Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“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,”7 ­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 draft8), 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,’’9 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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