announcer: The following is a presentation
of HBO Sports.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Tonight on "Real Sports"...
competitive youth cheerleading
is drawing lots of eager, young athletes these days
but also drawing a frightening number of sexual predators.
- This guy had already been charged
with sexually assaulting a young girl?
- Yes, yes.
- And still,
he's able to stroll through all kinds of gyms in Texas?
- Mm-hmm. I was very shocked.
♪ ♪
- The matter of how and when police officers use force
is a problem nationwide.
The broad search for a solution
has even reached the world of sports.
- How does anybody expect an officer
to take a violent, resisting person into custody
if we don't give them the tools to do so?
And we know how to teach people
how to do this particular task.
♪ ♪
- Once a quaint hobby for kids,
the trading of sports cards is today big business
with pieces of cardboard being treated
like master works of art.
- My friends, my generation,
I don't think we're gonna grow up
wanting a Pollock or a Monet or a Picasso.
I think they're gonna want, like, a Jordan rookie card
or a Giannis or a Luka or a Hank Aaron.
♪ ♪
announcer: And now,
from the HBO "Real Sports" studio in New York,
your host, Bryant Gumbel.
- Good evening and welcome to "Real Sports,"
where we are taking advantage of the dog days of summer
tonight to deviate from our usual four-story format
and instead explore three issues in depth,
one relating to the booming business
of sports collectibles,
one focusing on the ongoing problem
of cops using excessive force, and our first story,
which is about cheerleading and sexual predators.
Competitive youth cheerleading is a fast-growing sport
involving over 150,000 athletes.
Unfortunately, it has become the latest sport
to have been infiltrated by sexual predators
who are seeking easy access to trusting children.
Compounding the problem is the sad reality
that those charged with protecting the children
and policing the sport seem to be failing their kids.
Our Mary Carillo has that story.
- One and three!
- For Brooklyn Huckeba, there's always been one place
she felt comfortable and safe.
- When I was five,
I went to my first cheer gym and absolutely loved it.
- Right away? - I did.
- From then on, Brooklyn never wanted to leave the local gym.
She began training seven days a week
and grew into a budding star
in the world of All Star Cheer...
- Hey, look at that early tumbling there--
synchronized, beautiful.
- The competitive division of cheerleading
in which travel teams from across the country
flip, kick, and spin their way to glory.
So, when two years ago, at the age of 14,
Brooklyn met a top men's cheerleader
who offered to coach her up to his level,
she was thrilled.
- It was really cool
seeing somebody do all these amazing flips.
And you kind of just automatically look up to them.
- So you assume, "This guy can really help my game"?
- Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- Brooklyn thought she'd found a mentor.
That is, until a few hours later,
when her would-be coach found her on social media
and began sending sexually explicit messages,
first requesting naked photos of the 14-year-old,
then proposing, in graphic terms,
that the two have sex.
- The first overwhelming feeling I had was,
"This is gross. This is disgusting."
And it was nothing I had ever experienced.
And it did make me very angry.
- Brooklyn's mother, Shannon, says she was angry, too,
especially after she discovered
that the man her daughter met at the gym,
Kale Dunlap, was an apparent sexual predator
with a rap sheet available to anyone who cared to see it.
- I ran a background check on him through public data.
I found that he had two sexual assault charges.
- Was it easy to find that information?
- Absolutely. Two minutes.
- This guy had already been charged
with sexually assaulting a young girl.
- Yes, yes.
- And still,
he's able to stroll through all kinds of gyms in Texas?
- Mm-hmm. I was very shocked.
- Particularly, Shannon says,
because the gym where Brooklyn met the man
was supposed to be a safe haven.
It was overseen
by the United States All Star Federation,
or USASF,
the national governing body
for the sport of All Star Cheer.
USASF's mandate is to write the sport's rulebook
and regulate thousands of member gyms
and competitions nationwide
in order to protect its 150,000 young athletes.
- The USASF--
providing a safer environment to train and compete.
- Did you assume that
there were all kinds of safety protocols in place?
- Well, I did, because we had to actually have
a membership with USASF,
and you just assume
that they're gonna keep our athletes safe.
- So Shannon contacted USASF
to ask why a man
facing multiple charges of sexual assault
hadn't yet been barred from their gyms.
You must've assumed,
"Okay, something's gonna happen right away."
- You do.
And in the meantime, we had found a girl in East Texas
who also proceeded to file charges,
and he was arrested for those a month later,
and I let them know about that, and nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
- Yes, despite the mounting tide of evidence
against Dunlap,
he remained free to operate at USASF gyms.
And he wasn't alone.
Around that time, a "USA Today" report
identified a long list of individuals
in youth cheerleading
who'd been charged with or convicted of sex crimes,
scores of whom were affiliated with USASF,
yet still hadn't been banned by the sport's governing body.
But even as reports of sexual abuse
flooded into USASF,
one former insider says
the organization was doing very little about them.
- Over the course of a year,
there were over 100 individuals that were reported.
And sometimes those individuals had more than one report.
- How big a staff should've been there
to handle all of these problems?
- I think a minimum of five people was necessary.
- That wasn't even close to what it was.
It was you. - It wasn't even me.
- That's because Ginger Wilczak wasn't just
the one and only person USASF had hired to handle the issue.
She says she'd been hired on a strictly part-time basis
to work only a few hours each week on the exploding crisis.
A career expert in child protection,
Wilczak had been brought on in 2019,
in theory to weed predators out of the sport.
- I really thought that USASF was trying to bring in
an impartial person
who had the experience and the education to do the job
the way that it needed to be done.
But that is not the reality of what happened.
- At what point in your job did you realize
that this wasn't the job you'd signed up for?
- Within the first few weeks. - Really?
