Seven Tenths of a Second, page 5
My school life’s a mess by then and about to get a whole lot worse, but they don’t know that and they don’t want to know that. This is Wheel of Fortune, America’s favourite game show. They want confidence and precocity, and I can give them that. I can give them that all day long.
This is their once-a-year Teen Week segment, and I am among the chosen ones. The camera starts on the left and pans slowly right. We all have name badges on our chests. The first kid is called Allen. Allen has a receding hairline even then and the camera catches him glancing up at a monitor as the studio audience whoops and hollers.
Then the camera finds me. I’m applauding, too. Applauding myself. Applauding the audience. Applauding because that’s what you’re told to do. I’m wearing a white T-shirt with a rust-coloured shirt over the top of it and I’m waving more extravagantly than Allen is waving.
The camera keeps going. Jennifer’s next to me, and she is wearing a pretty floral dress. Then there’s another girl, with blonde hair in a pink dress with a high white collar; the camera’s too far away to make out her name.
Then there’s a girl with big hair that fits the era perfectly, and on the end of the line is a boy called Darryl, who looks a little more nervous than the rest of us. As the camera backs away and reveals the second line of eight kids standing behind us, I’m still waving. My right hand is blocking Allen out of the shot.
‘Welcome back as we continue Teen Week on Wheel of Fortune,’ the announcer says, raising his voice above the applause. ‘And now, here’s your host, Pat Sajak.’ When Pat gets to me, there’s something strange about his syntax.
‘Zak claims to be thirteen years old,’ he says. ‘Is that true?’ I don’t hesitate. ‘That’s me,’ I say. ‘Oh, you’re the one,’ Pat says. He asks what I like to study in school and I say math, history and science, none of which is strictly true.
And all of which might have been a surprise to my teachers in those subjects. I re-read my Grade 8 history report recently. ‘Often comes without book,’ the teacher has written. ‘Often misses assignments. I like Zak and want him to succeed. What’s wrong?’
Math is shorter and more to the point. ‘Very poor behaviour recently,’ it says. And science? Well, I got a Fail in science. ‘Low scores, little work done,’ that entry reads.
Pat Sajak says he’s seen on his sheet that I want to be a baseball player. Then he asks what’s the name of my team. This time I do hesitate. ‘White Sox,’ I say. Pat makes a joke of my pause. ‘Yeah, you want to be in the right dug-out during the game,’ he says, and the audience roars with laughter.
It’s been a long process just to get this far. I have a baseball buddy called Amani Smith, and a few months earlier he hears that Wheel of Fortune is doing auditions at different junior high schools in our area.
I’m at Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks. It’s called Louis Armstrong Middle School now and there’s a message scrawled on one of the walls that is a line from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.’ I quite like that. There are no messages like that when I am there.
So Amani mentions Wheel of Fortune. I’m not a game-show junkie or anything like that but I think it’d be fun to have a go. I like the idea of being on television. And anything is better than going to school.
Wheel of Fortune is huge in the States. It’s basically like Hangman with prizes, but its format is so successful that, back in the 80s, it is often getting nightly audiences of more than 30 million viewers. Even now, it gets more than 8 million.
So it’s a big deal. We get called up for the first round of auditions and go to a hotel somewhere in LA. There are probably about 200 students there and we have to do a series of Hangman-type tests. Only kids who get them 100 per cent right get through to the next round. Amani gets one wrong, so he’s out.
That takes the number down to forty kids and then you do a kind of screen test. You introduce yourself and say what you’re interested in, where you live, all that kind of stuff, just so they can get a feel for your personality. After that, they send you away. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
They’ve been round to quite a lot of the local schools so they’ve got a big pool to pick from. Not just the forty left from my heat. I get a call saying I’ve made it through to the next round, but the odds are still stacked against me. All the kids who made it through the other heats are here now and we get tested all over again.
We do another Hangman test, then they break us into groups and we play a mock round of Wheel of Fortune. It’s a rehearsal. Then they call out the names of the kids who have made it through to a final fifty and they read my name out.
They’re just looking at your personality and mix, and probably some girls, some boys, just looking at putting together a group. Then they say, ‘Zak, thank you very much for coming. You can go now. If we call you, you’re on the show.’
I get a phone call a week later. I’m in. Except there’s one last hurdle. There are three kids on each episode of the show and they do five episodes. So, they need fifteen kids but they take twenty. It’s in case a kid screws up somewhere along the line, gets caught cheating, gets ill or starts chatting to the audience. So there’s still a chance you could be a reserve. When we get to actual filming, I’m not a reserve. I’m on the show.
I win the first round when I pick up quite early on that the answer is the Smurfs. So I am already a winner on Wheel of Fortune. Then I win another round. This time, I get a bit lucky. A girl has got it pretty much all down and then gets it wrong when the words are down to Wild Bill Hic_o_.
I think she asks for a Y. Maybe she’s thinking of Hickory. I don’t know what the answer is, but I ask for a K, and it’s correct. It’s Wild Bill Hickok. I’ve never heard of Wild Bill Hickok, although I know now that he was a Western folk hero, a lawman and a gambler. I have to pronounce it right to win so I guess at that a bit, but I make it and Pat comes over to congratulate me.
