MARTIN MANLEY: I always recognized perhaps more than the average person how important happiness is. I just was never able to find it for more than brief periods in my life. And so I almost never use the word happy. I guess because I identify it as an emotion. Instead, I use the word satisfied, which is more of a statement of fact, something that can be measured or quantified, like X equals four satisfy the equation of two plus two equals X. At some point the issue is less about more than it is about not having less. Michael Jordan has talked about the joy of his first championship. But by the third championship it had become more relief. Happiness had become the absence of misery, the misery of losing.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Success didn’t come for Martin Manley, at least not like he originally planned.

 

RICH LEVINE: His moment at the 1989 NBA All-Star Weekend, a few minutes in the national TV spotlight, had come and gone. In Basketball Heaven, his book and the argument for more three-point shots never took off.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: In 1990, after the third edition of Basketball Heaven, Martin and Doubleday parted ways, and Martin determined that the third edition would be his last.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Basketball Heaven is when I first made an impact on others with respect to sports, and so the experience will always be special. I am 100% confident that I was ahead of my time, too far ahead.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: He dedicated years to producing a first-of-its-kind book series about the NBA.

 

RICH LEVINE: A plea for a more efficient brand of basketball.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Which now lined the walls of his garage. Kevin Mahar (PH), Martin’s assistant on the book, said the feeling was palpable.

 

KEVIN MAHAR: It was more of a disappointment. It was a lotta time and effort, but yeah, I’d say it was– a disappointment. You know, you– we– I can’t remember how many books we printed, but, you know, there were still stacks of ’em in his garage and, you know, and then it was like, okay, this is fun. Now I gotta go pursue a career.

 

RICH LEVINE: Martin had had a mission: to become the Bill James of basketball, a sports analytics visionary. But with his dream effectively retired, Martin began pursuing something bigger: a way to live life, maybe not to its fullest, but to peak efficiency.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: And as far as the basketball world knew, or cared, Martin had simply disappeared. But that didn’t mean his ideas vanished.

 

RICH LEVINE: From 30 for 30 Podcasts, I’m Rich Levine.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: I’m Nick Altschuller. And this is Chasing Basketball Heaven Episode Three: Almost Vulcan.

 

RICH LEVINE: In the early 1990s, as Martin Manley was putting Basketball Heaven behind him, the NBA still didn’t get it. Despite the lovely example set by shooters like Brian Taylor and Dale Ellis, and some very simple math, the three-point line was still mostly an afterthought. Meanwhile, the league got slower, less efficient. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had retired and another generation of big men took his place to dominate the decade.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Hakeem Olajuwon.

 

ARCHIVAL: Spin move by Hakeem.

 

RICH LEVINE: Patrick Ewing.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: David Robinson.

 

ARCHIVAL: David Robinson with the slam.

 

RICH LEVINE: Shaquille O’Neal

 

ARCHIVAL: He brought it down. He brought the whole goal down.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: They were the icons of the era.

 

ARCHIVAL: Olajuwon has David Robinson just bamboozled.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: These seven footers who played in the pink.

 

RICH LEVINE: Even the two guard who beat them all, a guy named Michael Jeffrey Jordan, did most of his work inside the arc.

 

ARCHIVAL: M.J. taking away. It’s one on four. Comes inside and (UNINTEL).

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: There was one time, though, in the 1992 Finals, Jordan hit six threes in a half, and it was such an incomprehensible outlier that they put it in a Gatorade commercial.

 

ARCHIVAL: There’s Jordan for three. Yes.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: I’m sure many of you are picturing the Jordan shrug right now.

 

RICH LEVINE: In 1993 there were more clues to the power of the three. That season the Phoenix Suns led the league in three-point attempts, and overall scoring. Their star, Charles Barkley, finally got the Manley-approved memo.

 

ARCHIVAL: Barkley, he hasn’t had a three. He does now.

 

RICH LEVINE: Barkley took, wait for it, three triples a game that year. Three. Barkley went on to win the MVP, and the Suns made it all the way to the finals. There they faced the Bulls, but lost in six games thanks in large part to that Chicago teamwork that Martin had begged for in Basketball Heaven. You remember how Michael Jordan just needs to trust his teammates?

 

ARCHIVAL: The Suns by two. And it’s (UNINTEL) out of this possession.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Down two in the final seconds of game six, Jordan brings the ball up, but is met with an immediate full-court press by Suns guard Kevin Johnson.

 

RICH LEVINE: And because this is the ’90s, the Suns are trying to prevent Jordan from driving to the hole and scoring the tying bucket. Jordan passes to Pippen, Pippen drives. He draws Horace Grant’s defender. He dishes to the big man on the left block. Grant immediately fires the ball out to John Paxson for the three.