- It does not take long for the shackles to be put on
for what you can do and what you can say.
- Wilczak says that despite her expertise,
officials at USASF limited her input
and routinely rejected her recommendations,
like when she proposed banning Kale Dunlap from USASF gyms.
Instead, he was left eligible.
- Why even bring me in?
Why even bring me in? - And then muzzle you?
- When all these cases were piling up, Ginger,
and it was on you to be talking to the victims,
to the parents of the victims,
what did you end up saying to these people?
- There were a lot of days I didn't answer the phone...
because I didn't know what to say.
- So did USASF hire you as window dressing?
- I think so.
I think it was the name and the credentials,
and that was all they wanted.
Had I been allowed to do the job
that I believed that I was brought in to do,
things would have turned out much differently.
- Wilczak says she'd wanted
to create the kind of child protection division
common in the other organizations
that govern youth sports in America,
from USA Baseball to USA Volleyball,
from USA Fencing to U.S. Figure Skating.
Those organizations are all supervised by Congress
and must answer to lawmakers on all matters,
including their policing of sexual assault.
- The governing bodies of these sports
bear a very serious responsibility.
- But what Wilczak didn't know at the time was that,
while USASF may look and sound like those governing bodies,
it's actually very different.
USASF is overseen not by Congress,
but by the lords of cheerleading,
and some insiders say
its primary focus is not child safety
but profits for the massive corporation
that rules over the sport.
- The priority was protect the brand.
- Not the child? - Correct.
- For two decades, Marlene Cota worked
as a vice president at Varsity Spirit,
helping the company dominate the industry
like few companies in any industry do.
- 90% to 95% of the business of cheerleading
is controlled by Varsity.
- So from top to bottom,
from the bows in their hair to all the events?
- Ponytails to the toes.
- In cheerleading,
whether you buy this uniform or that one,
attend this competition or that one,
or head off to this summer camp
or that one,
you're paying Varsity either way
because Varsity owns them all.
But Varsity's influence within the sport
reached a whole other level
when they created USASF to rule over All Star Cheer.
Varsity says they did it to make the sport safer.
Cota says they had another objective--
to ensure that as the rules of the sport
were being drawn up,
they would always favor Varsity.
- They created a governing body
so that they could manage
how they were going to keep that growth,
that machine going.
- Did anyone see an issue with a massive,
multibillion-dollar corporation
creating the governing body?
- No.
You know, the directive was always profit, profit, profit.
- So what is the USASF in your eyes?
- It's just another appendage of Varsity.
- It's a $2 billion organization
who has essentially set up
their own "governing body"
in order to police their own creation.
- Sarah Klein has investigated
USASF's child protection program
as an advocate for victims of sexual assault,
a role she took on a few years ago
not long after coming forward as the first known victim
of gymnastics doctor
and serial sexual predator Larry Nassar...
- My name is Sarah Klein.
Larry Nassar abused me from age 8 through age 25...
- Making her one of the hundreds molested
while gymnastics' governing body sat idly by.
You are well aware of what has happened
in the world of gymnastics.
You were a victim yourself.
Is cheerleading even worse? - Yes.
Because what I know about my work
and what I know about my personal experience
is pedophiles will find the path of least resistance.
And just the very structure of this sport
allows this to happen.
It's really sort of a breeding ground
for pedophiles.
[camera shutters clicking]
- The Nassar scandal exploded in 2017.
Yet, even amidst the fallout,
few publicly questioned if a crisis could take root
in the world of All Star Cheer.
On the contrary, the sport was enjoying a boom,
reaching a fever pitch last year
when cheerleading became the subject
of a runaway hit series on Netflix...
- If you haven't watched this show, it is amazing.
- A development that promised to deliver even greater renown
and profitability and excited everyone in the sport.
- I kind of binge-watched the Netflix show,
and I was really excited about it.
- So you must've thought, "God, what a showcase this is
for the sport my twins love." - Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- But Kristen, who asked that we not use her last name,
was confused when her twin 13-year-old sons,
both avid cheerleaders, told her
they were not interested in watching the show.
- They didn't jump in with the degree of enthusiasm
about the Netflix show
that everybody else seemed to have,
which at the time, I was kind of surprised by.
- You didn't know that they'd been victimized
by one of the stars of the show.
- No, I didn't.
- That star was Jerry Harris,
a bubbly and beloved fan favorite,
whose Netflix appearance made him an overnight celebrity.
Working the red carpet...
- Hi! - Hey, how are you doing?
- Nice to meet you! - How you doing?
- Appearing on talk shows...
- Jerry, you were part of this, by the way.
- Yeah. [laughter]
- Even winning over the president.
- We could meet one another for real.
- Absolutely, absolutely! I would love that.
- But Harris had apparently been using his newfound fame
for another purpose, too--
to sexually harass young boys in the sport.
- I saw a text message thread
between my son Charlie and Jerry
that concerned me.
And that was when I found this folder filled with things
related to his relationship with Jerry,
including a video of...
of Jerry masturbating.
- Is that as bad as it gets for a mother?
- It was pretty bad.
- But it got even worse.
Not only did Kristen find that Harris
had been incessantly contacting both boys,
asking for naked photos and sexual favors,
but she learned that the cheerleading star
had allegedly cornered one of her sons
at a recent competition.
- Jerry asked Charlie to go to the bathroom with him
and took him in the back of the bathroom
and very persistently pressured him there
for oral sex.
[voice breaking] Charlie has a hard time...
talking about that incident,
but Charlie was finally able to escape the situation
and leave the bathroom.
- Kristen reported the violation to USASF,
delivering photographic evidence
of Harris' lewd messages.
Then she says she was told to be patient
while USASF's experts conducted
a proper investigation.
But inside USASF,
Ginger Wilczak says she was told to stand down
and let her boss handle the matter.