You can just about hear me saying, ‘I don’t even know who that is,’ as some celebration music plays and the audience claps. ‘I guess you guys weren’t watching too much television in the 50s,’ Pat says, and everyone roars with laughter again.
I don’t make it through to the grand finale of the show because even though I win two of the four rounds, there are people who win more money than me and so they qualify for the last three.
I still win more than $3,050 in prize money, though, and the way the show works is that you use that money to choose what your prize will be. On TV it looks like you’re seeing this carousel of prizes for the first time, but you have already been shown what they are.
Well, as a twelve-year-old, the first thing you do is you go for the most expensive thing you can afford. In my case, that happens to be his and hers Cartier watches. It sounds like a slightly weird thing to choose, but I was just thinking of the monetary value.
I still think of that Wheel of Fortune episode as one of the formative experiences of my life. It teaches me a very basic principle of business: it is a lot easier to win, to make money, to succeed, to do a deal, if people like you.
Television executives, the high-powered types who run a show as popular and successful as Wheel of Fortune, don’t put people they don’t like on their show. They don’t want to take the risk. They want to go with people who will make good television.
So I am not shy in front of the camera. In fact, I relish the camera. I am bubbly. You could call me annoying, I suppose, but I don’t care about that. I just care about getting on the show. I have a goal and I pursue it and I am single-minded about it.
I know instinctively what they want from a contestant and I give it to them. I guess it is one of the first signposts to the fact that I am going to be a good salesman. This time, I am selling myself. And it teaches me that, whatever you’re selling, maybe you’re always selling yourself, too.
If people like you, they’re going to buy your product. Or it’s more likely that they’ll buy your product. Or, in my case, back in 1984, that they’ll put you on their television show. Either because, at some level, they don’t want to disappoint you by saying no to what you’re selling, or because they think you’ll be an asset to the show. I am a troubled kid in some ways, but I have smarts, and I use them.
At an early age, I am comfortable with the camera in front of me, comfortable under pressure, and able to say the right thing at the right time when others find that the limelight makes them freeze.
The best journalists have a knack of getting people to open up to them because they like them. While publishers say people don’t buy books about people they don’t like. The same principle applies in most walks of life.
And I won, right, so you feel like a winner. You feel successful. I mean, you feel like a winner just going on the show, but it’s even better to go on the show and excel and win.
The Netflix show Drive to Survive opens one episode in series seven on the whole Wheel of Fortune story. A lot of viewers seem to like it and relate to it because it gives them an idea that I am not from some rich, privileged background and that I had to raise money in whatever way I could to pursue my dreams.
We are not a poor family, but we are poor in Formula 1 terms, and I know when I take those two Cartier watches home with me that if I want to pursue my own ambitions in life, those watches and the money I get for them can be my passport to a new world.
Chapter 4
An MBA in the School of Hard Knocks
I’m an angry kid. I’m massively troubled at school. I feed my life on long draughts of anger and resentment, washed down with a pint or two of attention-seeking. I’m a handful for my parents.
I play ice hockey a lot and, surprise, surprise, I’m a big fighter on the ice. I’m good at hockey, but as soon as my friends show up at the rink, I’ll say to them, ‘Watch this,’ and I’ll start a fight. My friends know I’ll get into it with someone and, when it happens, it makes them laugh, so we are all happy.
I haven’t fought in a long time now, and I know I don’t look like much of a tough guy, but it’s still buried in me somewhere. I got it in me, but I haven’t deployed it in a while. It’s properly parked, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, waiting for something to trigger it.
If you see me as a kid in junior high school, you’d think I’m going to be a bust. You’d think I’m going to amount to nothing as an adult. You’d think I’m probably headed for a juvenile detention centre. And then somewhere worse, the older I get.
One hundred per cent that’s what you’d think. I’m a bad kid. I’m not malicious, but I am troubled. I fight a lot, I skip school, all at thirteen or fourteen. I’m angry. And you’re going to ask what I’m angry about back then, and I still don’t really know.
I’m not in an abusive household. My mom and dad’s marriage isn’t particularly happy but, as I’ve already said, I know that they love me. And I know that’s an advantage that not every kid has.
Maybe I’m angry because my mom and dad are away a lot. Maybe it is just kind of built-up energy. I don’t know if it is an attention-seeking thing. It’s entirely possible. I mean, even to this day, I seek attention. I’ve matured, but it’s still there.
I don’t know if it is a way of trying to exercise power by making myself a cause for concern. I’m a punk in school. I don’t mean a punk rocker. I mean a bad kid. I set off firecrackers in science class. It’s the kind of stuff that gets you expelled if you do it today. Part of it is just that LA is a difficult place to go to school. It can be dangerous. There’s a lot going on in the high schools there.
I am never the most popular kid, but I get by. Maybe I drive my popularity through trying to grab attention by being a punk. I’m the kid who, when the teacher turns around, is flinging paperclips at the back of their head. I mean, I’m an annoying kid in class. I do it because I know I can make everyone laugh.
