When Death is But a Game

by Julia M. Klein

DECEMBER 6, 2007        TAGS: WEB CULTURE, CELEBRITY         COMMENTS (1)

Pop diva Britney Spears, imperiled by her tabloid-worthy lifestyle, is starting to show up on lists. Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who has languished in a coma since January 2006, remains a source of frustration. And this year, the seemingly indestructible socialite Brooke Astor, dead at 105, finally will pay off.

So goes the buzz in the cheerily ghoulish world of dead pools – annual games of luck, skill and accident that involve forecasting, for cash or sport, who will bite the proverbial dust. Sorry, but Aunt Rose doesn’t count: Prospective corpses must pass a fame test, meaning winning a major obituary or committee vote. Criteria vary. But a little bit of fame is often better than a lot, and savvy research helps: Most games award extra points for uniqueness, or “solo hits.” Younger picks, if they expire, generally earn higher scores as well.

“Most people really get excited when they’re the only people in the whole game that get the hit. They get status that way,” says Armand DuPont, an accountant for Florida State University who administers The Death Game (www.egamegazette.net ), which bills itself as the oldest continuously running pool and requires nomination by a Gamester to join. According to Game historian Kihm Winship, it got its start offline in 1970 when two Syracuse University students started wondering who would die first: George Burns or Jack Benny.

These days, says DuPont, who has been playing for 28 years, the criterion for a hit is simple: The dead celeb must merit a New York Times obit. One player picked “a motorcycle guy who fought for new helmet laws in California,” recalls DuPont. “He was very famous among Internet biker people, but he didn’t even get an obit in the Los Angeles Times. So we didn’t give him [the player] the points.”

The 1988 movie The Dead Pool, starring Clint Eastwood, may have helped popularize the dead pool concept. The Internet – and especially the growth of search engines such as Google -- has fostered its spread, according to Jim Daggy, who runs Caskets on Parade (http://daggy.name/cop/2008/index.htm ). Daggy’s pool includes a category for natural disasters. Other pools allow picks for famous animals.

“Dead pooling, if you’re serious about it, is a 365-day-a-year activity,” says Daggy, whose real job is as “data hacker” for a political consulting firm. Caskets on Parade began at the Michigan State University radio station and today includes 31 teams, including one consisting of 47 workers in a hospital emergency room. Daggy says he spends up to 1,250 hours a year compiling a massive data base of the living and the dead, as well as playing in three dead pools. “The game is just the excuse to do the research to find out the histories,” he says.

Some pools pay off in cash. Others award titles and bragging rights. “I don’t like to do it for money or prizes. I think that’s a little weird. Our dead pool is for glory,” says Amelia Rosner, a New York advertising copywriter who runs the Alt.Obituaries News Group Dead Pool (www.aodeadpool.com ) with Bill Schenley, a retired financial adviser from Erie, Pa.

Rosner is nationally known for her sardonic “updates” commemorating each celebrity death. Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, credits her with creating “a new form of obituary: a mocking, highly opinionated riff that treats the departed not just as a significant contributor to our culture but as an unwitting player in a greater game.”

The Death Game is another pool that eschews cash rewards in favor of titles, including “Rookie of the Year” and the less-than-sought-after “Buffalo Cup,” for coming up empty all year. By contrast, Zachariah Love, the self-styled “commissioner” of the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool (www.stiffs.com), is promising a payoff of $2,007 to the first-place finisher for 2007.

The Atwater pool began offline in 1991 with just two players: Love and a friend. “We each got one [hit],” says Love, “and the one we got was Lee Atwater,” the influential Republican political consultant felled by a brain tumor that year.

At its peak, the Atwater pool had some 1,150 entrants, Love says. But the game has been plagued in recent years by what Love says is sabotage by a disgruntled player angered by a rule change that made it harder to rack up obscure hits. Now, five of 31 members of a Fame Committee must be able to identify the deceased for the hit to count, a move Love says restored both fun and fairness to the game. “It was supposed to be about Paris Hilton,” says Love, “and not some 5-year-old kid who happens to get a disease.”

You might think that dead pools represent the morbid intersection of Internet obsession and celebrity culture. But Love, who runs a Web site for a Santa Monica, Calif., guitar store, says his interest has always been in “deflating what I see as overblown ideas” about celebrities. “People tend to deify celebrities in an unnatural way,” he says. “People feel an emotional connection to them as though they were friends and relatives -- but they’re not.” The dead pool is a reminder of that. “There’s no room for sentiment in the winner’s circle,” Love says.

For David Kempler, a New York writer, the Atwater dead pool is a way of satisfying his gambling urges, with one bet securing a year’s worth of action. “I was fascinated by the concept of it, gambling on death,” he says. “I’m an amateur gambler, and this one seemed exceptionally decadent.”

Kempler says he particularly enjoys the reactions he gets when he mentions dead pools: “Wow, that’s really weird,” or “You’re disgusting and you’re an asshole.” Nevertheless, “the next time a celebrity dies, inevitably, whether they thought I was an asshole or not, they’ll come to me and say, ‘Did you have him?’ If I didn’t, they’ll say, ‘How can you not have him?’ ”

In short, says Kempler, “everybody ends up loving it even if they claim they hate it. It’s forbidden; you’re not supposed to root for death. But the death of a celebrity makes it better somehow. Because it’s not us – it’s them.”

Like the people whose deaths they predict, pools have a high mortality rate. Stephen Miller, now obituaries editor for the New York Sun and a freelance columnist for the Wall Street Journal, says that he used to run both an obit zine and “a modest dead pool with an entrance fee of like $20” for his colleagues at an investment bank. “Around the office, I became known as Dr. Death,” says Miller, who grew up next to a cemetery.

But Miller’s dead pool was among the unheralded casualties of the 9/11 attacks. “Our offices were on the 80th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center,” he says. “The money was in a cabinet. So my dead pool went down with the World Trade Center. Osama bin Laden ruined my dead pool.”




Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.

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