Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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СКАЧАТЬ “per sources” almost entirely by phone and text message. This makes these league gatherings a rare opportunity to lay eyes per them.

      Observing Schefter on his manic routine, I was left to wonder: would there be a day when this fully customized insider will be replaced by some ­Siri- or ­Alexa-­like oracle? Maybe named “Nuggetia”? (“Nuggetia, is Adrian Peterson too injured to start on Sunday?”)

      But then you see Schefter working his sources/relationships/friends, and you sense something that approximates human warmth. There is also something earnest, even winning, about how transactional his interactions are. When I interviewed Schefter, he won me over by dismissing my ­small-­talk efforts at the outset. “Okay, you don’t have to warm me up, time is of a premium, I got it,” Schefter said, directing me to turn on my tape recorder. “I’m going to give you whatever I can. I don’t want to waste your time.” By that, Schefter meant he did not want to waste his own time, which is almost always better spent hunting his Big ­Game—­trophy nuggets.

      On the sidelines before Super Bowl 51, Schefter was actually seen hugging Bill Belichick. This would earn him a personal ­foul—­15 ­yards—­from certain journalism referees. But damn, you kind of marvel. No one hugs Bill Belichick, certainly not reporters. Schefter should go into the Hall of Fame for that alone.

      In Boca, I watched Schefter huddle with Berj Najarian, Belichick’s longtime ­consigliere—­or director of football/head coach administrator (former Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe once had a dozen roses sent to Najarian on Secretary’s Day¹⁶). Berj is a jittery presence generally, but particularly so whenever Belichick is not around, like a St. Bernard displaced from his master. He is just the kind of functionary whose ­cock-­blocking and ­secret-­keeping powers make him an essential, even feared figure inside the league. “How many people talk about the consigliere?” the retired Patriots linebacker and ESPN analyst Tedy Bruschi said by way of refusing to speak about Najarian when Bruschi was approached on the subject by the New York Times. Schefter talks to the consigliere, which is all the more impressive. It makes Berj a solid gold source/­relationship/friend. Quiet chuckles emanated from the Najarian and Schefter powwow, a sense of a mutual comfort being taken.

      ­Well-­barbered ESPN insider Sal Paolantonio stood a few feet away from the duo, also yapping into his phone. “That tanned NFL guy from ESPN” is how an older gentleman in a Chicago Cubs cap described Paolantonio to his wife as they passed by the pack of media busybodies. Paolantonio has a long face and sports suede shoes and a pair of Rick ­Perry–­vintage glasses that make him look cerebral when reporting the latest on whether quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will return to the Jets. Like many of his Hair Club for Nuggets cohorts, “Sal Pal,” as he is known, is a former print guy. He covered the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1990s. But when you see him working insider quorums such as this, Sal Pal brings the strut of someone who has fully “graduated” to TV “personality,” at least tripling or quadrupling his salary along the way. His earpiece might as well be made of gold. “I don’t want this to sound the wrong way,” he told me, “but I feel like I was born to do this.”

      Also reporting for nugget duty was another NFL insider, ESPN’s John Clayton, who might have been my personal favorite. Slight and unassuming, Clayton looks like a parakeet with glasses, or maybe a math teacher. But he is also a machine, and one of the small victories of my career was to persuade my bosses at the Times Magazine to assign a Q and A with Clayton on the eve of the 2013 season. (First question: “You just covered twelve different team practices in the last eleven days. What did you dream about being when you grew up?”)

      After I summoned the nerve to introduce myself, Clayton confirmed a previous nugget I had extracted from Sports Illustrated’s NFL kingfish Peter King: that a woman wearing an i love john clayton T-shirt had traveled to Indianapolis during the NFL Scouting Combine to track Clayton down and announce herself to him as a John Clayton groupie. “Her name was Candy,” Clayton told me (of course it was). “The whole groupie thing is definitely a little bit creepy,” Clayton added. It’s safe to say that Clayton, who would be let go by ESPN a year later, could still walk through any airport in the United States and get hit up for more autographs and photos than the vast majority of NFL players, U.S. senators, and Nobel Prize winners.

