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"Jon is slow and fat! Jon is slow and fat! Jon is slow and fat!"
As the chant closed in, sixteen-year-old Jon Finkel backed against the cold metal locker in a bare concrete room that smelled like waxy lime deodorant and musty nylon gym bags. His enormous stomach quivered out from under his stained black Phillies T-shirt. His long tangled hair curled like a nest of a roller coasters into what he affectionately termed his "jew-fro." An enormous pair of square glasses slipped down a long, large nose that bent in the middle like it was perpetually ducking a punch.
Surrounding him were the familiar twisted faces, the bullies of Fanwood, New Jersey, 1995. But he noticed a new instigator: a scrawny loudmouth twerp who was even lower on the Nerd Pyramid than Finkel. The twerp was the worst breed of nerd, Finkel stewed, an outcast geek who acted like a cocky braniac even though he was hopelessly dumb. He bullied Finkel with the hopes of pulling himself one brick higher.
But, after years of abuse, Finkel wasn't going to be wedgied anymore. In a blur of blubber, he leapt for the twerp, pulling him to the ground. The mottled boys hollered as Nerd One and Nerd Two rolled on the concrete floor. Finkel had the twerp by the ears, and he was pulling the kid's face higher and closer to his, like he was going to sink his teeth in and devour it whole. The bullies chanted. The twerp whimpered. Finkel eyed the kid's sad pathetic face, and let him go. Finkel wasn't as slow and fat as he seemed. He had tapped a new power: Magic.
Magic: The Gathering is a card game that has quietly spawned an international phenomenon and multibillion dollar industry. Brought to market in 1993 for under $100,000, it now outsells Monopoly and Scrabble combined. It's overlooked, misunderstood, and, for some of the smartest kids on the planet, profoundly influential. Magic is the boot camp of geekdom, attracting pubescent power nerds and transforming them into real-life players. Those who seek insight into the future of Wall Street traders, research scientists, poker stars, technologists, and boot-strapped entrepreneurs would be well-served to sit down at a neighborhood Magic game.
Created by an iconoclastic, Ivy League mathematician named Dr. Richard Garfield, Magic combines mythological fantasy, baseball-card-style collectibility, and raw competitive strategy into something unique: it's called a trading card game. The fundamental design, which Garfield patented, is the basis of a cottage industry titles such as Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! It's the reason Hasbro -- the powerhouse behind Playskool, Tonka, and Milton Bradley toys and games -- paid a half billion bucks in 2000 to buy Wizards of the Coast, the scrappy start-up Garfield co-owned. The trail of Magic's shiny wrappers runs through pizza joints and dorm rooms, summer camps and cafeterias from the Main Streets of New Jersey to the hillsides of Japan. The game, published in ten languages and fifty-two countries, is now Hasbro's top brand.
For the best players, it's also a surprisingly lucrative lifestyle. Starting as young as fourteen, the elite travel to exotic locales from Rio de Janeiro to Kuala Lumpur competing in tournaments for $3 million in cash prizes. The pros make a living at Magic alone. With individual earnings as high as $350,000, many have put themselves through college with the game. In short, Magic is morphing legions of neglected whiz kids into ultra-savvy teenage high rollers or, as Garfield likes to call them, "mental athletes." Now this new generation of players weaned on video games, schooled on Magic, and empowered by the Internet is coming of age and cashing in. No one has cashed in more than Finkel, the greatest champ this underworld has ever produced, and no one has been more transformed.
In the decade since he was cowering in the locker room, he has gone from Magic World Champion to self-made millionaire renaissance gambler. He razed underground poker clubs, and online sites. He rose to the top of the country's largest card-counting blackjack team, earning a place on the most wanted list of nearly every casino around. He even beat the most seemingly unbeatable game of all, sports betting. As his younger sister Jenny jokes, "He's the poster boy for a generation of losers. He's shown that they can be successful too."
For millions of geeks in the know, Finkel's journey from chump to champ is the inspirational stuff of legend. He's the Rocky of playing cards: a sympathetic underdog who, through skill and determination, beat enormous odds to become a World Champion. Beaten up by jocks, overlooked by teachers, and shunned by girls, he was once an overweight, suicidal, self-described "loser" who typified how smart, awkward boys in America get lost in the shuffle. He would become a slim and confident heartthrob who epitomizes how, in the most unlikely ways, they're being found.
"It's amazing that a guy like me can become the best in the world at something," he says today, from his hip apartment in New York York's West Village. And once you find your edge, he knows, there's anything you can do. The geeks used to call him Finkeltron. Today they call him Jonny Magic.
