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Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times
Mark Leibovich
From the No.1 bestselling author of This Town comes a thrillingly raw and hysterical account of the billionaires, crooks, charlatans and scoundrels that own and run the NFL.American Football – with its celebrity players, billionaire owners, and cheerleaders with flawless teeth – is more American than apple pie. Which is why the celebrated New York Times journalist, Mark Leibovich, has chosen football as the vehicle through which to examine the troubled state of Trump’s America.Big Game chronicles a four-year odyssey that has taken Leibovich deeper inside the NFL than anyone has gone before. From the owners' meeting to the draft to the sidelines of crucial games, he takes in the show at the elbow of everyone from Tom Brady to big-name owners to the cordially despised NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell.Ultimately, this is a story of what may come to be seen as ‘peak football’ – the high point of the sport’s economic success and cultural dominance, but also the moment when the dark side began to show. It is an era of explosive revenue growth, as deluxe new stadiums spring up all over the country, but also one of creeping existential fear. Football was never thought to be easy on the body – players joke darkly that the NFL stands for ‘not for long’ for good reason – but as the true impact of concussions become inescapable background noise, it’s become increasingly difficult to enjoy the simple glory of football without the buzzkill of its obvious consequences.And that was before Donald Trump. In 2016, the NFL slammed headlong into America's culture wars. Big Game is a journey through an epic storm. Through it all, Leibovich always keeps one eye on Tom Brady and his beloved Patriots, through to the 2018 Super Bowl. Pro football, this hilarious and enthralling book proves, may not be the sport America needs, but it is most definitely the sport it deserves.




Copyright (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in the US by Penguin Press 2018
This UK edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
FIRST EDITION
Text © Mark Leibovich 2018
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Cover photographs © Kwangmooza/Getty Images (background); Darren Haggar (badge)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Mark Leibovich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Brief portions of this work, some in slightly different form, first appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine
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Source ISBN: 9780008317614
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008317645
Version 2018-08-17
In loving memory of great friends:
my father, Miguel Leibovich,
and brother, Phil Leibovich
Contents
Cover (#uf3409cff-29cb-5a1b-ad18-4e58939a1a43)
Title Page (#u0e8e4183-e4ad-527b-821d-99c674caf82e)
Copyright (#u9966cbdb-1b8e-59a6-a32e-780b1ab3a97a)
Dedication (#ufcdbc8fd-1284-5c2d-9b11-c229bee0e896)
Introduction FOOTBALL, IN SPITE OF ITSELF (#u1dfba51e-6d09-5980-a579-1f0c4d19cb02)
Prologue RESPITE (#udc56ad86-4647-51e2-9983-14247908eac1)
Chapter 1 THE SUPER BOWL WITHOUT JOCK STRAPS (#u2a2958a7-7662-53ab-9a88-3cfc3b8c2ac7)
Chapter 2 THE MONKEY’S ASS (#u616d98b1-8c71-5077-b0fb-4bd016c75548)
Chapter 3 NUGGETS (#u06bdac38-4145-57f7-a71b-97cf3894904b)
Chapter 4 “TOM BRADY HERE” (#u05c9afe5-0cff-5ba8-80db-8d56a31e7e7c)
Chapter 5 “BEWARE THE PISSED OFF PRETTY BOY” (#u0270890d-0be2-58af-8a2f-6b6b75470354)
Chapter 6 GARISH FIST ORNAMENTS (#ua373bbb5-2b82-53c9-bba8-7def813669b2)
Chapter 7 BALLGHAZI (#u2eded3f6-eeb3-5e8d-a42d-503e3352aa74)
Chapter 8 CHEATER (#u5a68c3bb-50ce-5ae1-a7ca-d5dd8e2ec347)
Chapter 9 NO ONE BUYS TICKETS TO WATCH A MORALITY PLAY (#u5bcb7746-98e8-52a1-b17c-3fce5166ad49)
Chapter 10 DINGS? (#uf0791fc2-343f-5c40-ac7e-f39ef1f9222f)
Chapter 11 WHUPPINGS (#uf206c252-42c3-5324-974e-ed34f3f2e2fb)
Chapter 12 “WE PAY HIM DAMN WELL TO BE NEUTRAL” (#u5b01b572-e95f-5907-98f0-a2175df29a4e)
Chapter 13 NO BROKE DICKS (#u2c473c96-a476-5e99-bae3-0a3182d5ba36)
Chapter 14 ROGER AND ME (#u24e76f7d-c242-5af9-9011-d480ec2e3afa)
Chapter 15 THE BIG SPLAT (#ub6f1ff0f-9aa2-5c76-a25f-78eb73107892)
Chapter 16 IMMORTALITY GETS OLD (#u072a01b0-ffe0-57f5-841d-9f252a40690f)
Chapter 17 “START BLOW- DRYING TEDDY KOPPEL’S HAIR ’CAUSE THIS ONE’S DONE” (#u43f50b43-b4fc-56a9-8413-fd0fddd544e2)
Chapter 18 AMERICAN CARNAGE (#u8f4e6359-cdd7-5c7e-a131-774aa884ab97)
Chapter 19 PATRIOTISM (#u891c163c-3180-55b4-bc43-f7086434dd45)
Chapter 20 CHEESEHEAD ELEGY (#uc07fb75b-6fd3-596c-ab35-34b4ac7196ea)
Chapter 21 “WE DON’T WANT YOU IN LOS ANGELES” (#u8f4297ed-b968-533f-b715-0ab52d8bd5e9)
Chapter 22 “I’M DRUNK, I’M STUPID, I’M A PATS FAN,” THE MAN TOLD POLICE (#u2bd3f202-2e13-556f-841d-bdf6ccd45d80)
Chapter 23 THE TV REPORTER IN THE BELICHICK UNDERWEAR (#u0818f6a3-e298-50b5-945b-61173a4de082)
Chapter 24 CLOCKS AND SITCOMS (#u2ab20310-eb36-5c4d-bd9f-5b45f18e620f)
Chapter 25 TURN-ONS (#uf72d569c-218f-5f0a-b5dd-9eec5048d54c)
Chapter 26 THIS MAN’S LIVER BELONGS IN CANTON (#uc5f4eef8-172c-5051-836e-7bcf74d27c7b)
Chapter 27 “FAITH, FAMILY, AND FOOTBALL . . . PROBABLY NOT IN THAT ORDER” (#u2567c40f-ffc8-5b5f-a28c-82ea060f17f5)
Chapter 28 “WE NEED A BLACK CHARLTON HESTON” (#ucbd5dee5-a2ca-5412-bf3d-1f334ce13ac6)
Chapter 29 JUST COMPARTMENTALIZE, BABY (#ubb2ff483-7f31-500a-bfcd-726a59433f6c)
Chapter 30 THE LAST VISIT (#u3151506a-1cf6-51d0-8900-9a85f3c39191)
Picture Section (#u1e20fd28-a1dc-54c7-a4be-7b71a318589e)
Acknowledgments (#ue9545420-f444-56a2-a5c1-4e1ba44a0186)
Notes (#u8b97d8ca-a9db-565c-9ea2-502385caa763)
Also by Mark Leibovich (#u419c01d4-2781-5414-8d00-be0850ca6e7f)
List of Searchable Terms (#uac78a830-e90d-50cc-800b-25287f33fce1)
About the Publisher (#ubdc38769-af21-519f-84eb-1d5f4b280785)
Introduction (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
FOOTBALL, IN SPITE OF ITSELF (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
February 4, 2018
It fell to the Brazilian First Lady to settle the ­punch-­drunk scene. She strutted in with the ­self-­assurance of someone who knew her aura preceded her, even in defeat. “Great game,” she said, not aware of the player’s name (he was out of his jersey, a lineman by the size of him). He knew hers. Gisele Bündchen was working the big game ­after chaos in a back hallway of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, seeking out Philadelphia Eagles to stun with her classy attaboys. I watched them ­flinch—“Uh, thanks, thanks very much.” Super Bowl 52 had just ended in a hail of confetti and an unanswered Hail Mary from her husband, New England quarterback Tom Brady.