 

ARCHIVAL: There’s Paxson for three. Yes. The Bulls take a one point lead and Phoenix …

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Paxson was open by about 20 feet. Jordan had 33 points, but with the game on the line he trusted his teammates, the formula for success Martin had written years before.

 

RICH LEVINE: But even after a champion chip-winning play that was peak efficiency, the league still didn’t take proper advantage of the three-point shot. In fact, teams were playing even slower and scoring steadily dropped. So the following year, 1994, the NBA moved the three-point line in by almost two feet. They were begging, someone, please shoot more threes. And to a certain extent it worked.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: In 1994 NBA teams took an average of 9.9 threes per game. In 1995, with the shorter line, attempts jumped to 15.3. But despite the bump, league scoring still fell. And the big men were still the apex predators, a team’s ace in the hole, and threes still seen as a role of the dice. With centers dominating, the admiral–

 

RICH LEVINE: I think you’re talking about David Robinson, who’s– seven foot one.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: I was. He won the MVP in 1995. Hakeem Olajuwon–

 

RICH LEVINE: Seven feet.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: –won two titles in ’94 and ’95. Patrick Ewing–

 

RICH LEVINE: Seven feet.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Thank you, Richard. Could’ve stolen the ’94 crown, as Knicks fans will tell you, if shooter John Starks had just hit a few threes in game seven. Meanwhile, Dikembe Mutombo–

 

RICH LEVINE: Seven foot two.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Off the top of your head you know that.

 

RICH LEVINE: Uh-huh (AFFIRM).

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: And the 1994 Denver Nuggets still haunt Sonics fans, becoming the first eight seed to upset a number one. In 1997, the league moved the three-point line back to where it is today. Like we said, that shorter arc didn’t have its intended affect on scoring.

 

Pace and spacing also suffered. Meanwhile, as Martin and the three were both stuck between the past and the future, an interesting thing was happening in the world of basketball analytics. And without Martin even knowing it, he was at the center of it. Whether that was through fate or luck, your beliefs are up to you.

 

RICH LEVINE: A new crop of stat obsessives were trying to bend basketball towards where they thought it could go, one jump step at a time.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: One afternoon in the early 2000s, in Seattle, Washington, a young man picked up a copy of Basketball Heaven, and without realizing it also picked up Martin’s torch.

 

KEVIN PELTON: So, the UW library had a copy of it when I was– a student at the University of Washington.

 

RICH LEVINE: That kid was Kevin Pelton, a college student and basketball fan who fell in love with the game while listening to Seattle Supersonics radio broadcasts in the early ’90s.

 

KEVIN PELTON: And I had a lotta time to read at that point on– on buses I was taking to and from campus and to and from– my internship.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: And that’s where he found himself drawn into the world of Basketball Heaven.

 

KEVIN PELTON: It was definitely intriguing to me, even though obviously it was, you know, already, you know, a dozen years old probably by the point I was reading it.

 

RICH LEVINE: And what was intriguing, just the way he was thinking and the– the–

 

KEVIN PELTON: Yeah. I mean, you know, again, there wasn’t a lot of history when I was starting out. So I– I first kind of stumbled onto this, I would say, the summer of 2000. I started reading Rob Neyer on ESPN.com, through that found Baby Prospectus, and started asking hey, who’s doing this for basketball? Which the answer was not a lotta people at that point. But, you know, Dave Huron (PH), Martin Manley, like, they– they were key figures. And– and I was gonna track down anything that existed, I was so passionate about learning about the history of the field.

 

RICH LEVINE: Pelton went all in. He graduated from UW in 2004, and by then was already covering the SuperSonics for the team’s website. By 2009, he graduated to covering the NBA and WNBA for ESPN.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: You may have heard of it. It’s a sports company based in Bristol, Connecticut.

 

ARCHIVAL: We now welcome in ESPN senior writer Kevin Pelton to talk about this NBA …

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Pelton has spent more than two decades now studying and covering the NBA.

 

KEVIN PELTON: Daryl Morey traded for Lowry in Houston and sent him to Toronto. Got (UNINTEL).

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: What makes him unique in that world is that he writes about the world through a mathematical lens.

 

RICH LEVINE: Kevin’s work has helped build sports analytics into a way of understanding basketball’s potential, a slow, steady way to put Martin-like ideas into the heads of countless basketball fans. A new fluency with analytics, that for die-hards like us, can feel like it’s always been there.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Kevin, of course, wouldn’t say these things. What he would say is that the person who really brought basketball analytics to the next level was the next person we want to introduce you to. Kevin first met Dean Oliver online, on a Yahoo group.

 

DEAN OLIVER: And so, like, you find the cave and there are all the hieroglyphics, right? Or– or maybe better than that, because it was like, “Oh, there’s other people out here doing this.

