Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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СКАЧАТЬ nods and is listening, quite clearly.

      This is Roger’s element. He looks freshly worked out. It would please him very much to hear me say that. He works out a great deal. And he loves to talk about how he works out a lot (SoulCycle, Pilates), and also mention exactly for how long he worked out that day. Goodell likes to trash-talk colleagues who don’t get to the gym at the early hour he does. “Good afternoon,” he will taunt them as they straggle in before 7 a.m. He runs an annual 40-yard dash in his work clothes, following up on a gimmick that NFL Network’s Rich Eisen performs every year at the Scouting Combine. Before the Super Bowl, Goodell holds a press conference where he typically takes a question planted with a kid reporter who might toss up some puffball about a league public service program, like one that encourages kids to exercise for at least sixty minutes a ­day—“Play 60,” the initiative is called.

      “Mr. Commissioner, how do YOU play sixty?” a kid asked Goodell before Super Bowl 49 in Glendale, Arizona. The beast pounced: “I played ­sixty-­five this morning on the elliptical,” Goodell preened. I am going to venture that you’ll never meet a man in his late fifties with such rock-hard abs.

      Goodell also likes to talk about how he used to play The Game himself. He played through high school till he wrecked his knee. But playing football was such a great experience for him. It gave Roger so much camaraderie and instilled so much character. If he had sons, instead of teenage twin daughters, he would by all means encourage them to play football. Other prominent parents have said they would not be so ­sure—­Barack Obama and LeBron James have expressed ambivalence, as well as the actual father of Tom Brady, knowing what we know now; Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, too, and a bunch of others. But Goodell says there are no sure things in life, whether you’re football playing or couch sitting, and he does his best to make the case.

      Goodell is apparently required to say that his first job is to “protect the Shield” x number of times a day as a condition of the $111 million in salary and benefits his ­owner-­bosses paid him between 2013 and 2015¹⁷. The Shield evokes gallant warriors and immovable forces, but it is also a reminder that the enterprise itself requires ­protection—­a shield for the Shield. When Goodell sits at his desk, he gazes upon a large rendering of the Shield on a back wall of his office. ‘‘It is a reminder to look out,’’ he says.

      “Protecting the Shield” roughly equates to protecting “the integrity of the game,” which is another platitude the commissioner throws out all the time. What all of that essentially means is that Goodell’s first job is to protect the ­Membership, and ­often from itself.

      The league, for instance, would prefer it if the Membership left the discussion of brain health to the experts, or at least to Dr. Goodell. It is part of the commissioner’s job, after all, to cushion billionaire brain farts on this issue. When health and safety questions are asked of the Membership, as they inevitably are, the moguls are careful to inflict the re­petitive ­sound-­bite trauma that the league arms them with (“the game has never been safer”). They then move on as quickly as possible.

      But owners can’t always help themselves, and at least one of them seems intent on proving this every few months. Colts owner Jim Irsay, for instance, sat in a golf cart in Boca, smoking a cigarette and holding forth with Dan Kaplan of the SportsBusiness Journal about the varying side effects of playing the sport. He likened the risks to the possible side effects of taking aspirin. “You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin,” Irsay said. “It might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body may reject it, where I would be fine.” This caused an Excedrin headache at the annual meeting, which Jerry Jones decided to assuage by brushing aside the rather obvious link between chronic traumatic encephalopathy and football. “No, that’s absurd” was Jerry’s take on whether playing football can result in CTE.

      Candor can prove as problematic as ignorance. Bills general manager Doug Whaley, for instance, was trying to be philosophical when making the obvious point that football is a dangerous sport and that injuries are inevitable. “It’s a violent game,” Whaley told WGR 550 radio. It would have been fine if he ended the sentence here. But instead, Whaley ended the sentence with “. . . that I personally don’t think humans are supposed to play.” And the headline wrote itself.

      Bills GM: I “don’t think humans are supposed to play” football

      This was problematic since ­football-­playing robots had not yet been invented. What’s more, Whaley was trying to convince actual human beings to come play for the Buffalo Bills. You can imagine the GM was ­frog-­marched up to the Bills’ PR office for cleanup duty. “Clearly I used a poor choice of words,” Whaley clarified in a statement the next day. He is human after all.

      So are NFL owners, just like us, although their positions grant them superhuman deference and platforms that can be irresistible. That is why league meetings, teeming with media, can be so treacherous. The Membership is forced into the ­sunlight—­when in fact most of them are suited to the shadows. Robert Kraft made himself available to the media for twelve minutes on a back patio. RKK had a message to convey. His audience was about twenty reporters and camera people, most from New England outlets. Kraft said he is proud of all the great things the Patriots have accomplished during his ­twenty-­three years as owner. We know this because he is always saying so and listing all the accomplishments (the Super Bowls, conference championship games, the consecutive sellouts). He does again: “It’s nice to step back a little bit and contemplate,” he said. But what RKK really wanted to say is that he is still angry over Deflategate. It’s important for New England fans to hear that, because they, too, are still angry and probably will be even if Brady wins another ten Super Bowls.

      “I want our fans to know that I empathize with the way they feel,” Kraft said. (Robert is a mogul of empathy kill!) Not only that, but he has written a ­letter—­a letter!—­requesting that the commissioner return the ­first- and ­fourth-­round draft picks he had docked the Pats over Brady’s alleged and horrible crimes. Kraft said the league was derelict in not considering the Ideal Gas Law when determining the team’s guilt or innocence (the Ideal Gas Law, as Joey from Quincy and most the rest of Pats Nation could explain much better than me, is an old physics rule explaining why a football might naturally lose air pressure in cold weather without the intervention of, say, a needle administered by a locker room attendant whose nickname is “The Deflator”). You can be certain that Mr. Kraft’s letter was a succinct biting missive written in his own hand, perhaps on stationery from the Ritz Paris.

      This flaccid protest was Kraft’s attempt to pander to New England fans while not losing his seat at the Membership Big Boy table or jeopardizing his ­still-­close relationship with Goodell. He tries to have it both ways, which elicits ­eye-­rolls from owners and league officials who are on to him. They call him “Krafty” (behind his back) and “needy Bob Kraft” (longtime Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy).

      One ­nugget-­hungry pest in Boca asked Kraft the requisite question about concussions. He parried it with the requisite sound bites about how “the game has never been safer” and how he used to play football himself (“lightweight” football at Columbia, gives him a certain authority). Another reporter pressed him to assess the overall performance of Goodell, who had just completed his tenth season as commissioner. “Putting personal situations aside,” Kraft straddled, “I think he’s done a very good job.”

      Translation: forgiveness comes easier when you’re making reams of cash.

      The Patriots’ longtime PR man Stacey James halted the session with a “thanks guys” in time for me to catch Woody Johnson doing a similar gaggle in a nearby conference room. Johnson does not often speak publicly. This is not atypical for hapless franchise bosses who oversee periodic coach and GM ­shake-­ups in big media markets like Woody and the New York J-E-T-S, JETS JETS JETS! Johnson also has an amusing gift for knucklehead statements, which makes him a recurring СКАЧАТЬ