Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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       5.

       “BEWARE THE PISSED OFF PRETTY BOY”

      ­October–­November 2014

      I have a favorite old quote about Washington, D.C., from Senator Thomas Gore, a progressive Democrat from Oklahoma who served in the 1930s (and was grandfather of the acerbic writer Gore Vidal). With its architectural grandeur, Senator Gore said, our capital would someday “make wonderful ruins.” I have similar thoughts sometimes when I approach a gleaming ­twenty-­first-­century football stadium. Stadiums constitute the true measure of an NFL owner. Or “stadia,” to use the plural form the league will often deploy when discussing “venues.” The NFL loves anything that evokes ­Rome—­e.g., Roman numerals for Super Bowls, never mind what happened to Rome.

      The vast buildings rise like monuments to a market legitimized as sufficiently Big League to deserve an NFL franchise. And then you imagine these coliseums abandoned one day, as “wonderful ruins” for anyone studying the passions and priorities of a civilization after it falls. This is not a complete fantasy in certain “markets”: the Houston Astrodome, billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1965, now sits forsaken in the shadow of the Houston Texans’ lustrous NRG Stadium; Detroit’s 80,­000-­seat Silverdome opened in 1975, was deserted after it closed in 2006, and has suffered a spectacular public decay ever since (a YouTube video of the trashed fossil in 2014 is a haunting thing to behold).

      As I pursued Brady, I made my first ever trip to Gillette Stadium, the Patriots’ home since 2002. In week five of the 2014 season, I flew to Boston from D.C. and drove south to Foxborough to see the Patriots host the unbeaten Cincinnati Bengals (4–0) in a Sunday Night Football game. Patriot Place, as the larger complex is called, rises along a could-be-­anywhere blotch of car dealerships, billboards, and ­fast-­food franchises on Route 1 between Boston and Providence. No one lives at Patriot Place.

      Robert Kraft described Gillette to me as a “diversified” stadium, meaning that it offers fans a diversified menu of ways (shopping, dining, game tickets) to be separated from their money. Because football is such a perfect TV sport, in both production and ratings, teams must offer extracurricular attractions to entice ticket buyers; only 7 percent of NFL fans have ever attended a game live.

      People outside New England who experience Foxborough as a recurring set of the NFL TV studio might believe the town is a quaint village of greens, Revolutionary War monuments, and assorted Ye Olde tropes. Returning from commercial breaks, networks reinforce this Disneyfied version of New England with stock shots of a steeple, a cider mill, maybe a landmark in Boston, which is a ­forty-­minute drive away. A huge replica of a lighthouse looms over the north end zone, though you’re as likely to see a real lighthouse in inland Foxborough as you are an actual Minuteman strolling through Harvard Square. In real life, Gillette Stadium is a concrete football Oz that reeks of merchandise, corporate sponsorships, and winning. Fans of the team have witnessed an astounding run of fifteen consecutive ­ten-­win seasons by the Patriots; the stadium has sold out every game since Kraft bought the team in 1994, including ­pre- and postseason games. I’d still much rather watch on TV.

      I arrived a few days before the game and paid a visit to Guerrero in his TB12 lair at Patriots Place. Guerrero, who was ­forty-­nine at the time, is a practicing Mormon of Argentine descent with a master’s degree in Chinese medicine from a college in Los Angeles that is no longer in business. His philosophy is built on three components, he told me: “We work on staying physically fit, emotionally stable, and spiritually sound.” Guerrero shared with me a mantra that he and Brady invoke a lot: “Where your concentration goes, your energy flows, and that’s what grows.”

      Brady is always telling his teammates to see Guerrero. It can be a tricky part to play with teammates. The Patriots have their own training, conditioning, and medical program. When I asked Guerrero if the conventional philosophies that govern training and treatment in the NFL ever clash with what he is doing, he said, “Most of the time.” I later put the same question to the Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft. “It doesn’t come without its challenges,” Kraft replied. “It’s not a straight line.”

      Brady barely hides his contempt for many of football’s traditional training methods. He told me about one of his teammates, an offensive lineman hampered all year by a bad shoulder. The guy’s shoulder was “on fire,” Brady said, and he was told to strengthen the area. Brady winces. “I’m, like, the guy presses seven hundred pounds and you need to make him stronger? The guy can lift a fucking car.” Brady’s tone can edge ­toward proselytizing.

      “The reality is,” Brady said, “if you want to live a better life, and you want to live well, you’re probably gonna have to take some different steps.” He shares with me a word he learned in Sanskrit, mudita. “It’s, like, fulfillment in seeing other people fulfilled,” Brady says.

      The Patriots were looking anything but fulfilled on the field. They began the 2014 season ­2–­2 СКАЧАТЬ