True story — Two guys drinking at a bar start talking about someone who won the Massachusetts lottery twice in six months.
To one, it smacked of a fix, someone on the inside helping out a friend. To the other, it was just blind good luck.
Then they started to trading their own stories. One bought a scratch ticket once that won him $20,000. Instead of bringing it into the lottery office, he sold the it to a “professional gambler” in a cash transaction completed in a parking lot. The “gambler” took his cut and handed over the rest of it in bills. The guy said his pocket was bulging bigger than you could imagine.
Not to be outdone, the other won $44,000 once at the dog track. He claimed he’d been offered the same deal, with a “professional gambler” willing to buy the winning ticket off him. Honestly it didn’t sound true. The dollar amount sounded like too much too.
It was a kind of nuclear arms race of “you won’t believe how much I've won” stories. But as I listened to these two, I couldn’t help but feel with both of them, there was a story behind these stories. Because there’s always a story behind a story.