He was already being criticized across the Hot Take Village for not sticking around the field long enough to congratulate his Philly counterpart, Nick Foles. So his supermodel wife, in Brady’s stead, was taking on his celebrity grace duties. She moved from Eagle to sweaty Eagle, representing Brady both as a sportsmanship ambassador ­and—­in a sly ­way—­as a killer consolation trophy to brandish over the new champs. She was the last power play in his playbook. And the Eagles had no answer for Gisele. She caught another one leaving the locker room. “Good game,” she said, startling him. “Uh, your guy’s amazing,” the Eagle muttered back.
Brady himself was behind a curtain dealing with the media. “Losing sucks,” he confirmed. “But you show up and you try to win, and sometimes you lose and that’s the way it goes.” The game had finished only fifteen minutes earlier, he reminded everyone.
Brady is an empire, like the league he plays in. Empires fall eventually, but one of their best moves is to sell the illusion of timelessness. Normal limits don’t apply. How many more big games did Brady have left? He kept getting asked this question, in so many words. “I expect to be back but we’ll see,” he said.
Four years earlier, in the Almighty’s den, Brady and I had discussed the “How much longer” question too: issues of age, mortality, and the actuarial tables that he knew were running against him in the NFL, or “Not for Long” as players call a league where the average career lasts 3.3 years. Barely anyone still plays in these big ­games—­much less ­excels—­past forty, Brady’s present age.
I wondered why he kept doing this, and whether he worried about confronting a void after he finished. “When I don’t have the purpose of football, I know that’s going to be a really hard thing for me,” Brady told me then. There was melancholy to him when he said this, one I’ve sensed in Brady sometimes, even in his pinnacle ­moments—­of which this batshit shootout in Minnesota was not one. He headed off his temporary stage and met up with his football goddess in a hallway. They shared a group hug with the kids, Instagrammed for proof.
Brady’s Patriot teammate Rob Gronkowski walked by en route to another makeshift podium. Gronk appeared dazed, more so than his usual stupor. He also had processing to do. Only ­twenty-­eight, the tight end had filled up an impressive share of stat sheets and medical charts over his eight seasons. How much more? He got that question, too. “I am definitely going to look at my future, for sure,” Gronkowski said, maybe more candidly than he expected. “I am going to sit down the next couple of weeks and see where I’m at.”
No one could blame him if he quit. His working life had been a pained procession of broken bones, concussions, surgeries, and rehabs. Even when health allowed, he performed under a doleful tyrant of a coach for a ­below-­market contract in what sure looked to be a cheerless work environment. He had plenty of money, two Super Bowl rings, and Hall of Fame credentials. He could move into any number of ­Gronk-­suitable ­existences—­WWE, action movies, or some reality show.
But Gronkowski was also born to play this game, as much as any mortal body can be. He was Peak Football, both in size (six foot six inches, 260) and temperament (beast). He could still dominate if he wanted to ­or—­more to the ­point—­he should still dominate because I really wanted him to still dominate. Yes, I want Gronk to keep playing because he helps my team win. That’s my selfish disclaimer: the Patriots are a disease I contracted early, growing up in Massachusetts. I still root for them, and am still trying to grow up (no longer in Massachusetts). The team has been great and interesting and despised for a long time. They make me feel like a winner, superior to my friends who root for other teams, and that’s important, God knows.
Allegiance to the Pats can be tricky. We lead the league in crosses to bear. Our owner can be a whiny ­star-­fucker and sniveling in victory. ­Everyone who follows pro football outside of New England is sick of us (excluding Donald Trump, Jon Bon Jovi, and maybe a few others). Big portions of the Patriots’ fan base have become entitled assholes. And yes, I might be one of them. Yet I am loyal to the Pats pretty much unconditionally, give or take the odd cheating rap or occasional Aaron Hernandez.
If anything, my infatuation with pro football has only deepened, even as I’ve supposedly become instilled with more mature priorities and a fuller knowledge of how the game operates and the kinds of people who operate it. It started in second grade, when my best friend, Josh, and I wrote a letter to our favorite player, Jim Plunkett, and invited the young Patriots quarterback to Josh’s house for dinner (he never responded). This attachment has endured through the years and withstood a steady ­helmet-­slapping of cognitive dissonance over whether I should know better than to keep following this sport as closely as I do. Scary research on posthumous football brains has been as impossible to miss as the testimonials from ­still-­living retirees about the sad state of their bodies. (To wit: “My life sucks,” Jim Plunkett, then ­sixty-­nine, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2017. “Everything hurts.”)
If you love football, you get good at blind spots and blind sides. NFL Network and NFL Films captivate with ­round-­the-­clock fairy tales: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun!” A football life can be irresistibly Hollywood and ­parable-­ready—­like the up-­from-­dirt saga of lineman Michael Oher, the protagonist in Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. But it’s easier to ignore how his story ends, if anyone even noticed: Oher missed most of the 2016 season with the Carolina Panthers after a series of concussions. He posted a photo of ten pill bottles on Instagram and captioned it “All for the brain smh.” Oher eventually deleted the post from Instagram, and the Panthers eventually deleted Oher from their roster.
The Lords of the League can appear overmatched by the moral and cultural moment that confronts them. Roger Goodell, the game’s embattled commissioner, who in late 2017 received a contract extension that could pay him up to $200 million, always seems to be presiding over some ­self-­inflicted mess. Under his watch, the NFL has gone from being one of the most unifying institutions in America to the country’s most polarizing sports brand. Goodell himself seems not inclined to accept much blame for this trajectory. “I think it’s a little more reflective of how somewhat divided our society is at this stage,” he told me in his New York office a few weeks before the Super Bowl.
Still, my ­four-­year incursion into the NFL has also led me to another impression: that for whatever reckoning might be in store for the ­sport—­and whether that reckoning comes now or ­later—­the game’s appeal is powerful and durable, and its redemptions are never far away. The sport has a way of grabbing you back. It happened here in Minnesota three weeks earlier, when the Vikings quarterback Case Keenum threw a 61-yard touchdown pass as time expired to shock the Saints in the NFC Divisional Playoffs. The play sent Twin Cities fans into merry conniptions, lasting right up until the moment their team got spanked a week later by the Eagles. It would be relived and rehashed around the country for several days, no doubt by people who a few months earlier were declaring themselves “done” with football over some kneeling player, lousy ref’s call, or other such outrage.
What to make of this beautiful ­shit-­show of a league? I get asked existential versions of the “How much longer?” question myself. Which camp was I in? The true believer camp (“If we lose football,” said David Baker, the president of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “I don’t know if America can survive”
) or the cataclysm camp (“In ­twenty-­five years, no one in America will play football,”
said Malcolm Gladwell)?
Are we witnessing the NFL’s last gasp as the great spectacle of American life? I’d probably put the game’s ­long-­term survival as a slight favorite over the doom scenarios. Pro football has prevailed too many times to bet against, in spite of itself.
