Buffalo News: Accountant makes Elias the source

A look at the most important man in Bill Madden’s life (well, outside of James “Prexy” Petrillo, that is)...Seymour Siwoff and his Elias Sports Bureau.

“You can’t talk to the computer in the English language,” said Siwoff, the company president. “From the very first day I realized, ‘Oh my God. You’ve got to learn the nomenclature of how to talk to this machine.’ That’s the key. We talk to it. And in many [search] cases you have to stop and think, ‘What’s a better way to approach this?’ ”

Siwoff and a staff of more than 30 have historical perspective at their fingertips and it regularly ends up on the lips of SportsCenter’s anchors, or tucked into newspaper notes columns. Quite often the facts they unearth aren’t nearly as impressive as their ability to unearth them, and with virtual immediacy. Usually Elias is providing the answer before the question’s been asked.

...“The difference between us and Google and Yahoo is, we put the stuff in the machine,” Siwoff said. “They brought us files already there. We spent a lifetime doing this. . . . To this very day we’re researching mistakes of the past in the sports we do, incredible as it is. In fairness to our previous generation, they didn’t have any computers. There was a casual approach to keeping statistics.”

“We like the sports themselves,” Siwoff said. “We just don’t like numbers, for example. We like the games. That’s more important than anything. There’s a romance to sports.”