RICH LEVINE: For those of you who have never used dial-up, a Yahoo group was an early online discussion board. It was like– participating in a subreddit or a message board, except every comment was transmitted over email.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: But for our purposes, the Yahoo group was basketball analytics’ first town hall, a place for like-minded stat-heads to meet and exchange ideas and challenge theories.

 

DEAN OLIVER: I found my people.

 

KEVIN PELTON: I found my tribe.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Actual discussions from these primitive days in February 2001? Does Hack-a-Shaq work? What rules changes improve the quality of the game? Why has Charlotte had such a good record without Derrick Coleman in the lineup, and a mediocre one with him in?

RICH LEVINE: A Caltech grad named Dean Oliver ran the group. At the time he was just looking for a few people who were thinking about the game like he was, folks smart enough to ask good questions but naïve enough to explore some crazy ideas.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Dean had majored in engineering and, unlike a lot of data obsessives, could actually hoop. He played point guard at Caltech. And he was busy working on his own book to change the game.

 

RICH LEVINE: That put him in competition with Martin Manley and Basketball Heaven. We caught up with Dean in the occasionally noise back lobby of the Embassy Suites Las Vegas during Summer League 2023.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: He said he had taken in Martin’s ideas and was less than impressed with his book.

 

DEAN OLIVER: It was casual. (LAUGHTER) It was definitely casual. I– he was addressing questions, I remember, that I don’t– they were more superficial (UNINTEL). I am really trying to understand how basketball works, and I don’t think that’s what his goal necessarily was.

 

RICH LEVINE: What do you think his goal was?

 

DEAN OLIVER: I think his goal was to kind of do a fan perspective. Who– who are the best players and things like that, and– and just kind of the superficial things that they talk about on broadcasts a little bit. I respect a lot of that, but it’s only– it’s not as deep as really what I wanted.

 

RICH LEVINE: For Dean, the north star was Martin’s north star, Bill James. What Bill James had done for baseball analytics, that was what Dean wanted to do for basketball.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: There was just one small problem that Dean couldn’t let go of: why had his hero, the real deal, Bill James, cosigned on a book that Dean felt was lame?

 

DEAN OLIVER: When his book came out, I wrote a letter to Bill James that said, “Why did you endorse the book? Because I didn’t think it was very good.”

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: In short time, Dean received a letter back from James. All the years later Dean still has this letter. He actually read it for us.

 

DEAN OLIVER: “I wrote a cover quote for Martin Manley because it is my policy to help and encourage people who want to do this kind of stuff. As a first effort, his first Basketball Heaven is a lot better than my first Baseball Abstract. You can’t compare his first effort to my tenth or twelfth. If you think you can do better than he did, for Christ’s sake, do it. It doesn’t have to– any value for me or anybody else for you to say you could do it better.” (LAUGHTER) Thank you, Bill.

 

RICH LEVINE: Do you remember–

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: After getting a kick in the pants from Bill James, the humble Dean wrote to Martin for some ideas, and asking for help.

 

DEAN OLIVER: It was cordial. I was definitely actually trying to understand how he was able to get published and how he went through that process. And I– I felt like I had things that were complementary that could help.

 

RICH LEVINE: Which displays a level of confidence, obsession, and intensity that maybe Martin could appreciate, right? He did not.

 

DEAN OLIVER: He was not necessarily the most friendly in his response. He was basically talking about him being ways– way ahead of me and everything.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Being influential doesn’t always work the way you want it to. Martin was going to influence Dean, just not as Martin hoped.

 

RICH LEVINE: Faced with a snooty response from Martin and some tough love from their shared idol, Dean had all the fuel he needed.

 

DEAN OLIVER: Bill, I don’t know if he hated me at the time. He obviously didn’t know me. But it was pushing me. And I think I read it and, like, “Okay, I need to do better. (LAUGH) I need to do better than him.”

 

RICH LEVINE: It took Dean nearly 14 years, but he finally met Bill James’s challenge and delivered the answer to how he could best Martin. In 2002, Dean wrote a book people actually do remember, Basketball on Paper, widely considered the seminal take on basketball analytics.

 

DEAN OLIVER: I said, “Well, just give me a piece of paper and let me write down what’s going on.” And I wrote down how the ball went from one player to the next. And I remember figuring it out from what I had written down on paper. And like, “Oh, there’s a logic here.” That just all these alternating possessions, and how you can estimate them from basic stats and everything like that, that is when I realized I knew something at that moment that no one else in the world knew.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: The foundational idea of the book was to break the game down into a series of possessions, a possession being a team’s turn with the ball. By examining these component parts, Dean opened up a new way to look at the sport as a whole. Sure, a traditional box score can tell you that one team beat another. But by looking at how effectively teams used each possession–

 

RICH LEVINE: Which gives us stats like points per possession, pace, defensive rating–

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: You can start to understand why one team beat another.