- When I saw the initial report,
it came along with an email that said,
"Don't do anything on this case.
I will handle it."
- What would you have done
if you had power over Jerry Harris?
- He would've lost his eligibility
as soon as I received that first report.
- Instead, Harris stayed eligible for months
and continued to make the rounds
as the sport's most visible ambassador.
All the while, prosecutors now say,
he continued to abuse young victims.
Varsity reported Harris to police--
they say shortly after they learned of the allegations.
But USASF didn't finally ban Harris
until his alleged crimes spilled into public view.
- According to "USA Today,"
the star of the Netflix documentary "Cheer"
is now reportedly under FBI investigation.
- Do you believe because Jerry Harris was such a star
in this world that that took precedence
over what was happening to your boys?
- Absolutely I do.
Preserving him did become...
more important
than safeguarding not just my kids
but the others
that he was doing the same thing to.
My kids couldn't sleep. They couldn't eat.
They were dealing with the fallout of all of this,
while Jerry, his star is continuing to rise,
and Varsity Brands, USASF
are all benefiting from that.
- While Kristen's boys were still suffering
in the aftermath of their abuse,
young Brooklyn Huckeba was trying to recover, too,
but was able to breathe easier when her abuser, Kale Dunlap,
was put behind bars
and finally suspended by USASF.
- It was very relieving
knowing that he wasn't going to come near me or anybody else.
- But just months later,
Brooklyn met another USASF member coach
named Mitch Ryan.
She says Ryan invited her to train with him at his home.
But once the two were alone,
she says Ryan offered her alcohol
and then pulled her to him.
- I moved away,
and he immediately had just pulled me closer,
and that's when I kind of lost all hope
and kind of realized if he wants something,
he's gonna get it.
- Brooklyn says
Ryan violently penetrated her with his fingers
and forced her to perform oral sex.
How bad did it get?
- I had woken up the next morning
and was bleeding.
My tonsils were, like, bruised
because of how hard he was holding me down.
And I took a shower,
and I just wanted to scrub every inch of my body,
just trying to get the memories away.
- Hoping to forget the ordeal,
Brooklyn waited weeks to tell her mother what had happened,
until she finally wrote her a letter
detailing the night's events.
Here's some of what you wrote.
"It was very painful, but I couldn't move
"because he was holding me.
"I could feel sharp pains for a while,
"and then I just felt numb.
I was holding my eyes shut, hoping it would be over soon."
- [sniffles] - It's okay.
Yeah, I just held her and cried.
We both cried.
- Ryan was reported to both the police and to USASF,
but Ryan, like Jerry Harris, was no ordinary cheerleader.
He, too, had been featured on the Netflix series "Cheer."
He, too, had become
a prominent figure in the sport,
and despite the allegations,
he, too, was kept eligible by USASF
until his alleged abuse was reported by "USA Today"
nearly five months later.
- It's just very frustrating that they waited that long,
when they--
They had the information, and they still did nothing.
And even now, they haven't followed up with us.
- You haven't heard from them? - No.
- Mitch Ryan was arrested
on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child.
His case is scheduled to go before a grand jury
later this year.
Through his attorney, he denies any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, his former castmate Jerry Harris,
has pled not guilty and is awaiting trial.
We wanted to talk to USASF,
but they declined our request for an interview.
In a statement, they say they remain
committed to athlete safety,
require their members to comply
with USASF's documented safeguarding principles,
and are now partnering with third-party
child protection experts to make the sport safer.
As for Ginger Wilczak, the child protection expert
parted with USASF after less than two years
but says she still harbors guilt
for having played a part in the industry's failures.
- I do feel like I've let some athletes down,
and that is something that I will carry.
- What do you say to people who blame you
for all of this happening under your watch?
- I accept that responsibility.
I failed, in that I did not do what I should have done--
pushed the issue further
and not been complicit in what was happening.
- But while Wilczak has left the cheer industry,
other advocates are now stepping in,
like Sarah Klein,
who didn't just survive her abuse by Larry Nassar
but also became a lawyer and recently brought suit
against USASF and Varsity Spirit
on behalf of Kristen and her two boys,
who she believes will expose the sport
to a reckoning of its own.
- What we saw in the sport of gymnastics,
it takes those first few courageous voices
to expose the truth,
and a snowball effect occurs.
That was an unraveling.
This is the beginning of an unraveling.
♪ ♪
- Mary, this one's really a tough one, isn't it?
- It was devastating.
This is the hardest story I've ever done for this show.
The idea that the first sexual experience a young boy
or a young girl has is sexual abuse is devastating.
- USASF. - Mm.
- How is it possible that they have managed
to avoid any kind of government oversight?
- Because it's not considered right now, anyway, a sport,
so it doesn't have to fall
under the national governing bodies
that all those sports,
many of them Olympic sports, have to fall under.
Congress doesn't oversee them at all.
- These people at Varsity Spirit,
have they a hand in any athletic effort
other than competitive cheerleading?
- Not to my knowledge.
I mean, cheerleading is a huge business.
It's getting bigger and bigger.
So, I mean, this is what they do.
They've been running this for years.
There are anti-trust lawsuits going on
because it's considered by its critics
to be a monopolistic enterprise.
- Let's give these people their proper credit.
Varsity Spirit, the parent company is Bain Capital,
and the man in charge is Bill Seely.
Remember the name. Mary, thanks very much.
Let's move on to another issue of social importance,
and that's the use of force by police officers.
The debate over how and when cops can or should apply force
is far from new,
but it has intensified in recent years
as more and more videos have gone viral,
forcing police departments to publicly account for arrests
that often look sloppy at best and cruel at worst.
There is no easy solution to the problem,
but the ongoing search for one
has now oddly led to the world of sports.
