tragic because most of them don’t have the talent. She did. And the inevitability of her fate was the sort of thing that she couldn’t help but think about. She even indulged herself by dabbling in tarot cards. She even read her own fortune every now and then.

“I did my own a number of times,” Rebecca Clarke said. “They came out different every time.”

3.

A century after Rebecca Clarke performed her first concert in the United States, a statistical physicist named Dashun Wang found himself thinking about people like her, even though he had no clue who she was. He was more interested in someone whose name he did know.

Wang focused on the year in which Albert Einstein managed to produce his research on the photoelectric effect that would later win him a Nobel Prize. At that point Einstein could have called it quits and taught himself how to yodel. Instead he published his theory of special relativity, a study of Brownian motion, and the most famous equation in the history of science: E = mc². He packed a career’s worth of intellectual achievements into a few months. What he did in 1905 is now known simply as “the year of miracles.”

But as he contemplated this run, Dashun Wang began to wonder how miraculous that year really was. By thinking about Einstein, he made an important scientific discovery of his own.

Let’s call it the law of the hot hand.

Wang believed it was not a coincidence that Einstein’s best work came in bunches or that Clarke had three straight triumphs. That’s how creativity works. Success is streaky. Hits are clustered. And this heightened state of ability is the key to understanding the lasting contributions of everyone from scientists to movie directors. Their careers are defined by their hot-hand periods. “What happens in the hot-hand period,” Wang says, “is what we remember.”

The first movie that one of those movie directors actually directed was a satirical documentary about a fictional, mediocre British rock band. Rob Reiner dragged his twenty-minute demo cut from studio to studio and kept being told that his mockumentary called This Is Spinal Tap would never work. He finally got the minimal amount of funding he needed from one of his father’s oldest friends and shot the whole film in five weeks on a shoestring budget. The movie was at best a modest success at the box office, but it was a smash with the critics. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called This Is Spinal Tap “one of the funniest, most intelligent, most original films of the year.” That review alone made Rob Reiner a movie director. All he had to do next was direct another movie.

The logical next step for someone in his position would have been to play it safe and ease his way into the mainstream. But he decided to make another movie that he wasn’t supposed to make. It was built around a bolder premise: a romantic comedy that dared to treat teenagers like adults. The Sure Thing was also a critical hit, and this time his film made some money. He’d earned the runway to make a third movie. And what did Rob Reiner do? He picked another movie he wasn’t supposed to make. The collective wisdom of the show-business crowd suggested that Stand by Me was bound for disaster. It was based on a story by horror novelist Stephen King, but it wasn’t a horror movie. It was almost as if Reiner and King were intentionally trying to alienate their most loyal fans. As if that weren’t enough to sink the film, Reiner basically cast a bunch of unknowns. And still the movie became a monster at the box office.

Now there was no longer any doubt about his directing ability. Rob Reiner was critically successful and commercially bankable. That was as powerful a Hollywood combination as peanut butter and jelly. This was finally starting to become clear to the movie studios that kept passing on Reiner’s projects only to watch the positive reviews and piles of money come pouring in afterward. But who could blame them? His movies were delightful contradictions. “He is successful not because he made movies that everyone expected to be a hit,” a newspaper reporter once wrote about Reiner, “but because he made movies that no one expected to be a hit.” So you might think that some enterprising producers would have sold their kidneys to put their names on a Reiner movie. But no. One of Reiner’s exchanges with a studio executive went like this:

“We love your films,” the studio executive said. “What do you want to do next?”

“You don’t want to do what I want to do,” Reiner replied.

“No, that’s not true. I want to do what you want to do.”

“No, you want me to do what you want to do.”

“No, I want to do what you want to do.”

The studio executive finally asked Reiner to name his next film.

“The Princess Bride.”

“Well, anything but that.”