RICH LEVINE: It took the entire field a giant step forward. And for his work, Dean landed a paid consulting gig with the Seattle Supersonics.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: The lovely green and gold.

 

RICH LEVINE: Yeah. You actually won me over with that performance. That is officially gold now in my book. But I can’t emphasize this enough, while Martin’s book got the conversation started, people were still thinking about the game in straight lines. Basketball on Paper added dimensions.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: So why else did Dean succeed while Martin vanished into obscurity? In fairness to Martin, Dean was 16 years younger so his research was aided by more capable computers and even an early form of the internet. He didn’t have to beg the league office for random box scores from Milwaukee, like Martin did. And so Dean became a revolutionary. He inspired a ton of people to look at the game with as much data as possible, and if that data was incomplete, find new ways to collect it.

 

RICH LEVINE: Martin Manley had written Basketball Heaven hoping his ideas about stats would influence how the game was played. Dean was the first modern numbers guy to receive a paycheck from an NBA team, but he was still only a consultant, a voice traditional decision makers only tolerated. The first math man to call shots from the top of an NBA org chart was Daryl Morey. If you’re a modern fan, Daryl Morey is possibly the first name you think of when you consider basketball analytics.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Like Martin, he’s a man with full confidence in his ideas and how he sees the game.

 

DARYL MOREY: Yeah, I have strong opinions on that. If you’re mad how analytics is taking your sport you should be mad at the rules. Like, ’cause analytics is like gravity, it just happens.

RICH LEVINE: Yup, Daryl does have some strong basketball opinions.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: And he rode those strong opinions all the way to the front office of the Houston Rockets, which leads us to April 3rd, 2006.

 

RICH LEVINE: This date marks a seismic moment in basketball analytics. After three seasons as senior VP for the Celtics, Daryl Morey was hired as the Rockets assistant GM. The following spring, at 34 years old, he was named the general manager.

 

DARYL MOREY: I think we were really working on the real building blocks, basically starting with the first level below points, which is possessions, and then efficiency with each possession, and then you can get (UNINTEL).

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Daryl Morey was a true believer in the power of stats.

 

DARYL MOREY: –chances now with turnover margin.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: And suddenly he was calling the shots.

 

DARYL MOREY: You can create an efficiency advantage, either through field goal percentage or–

NICK ALTSCHULLER: With earthquakes we use the Richter scale, which we’re sure Martin admires for its clean simplicity, one to ten, easy to understand. A one is a micro-quake, it happens all the time, you don’t even feel them. But a ten, everything breaks. And the landscape will never be the same.

 

RICH LEVINE: In terms of its impact on the NBA, Daryl’s approach is a nine. It even has its own nickname: Moreyball, a play on Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. With Moreyball, the geography of the court is the same, but where the players position themselves is drastically different.

Now everyone’s spread out. The paint is empty. And there are seemingly two plays: one, drive to the hoop for a closer, higher percentage shot, or two, drive to the hoop, draw the defense, and kick it out for a more efficient three-point shot, over and over again, the mid-range jump shot eradicated. This is a basketball strategy designed through the prism of statistics.

 

DARYL MOREY: So basically, all analytics and data do is whatever the rules of the game are, it’s going to squeeze out every last bit of winning– probability and efficiency.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: To maximize his system, Daryl traded for James Harden, the perfect Moreyball superstar with elite passing, driving, and three-point shooting.

 

ARCHIVAL: And James Harden with his ninth assist of the game. And he’s almost got a triple-double in his first performance. James Harden.

 

RICH LEVINE: But he also brought in players like Chuck Hayes, an un-drafted, undersized center out of the University of Kentucky, with a comically awkward jump shot.

 

DARYL MOREY: If you want something funny, go to YouTube and look up “Chuck Hayes free throw”.

 

RICH LEVINE: We’ve done this and highly recommend it.

 

ARCHIVAL: Chuck Hayes was the–

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Hayes is at the foul line and starts his motion on what looks like a normal free throw. But then just as he’s supposed to release the ball, he start.

 

ARCHIVAL: Uh oh …

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Instead, he falls forward and fires an off-balance line drive at the rim.

 

ARCHIVAL: That’s one of those you don’t even wanna watch. I mean, look at this, I mean–

 

ARCHIVAL: Oh, oh.

 

DARYL MOREY: If you went to Kentucky at the time to scout them you’d have to have a really good eye to see a 6’4.5″ center who can’t release the ball and say, “That guy is gonna be a good player in the NBA.” But the data was pretty overwhelming when he was on the court. So he’s, like, almost the plus/minus poster child.

 

RICH LEVINE: It was the same concept Martin Manley was writing about nearly 20 years earlier. Just because a player doesn’t score a lotta points doesn’t mean he’s pointless. In this case, Daryl quickly came to believe that this awkward, undersized Chuck Hayes was more valuable than former All-Star power forward Juwan Howard. Daryl shared this opinion with the Rockets head coach.

