Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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СКАЧАТЬ coach, “couldn’t hit the ocean” with one of his passes. Asked whether he agreed, Johnson said he had indeed seen Schefter’s ESPN report, and then tried to defuse the situation with, uh, humor. “I guess it depends on which ocean,” Johnson said. “Maybe it was a small ocean.” (He makes a fair point.) “The EPA describes that as an ocean. Anyway, no, that’s not funny.”

      Johnson always looks slightly daydreamy and disoriented. He is like an overgrown ­third-­grader who collects toy trains and rotten quarterbacks. His press session in Boca was no different, though he wore the game expression of a kid hopping back on a jumpy horse.

      He was immediately asked the evergreen question about the Jets’ quarterback situation. What was the Jets’ interest in free agent Robert Griffin III, who had visited the team? Johnson was noncommittal but generous enough to describe Griffin as being “very presentable,” an innovative construction in the tradition of Very White Men Describing Black Quarterbacks. He also offered a twist on the standard response to the concussion question, saying that he cares passionately about the issue because “I come from a health background.” (Being the great-grandson of the Johnson & Johnson cofounder would, I suppose, technically qualify someone for a “health background.”) Regardless, the Wood Man was not going any further on the issue. “I’ll leave that to the neurologists,” he said, presentably.

      Johnson had been responding to a question about an ­attention-­grabbing comment that was made a few days earlier by the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety policy, Jeff Miller. Miller, a nonneurologist (lawyer), had been asked by a congresswoman at a roundtable discussion whether “there’s a link between football and degenerative brain disorders like CTE.” “The answer to that is certainly yes,” he replied. Given the volume of scientific evidence and consensus on the ­matter, the admission carried a certain Is-­the-­Pope-­Catholic obviousness.

      But in light of the NFL’s past denials and hedging on the ­subject—­including Jerry Jones directly contradicting him almost ­simultaneously—­Miller’s words landed as a stunning confession. They garnered dramatic “Game May Never Be the Same” headlines (in the New York Times). They also made the NFL ­nervous—­lawyers and owners especially, even beyond their baseline state of unease that any little thing could topple their fragile dynasty, and possibly impact future litigation.

      League officials had always been, at best, cautious about larding their public statements with “potentials,” “possibles,” “allegeds,” and other qualifiers. Owners felt blindsided by Miller’s acknowledgment, especially as it signaled a shift in the NFL’s official line that there was no definitive link between football and CTE; and now they were all being asked about it at the league meeting. Of Miller’s remark, Woody Johnson stuck with “I’m not qualified to agree or disagree,” despite his health background.

      “WHERE THE HELL IS THAT THING SUPPOSED TO BE?” Bills coach Rex Ryan asked me on Tuesday morning. He was trying to get to the mandatory AFC coaches’ breakfast in which each team’s head man must endure a ­forty-­five-­minute-or-so tribunal at a table covered with reporters’ tape recorders, microphones, and ­heat-­lamped eggs. Ryan appeared not to know where he was going, and I told him I was headed to the same place he was. I was walking with a sense of purpose, which was an act (I have no idea what my purpose was), but enough to win Rex’s trust.

      He sipped from an iced coffee drink topped off with whipped cream in a Big ­Gulp–­size cup. By way of small talk, I asked him about Heather Locklear, the ­nineties-­era TV goddess known for her work on Melrose Place, and who I happen to know is Ryan’s favorite “celebrity crush.” I picked this nugget up from being one of the few people to read a ­behind-­the-­scenes ­book—­Collision Low Crossers, by my pal Nicholas ­Dawidoff—­about the ­Ryan-­coached Jets teams from earlier this decade. You can also get a lot done by having one obscure detail at the ready about a famous someone in case an icebreaker is needed. “She’s the best,” Ryan gushed over Locklear as he walked. Ryan’s ­better-­known sexual taste is his ­well-­documented foot fetish (because God forbid a ­middle-­aged football coach’s foot fetish not be “­well-­documented”). New York’s tabloids documented the naughty coach’s proclivity after an online video surfaced featuring a woman who looked like Ryan’s wife showing off her feet while a voice that sounded like Rex’s narrated the action. “I’m the only guy in history who gets in a sex scandal with his wife!”¹⁸ Ryan said. Ryan’s assistant coaches with the Jets arranged to have an autographed poster of Locklear sent to him. He hung it on his office wall and cherished it except for one thing. “She has her shoes on,” Ryan lamented.

      Rex was one of the few people I encountered in Boca who seemed curious about who I was or what brought me there. He did not recognize me as a sportswriter. I told him that normally I wrote about politics, which like football had reached a feverish level of fascination as Trump was then in the process of manhandling his way to the GOP nomination. Ryan was a public Trump supporter, but celebrity crushes excited him far more during our short walk. He told me he has added other crushes to his personal fantasy team over the years, Reese Witherspoon being the most recent. “It’s important to have some that are totally unattainable,” he mused. What’s the fun of having something you know you can have? I asked Ryan if he enjoyed these mandatory coaches’ breakfasts. “No, of course not,” he said. “Does anyone?” They take away from valuable work he needed to be doing for the Bills, for whom the playoffs have also been unattainable for seventeen years.

      Coaches took up their stations at assigned tables. Reporters and cameramen positioned themselves to best receive their boilerplate meals. Bengals coach Marvin Lewis vowed to “take each day as it comes,” and Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said running back Le’Veon Bell was recovering nicely from his knee injury, and then-Broncos coach Gary Kubiak said he had no time to savor his team’s Super Bowl ­win—­or, for that matter, the plate of cold breakfast meats placed before him. Life is hard.

      Ravens coach John Harbaugh was sitting a few tables away, announcing that he is “passionate about football.” He launched into a defense of the sport. There was a lot of this all week, especially from coaches. You mention concussions enough, and the parents who won’t let their kids play and all the damning media portrayals, and it gets them going.

      “Half our time here was spent talking about this issue,” Harbaugh said of concussions, sounding exasperated in response to a question from Peter King about the future of football. “I see a lot of people out there who are pretty passionate about attacking football,” he said. It was time to fight back. He spoke for an empire under siege. “I think it’s about time some people are passionate about defending football. And all of us that know what football’s about should stand up and do that.” King asked Harbaugh what he was running for. He suggested that the Ravens coach be appointed America’s “President of Football.”

      NFL coaches naturally make fervent evangelists for the game. But there has always been a flavor of exceptionalism around the sport, too, that suddenly felt outdated. “Presidents of Football” have long pushed the idea that football, and only football, can instill the character traits that are essential to what makes men Men. “Football requires and develops courage, cooperation, loyalty, obedience and ­self-­sacrifice,” the legendary coach Pop Warner himself wrote in his 1927 bible, Football for Coaches and Players. “It develops ­cool-­headedness under stress, it promotes clean living and habits.” Implicit here is that football promotes such virtues to a degree that basketball, soccer, or tennis never could. But it’s also more complicated than it used to be.

      THE ONE ESSENTIAL PERFORMANCE AT THE COACHES' BREAKFAST was Mr. Personality himself, Belichick. He had managed to skip out on many of the week’s other functions, such as the annual group coaches’ photo (along with his pal Andy Reid, the Chiefs’ coach, apparently to go golfing). But the breakfast was as close to mandatory as it got for the future Hall of Fame headsetter. The cliffhanger to be resolved: How contemptuous could Belichick make himself? СКАЧАТЬ