So perhaps it is an attention-seeking thing. I am definitely the class clown, big troublemaker, in trouble all the time. And so I carry that through my schooldays, and it even bleeds into my sporting life. I love baseball, but I get thrown out of a lot of baseball games in Little League, even though I’m the best player. If I do strike out, I’m chucking my bat.
I can’t get into my first-choice high school because of my attendance record so I go to Taft High School, on the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Winnetka Avenue in the Woodland Hills district of the San Fernando Valley. I continue ditching, the term we use in the States for skipping school.
I grow less and less interested in school. It’s not even about attention-seeking any more, or being the class clown. I just don’t bother showing up a lot of the time. I want to be free from school. One time, I go in to see the high-school principal with my parents and he turns to them and says: ‘Zak does know we have school on Fridays, right?’ I hate Fridays. I never go.
I get an A in baseball. I’m one of the best in school. And an A in work experience. Apart from that, I am a mess. I even manage to fall out with the baseball coach. I’m very cocky. I know I’m the best player and I act like it.
It’s a shame because I have proper talent as a baseball player. I would have been the youngest guy to make the varsity baseball team and I have the best batting average. I’m the first guy on the field for practices and the last one off, but it’s not enough.
One day we have try-outs and there’s a soccer game happening on the next field and I think they are encroaching on our space, so I mouth off to the soccer coach and they boot me out of baseball. Once I get cut from the team, I feel like that is me done with school.
I am a dropout really, but my parents persuade me I should try and get my high-school diploma so I leave Taft and they enrol me at a place called University High School, in West Los Angeles, not far from Santa Monica.
This is no longer in the Valley and, for a while, everything goes okay there. I’m in 12th Grade and no one knows who I am or what my back story involves, so I kind of keep my head down and just get on with things. I start karting and all my energy is going into that.
I’m minding my own business, but I’m still a little bit of a practical joker. I’ve still got a bit of punk in me, but not quite to the same level. It’s dormant, but then something brings it out.
Some girls have a cake and they are carrying it through the school to present it to one of their friends, singing ‘Happy Birthday’. The candles on this cake are lit, ready for the birthday boy to blow them out, and when they walk past me I blow them out.
My buddies, Josh and Mack, and I laugh and we go back to minding our own business. And then around ten minutes later, I’m talking to my friends and I feel this energy rush. I guess I must have heard footsteps approaching. I turn round and someone slams the cake right into my face. Bam.
The red mist comes down. Some kind of instinct sets in and I just chase this guy down. I think he gets about twenty metres and I catch him and put him up against the fence in the school yard.
Then I let go with a flurry of four of the best right hands I’ve ever thrown. I mean, just peaches of punches. And on the last one, his mouth explodes with blood and he drops to the ground. I’m just consumed by pure rage, like the violence of the cave.
I turn around and there are 200 kids surrounding me. It turns out the kid I have just beaten the living shit out of is the high-school class president, so the most popular kid in the school. And I am some jerk that nobody knows. When my adrenaline drops, it’s my turn to feel alarmed.
I stay at my girlfriend’s that night and my mom calls me the next morning and she’s in tears. The class president has spent the night in the hospital. It turns out I’ve broken his jaw so now his jaw is wired shut. His parents are lawyers. My mom says they are suing the school and us.
Do I feel sorry for him or contrite? Not really, to be honest. I actually think it is kind of badass. I’ve never broken anyone’s jaw before. That bravado doesn’t last too long. I have to go back to school and now everybody there wants to kill Zak Brown.
I’m on my own. Kids take a run at me in the corridors. People throw elbows. I’m terrified. There are threatening notes left in my locker. I’m a good firefighter, but this feels out of control.
It gets to the point where the whole theme of the high-school prom becomes ‘we’re going to beat the shit out of Zak Brown’. I turn up anyway. When I get out of the limo that has brought me, other kids start booing me. Inside, a couple of kids take a run at me.
The teachers see it and realize what is going on. Someone takes me aside and says they are nervous for my safety. They say I need to leave. And so I leave and that is the last time I’m ever at school.
I don’t even know if I graduated. Soon after, my mom writes to the school, pretending to be me, complaining that I never got my graduation certificate. They write back and say I’m one and a half grades short and if I take the class and pay them $1,800, they’ll graduate me. I’m not going to do it.
School is a failure for me. It’s hard to get away from that. But I don’t regret how it turns out and I don’t regret the lessons it teaches me, even if they are hard lessons, because, without them, I don’t think I would be where I am today.
I actually think the difficulties I encounter and the way I keep confronting authority teach me how to be very entrepreneurial, very, very hardwired in energy and ducking and diving. I’m in trouble, I’m getting out of trouble, I’m talking my way out of scrape after scrape. I’m always on the move. It makes me sharp and street-smart.
It means I have to wheel-and-deal early on in my life. I have to get used to manoeuvring and improvizing. Being threatened with all manner of sanctions becomes second nature to me. I guess it helps me to grow a thick skin, which is always useful in business, and in leadership.