Beyond that, I’m punting, or turning the question back on ­ourselves—­the hundreds of millions of us who have made the National Football League the superpower it is. Why does this game still mean so much, and why are we still here?
THE WORST THING ABOUT PRO FOOTBALL IS THAT A LOT OF IT HAS nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on ­TV—­and then you supersize all of it, stretch it over a week, and here we have the Super Bowl.
Our hosts did not disappoint. Neither did the weather. It was a frigid week in the “Bold North,” as Minnesota is apparently now calling itself, courtesy of its Super Bowl 52 host committee. I hadn’t heard “Bold North” before, just like I had no idea why Philly fans had taken to wearing German shepherd masks as their trademark identifiers instead of something, say, more majestic and birdlike (apparently the canine masks were meant to evoke the Eagles’ underdog ­status—­got it). This 2018 gridiron carnival played out in a dream sequence that featured the various parading werewolves of the NFL: “I saw Bud Grant walking with the queen. I saw Odell Beckham Jr. walking with the queen. I saw (Boomer) Esiason drinking a Starbucks at the Loews Hotel. And his hair was ­perfect.”
Both the Eagles and Patriots, and most of the international media, were based out at the Mall of America in Bloomington, next to the airport. By Friday, the warring Taliban factions
from Massholia and Phillystan had descended on this retail ­colossus—­big enough, by the way, to fit 7 Yankee Stadiums, 32 Boeing 747s, or 258 Statues of Liberty. The MOA also has its own in-house counterterrorism unit for our safety. Fans pestered players at the food court, a Chinese TV crew broadcast from the Splat-O-Sphere (at the Mall amusement park), and armed SWAT teams prowled among the Buffalo Wild Wings, Kiehl’s, and Benihana. Philadelphians were warned, as a security precaution, not to don their German shepherd masks inside the complex or to break into their menacing renditions of “Fly, Eagles, Fly.” They appeared undeterred by the counterterrorism unit.
As happens whenever large bunches of media people assemble in one place, there was no shortage of bitching about something or another. This week’s ­über-­complaint, obviously, involved why on God’s frozen earth we were here. As in, why would the league plunk down its marquee event in this NFC North Siberia? The consensus is that pro football has been overtaken by a “biblical plague of dickheads,” to paraphrase the late writer Richard Ben Cramer (granted, he was talking about journalism).
Like many things with the NFL, the real answer included dollar signs. This was all bribery fodder, essentially, or a Bold North variant on the civic blackmail and corporate welfare model that’s gotten many grand NFL edifices built and paid for. Football had awarded its grandest pageant to the Twin Cities in order to sweeten an already sweetheart deal in which state officials had agreed to subsidize a new ­billion-­dollar stadium for the billionaire owners of the Vikings. And taxpayers would foot about half the bill for a football Versailles whose primary ­beneficiaries—­a pair of New Jersey real estate ­barons—­cared little about the ­cash-­strapped predicament of Minnesota schools, roads, and “essential” services that were less essential than football.
And then came the extra point: local fans/taxpayers were also forced to play host to the marauding followers of the team that two weeks earlier had defeated the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game in ­Philadelphia—­and, for good measure, had pelted their kindly midwestern visitors with a Philly Special of profanity, hurled objects, and beer showers as they attempted to flee their beating.
All that said: the “Minnesota Nice” thing is legit. People are unfailingly friendly, even to outsiders who don’t deserve it. “I will always live in Minneapolis,”
Prince once told Oprah. “It’s so cold it keeps the bad people out.” Prince, however, did not live to see this invasion of Eagles and Pats fans at the Mall of America.
Yet just when you’re ready to pronounce the NFL dead beneath an avalanche of its own greed and ­bullshit—­hell, even declare the Super Bowl to be a trope for the decline of ­America—­you hit the payoff. The game starts, and with it the best part of pro football: football.
THERE IS AN HONESTY ABOUT FOOTBALL THAT MY DAY JOB—­politics—­could never match. No one tries to dress up or excuse a loss, which was refreshing after being lobotomized by so much political spin. No one tries to argue against numbers on a scoreboard, or convince a coach they deserve to start because they went to Harvard (or Alabama). “Football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection,” Frederick Exley wrote in A Fan’s Notes. “It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge.”
Super Bowl 52 was a glorious jailbreak. Both offenses ran circles around the opposing defenses. There was just one punt, few penalties, lots of big plays, and a few sandlot calls back and forth. The Pats tried a ­double-­reverse pass intended for Brady, who had run wide open down the right ­sideline—­only to drop the damn pass. This felt fateful, if not ominous.
Eagles coaches might have sensed the same because they called a similar play later in the half that Foles caught in the end zone. Philly fans were now beside themselves. They had dominated the stadium all night, outnumbering and outcheering smug Pats rooters by a ratio of about three to two. (We got totally owned, as the bros say.) Foles threw three touchdown passes, each requiring replays to confirm the balls were “possessed,” the passes were “controlled,” and the receiver “survived the ground.” But it was Foles’s touchdown catch that kicked the hysteria in the giant room up to decibels rarely heard from a Super Bowl audience in a neutral city.
At the start of halftime, I saw an older Eagles fan in a throwback Wilbert Montgomery jersey wheezing outside a men’s room. He was resisting an oxygen mask from a paramedic and wanted no part of an ambulance. He had suffered too many years with the Eagles to miss this reward. Air is overrated.
I came to respect Eagles fans, ­grudgingly—­very, very ­grudgingly—­as their desperation added a visceral edge. Could they handle ultimate victory? What would the city look like in the aftermath? Philadelphia police slathered Crisco on city poles to discourage celebratory climbing after the Eagles’ win in the NFC Championship Game. The ­precaution—­which based on news photos appeared not to ­work—­joined an instant pantheon of nationally recognized “Philly things.” Before the game, I spoke to many Philadelphia fans who fully expected calamity to intervene to ruin the ride. This is what being a Red Sox fan used to be like before we won in 2004, back in our lovable loser days (we are now ­neither).
In December, I was at the ­Eagles-­Rams game in the Los Angeles Coliseum in which the Eagles’ brilliant young quarterback Carson Wentz hurt his knee on a ­third-­quarter scramble. The injury did not appear serious at first, but Wentz was replaced as a precaution by his backup, Foles, who managed to hold a late lead. Philly ­fans—­a vocal majority in that stadium, ­too—­were joyous as they filed out of the Coliseum after a ­43–­35 victory over the NFC ­West–­leading Rams, only to get the news upon checking their phones that Wentz’s injury was in fact a ­season-­ending ACL tear. Elation to deflation, just like that. People were actually in tears. It was hard not to feel for the poor hooligans.
Nick Foles? Maybe a serviceable backup; but when posited as a viable Super Bowl quarterback, his name became a punch line. Foles had performed well as the Eagles’ starter in 2013 and part of 2014, but had worn out his welcome by season’s end—to the extent anyone ever gets “welcomed” in Philly to begin with. Not a single Eagles fan I spoke to believed that the team had any hope without Wentz and with Foles. But somehow Philadelphia kept on winning with the journeyman backup. They were underdogs at home in the playoffs against Atlanta and Minnesota, but won both games. New England was solidly favored in the Super Bowl, despite the Eagles’ being better at nearly every ­position—­except for the most important one on the field, quarterback, where the Patriots and Brady held what looked to be a historic advantage.