 

DARYL MOREY: I remember talking to Jeff Van Gundy. We were basically saying, “Hey, Jeff, Juwan was a great player, but this kid Chuck is better.” And he was like, “Well, but Chuck can’t shoot.” And we were like, “Yeah, that’s good. He won’t take any of those terrible mid-range (LAUGH) shots.”

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Eventually Daryl hired offensive-minded coaches like Rick Adelman and Mike D’Antoni. He assembled an organization built from the ground up to play efficiently. The Moreyball strategy is at the core of just about every offense you see in the league today.

 

RICH LEVINE: But even if this style of play was effective, and again, clearly more efficient, there was one snag. Many fans hated it.

 

ARCHIVAL: Has analytics ruined the NBA?

 

ARCHIVAL: The NBA has evolved, and it might be ruining the game of basketball.

 

ARCHIVAL: Teams used to play to the strengths of their players and have their own unique play style.

 

ARCHIVAL: Pretty much everybody plays the same way.

 

ARCHIVAL: Running up and down the court, shooting threes, or if you get a wide open layup, or a dunk.

 

ARCHIVAL: And until they lower the competitive advantage to be gained from shooting and making more threes, this is a problem that is here to stay.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Fans found basketball played at its most efficient to be, simply put, ugly. An offense built around threes and layups, an offense based on principles of efficiency, the short shots go in more, the long ones get you more point. Not a lot of variety. But that’s not Daryl’s problem.

 

DARYL MOREY: We are gonna get shoved to whatever is most efficient. You know, three-pointers shouldn’t be worth 50% more than the other shots on the floor, and until somehow that’s changed teams are gonna keep shooting more threes.

 

RICH LEVINE: And that’s not our problem either. Our problem is this.

DARYL MOREY: Martin Manley– Manley, I’m actually struggling to even find Martin Manley when I look on the internet.

 

RICH LEVINE: It’s sort of a big deal that Daryl Morey, who in many ways is the true example of success in basketball analytics, doesn’t even know who Martin is.

 

DARYL MOREY: Sorry, but did I ruin the podcast already? (LAUGH)

 

RICH LEVINE: No, Daryl. That’s our job.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: You might be curious. After all the writing Martin did about the three-pointer and efficiency, why people like Daryl didn’t know who he was or what happened to him after publishing Basketball Heaven. Dean Oliver, who wrote the book Basketball on Paper, certainly was.

 

DEAN OLIVER: I do remember wondering what happened to Martin, but he didn’t really have a big footprint. And so I couldn’t find him.

 

RICH LEVINE: Did you hear about Martin when everything kind of went down with him, like, at the end of his life?

 

DEAN OLIVER: I actually don’t even know the full story.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: So, we told Dean the full story. Man, the look on his face.

DEAN OLIVER: I have never heard any thought like that. I mean, it’s– it’s almost Vulcan, right, from Star Trek, right?

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Vulcans are a species who operate by cold logic and reason. Mr. Spock, half-Vulcan, was the cool customer who balanced out the hot-headed Captain Kirk. Martin and Spock would’ve made a hell of a pair. Real-life relationships were trickier. More after the break.

 

RICH LEVINE: After Basketball Heaven in the mid-1990s, Martin Manley was back on the ground, working for Millionaire Joe, his old buddy and Basketball Heaven financier. He also returned to normal human waking hours in that beautiful Topeka home with his beautiful Topeka wife. It’s the way to live. But not the life Martin wanted. The atmosphere was changed. Martin and Chris might’ve had their moment, but it quickly became clear that the dream was over.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Chris and I drifted apart. I take 100% of the blame. She was a very committed person and would do anything for me. It’s not intended to be an excuse, but my mom and dad were essentially both only children. They really didn’t understand nor were they able to pass on the idea of family. Both parents, and my two siblings, were all relatively individualistic people. We lived out in the sticks, many miles from the nearest town. You either learn how to entertain yourself or you’d go crazy. I probably did a little bit of both, as it turns out. But one thing is for sure, I learned how to exist in my own world.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Now, you might think that Martin being in his own efficiency-obsessed world would mean that he wanted to be alone, maybe even needed to be a loner. But here’s a little something we’ve learned about Martin: he’d like to be alone, just not by himself. Deep down, he loved love.

 

RICH LEVINE: He loved sappy duets.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I would say that other than my obsession with James Taylor, the duets were about the only other thing that moved me musically in the 1980s and 1990s. And so I started collecting them. This might seem like it wouldn’t be that hard to do, but in those days even researching what duets have been on the charts or slipped through the cracks, and by who, and how to get a copy, et cetera, was very difficult.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Love drives us all to strange places. Martin was no exception, utterly unafraid to go wherever it took him.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: My all-time favorite film is Little Shop of Horrors, 1986.

