I don't own Back to the Future.
When I was watching - well, re-watching Back to the Future 2 clips featuring the Almanac, and I got wondering what Biff had done early in the unaltered version of 1985 we saw prior to Doc and Marty travelling to 1955 to destroy the sportsbook, and I came up with this.
Enjoy!
I can't lose.
Ever since the disaster at the prom where McFly, the last person anyone would ever picture raising a fist, punched him in the face and threw him back into a car, Biff had been keeping himself to himself.
It wasn't because he was licking his wounds.
It was not because he was like a bull who'd gotten into a rough fight with another, tougher bull and one of his horns was snapped off, it was nothing macho like that, although a part of him wondered if he should go out there at some point and remind everyone Biff Tannen was someone to be feared. But he was too busy interspersing his studies with the Almanac and listening to the sports results on the radio. When he had first gotten the sportsbook and he'd started listening to the results, one after another, Biff had begun studying the book.
Nothing was a fluke, though he'd already gotten the idea of that when he had first listened to the UCLA results and again later that night in his car, for the last few weeks Biff had been running little checks on the information inside.
Everything, every single fact was totally accurate. The almanac was more than a book relating dry sports statistics; it contained information and released it in a very interactive way which made it 'user friendly.' It was like the author and publishing company who'd written and published the book had taken one look at the competition and did something totally different.
All he had to do was look up the results in the years and check the results against the months.
Biff leaned back in his easy armchair as he listened to the radio in his bedroom with the sports Almanac lying in his lap, his eyes narrowed as they glanced repeatedly from the radio speakers to the statistics in the book while he listened to the results of a baseball game in New York. As soon as the results came, Biff grunted with satisfaction when he saw the results of his experiment. He had been checking the results against the losing team, and thanks to the almanac, he had gotten accurate results once more.
It had been like this for the last 6 weeks ever since he had received the sportsbook from that old codger who'd told him he was a distant relative - yeah, right - Biff didn't see the resemblance and he certainly didn't understand what the catch was since the sportsbook contained information it simply shouldn't possess - and ever since he had been driving away after that fight with McFly, Biff had checked the results of another game over the radio in his prized car.
When he had done that he had been even more convinced the almanac's validity, although Biff had already known the moment he had sat next to his 'distant relative' in the car and listened to the results of that game, and how UCLA had won 19 to 17 there was something, but Biff had been too distracted with his own thoughts to really care about the implications.
The rivalry with 'Calvin Klein,' who was taking Lorraine to the damn prom.
His own money issues.
Bullying other kids.
Getting the manure out of the car, and worrying about the cost of the repairs; while he had good friends in the garage, Biff knew better than to push his luck with them.
But, now that Calvin Klein had mysterious left leaving Lorraine in the hands of McFly although how that happened, he genuinely did not understand since McFly had never shown any kind of balls or nerve in the past, Biff was now more interested in the Almanac. He remembered what the old man had said about keeping it on him and keeping it secret, and after he had realised what the book could actually do for him, Biff had no problem with keeping it so secret nobody would know about it now he knew how precious the almanac was, although he was curious about where the book had come from. He had tried looking up the publishing info, but when he had checked the book he had found the book would not be published until 2005!
Now, when he had first found out about that information, Biff had been beside himself and he had thought he was being conned, but every single time he checked the information in the almanac, and learnt of the sports injuries which were added into the games and how serious some of them were, Biff had at first naturally assumed the old man was part of a big con, but the more he thought about it, he had realised it didn't add up; match-fixing was big business and someone eventually caught on, but the part about the injuries made no sense the more he thought about it. Why would anyone allow their muscles to be pulled? Yeah, some might fake it, but again that made no sense. Why would anyone want to play a major game with him in the first place?
As he thought about it, while some of the games could be fixed, it was just not possible enough for anyone to fix so many games. And the Sports Almanac contained so much information that if someone was going to con him they would need to be very rich and very powerful to fix so many matches and so all kinds of things to make the results reflect what he was reading, it didn't make any sense. On top of that when he had first gotten the almanac and learnt what it did, Biff had believed it was too good to be true.
An old man giving him a book on sports statistics until the next century, what else was he to think?
In spite of those doubts, Biff had opted to try to make one small experiment to see just how good the almanac was. He had placed $90 dollars on a boxing match, and he had gotten another $90 out of it!
$180 might not be worthwhile in the long term, but Biff got over his doubts, and now he was making little piles of cash using the money from betting on the sports almanac, and he had begun to realise something important - how could anyone be sure he would actually be at the games to place a bet if they were being fixed?
But now he was convinced and Biff planned on using the book to make a fortune for himself.
After all, he thought, I can't lose, can I?