This is why it can be hard to turn away from football. The most ­unlikely of performers can electrify on the biggest of stages, and when you least expect it. This game was just deranged. Thrills came ­nonstop—­except when it all stopped.
A terrifying episode nearly ruined the whole party. In the second quarter, Patriots receiver Brandin Cooks caught a 23-yard pass over the middle, danced around for extra yardage, and never saw Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins charging at him and BOOM! The helmet-to-helmet ­hit—­deemed ­legal—­elicited another category of football gasp, the sickened kind. Everything went quiet and Cooks was not moving and holy shit. Things got solemn fast.
Football is the “secret vice” of the civilized, wrote William Phillips in the journal Commentary in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.”
This is true enough, but the notion is predicated on damage staying within bounds. The year had been filled with serious injuries to star players (Aaron Rodgers, J. J. Watt, Wentz, and a host of others). But none of them threatened vital organs or functions, with the catastrophic exception of the Steelers’ young linebacker Ryan Shazier, who suffered a spinal injury in a Monday night game against Cincinnati that jeopardized his playing career and (as of early 2018) his ability to walk normally again. Otherwise, even in the ­season-­ending cases, the injuries remained in bounds. As long as the gladiator is still ­breathing—­maybe favors us with a thumbs-up while being carted ­off—­we know we’ve remained safely on the right side of what our football stomachs can digest. Pass the bean dip.
But Cooks was motionless for two, maybe three minutes. The silence in the stadium was becoming gruesome. Not respectable. To state the unspeakable, and at the risk of sounding glib: the Super Bowl would be a most inopportune stage to have a player die ­on—­the NFL’s worst nightmare. My colleague Joe Drape, who covers horse racing for the New York Times and sat next to me in the press box, mentioned at this moment a tragedy from 2008 in which a filly had died on the track after finishing second in the Kentucky Derby. Since then, the sport’s leadership has lived in fear of a replay, believing horse racing might not survive another televised extravaganza that turned into a thoroughbred snuff event. It was obvious why Joe mentioned this now. Would they keep playing this game if Cooks died? Again, maybe this was needlessly glib and morbid (press boxes bring out the glib and morbid). But the NFL had almost certainly ­game-­planned for this scenario, figured out some contingency in the event of sudden death.
Thank goodness, Cooks survived the ground and the blow that planted him there. He finally picked himself up and walked off and we could all get on with our fun. Cooks was ruled out the rest of the night with a head injury, but everyone else was free to resume pounding. It took just a few seconds to feel the game rumbling back to life, like a restarted locomotive. Drape headed off on a beer run.
Spoiler alert: The Eagles won, ­41–­33. Brady, who had been named the league’s MVP for the third time the night before, was his usual New Age Ninja self, finishing with 505 yards and three touchdowns. His ­last-­ditch 51-yard heave, intended for Gronk, was batted away in the end zone. As soon as the leather hit the turf, everyone’s first ­instinct—­mine, yours, Brady’­s—­was to glance up at the clock to see if ticks remained. The zeros confirmed that time and Philly had beaten Tom, at least for this season.
“We never had control of the game,” Brady was saying afterward to punctuate a season in which the NFL had itself felt at the mercy of uncontrollable events and ­actors—­protesting players, rogue owners, and, not least, a U.S. president using our most popular sport as ammunition in the country’s culture wars. Football no longer felt safely bubbled off from the messiness and politics of the larger American reality show.
This would all take time to process. The sport felt exhausted and unsettled, even as the Big Game euphoria spilled onto the arctic streets. Eagles fans were delirious and also dumbfounded. They were the underdogs who caught the car, and now what? Reckoning and redemption stories are always getting tangled up in football, boom versus doom in a grudge match. It felt strange to experience Peak Football and have it also feel like the end of something.


Prologue (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
RESPITE (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
April 28, 2017
Goodell is a Douchebag!
—SIGN AT THE NFL DRAFT
PHILADELPHIA
Again, Philly.
The season ended here with a parade and started with one, ­too—­a parade of soon-to-be rookies ambling across a stage. The first NFL Draft ever to be held outdoors took place on a warm spring night, ten months and a very different identity ago for this proud and prickly town. Philadelphia had yet to achieve its unlikely Peak Football status. This was before Crisco poles and doggie masks and Nick Foles had also become celebrated Philly “things” (Foles had previously been a Philly “thing,” for sure, but mainly just a thing to heckle).
I joined a sweaty throng outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, near the Rocky statue. The City of Brotherly Love had been conferred by the NFL with the 2017 edition of its annual cattle call, kicking off a new tradition of the draft’s being held in alternating cities (it was in New York for decades, then Chicago for the previous few years). Philadelphia, of course, makes a curious welcome center for a nervous young man. The town owns an ignominious reputation for drunken and derelict fan ­behavior—­home to a population that allegedly booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs during an Eagles game at Franklin Field in 1968. Local fans have disputed L’Affaire Santa/Snowball for years (thus “allegedly”), or at least the intensity of the invective aimed at the bearded saint. They can get pretty worked up about this alleged libel, too (as they do), but the city’s reputation for fan loutishness has very much endured and been affirmed over the years. In 1997, the Eagles even established a court and jail in the bowels of Veterans Stadium to more efficiently deal with their unruly darlings.
Nearly two decades later, the prospect of an NFL Draft in Philadelphia shaped up as a potential dream matchup between the country’s most abusive fans and the sports world’s most abused commissioner.
My view was blocked by a guy in a Carson Wentz #11 jersey hoisting the aforementioned goodell is a douchebag! placard. Revelers chanted, screamed, and booed Commissioner Douchebag with impressive bloodlust. They included many drunken Eagles fans (redundant?) chanting “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!” in responsive intervals. ­Face-­painted toddlers chased around little green footballs. It was quite a scene, especially for a tableau whose primary action involved a stiff man in a suit reading young men’s names off index cards and then hugging them.
NFL drafts have become like solstice festivals to mark the unofficial peak of the football ­off-­season. “­Off-­season” has in fact become a misnomer and even a dirty word inside the modern NFL. “Off”-­anything is an affront to the manifest destiny of a sport whose mission is predicated ­year-­round upon the conquering of American downtime. No hour of the year should be safe from the league’s revenue grabs. Previously ­low-­key events like the NFL Draft, NFL Scouting Combine (March), and Hall of Fame inductions (August) have now become jacked-up merchandise and media extravaganzas unfolding over several days. The NFL is no longer just training camps, coaching carousels, and football games, but a series of highly produced set pieces, jubilees, and roving “fan experience” exposition parks in revolving venues.
The 2017 draft would be watched by 4.6 million people on two networks over three days, universes removed from the last time the draft was held in Philly, in 1960, when a few ­chain-­smoking sportswriters showed up at a hotel ballroom. “C’mon, Philly, come on!” Goodell implored about twenty seconds after he took the stage, inciting louder boos. At an aide’s suggestion, Goodell had considered a ­Santa-­themed joke, something to the effect that “now I know how Santa felt,” but opted against ­it—­in keeping with the commissioner’s general approach to humor (essentially nonexistent). He waved his hands toward his chest in the universal “bring it on” taunt. And it was on.
Sustained howls of derision. Greg Aiello, the NFL’s longtime flack, scolded the ingrate masses via Twitter for their unpleasant reception. “If those 70,­000+ fans in Philly like the Draft being there, they should cheer Roger Goodell,” Aiello tweeted. Apparently we were all doing this wrong. “He’s the reason the Draft is on the road,” Aiello continued in defense of his battered boss. This did nothing to stop the booing.