Let’s go back to what happened when Stephen Curry had the hot hand. His team started running plays to get him more shots, and his coaches demanded that he keep shooting. The result of his scoring was that it became more likely that Curry would score. A similar thing happens if you’re a director with the hot hand. Screenwriters, actors, and studios want to work with you. They want to assist you. They want to make sure you shoot. You get better opportunities because you’re hot. Success begets success. That is the simple power of the hot hand.

Remember what Curry said about the hot hand? Once it happens, you have to embrace it. Rebecca Clarke didn’t have the means to embrace it. It would turn out that Rob Reiner did.

Curry was a different player when he was on fire. He took longer shots. He took harder shots. He took shots that he never would have taken if he didn’t have a hunch that he was hot. There was even a name for these absurd shots that Curry took knowing that nobody could fault him if he missed. They were called “heat checks.” Rob Reiner’s heat check was The Princess Bride.

The Princess Bride was Hollywood’s great white whale. It was a fairy tale with fight scenes and true love, a children’s movie for adults that was silly and sweet, a film that managed to fuse romance, suspense, comedy, and drama. It was also a riddle haunted by a curse. Even after his three successes in a row, Reiner knew it would be tricky to make The Princess Bride. He didn’t know that it had proven impossible until that point, and he might have chosen a different project altogether if he’d been aware of the movie’s daunting history.

François Truffaut and Norman Jewison had tried to make The Princess Bride. Robert Redford tried to make and star in The Princess Bride. The legendary screenwriter William Goldman liked to tell people that multiple studio heads had been fired immediately after promising to make his film. This was odd. Any studio that wanted to be a hit factory would have been wise to follow a simple formula: make Goldman movies. This was the guy who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. His material was so valuable that by the early 1980s no one would have blamed Hollywood executives for rifling through his trash and buying the rights to his grocery lists. But his stature only made the convoluted saga of The Princess Bride more baffling.

There is so much that has to go right to make a movie that it’s a miracle any movie ever gets made. In theory it should have been easier for Rebecca Clarke to compose an entire symphony than it was for Rob Reiner to direct The Princess Bride. After all, if composing music is an individual pursuit, then directing a movie is a collective endeavor. But this is when it came in handy that Reiner was aware that he had the hot hand. He used it to bend circumstance his way.

When he decided to make this movie, to risk his directing career and spend the capital that he’d earned making a few hit movies, Reiner went to convince Goldman that he was worthy. He was petrified to ring the doorbell of his apartment. “The Princess Bride is my favorite thing I’ve ever written,” Goldman said after he opened the door. “I want it on my tombstone.” Reiner discussed his vision for the film and showed Goldman cuts of his previous movies. He would later call the meeting in which he earned Goldman’s blessing the greatest moment of his directing career. Once he had permission, there was one more thing Reiner needed: money. The Princess Bride’s screenplay called for swordplay, gigantic rodents, and torture chambers, as well as a cast of characters that included a Sicilian hunchback, the most beautiful woman in the world, and a giant. This was epic stuff. The problem with epic stuff was that it was also expensive. Reiner finally convinced Norman Lear, the All in the Family creator who happened to be a friend of Reiner’s father, to open his checkbook and lend him enough cash to make the movie. Only then did Twentieth Century Fox come along and agree to distribute Reiner’s project—even if that project was The Princess Bride. Reiner still laments how difficult it was to make The Princess Bride. The hot hand was the only reason that it was even remotely feasible.

We’re all lucky for it. If there were some way to quantify the number of people who have seen and enjoyed any given movie, The Princess Bride would rank at the top of the list. One of the closest approximations to that metric is a movie’s CinemaScore grade. CinemaScore is a research firm with movie data going back several decades, and this combination of longevity and reliability gives its grades a certain weight. If a movie has a good CinemaScore grade, it’s probably good. If a movie has a great CinemaScore grade, it’s almost certainly destined for greatness. But if a movie gets an A+ grade, it’s an instant classic.

