"In other personal pursuits, he once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game."

Last weekend's New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had plenty of important revelations about Kalanick and the company he runs, both of which have been facing some tough PR lately . But there was one incidental, almost throwaway line buried in the piece that made me stop in my tracks:

The line baffled me for a number of reasons, not least of which was that the concept of a "high score" in "Wii Tennis" didn't make much sense. Claiming the "world's second-highest score" in Wii Sports tennis is like claiming the second-highest score in Pong based on nothing but playing against the computer and your friends. Absent some sort of sanctioned tournament or logical third-party ranking system, the claim just doesn't parse.

And yet, the boast is oddly specific. Kalanick hadn't earned the best "Wii Tennis" score in the world according to The New York Times. He achieved the second best. If this was just a fabulist boast, why limit yourself to number two? And if it wasn't just puffery, who was number one?

What's more, the paper of record doesn't hedge its declaration with a "he said" or "he claimed." Kalanick's "Wii Tennis" high score is stated as a fact, and one that piece author Mike Isaac said on Twitter was "triple sourced." (Isaac didn't respond to further request for comment on his basis for the line.)

I've spent an admittedly ridiculous amount of time looking into this one sentence over the past few days. As it turns out, getting to the bottom of Kalanick's Wii Sports skill requires delving into the vagaries of human memory, reverse engineered asymptotic leveling systems, and the semantic meaning of video game achievement itself.

What Sacca saw

Though The New York Times gave it a fresh burst of attention, Kalanick's claim to the second-highest "Wii Tennis" score is not a new one. The factoid appeared on Uber's about page at least as far back as 2013, where, in addition to other achievements, the site says that Kalanick "somehow... also managed to rack up the second highest Wii Tennis score in the world. Game, set, match." The boast is mentioned in a Chicago Tribune piece from last month as well.

In a 2014 Financial Times interview, Kalanick also claimed to be "number seven in the country in Angry Birds." In all these profiles, the boast is supposed to reflect a wider drive to win at pursuits others treat less seriously. "If somebody gives me a casual game and says, ‘OK, here’s the world record,’ I’ll just go until I’m there," Kalanick told the Financial Times.

For more details on the "Wii Tennis" story, we need to rely on Chris Sacca, the (recently retired) silicon valley investor who became something of a household name through ABC's Shark Tank. In a 2015 Medium post, Sacca uses a "Wii Tennis" anecdote to highlight Kalanick's extreme competitiveness.

As the story goes, during a holiday get-together with friends and family, Sacca's father challenged Kalanick to "a friendly Wii Tennis match." The elder Sacca held his own against Kalanick... until the Uber executive revealed that he was using his weaker hand. "With full Princess Bride panache," as Sacca writes, Kalanick switched to his dominant hand and proceeded to win every single point going forward.

The key detail in Sacca's story comes next, when Kalanick tries to "offer... a touch of consolation" to his vanquished opponent:

“I have a confession to make, Mr. Sacca. I’ve played a fair amount of Wii Tennis before,” [Kalanick said]. While talking, he used his controller to navigate through the settings pages on the Wii to a list of high scores. “In fact,” he continued, “on the Wii Tennis global leaderboard, I am currently tied for second in the world.”

Reading this detailed explanation only set off more alarm bells in my head. Wii Sports doesn't have any "global leaderboard," as Sacca claims. There is no "settings pages" on the system or the game to let you compare your performance to anyone else online. I literally wrote an entire reference book about the Wii, in which Wii Sports filled an entire chapter, so I'm pretty confident on this point.

Yet Sacca also seemed pretty confident in citing a "Wii Tennis global leaderboard." It's a story he's repeated at a convention and in a podcast in recent years, citing "global leaderboards" both times.

I tried desperately to come up with some explanation that meshed with what Sacca saw. Were they maybe playing on the Wii U re-release of Wii Sports Club, which did feature online multiplayer and regional leaderboards? Sacca said the story takes place on "New Year's Day, 2010 I believe," well before the Wii U was available, so that doesn't help.

Were they possibly playing another tennis game on the Wii? Titles like EA's Grand Slam Tennis and Sega's Virtua Tennis 2009 seem to have online competition, after all. This also feels unlikely; Wii Sports has been a pack-in game and primary system seller for the Wii since its 2006 launch, to the point that "Wii Tennis" can safely be assumed as the tennis mode in that game (though the wording is frustrating for the sake of clarity, in this case).

Maybe Kalanick had navigated to some sort of online score listing via the Wii's Web browser? There are a few sites that maintain high score lists for some Wii Sports training modes and the game's "skill level." However, Sacca refers to it specifically as a "settings page on the Wii" in multiple tellings, and training mode scores don't seem a likely focus for this kind of boast (Twin Galaxies, the closest thing to official scorekeepers that the industry has, says it has no idea what Sacca is referring to, for what it's worth).

Desperate for more details, I reached out to Sacca to confirm and explain some of the details in his story, specifically the details about a "leaderboard." To my surprise, he actually responded. You can see our entire discussion in the Twitter thread linked above, but here's the core of his reply:

I assure you there was a world ranking at that time. I just checked with other friends and family who were there. Among the reasons we remember it clearly is that we had a long discussion about whether #1 was actually a hack or not. We talked at length about whether hacking the top spot would be a penetration of the software itself or a mechanical hack of the controller. We also remember that he didn't exclusively occupy #2. He was tied with others. This again highlighted #1 as a potential hack. Sorry I don't have anything else to offer as you hunt this down.

It seems clear that Sacca (and his friends and family, apparently) has a distinct memory of seeing Kalanick at No. 2 on some sort of "world ranking" for "Wii Tennis." Yet it's just as clear that there has never been any in-game, online ranking in the original version of Wii Sports. What's going on?

Enter the "skill level"

While Wii Sports doesn't have any online leaderboards, it does have one in-game measure of progress through each of its component sports. This "skill level" is an Elo-style measure of performance that goes up and down depending on how well you do against the computer-controlled AI.

The skill level is the closest thing to an overarching "score" that it makes sense to refer to in Wii Sports, though I'd argue calling it a "score" is incorrect at worst and misleading at best. In any case, I believe confusion over this skill level is probably at the heart of Kalanick and Sacca's "Wii Tennis" claims.

The most detailed and accurate breakdown of the Wii Sports tennis skill level system I've been able to find is here. The full explanation gets into some pretty detailed math, so here's a brief summary:

In Wii Sports, every Mii you use starts with a skill level of zero. Every time you beat a computer opponent, that skill level increases based on your score in that match and the (simulated) skill level of the opponent.

The skill level of your next computer opponent goes up alongside your skill level until you face the top-ranked computer opponents in the game, Elisa and Sarah, who have skill levels of 2000 and 1900 respectively.

Once you reach Elisa and Sarah, the rate of skill level increase quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. At a skill level of 2300, you can earn up to five skill levels per game won. At level 2350, you earn up to two levels per win. To go from skill level 2398 to 2399 requires 14 perfect games in a row.

All told, it takes at least 160 wins against the computer AI to reach a skill rating of 2399, and that's only if you can pull off dozens of perfect 40-Love matches against the toughest computer opponents the game can throw at you.