Next to me on the grass stood a Cleveland Browns fan named Mike Carr, who had driven fifteen hours from his home in Lansing, Michigan. Carr was intent upon learning in person the identity of the player his team would select first overall. He could have watched from home, as he did over hours and days of coverage devoted to the previews, player capsules, and mock drafts in the run-up. He could have learned, in real time, what scouts were saying about the drafted players; that Ohio State cornerback Marshon Lattimore, for instance, was “genetically gifted,” according to an NFL Network chyron.
But Carr preferred to be here, both to represent his native Cleveland and to shout down ­Goodell—­the latter being as basic to this experience as candy on Halloween.
Carr does not care for the commissioner for many reasons. He mentions his bungling of the Ray Rice ­fiancée-­battering episode from a few years ago. But mostly he spoke of jeering Goodell as a civic duty, a kind of proxy for the ­love-­hate addiction our ­adrenaline-­addled country has for this sport (that so many love) and this league (that so many love to hate). This was a Maximum American moment, courtesy of your favor­ite pro sports league and oligarchy.
“Freedom of association is a powerful thing,” Michael MacCambridge wrote in America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football ­Captured a Nation. “Every organization in America is someone’s version of utopia.” Even the Cleveland Browns. Carr will love them through thick, thin, and Johnny Manziel. He wore a johnny rehab T-shirt to memorialize his team’s train wreck of a ­first-­round pick from a few years ­ago—­a ­one-­man reality show in his own right. “I hope the Browns take Myles Garrett,” Carr told me, referring to the defensive end from Manziel’s alma mater, Texas A&M. “But I’m mostly really looking forward to booing Goodell.” It would prove a satisfying night all around.
Goodell ­bear-­hugged draftees as they walked onstage. Every few picks, the commissioner would bring human shields with him up to the podium, maybe in an effort to discourage booing: these were the Make-A-Wish Foundation kids, elderly Hall of Famers, and beloved ­former Eagles whom no one would possibly hate, even in Philly. Who could badger even Roger when he was accompanied by a ­cancer-­
stricken ­fourteen-­year-­old Ravens fan who read the name of Baltimore’s ­first-­round selection? In an upset, the mob behaved itself and gave the kid a nice moment. The outdoor draft in general played to upbeat reviews, even evoked the Big Game ambience of a fall Sunday at certain points.
“Especially when they played the national anthem, I caught chills,” John Ross, a University of Washington wide receiver who was chosen in the ninth spot by the Cincinnati Bengals, said later. “I thought we were going to strap it up and play.” On nights like this, the NFL’s iconic logo, or “Shield,” might as well be the American flag.
This being the ­twenty-­first-­century NFL, even these shiny scenes are destined to get shaded with something. The ­well-­played draft followed an incomparable Super ­Bowl—­with the Pats’ overcoming a ­28–­3 deficit to stun the ­Falcons—­but it was all being interspersed with one buzzkill or another. If it’s Monday, we were learning that Dwight Clark, the great 49ers receiver, had been diagnosed with ALS, probably related to his career choice; Tuesday brings news that the Bears’ Hall of Fame running back Gale Sayers is suffering from dementia. I caught brief word about the Clark and Sayers diagnoses on the NFL Network, which then moved seamlessly into another mock draft. Former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who was serving a life sentence for a murder conviction, was found hanging from a bed sheet in his Massachusetts prison cell on April 19. He died, at ­twenty-­seven, with what researchers would later describe as the most severe case of CTE they had ever seen in a person his age. Hernandez also died, at the very least, with a dark sense of timing: that was also the day the Patriots were scheduled to make their ­post–­Super Bowl visit to the White House.
Politics always seemed to be intruding somehow. This was very much a product of Donald J. Trump, and his ability to swallow up as much attention as possible from this bizarre American moment he was leading
the nation through. Why should football be safe? Indeed, minutes after Super Bowl 51 ended members of the ­Patriots—­a team Trump had very publicly adopted as his ­own—­were being asked whether they would visit the White House, given the polarizing ways of the new president. Patriots tight end Martellus Bennett was the first to say no thanks, and a running tally would ensue over who else would demur. Six Patriot players said they would skip the traditional visit, and there were several additional ­blow-­offs on game day. Brady himself came under heavy pressure to pass from his wife, his liberal Bay Area family, and assorted other ­anti-­Trump friends (Brady had known Trump for years, judged a beauty pageant, and golfed with him a bunch of times). On the appointed day, Brady was a no-show, citing “personal family matters”—­as in, his family, especially his wife, would have killed him if he had gone. Brady’s absence put the starstruck Trump in a foul mood. He did not mention Brady in his Rose Garden remarks and did not take a phone call from the quarterback that night. Sad!
I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT AMERICAN POLITICS AND CAMPAIGNS for sixteen years. Politics in that time has become a rolling entertainment spectacle, and perhaps the only ­real-­stakes reality show that Americans were following as closely as they were the NFL. Politics grew hotter, as football did, under the raw nihilism of today’s culture. And that was even before Donald Trump was running for anything.
Trump’s presidential campaign featured many of the conditions that the NFL had enjoyed for years. He generated news every day, not all flattering, but enough to make him inescapable. He was covered by a pack of political reporters who often treated campaigns like Big Games themselves (with “­pre- and postgame” coverage of debates), as opposed to complicated issue slogs with ­real-­life consequences. Trump was his own Big Game, seemingly the only one people and media were paying attention to. He elicited passion pro and con. He appealed to a white male confirmation bias and sense of siege present in many who love football.
Every fan at some point becomes convinced the league office, other teams, referees, and announcers have it in for their utopia. The system is rigged against us. Like most Patriots devotees, I started hating Goodell for his punishment of Brady over Deflategate, the football air pressure debacle that (as Stephen Colbert correctly noted) was the rare sports scandal about shrinking balls that does not involve steroids. Did being mad at the league stop me from shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for tickets, DirecTV, NFL Sunday Ticket, RedZone, and the tools of dependence the cartel keeps pushing my way? That’s funny.
As with any decent reality show, the NFL is juiced by controversy, in many cases of its own making. Deflategate provided a trivial diversion after the previous season’s nightmare of a reality show, the one featuring the star running back ­cold-­cocking his fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator and then dragging her limp body into the casino. Goodell suspended Ray Rice for two games only to ­have—­plot ­twist—­the security video of Rice’s knockout turn up on TMZ. This led Goodell to make Rice’s suspension “indefinite” and to months of recriminations over how the league could not have known about the video as it had claimed. It also raised fundamental questions about whether the NFL cared about domestic violence ­and—­even ­more—­about whether Goodell should keep his job. Reality TV does love a deathwatch.
Still, notwithstanding the NFL’s ­year-­round ability to be compelling, something was happening to this sport. Football felt less confident and more precarious, at least from the outside. I wanted to immerse myself to a point that exceeded my usual fan’s engagement, beyond the preapproved ­all-­access “experience” shows that bring us inside locker rooms and huddles and sideline confabs. For as ubiquitous as the NFL has made itself, there still remained a great mystery about the league. I had become especially curious about the closed cabal of “insiders” who owned, operated, and performed in the circus. The Rice case laid bare how little I knew about this world in a way I had not appreciated. It exposed a level of vulnerability in something that appeared so invincible. One day, a new season was set to begin, fresh with the promise of new ratings records and revenue horizons; next, this supposedly “existential crisis” hits the sport with the suddenness of a left jab on an elevator.