It’s a profound achievement to make even one movie worthy of the A+. Only ten directors have two A+ movies. But there is one director with three A+ movies. They were released within a span of five years and have almost nothing in common except for the man in the director’s chair. Rob Reiner made A Few Good Men in 1992. He made When Harry Met Sally . . . in 1989. And his run of A+ movies started in 1987 with the making of a movie that no one wanted him to make.

That movie? It was The Princess Bride.

4.

To understand what Dashun Wang and his collaborators found, it helps to understand how they found it. Wang’s team wanted to put some numbers behind fuzzy concepts like artistic taste, scholarly impact, and whether a movie is good, and they went searching for objective data that could help them quantify the subjective. The point of their research was not to compare academics to directors. It was not even to compare academics with academics or directors with directors. It was to compare the works of Einstein with the other works of Einstein. They wanted to pinpoint when creative types peak. The only way they could do that was by comparing their subjects with themselves.

The data they collected was sufficiently large to make some interesting conclusions. They looked at the auction prices for three thousand artists, the Google Scholar and Web of Science citations of twenty thousand academics, and the IMDB movie ratings of six thousand directors. Once they looked at those numbers, they found themselves staring at a surprising pattern: 91 percent of financially successful artists, 90 percent of published scientists, and 82 percent of directors whose films reached theaters had at least one hot-hand period in their careers. They had caught fire. The most expensive paintings, influential research, and beloved films were not independent events. They were the by-products of creative streaks.

While he found evidence for the hot hand only among artists, scholars, and directors, Wang is convinced that he would find it in any other industry. He believes it’s universal. When people had the hot hand, their quantity of work might have been the same, but the quality of that work was empirically higher. These were prolonged stretches of professional success in which people outperformed even their own expectations. They took advantage of their resources when they were hot to get hotter. These cultural luminaries and scholarly dignitaries were the best versions of themselves when they had the hot hand. This was fundamentally different from the fleeting rush of the hot hand in basketball. It wasn’t a matter of short-term momentum. The peaks of their careers lasted anywhere from three to five years, and the way their hits built on one another meant there were long-term effects to getting hot.

“If I know your best work, I know when your second best will be and when your third best will be,” Wang says. “That’s your hot-hand period.” But it’s not linear. It’s jagged. “You’re progressing along with a certain level of performance, and then all of a sudden your performance elevates to another level,” Wang explains. “You’re not yourself anymore. You’re not producing more than you expect. But what you produce in that period is much, much better.” Maybe the most riveting thing he found was actually something he didn’t find: there is no way yet to predict when someone is on the verge of such a streak. “Your hot streak can come at any time,” Wang claims. “What I learned from my own research is actually rather uplifting. Because the hot streak can start with any work, the only sure way to prevent it is to stop publishing. If you keep going, your hot streak may be yet to come.”

But how do you know if you’ve already had your hot hand? You don’t. You can’t! If you were to ask Wang for advice, he might tell you that it doesn’t matter what your circumstance is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Rebecca Clarke or a Rob Reiner. It doesn’t even matter if your hot-hand period is on the horizon or if it has already passed.

“The answer is the same,” Wang says. “You should keep going.”

Wang is such an unfailing optimist about the hot hand that he makes it easy to forget that behaving in this manner can backfire. It’s a supremely risky philosophy. Confidence can become arrogance. Arrogance can become ignorance. Your internal ability can get you only so far. That doesn’t mean you should quit your beer-league basketball team just because you won’t make it to the NBA. But it does mean that you shouldn’t delude yourself. Stephen Curry recognized the conditions were ripe for a hot hand. Rebecca Clarke realized they weren’t. That is the loophole in Wang’s law of the hot hand. There are many industries where your internal cadence is at the mercy of external forces. Sometimes those external forces break your way and the result is magic like The Princess Bride. Sometimes those external forces crush ambition. Talent is important, but circumstance is imperative, and circumstance beats talent when talent doesn’t have circumstance.

But the reason to put some faith in Dashun Wang and trust the law of the hot hand is that it’s not out of the realm of possibility for circumstance to appear when talent least expects it.

In fact it’s happened before.

