Newly in possession of his drivers license and a hand-me-down car, Dan Cronin was given a job by his parents one Saturday in the mid-1980s: drive his younger brother, Mick, to three eighth-grade basketball games in Cincinnati. On the way to the first game, in his sky-blue Ford Granada equipped with an AM-only radio, Dan proposed a wager.
I bet you $20 that you can’t score 100 points total on the day.
Mick, both hypercompetitive and a highly advanced player for that age, took the bet. The first game, for St. Ann Catholic School, he filled it up—more than one-third of the way to winning the bet, he recalls.