“Everything can change so fast in our society, for me or anyone else,’’ Goodell told me in one of the sporadic conversations we had over the last few years. ‘‘Only the paranoid survive’’ is a favorite mantra of his, and a phrase you hear a lot around NFL headquarters. It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another of the corporate clichés preferred by Goodell, someone who preambles many of his sentences with “As I say around the ­office . . .”
But “only the paranoid survive,” a motto associated with Intel’s Andy Grove, struck me as a telling conceit for the modern NFL. While Grove’s assertion is meant as a call to vigilance and aggressiveness, the NFL’s application of the phrase seemed more in tune with defensiveness and raw nerves. This also became clear to me as soon as I began peeking behind the Shield.
‘‘It’s like this thing I say around the office, ‘Believe in better,’’’ Goodell was telling me in January 2016. We were standing on the sidelines at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, before that season’s NFC Championship Game between the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers. Up on a Jumbotron, the Patriots and Broncos were playing in the AFC game with sound turned up to a level that accentuated the crunch of every tackle. Each blow echoed through the stadium, and a startled gasp went up in Charlotte after Patriots receiver Danny Amendola was knocked into next week by a Denver safety. Amendola appeared staggered.
Goodell kept talking. He is fond of words like “monetize.” He also talks a lot about finding new revenue streams and ‘‘growing the pie.” The league is always ­sharing—­or ­leaking—­its gaudy ­dollar-­signed pie. Goodell said he wants the NFL to achieve $25 billion in gross revenue by 2027 (it stood at $14 billion as of 2017). Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner from 1960 to 1989, who steered it on the trajectory of its exploding popularity and riches, preached that it was a bad look for the league to have financial figures in the news. Goodell’s NFL has no such reticence. Today’s owners have proven again and again how much they crave big numbers; so that’s what their ­commissioner—­their ­employee—­serves up. Since Goodell became the league commissioner in 2006, most of the owners have seen the value of their franchises double (twenty-nine are now among the fifty most valuable sports franchises on the planet, according to Forbes).
Pie is delicious.
Yet it also felt like a moment when the beast might be getting fat, when the business and the pageant of the NFL could be overtaking the perfection of the game. Was football teetering on the edge of a darker future? Or was I just being breathless (“teetering,” always a tell), trying to overhype this as a moment of truth and sell it as a showdown between World Domination and Sudden Death? Football is just football, after all; angst is for writers.
My expedition would kick off with an email from the great Brady himself (“Tom Brady here,” the subject line ­said—­a “yeah and I’m Santa Claus” moment if I’ve ever had one). This was a new and different cara­van for me. I do not normally cover sports and have no history with any of these people. I embedded with the top executives of the sport, got drunk and passed out on Jerry Jones’s bus, attended the league’s committee meetings, parties, and tribal events, interviewed journeyman and superstar players and about half of the owners (sneak conclusion: billionaires are different from you and me). I would get doused by vomit at the draft, sprinkled by confetti at the Super Bowl, cried on by a spurned Raiders booster from Oakland, and hugged by a stricken Steelers fan I met at Heinz Field during a public viewing for the team’s longtime owner, Dan Rooney, who died in April 2017. The woman wore a Troy Polamalu jersey, said a silent prayer, and rubbed a ­Steelers-­issued “Terrible Towel” on Mr. Rooney’s casket.
NFL evangelists are always couching their product as a gift of escape. Football provides its disciples “a chance to really celebrate and come together and get away from our everyday troubles,” Goodell said in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer before the Super Bowl a few years ago. In Goodell’s telling, life is hard, but Sundays liberate and give solace. Games are confined to about three hours and offer us a thrilling parenthetical escape from our “troubles.”
‘‘We offer a respite,’’ the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, told me. ‘‘We are a respite that moves you away from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps.’’ Jones is in many ways the embodiment of today’s NFL: rich, audacious, distracted, shameless, and a veteran of more than a few trials and missteps of his own.
For me football was a respite from my day job, and from Donald J. Trump, insofar as Trump could be avoided at all.
In 2013, I wrote a book about another cozy and embattled dominion, Washington, D.C. This Town, it was called. I wanted to capture that world at a moment when it seemed Washington had reached a saturation point of ­self-­congratulation as the rest of the country looked on with venomous fascination. I wanted to portray life inside the debauched seat of the capital at a formative moment. The orgy felt overdue for a reckoning. Populist tension was getting too hot outside the Beltway, and conditions seemed primed for an invading agent. I was as shocked as anyone by Trump’s election, but not that the puffed-up world of D.C. would ­ignite a counterforce that could blow up politics as we knew it.
I wanted to do something similar with the NFL: to take a fuller anthropological measure of an empire that seems impossible to imagine America without, and yet whose status quo feels unsustainable.
To much of the American heartland, in football hotbeds like Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Texas, the game represents a way of life under attack. Fans, coaches, and many players resent the boutique coastal sensibilities that they believe exaggerate the risks of brain injuries. Football’s biggest critics, they say, never played the game or felt the passion of a Friday Night Lights town. I became conscious of this disconnect as someone residing in a Northeast media bubble that so badly missed where the country was headed during the 2016 election.
We are products of the tribes we inhabit and our groupthink assumptions. As sports fans, we ­self-­select parochial enclaves. Every Pats fan I know is certain that Goodell royally screwed our Greatest Quarterback Evah in Deflategate. Then there’s the 90 percent of the rest of the country that roots for other teams and whose worldviews skew accordingly. Ravens fans held rallies in support of Ray Rice ­postelevator and still could be seen wearing Rice’s #27 jersey all over Maryland. This is your brain on football.
Jerry Jones described the beauty of the NFL to me as a weekly Coliseum clash in which representatives from my town and your town met up. ‘‘And we’ll just have a big old time, being relevant to one another,’’ Jones told me. ‘‘Relevant’’ is a term you hear a lot around the league. It is a curiously timid concept given the financial and cultural dynasty the NFL has maintained for five decades (were the Beatles “relevant” to rock ’n’ roll?). Why mention relevance? It goes to the insecurity, maybe, or paranoia at the thought that some disruption could come along as easily as Trump did, descending from an escalator and dragging norms down with him.
The NFL is a norm. It is also a swamp. You learn that soon enough, a roiled and interconnected habitat. Everyone up and down can be a part of the same Big Game.
Another thing I have learned writing about Washington: if you’re well positioned, the swamp is a warm bath. I keep thinking, for some reason, of a story told by Leigh Steinberg, the ­once-­high-­flying agent who represented the league’s elite players for about ­twenty-­five years before plummeting into an abyss of lawsuits, bankruptcy, addiction, etc. Back when he was still a “Super Agent” in the 1990s, Steinberg negotiated a contract extension for Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. To celebrate, he and Robert Kraft repaired to the owner’s home on Cape Cod for a special champagne ­toast—­together in Mr. Kraft’s hot tub. “I can’t think of another owner in the NFL I would have rather shared a hot tub with,”
Steinberg wrote warmly in his memoir. This, too, is football.
1. (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
THE SUPER BOWL WITHOUT JOCK STRAPS (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
March 20, 2016
The Membership is not at all pleased with these accommodations. Who found this place? Heads need to roll. Kids on spring break keep running through the lobby in bathing suits, like this is Six Flags over Boca or something. They are carrying milk shakes and ice cream cones with ­rainbow sprinkles.