Our David Scott explains.
- Stop!
- These are some images of recent arrests
around the country.
- [chokes] - Stop.
- [groans]
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
- Stop!
- From Connecticut...
[indistinct shouting]
- To Arizona...
- What the fuck? Hey, yo! What the fuck, yo?
- To Maryland.
In the era of cell phones and social media,
videos like these have become more and more common.
And along with society's increased focus
on social justice,
more people than ever are questioning the ways
in which America's police officers use force.
Many are demanding change,
from reforming police
to eliminating them altogether.
all: Abolish the police!
- But now some are saying that the best remedy
can be found in the last place you might think to look.
- Again, out! - And down goes Curry!
- Out cold.
- Yes, the people who created America's most violent
professional sports competition
now say they can create the country's least violent cops.
- We happen to have a solution
that is so desperately needed
by every police officer in America right now
because this is what we do.
This is what I was born around.
- Rener Gracie is a member of the family
that created the UFC...
- This is the main event!
- The professional competitive circuit of mixed martial arts.
[cheers and applause]
The league was launched nearly 30 years ago
by Gracie's father.
- We hope we enjoy the show.
And this is what real fighting is all about.
[cheers and applause]
- Its first star and inaugural champion was his uncle...
- There's the tap, there's the tap.
- And one of its core strategies was invented
by his grandfather,
a martial arts grandmaster from Brazil.
It's a system of holds and locks
called Brazilian jiu-jitsu,
or BJJ.
And for years, it's been used by the fighting Gracies
to subdue their rivals
no matter how big or how strong,
no muss and no fuss.
- And the Gracie train keeps rolling!
- Jiu-jitsu truly enables the smaller, weaker individual
to stand a chance
against a larger, more athletic aggressor
in a violent physical altercation.
And because of its inherently nonviolent nature
versus violent, brutal strikes like other arts,
allows us to do that at the most gradual progression.
- Is that a central concept,
to exercise the minimum effective dose of force?
- The philosophy is absolutely
the least amount of force necessary
to neutralize the aggressor and their threat to us.
- It's the part of any MMA fight
that's the least bloody and the most boring.
No punches, no kicks, just calm control.
But if that's not always what fans want in their fights,
it's exactly what the public wants
out of its police arrests, so the Gracies say it's time
to teach their secrets to cops.
- How does anybody expect an officer
to take a violent, resisting person into custody
if we don't give them the tools to do so?
It's common sense.
If you ask me to do something, teach me how to do it.
And we know how to teach people how to do this particular task.
Pry that leg through.
Turn those hips, come in this way.
- That's why Rener Gracie is now touring the country,
inviting cops to join him at the gym
and coaching them up
on takedowns and other techniques.
- Coming up on your toes,
come in, circling, circling, on your toes, excellent.
Melt the hips coming in. Excellent.
- Like at this session in the San Francisco Bay Area
last month, where Rener and his brother Ryron,
another martial arts master,
put on an exhibition for local cops.
First, they used me as the suspect.
- Let's go. We're coming in. Yes.
- [grunts] - Okay.
- Then someone far bigger and stronger.
- Couple slaps, couple slaps. Go.
Hit him in the head, suspect.
Get some real range for your strikes.
Reach for his face. Touch his head. Go, suspect.
Go, suspect. Holy moly! [laughter and applause]
Were you trying to get out? - Yeah.
I just felt like I was getting smothered.
- Jiu-jitsu as we teach it,
not only does it accomplish the objective
of neutralizing violence and taking someone into custody,
but it does it in the most "camera friendly" way possible.
- Is the goal fewer viral videos,
or is the goal better outcomes?
- The goal is repaired relationships
between communities
and the law enforcement agencies that serve them.
- Among Gracie's instructors here, Damon Gilbert,
who learned BJJ from Gracie a decade ago
and his now passing those lessons along.
- Nice job. Nice movement.
- Gilbert is plenty familiar with the issue
of how police apply force
as an officer in the Oakland Police Department.
But he's also seen the issue from the other side
back when he was in high school
and was at the scene of an altercation between some cops
and his classmates.
- Next thing I know,
someone threw a cup, hits the officer on the shoulder.
I don't know why he picked me,
but that man slammed me to the ground,
punched me in the face a couple times.
I put my hands behind my back. That man punched me.
Punched me, punched me. - Wow.
- The tears came out
because I didn't think it was supposed to be like this.
- You're a kid. - Yeah. I'm 16, 17.
And my grandmother pulled me to the side,
and she said, "Damon,
"you can either harbor the hate and anger that you have
"for police officers because what happened to you,
"or you can decide to make a change.
What are you gonna do, young man?"
- Gilbert decided to try to make a change from the inside.
He joined the Oakland PD and has become an advocate
for BJJ training in the department--
the key, he says, to rebuilding the bond
between cops and local communities.
- That's the burden of every police officer--
to do our absolute best,
to do double the work to regain the trust of the community.
And guess what.
It only can be done by our actions.
It's like a dual responsibility...
- Slowly but surely, more and more police departments
are quietly turning to BJJ,
especially when a crisis hits home,
like it did in 2019 in Marietta, Georgia...
- Please! [Taser clicking]
Please don't do it! - Stop it!
- Where a late-night arrest at a restaurant
descended into chaos.
- Stop! No!
- What do you see when you look at that incident?
- Four officers were having a difficulty
controlling one person.
It looks terrible. It just looks terrible.
- Jake King is a major in the Marietta Police Department.
He says the moment served as a wake-up call
to his organization.
- It really put a lot of pressure on us as an agency
because the public has decided, and I agree with them,
they don't like to see us punch and kick people
or talk disrespectful to people.
- Do you believe that there's a gap
in what the public expects from police
and what police are capable of?