It was a hot summer day in 1998, and thousands of sports fans were following the lead of their favorite athletes: They were going to Disney World.
They stormed Disney's Wide World of Sports, a sprawling complex covering thousands of acres near the theme parks in Orlando, Florida. On any given day, all-American kids might catch a glimpse of an all-American sports star: Shaq shooting hoops, Tiger Woods playing golf. On this day, they queued to meet an overweight twenty-year-old from New Jersey with a curly weird fro. His name was Jon Finkel, the Michael Jordan of Magic, or, as he was more commonly known, Finkeltron.
Finkeltron was a star, and he was shining in Magic in every possible way. Depending on how high players placed, they received points which affected their overall ranking. Between all his high finishes, Finkel finished the 1997 -- 1998 season with more points than anyone. This earned him the coveted title, Player of the Year. Most impressively, in the minds of the increasingly competitive Magic pros, Finkel had become the number one money earner in the game. In total, he had won $85,000 in less than two years. It sure beat minimum wage at Dominoes.
All day, Finkel sat behind the card table signing Magic cards and playing hands with awestruck geeky kids. At one point, a young fat boy with horribly thick glasses waddled up and handed Finkel a card. "You're my hero," the boy squeaked. Finkel eyed the kid, wondering if he heard him correctly. The boy just smiled, as he giddily snatched the signed card from Finkel's paw and ran off to show his mother.
He should get a different hero, Finkel thought. Despite his success, he hardly felt heroic. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw a failure, in mind and in body. He still felt, as he said, like a "loser" inside. After all his years of good grades and his near-perfect SAT score, after all, what did he have to show for it? By hastily filling out his college essay by hand, he had blown his shot at an Ivy League school. Then he managed to fail out of the only university that accepted him, Rutgers.
Physically, things were worse than ever. On his twentieth birthday, he still tipped the scale at over 250 pounds. One day he tried to button his pants, but couldn't. When he went to a store to get himself a new pair, they didn't have his size. "Maybe you should try the Big and Tall Men shop down the street," the cute girl behind the counter said. Finkel stomped outside. "Jesus," he said, "I am fat! I can't buy pants in a normal store! I mean, what the fuck?"
His attempt to distract people from his weight by bleaching his hair only made matters worse; now he was a fat guy in tent-sized pants with goofy thick glasses and a bad dye job. While other guys were dating and hooking up, Finkel felt like a hopeless eunuch. He was probably the only champ on the planet who couldn't get a girl, he figured.
To compound his feelings of inadequacy, the spotlight trained on him more than ever. As the whiz kid hero of Magic, Finkel was doing more and more personal appearances and television interviews. Despite the empathetic appeal that Finkel's underdog persona had with their target audience, the staff at Wizards did their best to help get their superstar into shape.
They began holding Sunday night basketball games at the end of tournament weekends. It became a ritual on the road; while the players were competing, they'd scour whatever town they were in -- Tokyo, Rome, Kuala Lumpur -- for a basketball court. Then they'd herd out the most misfit Magic players -- like a busload of rejects from The Bad News Bears -- and nudge them out onto the pavement. These guys had spent most of their lives being the last in the lineup at school, and now, for once, they were going to learn how to play.
During one game, Finkel got the ball and charged awkwardly for the basket. Just as he leapt, he got checked in the chest, falling forward, and watching his glasses fly in slow motion from his face and shatter on the ground. As the laughter swelled around him once again, he knew what he had to do. Now that he had become a hero, he had better start acting like one.
Finkel bought contacts. He went to the mall, and spent a couple thousand dollars on new clothes: button-up shirts, new jeans. He ditched his old broken-down car, and bought a brand new Saturn. He invested in mutual funds. He joined a gym, replaced Happy Meals with tuna sandwiches, and began working out four days a week. With all the cash flowing in from tournaments and money games, he and the other teenage Magic stars began living less like nerds and more like high rollers.
Wizards was now hosting events in more and more exotic locales: Amsterdam, Oslo, Manila, Kyoto, Madrid. Expensive steak dinners became ritual on the tourney circuit. Foreigners didn't know what to make of the motley crew of geeks sauntering into the restaurants and ordering the most expensive wines. After dinner, the Magic geeks might go to a strip club, blowing $2000 in a night. When asked, they just introduced themselves as card players. People assumed they meant poker, not Magic.
As he continued to dominate on the road, Finkel slowly transformed himself. He dressed better. He lost weight. And, after months of studying how to approach girls on a website called PickupGuide.com, he even got laid. Though he never considered himself completely happy, Finkel felt like, at long last, he was in control of his game. He was doing well in school, winning tens of thousands playing cards, making great friends. He knew just how he was going to celebrate: by seeing the movie that all the Magic players were talking about, Rounders.