 

AUDREY: Audry Junior will be the sweetest thing in the whole wide world.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: There are many reasons why. It’s funny, it’s clever, it’s got great music, and it can’t be squeezed into a particular genre. It’s weird.

 

AUDREY: Feed me.

 

RICH LEVINE: Of course, his favorite movie could never be Shawshank or The Godfather.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: There probably aren’t 1,000 people in the world that would list it as their all-time favorite movie, but I’m one of ’em.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: A cult classic, Little Shop of Horrors is the story of a flower shop employee, Seymour, who discovers that one of his plants is sentient, carnivorous, and hungry for human blood. Oh, and human love. Honestly, it makes sense that Martin could view that movie and much of life through the eyes of shy, awkward Seymour, Little Shop of Horrors‘ scrappy plant lover.

 

RICH LEVINE: So, Martin got back into the dating game, back on the market.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Wooing local singles with his poetry on Matchmaker.com.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Morning comes soon, and I pry open my eyes, though your face I can still plainly see. The sandman and tooth fairy have said their goodbyes, but your face still lingers with me. Yes, Mary is pretty and Jacquelyn is fine, and Connie is beautiful too. But Sheena was tops till the second time I clicked on Cathy242.

 

RICH LEVINE: Hot damn. We’re not sure how that particular slice of eloquence worked out for Martin, but soon enough he met his match.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: An early 30s divorcee and mother of two young girls, Teri Hanson.

 

TERI HANSON: Well, I thought he was nice-looking. But he had a Glamour Shot picture of him in a tuxedo, which was kind of a turn-off. But (LAUGH) I thought I’d give him a shot.

 

RICH LEVINE: We’ve seen this photo, and girl.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: It’s a Glamour Shot like your high school prom picture is a Glamour Shot. His collar is bent crookedly over what is clearly a clip-on. His tufted hair is parted broadly down the middle, like when a cow tramples its way through a corn field.

 

RICH LEVINE: There is a separate picture after an outfit change, of course, where Martin looks like an absolute stud. The man was capable of both. So dichotomous.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: But he had no one to tell him maybe don’t stop to rent a tux, (LAUGH) at least no one he would ask for advice. Otherwise he wouldn’t have done this on that first date with Teri.

 

TERI HANSON: He brought a photo album on the date to show me all the work that he’d done on his house, like he was trying to impress me.

NICK ALTSCHULLER: At least he didn’t bring a stud finder and hold it to his chest. “Beep, beep, beep, ooh, I found one.” (LAUGHTER) Still, Martin found a way.

 

TERI HANSON: Okay, this sounds terrible, he actually spent the night. We didn’t sleep together. (LAUGH) But I had–

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: You were adults.

 

TERI HANSON: –a pull-out couch and he lived in Topeka, and– and we’d been up late. So I let him sleep on the couch overnight. But we went to a movie the next day. It was– There’s Something About Mary. And (LAUGH) we were watching the movie, and the part where Brett Favre (LAUGH) comes in, and I said, “Oh, Brett Favre.” And he said, “Will you marry me?” (LAUGHTER)

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Less than a year later Martin made his proposal official.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: There were times when I was actually a romantic, although even being romantic was tempered by my analytical way of thinking. In this particular case, that made what I did in my proposal to Teri special. At least in my opinion. I decided to do it via a crossword puzzle.

 

TERI HANSON: We were going– down to the Lake of the Ozarks, I think it was, camping with some friends. So, on the way there I was doing the crossword.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Teri liked doing crossword puzzles because she was good at ’em. She was always smart, getting a degree and MBA while working full time, straight As. She then got her CPA. Anyway, I made up a crossword puzzle that I knew she would want to do. I made it the size of USA Today‘s paper, and put it in as an insert.

 

TERI HANSON: I knew that he had made it up and what he was asking, (LAUGH) ’cause it was a pretty simple– it was too easy. But I didn’t– I didn’t let on. You know, I let him think he was surprising me, so.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: The insert showed the puzzle filled in with the answers. “TLW will you marry me MAM.” Foolishly, she said yes.

 

RICH LEVINE: Honestly, I’d have said yes too. I love a good crossword puzzle. But after they tied the knot, it didn’t take long for Rico Suave from the Glamour Shots to rather abruptly reveal his true self.

 

TERI HANSON: I just remember him losing interest in– in our relationship pretty soon after we got married. And that– that was the hardest thing.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: You said– once he completed a project he moved on to the next thing pretty q– do you think once, you know, you exchanged rings that, like, his job was done–

 

TERI HANSON: Yup–

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: –in his head?

 

TERI HANSON: Yup. I remember him being different on the honeymoon. His focus changed.