- What they get and what they expect
is two totally different things.
And it's not just us.
We can go watch tons of other videos and say,
"Okay, that officer could handle that so much better
and have a different outcome."
- King says that the problem is
that officers simply aren't taught how to do their job.
He says that when it comes to shooting their firearms,
cops are trained extensively
and must engage in frequent practice
and regular recertification.
But when it comes to training in hand-to-hand tactics...
- The state here has
a zero requirement for yearly training.
- Zero?
- You never have to attend any training
that involves putting hands on people.
But how much training do I get in firearms?
Well, I qualify twice a year. We have a simulator downstairs.
I can go to a gun range and shoot whenever I want.
- So of the 150 officers on your staff...
- 145. Yes, sir. - 145.
How many of them have fired their gun
in the line of duty, would you say?
- Three. - Three?
How many have had to put their hands on citizens
in the line of duty?
- Every single one of 'em.
- Rener Gracie says it's basically the same story
at police departments across the country.
- You're spending the vast majority of your training time
on the firing range shooting at a bull's-eye.
Pop, pop, pop. So you hit the target.
And you spend 1% of your training time every two years
in how to hold someone and grab someone.
- The thing that police officers
are least likely to do on the job
gets the overwhelming amount of training.
And the thing that they are most likely to do on the job
gets vanishingly little.
- You nailed it.
- The inevitable result, Gracie says, scenes like this.
And when video of this arrest went viral around Marietta,
officials decided it was time to make a change.
That's why these days,
you can often find Marietta's cops
heading to the local BJJ gym,
where they trade in their police blues for jiu-jitsu gis
and learn the art of BJJ.
The training program was implemented by Major King
and paid for by the department--
$10 per cop per class.
King recommends it for all of his officers
and has made it mandatory for recruits.
- We have probably about 18, 20 officers here
training today.
- At all different levels? - Yeah, all different levels.
The highest level would be purple belts.
And then down to the recruit
that it's her second training session.
- Today the officers are learning
how to use their body leverage to put handcuffs on a suspect.
The idea is that next time,
instead of a dogpile like this...
- Stop! No!
- It should look like this.
- Left hand under.
Reach and grab the wrist, pull all the way back,
and you can handcuff right here.
- Marietta's officers say
the training is already paying off.
Luis Valdez says he used his new skills recently
after a patient he was transporting
to a psychiatric hospital suddenly tried to escape.
- He tried to push me away,
but with the training that I've received,
I was prepared for this.
I was able to effectively, you know,
get a grip on him and bring him down.
[indistinct radio chatter]
You're gonna be all right.
- You have to make that... [snaps fingers]
Instant decision. - Exactly.
It's like that muscle memory just clicks in your head.
- But even as some are buying into the potential of BJJ,
others say they're unconvinced by the idea.
- As much as I like and respect BJJ as a martial art,
I don't think painting policing over with a BJJ brush
is going to change the industry.
- Seth Stoughton is a law professor
at the University of South Carolina
and was a police use-of-force expert witness
in the trial of police officer Derek Chauvin
for the killing of George Floyd.
- No reasonable officer would've believed
that that was an appropriate, acceptable,
or reasonable use of force.
- It's not that Stoughton is anti-cop or anti-martial arts.
In fact, he used to be an officer
and a martial arts instructor, too.
But he says he's skeptical that BJJ is the solution,
because over the years,
he's seen so many other supposed solutions
come and go.
- The idea that one tool or one technique
or one martial arts system
would significantly address some of the problems
in use of force,
I don't know which version of that movie we're on,
but we're definitely into reruns.
- Consider in the 1960s, officers were given Mace,
which was supposed to allow them to subdue suspects
without excessive force.
In the '90s, they were issued Tasers,
which were supposed to address the problem
of bad firearm use.
Even martial arts has been pitched as a solution before,
from Muay Thai to nunchakus
to complex self-defense programs.
But every promised cure has fallen short.
- This is the history of policing--
gravitating towards the next big thing
and when the next crisis rolls around,
they abandon the old next big thing,
and they're on to the newer next big thing.
- Stoughton also worries that any effort to scale up
BJJ education to officers around the country will result
in training that's watered down and inconsistent
and that many cops would learn poorly--
perhaps just enough to be dangerous.
Do you worry that BJJ
just becomes another tool to be abused?
- What I worry about is the potential for misuse.
In a high-pressure environment,
a half-trained officer may not know how far to go
and may go way farther than they should.
If we want officers
to have the physical skills that they need,
they need to train consistently
in an appropriate live training environment,
and that means time, manpower, dollars.
- Yeah.
- And those are real constraints in policing.
- But back in Marietta, officials say
they've proven this can work in the real world.
Major King says his department's data
clearly indicates fewer and less violent clashes
between cops and suspects.
- I was looking at injuries to officers,
and I found that there was a 48% reduction
in officers being injured.
So then I start researching more,
and we reduced injuries to suspects by 53%.
- Based on the deployment of Brazilian jiu-jitsu
in patrol?
- Yes.
And the data showed even further
that if you scuffled, resisted arrest,
you were 200% more likely to be injured
by a non-jiu-jitsu officer than somebody that had been through
the mandatory program or was a practitioner of jiu-jitsu.
- Really?
- Taser use has gone down by jiu-jitsu officers.
Then I went through workers' comp claims.
We saved almost $70,000 in the first year.
Significantly less than what program costs us to run,
for sure.
- King showed us video after video
of Marietta police officers using their BJJ skills
to defuse volatile situations...
- Why? Bitch! Bitch!
- Instantly turning moments of chaos into control...
- Now you're getting felony charges.
- [speaks indistinctly]
- Like this one,
where officer Jared Nuti is engaged in a foot chase
with a mentally ill man.
