A Lesson from John McEnroe by Way of Kevin Bacon

July 18, 2024

David Scharf, CCA president

Winter 2012, Madison Square Garden. The New York Knicks are taking on the Detroit Pistons and it’s turning into a blowout (in favor of New York). There are a good number of celebrities in attendance, including John McEnroe (the tennis legend) sitting courtside, just across from where we are sitting (albeit we are a bit higher up in the stands). Next to McEnroe sits a couple, no one we recognize. As the first half progresses, we see McEnroe talking more and more to the woman, even leaning back to talk to her behind the man’s back (literally). The man does not look happy. After halftime, we see them return, only this time the woman is now sitting right next to McEnroe with the man now completely shunned. By game’s end, McEnroe has successfully stolen this man’s partner right in front of our eyes.

Or so we thought. In fact, the “couple” was none other than Patty Smyth (the singer-songwriter rockstar) and her father. More importantly for our story, Patty Smyth is John McEnroe’s wife; and the man she was with – John McEnroe’s father-in-law.

How could we have gotten this so wrong?   

Well, for starters, it certainly provided some good entertainment for us (given the blow-out that the game was). As humans, we are always making stories out of the data we have – not just for our entertainment, but for our survival as well (assessing whether we are in a dangerous situation and whom can we trust, etc.); as actuaries, we are masters of making stories out of data, with the added advantage of having rigor in evaluating the data presented and in the assumptions we make.*

But there is another angle here that I would like to consider related to “six degrees of separation” and Kevin Bacon (the famed actor, making his appearance in this blog post as our third celebrity guest).  No one really knows why fate chose Kevin Bacon to be the standard bearer for the measure of human connectivity – somehow “six degrees of separation” had morphed into its now well-known variation “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.  By calculating your degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, you generate your Bacon Number.**  I actually prefer the more obscure Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number, which measures your cumulative degrees of separation from the mathematician Paul Erdos, our Kevin Bacon, and the heavy metal of Black Sabbath!  But let’s keep things simple here.

It was precisely because we had a medium degree of separation from John McEnroe that led to our scandalous*** supposition. Had we had a higher degree of separation, we would not have known who John McEnroe was and we would perhaps be telling a different story about someone else. If we had a lower degree of separation, we would have known he was married to Patty Smyth and was simply sitting with his wife – the story we would have then told would have aligned a lot better with what actually took place.

Now there is a special case of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon where the degrees of separation equal zero.  This is identical to having a Bacon Number of zero. Now there is only one person in the world with a Bacon Number of zero, and that is Kevin Bacon himself. There are no degrees of separation from yourself!

So what stories do we tell with zero degrees of separation, when we are part and parcel of the story itself, where it is our very own story we are telling and creating? That story is not as easy to tell as we may suppose. For as much as we may logically assume that zero degrees of separation would mean we know ourselves and our life story, there remain missing pieces and parts unknown. Our life story is not yet complete – there is still more for us to do, more to uncover. While there is no shortage of ways to do this, I will recommend something that is near and dear to my heart – and that is volunteering for something you are enthusiastic about. It can serve as the perfect way to pursue your passions and the path to filling in some of the missing pieces in your life story.  

So the next time someone is telling a story about you, there will be plenty of positive information to draw from – everyone loves a good volunteer! And maybe, just maybe, you may even find that you are beginning to truly know yourself.

*For more on how actuaries evaluate data, make assumptions, and create models, see my November 2023 blog post titled The Second 'C'.

**Last week I watched Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F co-starring Kevin Bacon.  Four days later, I found myself attending a show of The Bacon Brothers in concert, giving me four days of separation from Kevin Bacon. Allow me to introduce and propose a brand-new metric, to be known henceforth as your Bacon Date.

***Interestingly, Patty Smyth was originally the lead singer for the 1980’s pop-rock, new-wave sensation Scandal.