Finkel was intrigued from the movie's tagline he'd seen in ads: "In the Game of Life . . . Play the Cards You're Dealt." The story follows a young law student, played by Matt Damon, who's recovering after losing his tuition in a high-stakes game of poker. When his old card-playing buddy, played by Ed Norton, gets out of prison and needs to pay off a big loss to a Russian lowlife, Damon plumbs back into the underground poker world again.
Sitting in the dark theater that night, Finkel watched the action in a trance There was nothing glamorous about the portrayal of the poker world in Rounders, but it was compelling nonetheless. Finkel loved the reality the movie portrayed. It was mental competition for money, he thought. Here was this young kid playing cards obsessively, winning enough cash to pay his way through college. The more he played, the more he transformed, discovering himself, his values, his life.
As the credits rolled, Finkel couldn't move from his seat. A lightning bolt shot from the screen through his freshly bleached jewfro, and electrified his brain. "Holy shit," he realized, "that's me. I'm a card player. This is what I was meant to do!"
He had to find a poker table, and fast.
Using his Magic winnings for a bankroll, Finkel stormed the casinos of Atlantic City and the underground clubs of New York. The iron-clad discipline and raw strategy skills he had built over years of Magic competition served him well. The money was rolling in, and a whole new world was beginning to open up before him. He didn't have to be a sucker, he realized, he could play with skill and find the edge. He could beat the biggest games in town.
He began leading a double life: advantage gambler by night, All-American Magic star by day. Though he was long considered the best in the game, and remained the sport's biggest money winner, he still felt like he has something to prove. He had yet to capture a big official title. So one weekend in June 2000, he flew back to the Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando to do just that. It was time for the U.S. National Championship of Magic, and Finkel was ready to win.
Lines of young players queued up to ask Finkel to sign their Magic cards. They hero-worshipped him more than ever. "Hey Jon!" said one gawky boy slathered in pimples, "you're my idol." The first time Finkel had heard such words, he didn't know what to say. But by now, after hearing this so many times, he had refined his own self-deprecating comeback. "Maybe you should find a better hero," he joked confidently, "May I suggest Michael Jordan or Bill Gates." All the fans laughed along with him.
Finkel didn't just act the part of a champion, he looked it. He showed up wearing black slacks, and a black button-up shirt, neatly groomed. When the television cameras closed in, he stood extra-straight, lowered his ordinarily booming fast volume to a clear slow voice, and represented the game as best he could. He felt like it was his responsibility. And when the time came to play, he gave the audience the show they expected.
Sitting on the main stage with ESPN2 filming the action, and a microphone recording his every word, Finkel demolished his competition. He cast his Yawgmoth's Will and tapped his Thrashing Wumpus, unleashed his Vampiric Tutor. Players watched in awe as competitors withered in front of what had now become dubbed the "Finkel Fear Factor" or FFF. Even players who had the game locked would inexplicably fold their cards, assuming wrongly that Finkel had him beat.
By the end of the Nationals at Disney, Finkel proved himself once again, crushing his competition to become, once and for all, Magic's U.S. champion. The crowd cheered uproariously. Finkel proudly clutched the oversized check for $25,000 and hoisted his gold trophy high into the air. The photographer from Sideboard, the Wizards-sponsored magazine, snapped the cover shot.
As the cameras rolled, the fans and reporters rushed in to congratulate their man. Finkel would now lead the U.S. team to the ultimate Magic competition: the World Championships held in two months in Brussels, Belgium. Finkel gave interview after interview, posing for photos with his big gold trophy. When a reporter unfamiliar with the game concluded his questions, he asked, "do you have a nickname, Mr. Finkel, something we can use in the story? I hear they call you Finkeltron."
Finkel winced. He hated that nickname as much as he hated all the other goofy nicknames that had plagued his past: Stinkel, Wrinkle, Ronald McFinkel. But he wasn't a kid anymore. He was a man, a card player, a professional, and if ever there was a time to do something about his moniker, it was today.
Here in front of all his fellow geeks, in the glare of the spotlight, with the money in hand, Finkel was going to achieve the impossible. He was going to defy the unwritten commandment that a Dude May Not Nickname Thyself. He was going to declare his own nickname, and make it stick. "If you're going to call me anything," he told the reporter, "call me Jonny Magic."
It was time to leave Disney World. He was going to Vegas.
[Adapted from Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids by David Kushner. Copyright 2005 by David Kushner. Reprinted by arrangement with the Random House Publishing Group.]