- Bro, you got to stop.
He hopped a couple fences, and we got into a front yard.
And I used my leg to scoop out his right leg...
Hey!
And I angled him for the grass.
You got to stay down.
- Then we see that you're communicating with him
after you've gained control.
What's that about?
- If you train jiu-jitsu
and you're on the ground with somebody,
you're in control, trust me.
So, at that point,
I could just relax, talk to the guy.
You're good, bro.
- It kind of allows you more latitude for benevolence.
- Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
- He even pats him on the back, saying, "You're gonna be okay."
- Didn't have to do that.
- No, he didn't have to do that.
But because of his demeanor and his control, there he was.
- And for advocates of BJJ training,
moments like those show
just how much change could be possible.
They say that cops trained in BJJ will be cooler,
calmer, more confident,
and thus not just less likely to use excessive force,
less likely to even use force at all
when it's not needed.
It may be Gracie's boldest claim.
What can BJJ really do
to influence the decision whether or not to use force?
- More jiu-jitsu...
lower perception of threat.
Every officer who is empowered with jiu-jitsu,
it's so much harder to shake their confidence.
And when you have trouble shaking someone's confidence,
you have trouble pushing someone to the brink.
- Now you see a second officer come in, and you see her--
- In fact, Major King says that his BJJ-trained officers
have been almost 60% less likely
to engage in use of force to begin with.
- One officer's headed there...
- King concedes that there is no single cure-all
for today's policing crisis but says the changes he's seen
in both skill set and mindset of officers
are important first steps,
even if the road ahead is still a long one.
- We didn't get here overnight,
and we're not gonna get out of it overnight.
Has law enforcement earned some of its black eyes?
We absolutely have.
But can we do something better moving forward?
Yes, we can.
- Law enforcement has no choice but to get better right now.
This is it.
If we don't do what we're setting out to do,
the alternative is unacceptable.
♪ ♪
- David, there's so much to chew on here.
I'd like to believe something like this can work,
but the problem of police violence
is often a problem that's more of a mindset
than it is with the problem of tactics.
- Yeah.
There are all kinds of systemic issues in policing
that are beyond the grasp of something like BJJ.
But now there's evidence that if we change the skill set
and the mindset of policing,
we can actually create better outcomes,
and that's a big idea.
- Is it normal to think
that you can change the mindset by changing the skill set?
I mean, the problem with rogue cops is
their intention is to inflict the most violence
they can legally get away with.
- Nothing is going to remediate a malicious cop,
but if you start from the presumption
that most cops want to do the right thing
and you join that with a skill set
that actually values the least effective force,
the minimum dose of force,
then I think you have a good idea
for today's policing.
- I was disappointed to hear
that there have been other efforts along the way
and all of them proved temporary.
Is there any reason to think this one, BJJ,
might have longer legs than the other one,
more staying power?
- It's tough, because scaling up this kind of training
through all of the bureaucratic and other obstacles to doing so
in police systems, that's a big if.
If you could do it, I think the nascent evidence suggests
that you can actually move the needle.
Is it gonna be a panacea for police problems in America?
Absolutely not.
But if we can change the outcomes, it could help.
- Every little bit would help. David, thanks.
- Thank you.
- Our last story is about the booming business
of sports trading cards.
A few days ago, Major League Baseball announced
that it is ending its licensing agreement with Topps,
the company that has been synonymous
with the most popular trading cards for over seven decades.
If that seems unfathomable to those of us
who spent nickels and dimes to buy cards as a kid,
it's also fitting.
See, those days of collecting and trading
simply for fun are long gone,
replaced now by a multibillion-dollar business
that is growing fast with no end in sight.
Our Jon Frankel reports.
- I'll trade you Dick Groat for Eddie Matthews.
- For generations, young boys collected
and swapped trading cards of their favorite athletes...
- I'll trade you John Christensen for him.
- Okay.
- For a reason that's become a bit old-fashioned
in modern-day America-- for fun.
But today trading cards
looks a lot more like trading stocks,
and the boys doing the trading aren't in it for fun
but for fortune.
Your dad said something to me.
Your dad said you are worth more than he is.
- [chuckles]
- Is that weird?
- It's definitely really weird
knowing that the value of my cards is worth more than,
you know, many middle-aged, you know, older people.
- Did you think that you would be a multimillionaire
at the age of 18?
- I didn't think I'd be a multimillionaire
by the age of retirement.
- Adam Ripps is a freshly minted
high-school graduate in suburban New York.
He's also rich,
so rich, in fact,
that while his friends are all heading off
to start college this week,
Adam is staying right here in his childhood bedroom
to continue his childhood hobby.
You think that you can make more money by trading cards
than a college education is worth?
- It's fair to say that I can make more money on cards.
- Ripps is riding the wave
of one of the biggest investment booms in America--
the boom in sports collectibles.
He's built an empire in just a few years,
starting when he was merely a young man
making small trades of inexpensive cards.
- I would buy some cards for $20 and sell them for $40
or some cards for $50 and sell 'em for $100.
And once I was able to kind of prove that this is something
I could sustain and something I could make money on,
I was able to convince my parents
to give me $5,000 to spend
from my bar mitzvah money stash
and I put that into Giannis Antetokounmpo
back in 2015, and that turned out to be
one of the greatest investments I ever could've imagined.
- It was a good bar mitzvah. - It was a good bar mitzvah.
It was a good bar mitzvah.
- That's because soon after...
[crowd exclaims]
Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Greek Freak,
hit the NBA scene like a bolt from the blue,
sending the value of his cards soaring.
Suddenly flush with cash, Adam bought more cards
and by his junior year had amassed a huge collection.
That's when a second bolt hit from the blue--
the COVID pandemic,
which devastated much of the world
but had a very different effect
on the world of sports trading cards.