 

RICH LEVINE: It was little things.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Martin things.

 

RICH LEVINE: For instance, instead of dinners at Outback Steakhouse or trips to the movies, Martin was now more concerned with?

 

TERI HANSON: Oh yes, the weather. The weather. He got into deciding, I guess, who was the best weather forecaster. So every night he watched, like, three different stations to see their predictions, and then compared how close they were to the– so, like, we– we couldn’t go out anywhere, because he had to be home, ’cause we d– you know, he– w– didn’t have a DVR back then.

 

RICH LEVINE: And he was doing it for–

 

TERI HANSON: So–

 

RICH LEVINE: –no other reason than just–

 

TERI HANSON: It interested him.

 

RICH LEVINE: So, you– we can’t go out to dinner tonight because I need to be home to see the weather report?

 

TERI HANSON: Well, we– we could go, but we have to be back at, you know, 6:00 or whatever.

 

RICH LEVINE: He also fell back into unhealthy sleeping habits.

 

TERI HANSON: We lived daylight hours, and the kids always had to be quiet because he was sleeping all day and then he’d be up all night. I did start to resent that. And in fact, I– I started charging him rent that last year. Because he was just a roommate. I mean, we never saw him. I wasn’t– we weren’t sleeping together.

 

RICH LEVINE: Finally, in 2004, after less than five years of marriage, Teri filed for divorce.

 

TERI HANSON: You know, he had changed. He wasn’t fun anymore.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: No matter how much I like the idea of a second chance marriage, especially with kids, I was still largely a fish outta water. I tried to be mold-able, and god knows Teri tried to mold me. But at some point I think I rebelled against it, because I just felt I was losing my identity.

 

RICH LEVINE: A lot had changed in Martin’s life. Now, on the other side of 50 years old, the dream of a Basketball Heaven, to be the Bill James of basketball, was long over. So was his relationship with Teri. He was lost. So in true Martin fashion he found some things to hold on to. Like, really hold on to.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: When I was about 54, I started wearing a fedora all the time. Okay, I didn’t wear one when I slept at night, and I didn’t wear one in church. Otherwise 100% of the time, even when home alone. They just became a part of who I was. There are plenty of people whom I’ve met over the past six years and have gotten to know that have never seen me without one.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: With a new look locked down, he turned back to the one thing that was always there when he needed it: work.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I decided I needed to do something that I would enjoy, and I took a job with the Kansas City Star sports department, responsible for statistics. Pretty much all I had to do to get the job was hand them a copy of one of my books.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: For seven years, Martin crunched the numbers as the Star‘s statistics editor, bringing his very Martin-like work ethic to writing analytics-inspired content about the Royals and Chiefs for Upon Further Review, a sports blog on KansasCity.com.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I was a workaholic. I never missed a day. I rarely even took my vacation. I never took breaks, never stopped to eat during a shift, worked my butt off pretty much every minute I was there, because I just wanted to work.

 

RICH LEVINE: Ceaseless toil? Don’t threaten Martin Manley with a good time.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Basically, I lived, ate, drank, and slept when I had time, Kansas City sports, Kansas City Star, and Upon Further Review. What life?

RICH LEVINE: Finally all of that work became too much of a good thing.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: The amount I alone was responsible for just kept increasing and increasing. I could only work 70 hours a week for so long before I just couldn’t take another second of it, literally.

 

RICH LEVINE: So, Martin quit.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: My last second was February 6th, around 11:55 p.m. I wrote my final article on UFR that night.

 

RICH LEVINE: He was finally free from the shackles of work. So what did Martin do? He created more work, filling the void by fanatically writing for a new sports blog of his own. He called it Sports in Review.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Took about a month to get Sports in Review up and running. But once I did, I took on the same mentality. I never skipped a day.

 

RICH LEVINE: The Cal Ripken of KC sports bloggers.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I doubt if there was another human being alive that has published as much data-based research with commentary as I have over that time period, no matter the field. The question is whether I’m complimenting myself or condemning myself. I think I’m complimenting, but I can see both sides. You be the judge.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: What Martin found when he turned his raging workaholism to the internet in 2012 was a place where everyone could, and it seemed like everyone did, have a blog. This was the heyday of a million niche corners filled with self-styled experts drawing small crowds to argue and opine about everything. Martin’s new home was the perfect place to pour all his varied interests.

 

RICH LEVINE: But more and more his life became a series of math problems.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: The other day I was in a fancy FedEx retail store where there was a little fridge with several different kinds of pop. They were all the same size, 20 fluid ounces. The cost was $1.50 each. That’s 7.5 cents per ounce.

 

RICH LEVINE: Quick calculations.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: A two-liter bottle of Sam’s Cola, or a variety of other soft drinks, is about $0.60 at Walmart. A two-liter bottle has 68 fluid ounces, so that means it’s less than a penny per ounce. And that means that the pop I drink at home is about eight to nine times cheaper per ounce than at the FedEx store.