5.

One summer day in 1564, before Dashun Wang, before Rob Reiner, long before Rebecca Clarke and even before Queen Anne, a small village in the English countryside was rattled by the sudden death of a weaver’s apprentice. The local tragedy was immortalized in the margins of the town’s records. Next to the name of the weaver’s apprentice were three ominous Latin words: Hic incipit pestis.

“Here begins the plague.”

The plague wiped out a sizable portion of this particular town. It was an indiscriminate killer. The weaver’s apprentice was the first of more than two hundred people to die over the next six months. Who lived and who died was seemingly a matter of chance. The plague could decimate one family and spare the family next door. In one house on Henley Street was a young couple who had already lost two children to previous waves of the plague, and their newborn son was three months old when they locked their doors and sealed their windows to keep the plague from invading their home again. They knew from their unfortunate experience that infants were especially vulnerable to this morbid disease. They understood better than perhaps anyone on Henley Street that it would be a miracle if he survived. Seven of ten babies died in plague years. It was as if every family were flipping a coin unfairly weighted toward heads and betting a child’s life on tails.

But when the plague was done with this small village in the English countryside, a little town called Stratford-upon-Avon, the couple breathed a sigh of relief that their young boy was still alive. William Shakespeare was a miracle who grew up to do miraculous things.

There’s a possibility that Shakespeare developed some kind of immunity to the plague because of his exposure when he was an infant, but that speculation began only centuries later and only because the plague was a constant nuisance to Shakespeare. “Plague was the single most powerful force shaping his life and those of his contemporaries,” wrote Jonathan Bate, one of his biographers.

Shakespeare was around the plague enough to recognize its symptoms. First the body temperature would spike. Next came the headache that would spread to the back, the legs, the groin, the armpits, and the neck. Before long everything would hurt. Anyone who tried to walk at this point would have looked and sounded like he’d chugged a bottle of tequila. His breathing would have been so labored that he wouldn’t have been able to talk without slurring his words. It would only get worse from there. The skin would become a patch of carbuncles—even the words associated with the plague were gruesome—and by that point the outcome would be inevitable. The last stage of torture was the brain crying uncle. The victim endured the last few hours of his life in a state of madness. The whole thing was wretched enough to spend your life worrying about how you might die.

The plague was naturally a taboo subject for much of Shakespeare’s writing career. Even when it was the only thing on anybody’s mind, nobody could bring himself to speak about it. Londoners went to the city’s playhouses so they could temporarily escape their dread of the plague. A play about the plague had the appeal of watching a movie about a plane crash while thirty-five thousand feet in the air.

But the plague was also Shakespeare’s secret weapon. He didn’t ignore it. He turned his enviable talent and his lamentable circumstance into the hot hand.

And that brings us to the macabre history of Romeo and Juliet.

It’s basically impossible to appreciate the truly bonkers nature of this play when you read it for the first time. You probably remember the basics of the plot: Romeo and Juliet are born into rival families; Romeo and Juliet fall in love; Romeo and Juliet die. But do you remember how any of that happens? Maybe not. And did you know the plague is what ultimately drives Romeo and Juliet apart? I bet you didn’t. Perhaps you vaguely recall the only explicit mention of plague in the entire play: “A plague o’ both your houses!” But the plague is actually everywhere in Romeo and Juliet.

Let’s refresh your memory of Shakespearean dramas. In case you don’t remember, there’s a death in Act III of Romeo and Juliet. A murder! Romeo has killed his rival, Tybalt, who happens to be the cousin of Juliet. At this point she’s supposed to marry Paris, but she’s actually in love with Romeo, which is a problem because Romeo’s family is the sworn enemy of Juliet’s family. It’s also a problem because Romeo is now banished after killing Tybalt. Juliet doesn’t know what to do. She turns to her spiritual authority, Friar Laurence, who has already decided there is one way and only one way to bring the Montagues and Capulets together. To end their blood feud, he will have to marry Romeo and Juliet. Friar Laurence’s new plan requires Juliet to drink a potion that will put her to sleep for so long that her family will have no choice but to conclude that she is dead. At the same time, Friar Laurence writes a letter to Romeo explaining the harebrained scheme, and Friar John will deliver it to the town of Mantua. The letter instructs Romeo to sneak back to her open coffin and steal Juliet so they can live happily ever after.

