Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

Prologue

RESPITE

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,”6 Steinberg wrote warmly in his memoir. This, too, is football.

1.

THE SUPER BOWL WITHOUT JOCK STRAPS

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.