Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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СКАЧАТЬ assembly. If NFL teams and their home fields are properties on a Monopoly board, think of AT&T Stadium as ­Boardwalk—­and O.co Coliseum as jail.

      Davis is fully aware of his runt-of-­the-­litter standing. His fellow owners find him amiable, though they treat him like their pet rock. But Davis also knows that to own an NFL team is akin to holding a precious lottery ticket. ‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis told me. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’ Yes he does. And what makes Davis a really Big Man in Boca is that he was, at that point, looking to move his team the hell out of Oakland. He was a free agent and ready to ­roam—­the Raiders were “in play.” Davis might frequent Hooters for its ­all-­you-­can-­eat-­wings specials and wear a fanny pack. But don’t for a second think he is not royalty in Pigskin America. Davis moved coolly through the lobby in a black and white ­pin-­striped suit, taking questions about his plans.

      This was a few months after Davis’s fellow owners, in late 2015, had thwarted his attempt to move the Raiders to a new stadium in Los Angeles. The Membership preferred that the St. Louis Rams and eventually the San Diego Chargers go there instead. The league had multiple concerns about the Raiders in L.A., not least of which was making Davis the face of the NFL in the country’s ­second-­biggest market. Cue parable: “You get your butt kicked, you get off the ground, you move forward,” Davis went on. “That’s what you do in life. And you learn that in this business on Sundays.”

      Football never lacks for parables. Keep moving the ball down the field. Mind your blocking and tackling. Run to Daylight (a gridiron philosophy immortalized by Vince Lombardi). For Davis daylight represented anywhere but Oakland. Las Vegas was very much on the radar, he said. Putting an NFL team in the gambling capital of the world held a certain danger and allure, like the Raiders themselves. In general, there will be no shortage of civic suitors waving their thongs in the faces of NFL owners stuck in bad stadium marriages. (James Carville’s line about Bill Clinton’s extramarital accusers kept jumping to mind: “Drag a ­hundred-­dollar bill through a trailer park and you never know what you’ll find.”)

      “St. Louis, as you may have noticed, doesn’t have a team,” a reporter from the ­just-­abandoned home of the Rams was saying to Davis in Boca. “St. Louis would love to have the Raiders,” the reporter persisted to Davis, sounding more and more desperate.

      “Why aren’t you interested in St. Louis?”

      Davis said he understood the man’s anguish. He assumed a tone of empathy as he let the man down in gentle buzzwords: “The Raider brand is a different brand that St. Louis would not maximize,” he explained.

      “Would Las Vegas maximize the Raider brand?” another reporter asked.

      “I think the Raiders would maximize Las Vegas.” The moving gallery behind Davis laughed, except the intrepid St. Louis reporter.

      “St. Louis doesn’t have enough of a Raiders image?” he said, a little sadly. “It has beautiful land, a nice stadium.”

      “I don’t feel it in my heart,” Davis said. “Sorry, man.”

      THE REST OF THE MEMBERSHIP ROLLED INTO THE RESORT BY Town Car and wheelchair. By league convention, they must always be referred to as “Mr. So-and-So,” befitting their status and genders (among the rare female members of the Membership is a widow, the Detroit Lions’ ­then-­ninety-­year-­old Martha Firestone Ford, wife of the team’s late owner William Clay Ford; Virginia McCaskey, the ­then-­ninety-­three-­year-­old “Corporate Secretary” of the Bears, is the eldest daughter of the team’s late founder, coach, and owner, George Halas). The first batch of arrivals resembled one of those reunions of ancient World War II squadrons, minus the flags and applause. New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson, then ­eighty-­eight, was wheeled through the front entrance with a big grin on his face belying the battles he has fought with the league over the years (and more recently with his children in court over control of the Saints, among other toys).

      Jones, who entered wearing dark aviator glasses, was nearly ­chop-­blocked by a pair of runaway kids. He was holding a tumbler of ­something—­never just a glass with Jerry, always a tumbler, even if it’s milk, which it rarely is. He loves a “big old time” and can be irresistibly fun, with a big taste for Scotch, a gleam in his icy aqua eyes, and a penchant for circuitous lectures that he will often stumble over but that will still make a strange kind of ­sense—­sometimes.

      When I asked Jones why the NFL could hum along despite the perennial crises it faces, Jones launched into something he once heard from a friend who owned a chain of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. He asked his friend how HoJo’s could keep the tastes and flavors of the food consistent from franchise to franchise. The answer: intensity. ‘‘If something is supposed to be cold, make it as cold as hot ice,’’ Jones said. ‘‘If it’s supposed to be hot, have it burn the roof of their mouth. Intensity covers up a lot of frailty in the taste and preparation.’’ Thus, he concluded, the hot intensity and drama of football can obscure the dangers and degeneracy inherent to the sport.

      Next down the virtual red carpet was Patriots owner Robert Kraft, strutting through the front entrance in his Nike customized sneakers (“Air Force 1’s”) and silvery hair stuck straight up in the wind. If you achieve a status of “influential owner” around the league, as Mr. Kraft has with his multiple Lombardi trophies, sexy young girlfriends, and perceived closeness with Goodell, you get called by enhanced names, or better yet, initials. Mr. Kraft was merely “Bob Kraft” when he bought the team in 1994, but at some point graduated to “Robert Kraft” and then eventually “RKK,” at least among certain initiated sectors of Foxborough and 345 Park Ave. You know you’re exalted when you achieve initials status. “Brady calls me RKK,” I heard Kraft boast to Adam Schefter when they passed each other in the hallway. If RKK is good enough for ­Brady—“a fellow Michigan man,” Schefter pointed ­out—­it’s good enough for King Nugget.

      Kraft had been making a big show of still being mad at the league over the endless Deflategate saga. He believed Goodell and a group of his bitter rivals are intent on messing with his dynasty, stealing his draft picks, soiling his reputation, and railroading his quarterback. “Jealousy and envy are incurable diseases” had become Kraft’s signature refrain.

      Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, trailed several paces behind Kraft in the lobby, as he has for years in the AFC East. He wore a white Jets cap and crooked backpack. Kraft would diagnose Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV with the “incurable disease.” On the day that the league announced its sanctions against the Patriots and Brady, Johnson’s wife, Suzanne, tweeted out a smiley face emoji before deleting it. Even worse was when the Wood Man himself “favorited” a tweet calling for his own general manager at the time (John Idzik) to be fired. Johnson apologized and called the move “inadvertent.”

      There is much about the Membership that is “inadvertent,” starting with who gets to join this freakish assembly. They are quite a bunch: old money and new, recovering drug addicts and ­born-­again Christians and Orthodox Jews; sweethearts, criminals, and a fair number of Dirty Old Men. They are tycoons of enlarged ego, delusion, and prostate whose ranks include ­heir-­owners like the Maras, Rooneys, and Hunts, of the Giants, Steelers, and Chiefs, respectively, whose family names conjure league history and muddy fields, sideline fedoras and NFL Films. There is also a ­truck-­stop operator¹⁰ whose company admitted to defrauding its customers in a $92 million judicial settlement, a duo of New Jersey real estate developers who were forced to pay $84.5 million in compensatory damages¹¹ because, according to a judge, they “used organized ­crime–­type activities”¹² to fleece their business partners, an energy baron who funded an antigay initiative¹³, a real estate giant married to a Walmart heiress¹⁴, tax evaders, СКАЧАТЬ