It was a pretty terrible plan that worked out pretty terribly—but not for the reasons you might expect. Juliet drinks the potion. Her family concludes she’s dead. Romeo sneaks back to see her. So far, so good. But the whole thing unravels because of what should have been the most reliable part of this ridiculous plan: Friar John never makes it to Mantua, and Friar Laurence’s letter never makes it to Romeo.

What happens next is a series of highly unfortunate events. Romeo thinks Juliet is dead. He kills himself. Juliet wakes up from her fake death and learns that Romeo is dead for real. She kills herself. For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

But let’s rewind a few scenes. Let’s read how Friar John explains to Friar Laurence why he never reached Mantua. Let’s figure out how the whole foolish scheme fell apart.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Welcome from Mantua. What says Romeo?

Or, if his mind be writ, give me his letter.

FRIAR JOHN

Going to find a barefoot brother out,

One of our order, to associate me,

Here in this city visiting the sick,

And finding him, the searchers of the town,

Suspecting that we both were in a house

Where the infectious pestilence did reign,

Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.

So that my speed to Mantua there was stayed.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Who bare my letter, then, to Romeo?

FRIAR JOHN

I could not send it—here it is again—

Nor get a messenger to bring it thee,

So fearful were they of infection.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Unhappy fortune!

Look again: Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Sealed up the doors . . . / So fearful were they of infection.

Why didn’t Friar John deliver Friar Laurence’s letter to Romeo? Because of the plague. The plague is the plot twist that turns the most famous love story ever told into a tragedy.

Friar John never makes it to Mantua with the letter for Romeo because he gets stuck in quarantine, and no one in Shakespeare’s time would have dared to question such a restriction. They knew that defying quarantine made you eligible for a whipping and walking around town with plague sores could be punished by execution. It was a regrettable way to die: you survived the plague only to be killed for it. This is why Friar John doesn’t understand how Friar Laurence could be so upset with him. Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t realize it’s because the plague is about to kill Romeo and Juliet.

The exchange between the friars amounts to twenty-four lines. It’s one of the shortest scenes in the entire play. It’s over before most kids reading it in high school realize what has happened. And yet it’s essential that we do. The whole play turns on this one scene. You might be wondering how the plague could be pulling the strings of a Shakespeare play and you might not have known until this very moment. As it turns out, that was the point. Shakespeare was being purposefully obtuse. He wrote in veiled language because the subtext would have been obvious back then. He didn’t have to belabor the point. The plague was the Shakespearean equivalent of ending a tweet with “Sad!” There was no need for any sort of further explanation. “It was omnipresent,” says Columbia University professor James Shapiro. “Everybody at the time would have known exactly what those one or two lines meant.”

Romeo and Juliet would not be the last time that Shakespeare used the plague to his advantage. The rule of thumb until not too long ago was that Shakespeare wrote two plays every year. But when Shapiro began his life’s study of the playwright, he deduced that his fellow literary scholars were not exactly statisticians. They had come to that number simply by dividing the number of plays he wrote by the number of years in which he wrote them. According to their calculations, if Shakespeare wrote ten plays in five years, he wrote two plays a year. The actual chronology of those plays had been mostly ignored ever since Shakespeare’s contemporaries organized his First Folio not by year but by category: comedy, tragedy, or history. This dubious math went unchallenged for hundreds of years. By the time Shapiro became a professor, the notion that Shakespeare wrote two plays every year was close to gospel. But there was a rub. And the rub is that it wasn’t remotely true.