- What happened is that
a lot of people got connected to sports cards
because of nostalgia,
because there was no sports betting going on anymore,
no more live sports.
And so a lot of people who collected as a kid
got back into it,
or they found their old collections in their house.
- With no sports on the field or the courts,
this became the action? - It became the action.
- As a result,
did you see prices jumping through the roof?
- Everything went up.
- Today Adam's collection is worth
an estimated $3 million.
His bedroom is decorated with some
of the most expensive pieces of cardboard around.
Michael Jordan.
- This one has been preserved in amazing shape.
Right now it's probably worth around $75,000.
- And you paid what for it?
- I bought this one over a year ago for $12,000.
- Okay. All right. What else we got here?
- I got this one for around $13,000.
Right now it would be probably be worth $80,000 to $100,000.
- But it's not just teenagers who have become wealthy
buying and selling little pieces of cardboard.
- I'll give you $500 in store credit.
- Nate Burns used to sell real estate for a living.
But even when the market was booming,
he never made close to what he's making these days
running a card shop outside of Nashville.
So I want to get this straight.
In a typical year as a realtor,
you were making $40,000, $50,000.
What are you making now? - Millions.
- Millions? - Millions.
- I tell people sometimes even now
that I'm afraid that I'm going to wake up
and it's the first day the store's open
and this was all a dream.
Order number 22!
Autographed letter patch book card.
- Burns says his business boomed during COVID
because he was able to do most of it online,
like the show he hosts every night
during which he sells packs of cards to his viewers,
then opens them to reveal what's inside.
- Ooh-hoo-hoo!
We open products for customers all over the world.
- Somebody says to you,
"I want to buy a pack or a box..."
- Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm. - "Off your shelf."
And they'll let you open it. - Live.
- That's right.
Burns's customers actually pay him a few hundred bucks
to open their new packs...
- Big Mike! Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Let's go, baby! Let's go!
- Hoping that one of the mystery cards inside
will turn out to be worth a fortune.
It sounds like people who are watching the lottery numbers
announced on TV.
- Very good analogy.
- What's the biggest card you've revealed on your show?
- Well, we've hit three of the Luka Doncic
National Treasures rookie cards.
At the time we pulled 'em, they were $7,000 each.
Now, they're worth a quarter of million dollars each.
- How does that happen? - Supply and demand.
- That demand got so out of hand recently
that Target,
one of the country's largest chain stores,
stopped selling sports cards
after customers who had camped out all night
looking to load up on cards
started fighting over their place in line,
with one person pulling out a gun.
- Shoppers at a Brookfield Target
were forced to run and hide after a fight this morning
in the parking lot.
- Police say it all started with a disagreement
over trading cards.
- People are looking for the gold ticket.
- They're looking for the $20 bill on the shelf
that they can turn into a $100 bill.
- Or more. - Or more.
- Last month we watched as Burns prepared to leave town
for the Super Bowl of card conventions in Chicago.
He planned to be a major player
and prepared accordingly,
arming himself with millions of dollars' worth of cards
and $500,000 in cold, hard cash.
He didn't fly commercial but on a private jet,
befitting his new status as an investment tycoon.
By the time we caught up with him again
just a few hours later,
Burns had already done
more than $400,000 worth of business.
What's the most expensive card you've sold here?
- Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, triple autograph.
- And that went for how much? - $150,000.
- And there were sales like this
all over the convention hall--
fans celebrating the golden age of sports cards.
- It is like no other time in the history of this business.
- Mike Gioseffi is an industry expert
who hosts a podcast on The Ringer.
- Every couple months now,
it seems like we're seeing a new highest card ever.
Million-dollar cards were not really a thing ten years ago,
and now just yesterday at the show,
somebody bought a Patrick Mahomes rookie
for over $4 million.
Couple weeks before that, it was a Babe Ruth--$6 million.
LeBron for a million before that.
- And then I'm gonna keep those cards,
and I'm gonna put 'em out on my mantel place,
or I'm gonna put 'em up on the wall?
- I hope you live in a nice area.
I'm not putting a $5 million card on my mantel.
But I think almost all these guys,
it's going in a vault somewhere.
- And that's precisely where
real estate mogul Kurt Rappaport
keeps his collection-- in a vault in Beverly Hills.
And when he wants to transport his cards anywhere,
like to his beach house just up
the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu,
his insurance company requires that he does so
with armed security...
lots of security.
I'm Jon. - Jon, pleasure.
- Really nice to meet you. - Good to meet you.
- You got some pretty precious cargo there, huh?
- We do. Yes.
- How many cards do you have in there?
- We have about 24.
- What are those 24 cards estimated to be worth?
- Well... [sighs]
According to the insurance company,
it's about $40 million.
- $40 million? - Yeah.
- You got that handcuffed to your wrist?
- [chuckles] I don't, but I got good backup.
- Rappaport says that during the pandemic,
while stuck at home without much to do,
he started researching sports cards
and thought they'd make for a wise investment,
especially after learning they have outperformed
the S&P 500 over the last 20 years.
Before long, he was all-in,
even buying one of the most coveted cards of them all--
the famous Honus Wagner T206.
- Honus Wagner's card is the Holy Grail of all sports cards.
- You paid what for it? - $3.7 million.
- Did that make you gulp?
- No, because I thought it was a great deal,
and in retrospect, it was a tremendous deal.
I've had people offer me, you know,
2 1/2 times what I paid.
- And you've said no? - I've said no.
- Why?
- 'Cause I wouldn't have the card anymore.
[chuckles]
- But you don't have the card anyway.
It's in the bank.
- I go visit it frequently.
I'm a frequent visitor to the vault.
- Have your friends ever said to you,
"Wait a minute.
