Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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СКАЧАТЬ as they were the NFL. Politics grew hotter, as football did, under the raw nihilism of today’s culture. And that was even before Donald Trump was running for anything.

      Trump’s presidential campaign featured many of the conditions that the NFL had enjoyed for years. He generated news every day, not all flattering, but enough to make him inescapable. He was covered by a pack of political reporters who often treated campaigns like Big Games themselves (with “­pre- and postgame” coverage of debates), as opposed to complicated issue slogs with ­real-­life consequences. Trump was his own Big Game, seemingly the only one people and media were paying attention to. He elicited passion pro and con. He appealed to a white male confirmation bias and sense of siege present in many who love football.

      Every fan at some point becomes convinced the league office, other teams, referees, and announcers have it in for their utopia. The system is rigged against us. Like most Patriots devotees, I started hating Goodell for his punishment of Brady over Deflategate, the football air pressure debacle that (as Stephen Colbert correctly noted) was the rare sports scandal about shrinking balls that does not involve steroids. Did being mad at the league stop me from shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for tickets, DirecTV, NFL Sunday Ticket, RedZone, and the tools of dependence the cartel keeps pushing my way? That’s funny.

      As with any decent reality show, the NFL is juiced by controversy, in many cases of its own making. Deflategate provided a trivial diversion after the previous season’s nightmare of a reality show, the one featuring the star running back ­cold-­cocking his fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator and then dragging her limp body into the casino. Goodell suspended Ray Rice for two games only to ­have—­plot ­twist—­the security video of Rice’s knockout turn up on TMZ. This led Goodell to make Rice’s suspension “indefinite” and to months of recriminations over how the league could not have known about the video as it had claimed. It also raised fundamental questions about whether the NFL cared about domestic violence ­and—­even ­more—­about whether Goodell should keep his job. Reality TV does love a deathwatch.

      Still, notwithstanding the NFL’s ­year-­round ability to be compelling, something was happening to this sport. Football felt less confident and more precarious, at least from the outside. I wanted to immerse myself to a point that exceeded my usual fan’s engagement, beyond the preapproved ­all-­access “experience” shows that bring us inside locker rooms and huddles and sideline confabs. For as ubiquitous as the NFL has made itself, there still remained a great mystery about the league. I had become especially curious about the closed cabal of “insiders” who owned, operated, and performed in the circus. The Rice case laid bare how little I knew about this world in a way I had not appreciated. It exposed a level of vulnerability in something that appeared so invincible. One day, a new season was set to begin, fresh with the promise of new ratings records and revenue horizons; next, this supposedly “existential crisis” hits the sport with the suddenness of a left jab on an elevator.

      “Everything can change so fast in our society, for me or anyone else,’’ Goodell told me in one of the sporadic conversations we had over the last few years. ‘‘Only the paranoid survive’’ is a favorite mantra of his, and a phrase you hear a lot around NFL headquarters. It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another of the corporate clichés preferred by Goodell, someone who preambles many of his sentences with “As I say around the ­office . . .”

      But “only the paranoid survive,” a motto associated with Intel’s Andy Grove, struck me as a telling conceit for the modern NFL. While Grove’s assertion is meant as a call to vigilance and aggressiveness, the NFL’s application of the phrase seemed more in tune with defensiveness and raw nerves. This also became clear to me as soon as I began peeking behind the Shield.

      ‘‘It’s like this thing I say around the office, ‘Believe in better,’’’ Goodell was telling me in January 2016. We were standing on the sidelines at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, before that season’s NFC Championship Game between the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers. Up on a Jumbotron, the Patriots and Broncos were playing in the AFC game with sound turned up to a level that accentuated the crunch of every tackle. Each blow echoed through the stadium, and a startled gasp went up in Charlotte after Patriots receiver Danny Amendola was knocked into next week by a Denver safety. Amendola appeared staggered.

      Goodell kept talking. He is fond of words like “monetize.” He also talks a lot about finding new revenue streams and ‘‘growing the pie.” The league is always ­sharing—­or ­leaking—­its gaudy ­dollar-­signed pie. Goodell said he wants the NFL to achieve $25 billion in gross revenue by 2027 (it stood at $14 billion as of 2017). Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner from 1960 to 1989, who steered it on the trajectory of its exploding popularity and riches, preached that it was a bad look for the league to have financial figures in the news. Goodell’s NFL has no such reticence. Today’s owners have proven again and again how much they crave big numbers; so that’s what their ­commissioner—­their ­employee—­serves up. Since Goodell became the league commissioner in 2006, most of the owners have seen the value of their franchises double (twenty-nine are now among the fifty most valuable sports franchises on the planet, according to Forbes).

      Pie is delicious.

      Yet it also felt like a moment when the beast might be getting fat, when the business and the pageant of the NFL could be overtaking the perfection of the game. Was football teetering on the edge of a darker future? Or was I just being breathless (“teetering,” always a tell), trying to overhype this as a moment of truth and sell it as a showdown between World Domination and Sudden Death? Football is just football, after all; angst is for writers.

      My expedition would kick off with an email from the great Brady himself (“Tom Brady here,” the subject line ­said—­a “yeah and I’m Santa Claus” moment if I’ve ever had one). This was a new and different cara­van for me. I do not normally cover sports and have no history with any of these people. I embedded with the top executives of the sport, got drunk and passed out on Jerry Jones’s bus, attended the league’s committee meetings, parties, and tribal events, interviewed journeyman and superstar players and about half of the owners (sneak conclusion: billionaires are different from you and me). I would get doused by vomit at the draft, sprinkled by confetti at the Super Bowl, cried on by a spurned Raiders booster from Oakland, and hugged by a stricken Steelers fan I met at Heinz Field during a public viewing for the team’s longtime owner, Dan Rooney, who died in April 2017. The woman wore a Troy Polamalu jersey, said a silent prayer, and rubbed a ­Steelers-­issued “Terrible Towel” on Mr. Rooney’s casket.

      NFL evangelists are always couching their product as a gift of escape. Football provides its disciples “a chance to really celebrate and come together and get away from our everyday troubles,” Goodell said in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer before the Super Bowl a few years ago. In Goodell’s telling, life is hard, but Sundays liberate and give solace. Games are confined to about three hours and offer us a thrilling parenthetical escape from our “troubles.”

      ‘‘We offer a respite,’’ the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, told me. ‘‘We are a respite that moves you away from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps.’’ Jones is in many ways the embodiment of today’s NFL: rich, audacious, distracted, shameless, and a veteran of more than a few trials and missteps of his own.

      For me football was a respite from my day job, and from Donald J. Trump, insofar as Trump could be avoided at all.

      In 2013, I wrote a book about another cozy and embattled dominion, Washington, D.C. This Town, it was called. I wanted to capture that world at a moment when it seemed Washington had reached a saturation point of ­self-­congratulation as the rest of the country looked on with venomous fascination. I wanted to portray life inside the debauched seat of the capital at a formative moment. The orgy felt overdue for a reckoning. Populist tension was getting too hot outside the Beltway, СКАЧАТЬ