“What is this, summer camp?” said Steve Tisch, the film producer and chairman of the New York Giants. If you own a football team, yes, in a sense it ­is—­summer camp for superrich postmenopausal dudes. The National Football League offers them ­round-­the-­calendar recreation, delicious food, and a dedicated counselor/commissioner to hold their hands and buckle their ­big-­boy pants. Tisch is known among certain campers as “the Tush.” He is a model bunkmate: well liked, good company, and always helpful about hooking his NFL partners up with party invitations and tickets to the big Hollywood award shows when they come through L.A. He introduced Bob Kraft to his kid girlfriend, the ­model-­actress Ricki Noel Lander, at a party at Chez Tush. Tisch owns the distinction of having won both a Super Bowl and an Oscar (as a producer of Forrest Gump). He displays both trophies in the den of his home in Beverly Hills.
“Look at these,” Tisch told me as he admired the twin booty when I visited him at his hillside mansion. “They were great to show off when I was dating.” That was before Tisch met his newest trophy, the gorgeous Katia Francesconi, whom he celebrates with a photo display in his front entryway. She speaks five languages, Katia does, and for their first “serious” date, Tisch flew her to the Toronto film festival, then to Pittsburgh for a ­Giants-­Steelers game, then to Spain. He proposed in Portuguese.
Tisch has a certain dumbfounded charm about him. You could even call it ­Gump-­like in how he projects both a lurking detachment and an utter sense of belonging to the privileged jungles he occupies. He is easily amused. When I first met him, at a Super Bowl party, Tisch told me to call him on his cell phone. He would be more than happy to share with me his impressions of America’s most successful sports league and the sanctified club he belonged to as an NFL owner (“Junior high school for billionaires,” as he described this confederacy). I asked Tisch for his phone number. “Sure,” he replied. “Just dial 310 Take-A-Hike.” And the happy camper laughed a little harder than I might have expected him to. It’s good to be the Tush. He told me to call anytime. Once, I asked Tisch if he was in fact the only person on the planet with both an Oscar and a Super Bowl trophy. “I have two Super Bowl trophies, asshole,” the Tush corrected me, and further amused himself.
But he is no fan of this Boca Raton Resort and Club. Neither are his fellow owners. It will not do, and the head counselor will hear about this. There are too many ­kids—­real ­kids—­making noise amid this great gathering of sportsmen. What use would any titan of great means and legacy have for the Flow Rider Wave Simulator out by the cabanas? It strikes a discordant note with the important business the No Fun League is trying to conduct here.
Ideally, the NFL’s winter huddle would take place about an hour to the north. The Breakers in Palm Beach would be everyone’s first choice. Boca is okay, and the Resort and Club, a Waldorf property, has its appeal (an ice cream store off the lobby, and who doesn’t love ice cream?). But it’s not close enough to the water, the layout is strange, and besides, it’s hard to be satisfied with anything when you’ve known the best. As a football potentate, you’re in this for the brass ring, and the ­Breakers—­apex of taste, luxury, and ­convenience—­represented the brass ring. About one-quarter of NFL owners have homes within an hour of the premium resort. Built in the 1890s, the Breakers is a playground for this particular kind of tycoon. “After fires in both 1903 and 1925, the hotel reemerged more opulent each time,” the Breakers’ website reads. The football emperors would hope to say the same someday about their sport; would that their current set of conflagrations end up as only brushfires.
The Breakers is respectable and resilient, just as the league and its patrons believe themselves to be. At any given time, the Breakers’ guest register “read[s] like a who’s who of early ­20th-­century America: Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, vacationing alongside US presidents and European nobility.” Or so says the Breakers’ website.
In any event, that is more in line with how NFL owners view themselves. They are not just hobbyists, but more like ministers, or actual figures of history; certainly they’ve earned the right to be called philanthropists, right? With all they’ve contributed?
They talk a lot about all the “quiet giving” they do, or have their PR people do it (while mentioning, of course, how “Mr. So-and-So does not like to call attention to himself”). They are rich enough to care about their legacies. At the very least the owners fashion themselves as pillars of their communities, although many of them are in fact despised in their hometowns and remain stubbornly out of view. It’s hard to dislodge a pillar.
“There is the Breakers and then there’s everything else,” one of the owners told me as he surveyed the riffraff in the crowded lobby in Boca. He asked that I not reveal his name “because I don’t want to come off like a spoiled rich guy.”
Not to overstate the gravity of this Boca Raton failure. A subpar resort for the NFL’s annual meetings will make no one’s roster of “existential” matters that supposedly threaten the league; nothing like the drop in ­youth-­football participation, nor lawsuits, regulatory roadblocks, and disruptions to the broadcast model that the league’s modern business has been built on. Nor would it rank among the battery of blows that Commissioner Goodell manages to suffer, or ­self-­inflict, or aggravate, every few months. But it’s also of a piece with something being ­off-­kilter with America’s beloved blood sport. You hear about “statements” being made in the NFL; as how the Dolphins can “make a statement” to the league by beating the Patriots on a Monday night, or how Adam “Pacman” Jones, the Bengals cornerback with long dreadlocks and a rap sheet to match, can “make a statement” by concussing the Steelers’ Antonio Brown with a big hit on a crossing pattern.
NFL meetings also make a statement. They should assert an elegant show of force from a superpower league. The syndicate operates as a drug kingpin of sports and entertainment in a nation packed coast to coast with junkies. Who can’t leverage a setup like this? “Hey, even the worst bartender at spring break does pretty well,”
­pooh-­poohed Eric Winston, a journeyman offensive lineman, last with the Bengals, belittling ­Goodell’s performance.
Had Peak Football been achieved? As with any empire, there is a sense that for all its riches and popularity, the NFL is never far from some catastrophic ­demise—­or at least might be flying close to the top of the dome.
It was thus vital that this annual meeting convey every confidence at a moment of great prosperity and unease. The owners should feel reassured. Pro football might be played by bulked-up exhibits before tens of millions of viewers, but it’s these puffed-up billionaires who own the store. These are the freaks, the club that Trump couldn’t crack. They are known in their collective as “the Membership.” “The ­Thirty-­two” is an alternative shorthand, or ­thirty-­one if you don’t count the ­shareholder-­owned Green Bay Packers (on the other hand, it still totals ­thirty-­two since the Giants are co-owned by two families, the Tisches and Maras). These members envision themselves as noble stewards of their communities and wield their status with an assumption of ­permanence—­a safe assumption since there are venereal diseases easier to get rid of than, say, the Washington Redskins’ owner, Daniel Snyder. Plus, the Membership gets to keep most of the NFL money and none of the brain damage.
Network cameras focus on the bespoke Caligulas in their owner’s boxes at least once a game. This is a strange NFL custom. We as viewers must always be favored with reaction shots from the owner’s ­box—­their awkward high fives and crestfallen stares. It is as if we could never fully appreciate what we’ve seen on the field unless we also witness its ­real-­time impact upon the presiding plutocrats. The human toll! Do owners in any other sport receive this much TV time during games? Maybe horse racing. There is something distinctly Roman about this.
THESE LEAGUE CONVOCATIONS ARE HEAVILY ANTICIPATED AND carefully planned. In the NFL’s perennial season of external hype and internal ­hand-­wringing, they are compulsory retreats. Every prime and middling mover from the league is here, though the actual ­players—­with a few scattered ­exceptions—­are not invited. Club executives with team lapel pins cavort with coaches, ­front-­office types, and their hangers-on; agents, “friends of the league” and various appendages, stooges, functionaries from the 345 Park Avenue league headquarters, and TV “insider” types in their perpetual pancake makeup. League meetings are the NFL’s Super Bowl without jockstraps.