 

RICH LEVINE: All to solve for a most efficient life.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Martin was ahead of the curve on the whole self-optimization, five-hour work week, meal replacement shake existence. Martin was on it far before the social media influencers, before there were social media influencers. He started with food, one meal a day.

RICH LEVINE: And he would never spend more than $6 on that meal, which created a brief hurdle when it came to ordering a pie from his beloved Godfather’s Pizza.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I finally figured out the best way to do it. There is a longstanding $4 off coupon on their site for a jumbo, and so applying that with tax, just over $28, they cut it into 12 pieces. I would have three slices each day for four days. That’s $7 per day, but I get back to the average of $6 because almost every other meal is less than $6.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: He also went even deeper back into his Basketball Heaven sleeping habits.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I tried everything. One that worked for a while was staying up 36 hours and sleeping 12. I thought that was most efficient, because I had more prime hours in which I could work.

 

RICH LEVINE: The more comfortable Martin became in his own, efficient world, the more fearful he became of life on the outside, a world he couldn’t control.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I decided I would never leave the country. The main reason is because I have zero confidence in my safety anywhere else. The horror stories you hear about, those of Americans being targeted, kidnapped, or arrested in some foreign land, are more than enough to discourage me from being one more victim.

 

RICH LEVINE: And living online, Martin ran headlong into a phenomenon that is now clear: there’s a community for everyone.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I practically lived on the internet over the last 15 years, and I made a lotta friends. I probably operated better in that environment than in the real world.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: But the more you socialize online the more isolated you can feel. Martin’s life was wildly efficient, but it was also incredibly exhausting and lonely, rootless. All of it perfectly dialed in and calibrated to his own specific ideals of peak performance and optimization.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Four Ps to a healthier you: pizza, Pepsi, poop, and pee.

 

RICH LEVINE: He lived this way for years.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Until one day Martin did the math and landed on a different solution.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: I decided I wanted to have one of the most organized goodbyes in history, and I think I will be successful.

 

RICH LEVINE: He planned the most efficient death.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: You will rarely get any details for why a person committed suicide, but that won’t be the case with me. This may be the most detailed example of a suicide letter in history, something to be entered into the Guinness Book of Records. My hope is that it is.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Almost Vulcan. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or is in emotional distress, help is available. Contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or 988LifeLine.org.

 

RICH LEVINE: Next time on Chasing Basketball Heaven, Martin tests his commitment to efficiency.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: My new year’s resolution is to explore the idea of committing suicide sooner rather than later, meaning don’t just put it off until I become too old to matter to anyone, or too old to record my life for posterity.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: And begins work on his magnum opus.

 

MARTIN MANLEY: Let me ask you a question. After you die, you can be remembered by a few-line obituary for one day in a newspaper, or you can be remembered for years by a site such as this. That was my choice, and I chose the obvious.

 

RICH LEVINE: Chasing Basketball Heaven is a 30 for 30 Podcast produced by ESPN, Hyperobject Industries, and Meadowlark Media.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: It was recorded and hosted by Nick Altschuller and Rich Levine, with Craig Kilborn as the voice of Martin Manley.

 

RICH LEVINE: Executive producers from Hyperobject Industries and Meadowlark Media are Adam McKay, Clare Slaughter, and Bradley Campbell.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Senior editorial producer for 30 for 30 Podcasts is Preeti Varathan.

 

RICH LEVINE: This series senior producer is Raghu Manavalan.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: The series producer is Gus Navarro.

 

RICH LEVINE: Consulting producer was Gary Hoenig.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Story editors were Jamie York and Mac Montandon.

 

RICH LEVINE: Sound design and mixing by John DeLore.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Theme song composed by Allison Leyton-Brown and John DeLore.

 

RICH LEVINE: Show art by Brian Lutz.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Fact checking by Matt Giles and David Sabino.

 

RICH LEVINE: For 30 for 30 and ESPN, line producer is Catherine Sankey.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Associate producer is Isabella Seman.

 

RICH LEVINE: Production assistants are Diamante McKelvie and Anthony Salas.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Producer is Carolyn Hepburn.

 

RICH LEVINE: Senior producers are Marquis Daisy and Gentry Kirby.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: Heather Anderson, Marsha Cooke, Brian Lockhart, and Burke Magnus are executive producers for 30 for 30.

 

RICH LEVINE: Rights and clearances by Jennifer Thorpe and Kaal Griffith.

 

NICK ALTSCHULLER: This podcast was developed by Tara Nadolny and Cynthia Paribello.

 

RICH LEVINE: To listen to more sports series like this one, search 30 for 30 Podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts. Or find us at 30for30Podcasts.com. Thanks for listening.