That's a ton of money to put into a piece of cardboard."
- I heard it all.
And, "You're crazy," "What are you thinking?"
You know, "It's a baseball card."
And then I started explaining that, no,
there's an exact science to it.
If you buy the most beautiful cards,
there's always gonna be a value for that.
- And that's exactly how Rappaport says he went about
building another one of his collections.
Look anywhere on his walls,
and you will see one masterpiece after another.
He told us he considers his sports cards
to be no different,
from Jackie Robinson to Babe Ruth to Henry Aaron.
- I really wanted things that I reacted to,
things where I would look at and say,
"That's a beautiful card.
That looks like a Warhol to me."
- Don't laugh, because Rappaport is not the only one
who considers sports cards to be akin to great works of art.
So does--ready for this?
The FBI.
That's right.
Back at the sports card convention in Chicago,
the FBI's art crime team was on the lookout for fraudsters,
people trying to pass off phony cards for big bucks.
We're talking about trading cards,
and yet this falls under a category of art crime.
Is that right? - Correct.
There's such a high dollar amount
going through this industry right now,
nobody should be shocked that we are looking to root out
the bad players within the--
- Brian Brusokas is an FBI agent.
Are you seeing the same sorts of things
in the card-trading business that you see in the art world?
Fraud and fakes and forgeries? - Absolutely.
- Can you put a dollar figure on the amount of fraud
in this business each year?
- In the millions. It's a billion-dollar industry.
- And recently, that industry took yet another leap forward,
expanding the market into the virtual world.
While all of the cards for sale in Chicago
could be touched, held, and traded,
a new kind of card was recently created
that exists only online.
The NBA has begun selling video highlights
as collectibles
under the brand name NBA Top Shot.
- So NBA Top Shot in its simples form
is just digital basketball cards.
And so think about anything that you know
about physical sports cards
and take away the physical, actual piece of cardboard,
and that's Top Shot.
- It's just online? - Exactly right.
- When he's not working at his day job in finance,
32-year-old Michael Levy loves watching sports,
especially basketball.
So one day last fall when he saw that the NBA had started
selling individual highlights of players, he was intrigued
and, before long, started buying them up.
How much did you invest when you first got into this game?
- I invested between $175,000 and $200,000.
- I assume that $200,000 grew substantially.
- It topped out at around $20 million.
- Of course, what goes up can also come down,
especially in a trendy, new market.
And today Levy's collection is worth a mere $12 million.
Still, it's a staggering number,
especially to the many people
who can't quite grasp this strange, new idea.
Explain to me the value of having a video highlight
if I can go on any online service almost
and pull up that highlight?
Any sports broadcasting network could show that highlight.
What makes it special that you have that?
- What makes the Top Shot moment valuable
is that it's an authentic licensed product from the NBA
that has verifiable scarcity and a market around it.
- Isn't a collectible
about being able to hold it in your hand,
to appreciate it, to put it on your shelf?
- So I'd say, traditionally, that's the case.
But the world's moving more digital,
and what I'm hopeful for
is that these sorts of digital assets
are seen as the new-age version of sports cards.
- But all of this begs the question--
after a year of unprecedented growth
that has made lots of people fabulously wealthy,
will the market for sports cards,
both traditional
and digital, burst?
Perhaps no one has more on the line
than 18-year-old Adam Ripps,
the teenager who's skipping college
to make sports cards his life's work.
Are you concerned that this could crash?
I mean, when you say your collection's worth $3 million,
maybe in a week from now, it's worth a fraction of that.
- I think it's cyclical. and so like every market,
there's going to be ups and downs.
A lot of people like art, a lot of people like watches,
and there's a ton of people that love sports cards.
My friends, my generation,
I don't think we're gonna grow up
wanting a, you know, a Pollock or a Monet or a Picasso.
I think they're gonna want, like, a Jordan rookie card
or a Giannis or a Luka or a Hank Aaron.
So the fact that people are looking at these
as real tangible assets now is super cool.
♪ ♪
- Jon, just based on what I saw on tape,
the people immersed in this are, in the main,
young, white, male.
Fair? - Fair. Absolutely.
I mean, when we were at the national convention show,
you didn't see much different than that.
- Yeah, what I also saw on the tape
at these trade shows was an awful lot of cash.
Is it a cash business? - There is a lot of cash.
There's also a lot done digitally,
especially with COVID now.
People were trading cards that way.
So I think that when you're talking
about million-dollar cards, that's all being monitored,
that's being watched by people,
but, yeah, there's people exchanging cash here.
- So let's talk fair share. IRS getting their fair share?
- I'm guessing they are,
especially when you're talking
about the high end of the cards.
I mean, it's a fairly monitored business.
I mean, when you think that the FBI is in there
watching for fraud... - Yeah.
- I think they're watching everything.
- What about the essential workers of this business,
which is the athletes who drive the cards?
Are they getting their fair share?
- I think they are.
I think the players' associations
are more hip to it now, and they're making deals
that enhance the pocketbooks of the players,
and also the players are now actively participating
in this collection,
so they're making money as collectors as well.
- Whatever goes up has to come down.
Is this bubble gonna burst anytime soon?
- I mean, that's the big question.
Kurt Rappaport would say that when he did his homework
that the trading card market outperformed the S&P
over the last 20 years, so who knows?
I mean, stock markets crash. This could crash as well.
- I had cards as a kid. Didn't keep 'em.
Did you keep yours? - No.
No, those cardboard boxes went out a long time ago.
- Shows what we know. - Yeah.
- Hey, Jon. Thanks very much. - You got it.
- We'll let that be our last word for this evening.
For all the good folks here at "Real Sports,"
I'm Bryant Gumbel.
Thank you so very much for being with us.
Please stay safe and good night.
♪ ♪