      Our quadrant of the lobby had by now also come to include Sports Illustrated’s King and Profootballtalk.com’s Mike Florio. It made for quite the impressive cluster of NFL media yentas from the Nugget Industrial Complex. If God forbid a bomb went off in here and wiped everyone out, we would suffer an immediate nugget famine, necessitating an emergency airlift to fantasy players. Seeing all of them clustered, waiting to do their “­stand-­ups”—­or “hits”—­my mind jumped to the ESPN ad tagline “We Are Men Wearing Makeup Talking About Sports.” That is indeed what they are, but it misses how dead serious their rat race is.

      Nugget dealers run in a pack, and most do their best to be classy about giving ­shout-­outs where due. (“Bengals Rey Maualuga checking into Betty Ford later this month, according to Adam Schefter,” praised Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “Good Nugget.” Credit for nugget recognition in this particular case: Deadspin’s Drew Magary.) But some do not give proper ­shout-­outs, which can be a sore spot and invite pariah status in the academy. Don’t get Schefter started, for instance, on his former employer, NFL Network, and how derelict they can be about giving props. Actually, I did get him started. He was being driven in to work one morning during the season and listening to some NFL show on Sirius Satellite Radio. “They’re saying [Bengals tight end] Tyler Eifert is going to have back surgery and be out four to six months. I’m like, ‘Really, where did you get that from?’ Nothing about ESPN. Nothing! Nothing. If I ever did that to somebody, what is done regularly to ESPN, I would be called on it every time.” Not cool!

      No doubt, things can get heated inside the kettle of nuggets. Florio, of ProFootballTalk (PFT) and NBC, has developed a devoted following for his aggressive and increasingly combative tone. Several team and league officials told me they check ­ProFootballTalk—­and Florio’s Twit­ter ­feed—­first thing in the morning and several times a day. He can be refreshingly edgy toward subjects and competitors ­alike—­though not everyone finds him refreshing. “He’s not a journalist,” ESPN ­nugget-­monger Chris Mortensen said dismissively to me about Florio. “He’s ­really not a good person.”

      Florio has even been accused of being (gasp) unclassy! After the 2018 Super Bowl, Florio went out on a lonely limb to report that Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels was having second thoughts about becoming the next coach of the ­Colts—­though several outlets had reported his hiring as a done deal. When Schefter reported that McDaniels would be staying in New England after all, Florio made a point of tweeting thus: “Attention everyone who assumed I was making it all up: SUCK IT.”

      FOR AS FOCUSED AS THEY ARE ON THEIR PHONES AND NEXT HITS and receiving their just ­shout-­outs, nugget hunters have a sixth sense whenever Big Game enters their perimeter: a head coach or chatty owner, perhaps, or the occasional ­Moby-­Dick himself. As Goodell moved through the summit grounds like a traveling sheikh, a siren might as well have sounded in Insider Village, such was the state of high alert. No one would expect the commissioner to actually feed anybody anything, but still, witness must be borne to the ­ruddy-­faced emperor. The son of the late Republican senator of New York Charles Goodell, the commissioner’s politician genes are evident. He is a most prodigious slapper of backs, knower of names, gladder of hands, and toucher of bases. He moved among his constituents in a former jock’s ballet of bro hugs and ­two-­handed handgrips and shoulder squeezes punctuated with backslaps. He received guests, laughing easily, maybe for real, or maybe not.

      “Good to see you, Coach,” Goodell called out to Carolina Panthers headman Ron Rivera in a central patio. Goodell’s orange hair looks especially bright and shiny in the sunlit room, as does the Creamsicle hue of his face. “Great season this year,” Goodell tells Coach Rivera. Their handshake flowers СКАЧАТЬ