Boca represented its own special ­NFL-­through-­the-­looking-­glass spectacle for interlopers like me. In the context of today’s NFL, there was something elemental about watching the league ­self-­examining and ­self-­celebrating its efforts. The Shield credentialed 310 media members for its 2016 league meeting (compared with 1,711 for the next month’s draft
), though it seemed like half the people “covering” it either worked for the NFL or one of its team websites or an outlet (ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS) that paid billions of dollars to the NFL for the rights to televise its games and to be a “valued broadcast partner.” Everything feels so perfectly symbiotic.
Perhaps the biggest drawback about Boca is that the grounds get congested. Unlike ­you-­know-­where. But apparently the Breakers had decided this year that it could do better charging regular rates during a peak spring break week than by offering the NFL a group package. Insulting! Who said no to the mighty NFL? Was the Breakers making a statement?
League meetings are typically held between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft. They represent the first official event of the new NFL year, which officially began on March 9 at 4:00 p.m., 345 Park Avenue time. Big Football is such a force that it abides by its own calendar and revolves around its own sun. Execution matters. 345 Park Ave (simply “345” as the entity can be known in shorthand) must demonstrate to its internal ­audience—­particularly the most important internal audience, its ­thirty-­two ­owner-­bosses—­that it is vigilant about all threats, foreign and domestic and homemade; that it is capable of striking a proper balance between aristocratic fun and the ­all-­business collusion of gathered mob factions. And this could be such a perfect sunny environment for an existential crisis. So, game faces everyone.
And Shields, many Shields. The grounds were properly decked out with the ­star-­studded, ­upside-­down medallions with a football floating on top. Large golden Shields dominated walls. They were slapped on doors, carved into ice sculptures, and etched into cuff links. The Shield is a symbol of almost mystical power. It stands for big notions, like ‘‘Respect,’’ ‘‘Resiliency,’’ ‘‘Integrity,’’ and ‘‘Responsibility to Team’’ (imprinted in big letters on the glass entrances at 345 Park). Hotel personnel wore tiny Shield pins (valet lady: “They made us wear ’em this week”). The Shield might be a commercial insignia, but at league meetings they also function as icons among the initiated, like Scientology crosses.
It had been a rough few months for the Shield, if not the coffers of those in charge. Fans were craving football more than ever while at the same time finding reason to despise the league. A messy ­intra-­mogul tangle had just culminated over which team, or teams, would win the right to move to Los Angeles, home to the ­second-­biggest TV market in the country (made up of millions of actual people who had seemed perfectly content without an NFL team, let alone two NFL teams, for ­twenty-
one years). Bad feeling would linger between owner factions loyal to the competing stadium projects. Fresh generations of embittered fans were being turned out into the world via the spurned cities of St. Louis and eventually San Diego and Oakland.
The ­just-­completed season began with the Patriots hosting the Steelers in the NFL Kickoff Game, which occurred one week after a federal judge vacated Goodell’s ­four-­game suspension of Brady over his alleged role in the Deflategate saga, which still had a whole season left to run. Deflategate was the consummate NFL reality show featuring perfectly unsympathetic perpetrator/victims (the most loathed franchise in the league), as well as an even less sympathetic Keystone Kop (the sanctimonious commissioner) at the controls. But then (plot twist!) the judge overturned the suspension and the ­pretty-­boy quarterback got to play the entire season and the commissioner was nowhere to be seen at his own NFL Kickoff Game. Robert Kraft strutted before the bloodthirsty crowd on Opening Night and hoisted the Patriots’ latest Super Bowl trophy, WWE style.
Joe Thomas, an ­All-­Pro offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns, compared Goodell with the ­professional-­wrestling impresario Vince McMahon. He called the commissioner’s tactics ‘‘brilliant.” ‘‘He’s made the NFL relevant 365 [days a year] by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,’’
Thomas said of Goodell in the midst of Deflategate. ‘‘It’s made the game more popular than ever, and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business, and it’s making so much money.’’ He added: ‘‘It’s almost like the Kim Kardashian ­factor—­that any news is good news when you’re in the NFL.’’
THE NFL IS TOO SELF-SERIOUS TO ACCEPT ANY COMPARISONS with Kim Kardashian or Vince McMahon or Donald Trump. But it’s also obvious that even embarrassing ­episodes—­like ­Deflategate—­can provide helpful “entertainment” that diverts from Existential Issue One in football: concussions. Reports of players leaving the game with mangled brains, or prematurely retiring over safety concerns, or the latest retiree discussing how compromised his mind and body are at a young age, have become boilerplate accompaniments to your weekly betting lines, injury reports, and fantasy stats. At what point would fans of the game become rattled? Lawyers, parents, and the media had taken notice. But based on TV ratings and league revenues, customers to this point had proven immune from any repetitive trauma. Denial is itself a powerful shield.
At his Super Bowl “State of the League” press conference the month before, Goodell was asked about a spate of youth football players who had died the previous season. “Tragic,” he said, and then touted all that the league is doing to teach safer tackling techniques. “There is risk in life,” Goodell concluded. “There is risk in sitting on the couch.”
“Roger’s couch remark,” as it became known, did not go over well among the increasingly vocal set of crippled former players and the surviving family members of dead ones. “These men and their families deserve better,” said Tregg Duerson, son of the Bears safety Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in 2011 at age fifty and was later diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease found in scores of deceased players. Duerson spent eleven seasons on the couch.
Goodell is always touting the league’s virtues as a moral force. ‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ he told me. Football provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community, religious, and family institutions is weakening. ‘‘It unites people,” Goodell continued. “It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’
League meetings also give ­people—­needy billionaires in this ­case—­a chance to sort of come together. Would they ever choose one another as business partners? Probably not, but that’s the nature of a cartel. You don’t always get to choose. NFL owners are stuck in a vicious marriage, but no one wants a divorce and why would they?
Really, what signature player of the ­twenty-­first century would not want a piece of the Shield? Put it on TV, and people will watch; stick it on a jersey, they will wear it. The price of television ads during the Super Bowl has increased by more than 75 percent over the last decade.
If greed is ever a topic among owners, the conversation is mostly rhetorical. Is it worth more ­pie—­maybe another billion or two of dollars in annual revenue for a ­league—­for a franchise (say, the Oakland Raiders) to rip the hearts out of some of the most devout fans in the country to grab a much sweeter deal in a city like Las Vegas? Is it the league’s problem that Vegas is willing to shell out three-quarters of a billion dollars to build a stadium even though its schools are underfunded and its roads are medieval? Takeaway: Rhetorical quandaries are tiresome. And they can cost you money.
“You guys are cattle and we’re the ranchers,” the late Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm once told Hall of Fame offensive lineman Gene Upshaw during a collective bargaining negotiation. It is an ­oft-­quoted line that encapsulates the whole setup. Players get prodded, milked for all they’re worth, sold off, put out to pasture, and slaughtered. Implicit also here is that the cattle’s time is fleeting, like Not for Long football careers. “And ranchers can always get more cattle” is how Schramm’s quote concludes.
Likewise, the Patriots can always get another defensive lineman, which is why Nick Fairley, a veteran free agent previously of the Rams, was being whisked through the Boca Resort. Fairley is the rare cattle to be seen at this ranchers’ convention. Bill Belichick, the head coach, will inspect the livestock here along with the rest of the New England brass. (Fairley wound up signing with the Saints.) Upshaw said he had considered writing a memoir about his union ­activities—­joking that its working title was “The Last Plantation.”

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