“It turns out Shakespeare always tended to write in inspired bunches,” Shapiro says. “It’s something that took me a while to wrap my head around simply because I always kind of believed the unsubstantiated claims that he was churning out two plays a year. But that’s never what he did.”

Shakespeare ran hot and cold. His plays were not spread over the course of his career. They were clustered. If he’d studied playwrights instead of movie directors and artists, Dashun Wang would have written about Shakespeare. James Shapiro did exactly that. And he paid close attention to the circumstances that resulted in his 1606 renaissance. “Once you start seeing those plays are really bunched, you start asking: Well, what accounts for a lot of plays in a very short period of time?” he says.

There is another way of asking this question: Why did Shakespeare have the hot hand?

Shakespeare’s creative awakening in 1606 came immediately after he’d temporarily disappeared. He’d gone silent as England went through a national transformation under King James. The world as he knew it was a fundamentally different place. But in addition to all the usual fears and anxieties that come with political upheaval, there was something else on Shakespeare’s mind. It was also a plague year.

The horrific disease’s latest deadly assault on the London area turned out to be the greatest thing that could’ve happened to this playwright. Shakespeare was able to take advantage of the circumstances in a way that Dashun Wang would appreciate. He didn’t stop writing. He kept going. And his talent was about to collide with the oddest bit of circumstance. What could have killed Shakespeare really did make him stronger.

The plague closed London’s playhouses and forced Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, to get creative about performances. The players had to hit the road. But as they traveled the English countryside, stopping in rural towns that had not been stricken by the plague, Shakespeare hung back by himself. He was too old to be touring, and he no longer had any interest in acting. He felt that writing was a better use of his time. “This meant that his days were free, for the first time since the early 1590s, to collaborate with other playwrights,” Shapiro wrote in his book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

Shakespeare also benefited from the plague in a most unsavory manner: the plague killed off his competition. By the early 1600s, boys’ theater companies were more popular than adult troupes like Shakespeare’s, and the children were getting the best stuff from Shakespeare’s rival playwrights because talent attracted talent. It was a cycle that Shakespeare couldn’t break. He was writing tragedies for adults. With the possible exception of Queen Anne, the audiences wanted satires starring children. But in the hot summer months when the plague wiped out thousands per week, the people who were most susceptible happened to be the people who’d stolen business from Shakespeare. The King’s Men would eventually take back their theater spaces and their playwrights because of this disease that preyed on the young. The plague created the circumstance that enhanced Shakespeare’s talent. The world had evolved in his favor. All he had to do was adapt.

And that’s when it clicked for Shakespeare. That’s when he got hot. That’s when King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra came rushing out of him.

“Three really extraordinary tragedies,” Shapiro says. “I’m always interested in how and why this mysterious thing happens of understanding fully the world that you are in and being able to speak to it and for it.” It’s often tempting for the scholars to scrutinize certain moments of Shakespeare’s career through the lens of his personal life. The issue with that line of research is that they still don’t know all that much about it. “We have no idea what he was feeling,” Shapiro wrote. “We know a great deal more about how a rodent-borne visitation in 1606 altered the contours of Shakespeare’s professional life, transformed and reinvigorated his playing company, hurt the competition, changed the composition of the audiences for whom he would write (and in turn the kinds of plays he could write), and enabled him to collaborate with talented musicians and playwrights.”

Shakespeare was never a metronomic writer. He was streaky. He wrote in runs. And this run was dependent on forces beyond his grasp. The plague turned out to be the unlikely opportunity of his lifetime. It was because of the plague that he was able to turn a period of great societal upheaval into something else altogether: his hot-hand period.

Shakespeare was talented enough to enjoy some modicum of success no matter his circumstance. Rebecca Clarke was, too. But he made one success into two and three only because those conditions broke his way. His plays were neither random nor independent. One led to another, which led to yet another, which would hopefully lead to another. Shakespeare’s ability to capitalize on his circumstance was a form of power never afforded to a talent like Clarke.

So was it him? Or was it the world around him? It was both.

William Shakespeare changed the world only because the world changed first.

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