Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich

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СКАЧАТЬ news is good news when you’re in the NFL.’’

      THE NFL IS TOO SELF-SERIOUS TO ACCEPT ANY COMPARISONS with Kim Kardashian or Vince McMahon or Donald Trump. But it’s also obvious that even embarrassing ­episodes—­like ­Deflategate—­can provide helpful “entertainment” that diverts from Existential Issue One in football: concussions. Reports of players leaving the game with mangled brains, or prematurely retiring over safety concerns, or the latest retiree discussing how compromised his mind and body are at a young age, have become boilerplate accompaniments to your weekly betting lines, injury reports, and fantasy stats. At what point would fans of the game become rattled? Lawyers, parents, and the media had taken notice. But based on TV ratings and league revenues, customers to this point had proven immune from any repetitive trauma. Denial is itself a powerful shield.

      At his Super Bowl “State of the League” press conference the month before, Goodell was asked about a spate of youth football players who had died the previous season. “Tragic,” he said, and then touted all that the league is doing to teach safer tackling techniques. “There is risk in life,” Goodell concluded. “There is risk in sitting on the couch.”

      “Roger’s couch remark,” as it became known, did not go over well among the increasingly vocal set of crippled former players and the surviving family members of dead ones. “These men and their families deserve better,” said Tregg Duerson, son of the Bears safety Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in 2011 at age fifty and was later diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease found in scores of deceased players. Duerson spent eleven seasons on the couch.

      Goodell is always touting the league’s virtues as a moral force. ‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ he told me. Football provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community, religious, and family institutions is weakening. ‘‘It unites people,” Goodell continued. “It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’

      League meetings also give ­people—­needy billionaires in this ­case—­a chance to sort of come together. Would they ever choose one another as business partners? Probably not, but that’s the nature of a cartel. You don’t always get to choose. NFL owners are stuck in a vicious marriage, but no one wants a divorce and why would they?

      Really, what signature player of the ­twenty-­first century would not want a piece of the Shield? Put it on TV, and people will watch; stick it on a jersey, they will wear it. The price of television ads during the Super Bowl has increased by more than 75 percent over the last decade.

      If greed is ever a topic among owners, the conversation is mostly rhetorical. Is it worth more ­pie—­maybe another billion or two of dollars in annual revenue for a ­league—­for a franchise (say, the Oakland Raiders) to rip the hearts out of some of the most devout fans in the country to grab a much sweeter deal in a city like Las Vegas? Is it the league’s problem that Vegas is willing to shell out three-quarters of a billion dollars to build a stadium even though its schools are underfunded and its roads are medieval? Takeaway: Rhetorical quandaries are tiresome. And they can cost you money.

      “You guys are cattle and we’re the ranchers,” the late Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm once told Hall of Fame offensive lineman Gene Upshaw during a collective bargaining negotiation. It is an ­oft-­quoted line that encapsulates the whole setup. Players get prodded, milked for all they’re worth, sold off, put out to pasture, and slaughtered. Implicit also here is that the cattle’s time is fleeting, like Not for Long football careers. “And ranchers can always get more cattle” is how Schramm’s quote concludes.

      Likewise, the Patriots can always get another defensive lineman, which is why Nick Fairley, a veteran free agent previously of the Rams, was being whisked through the Boca Resort. Fairley is the rare cattle to be seen at this ranchers’ convention. Bill Belichick, the head coach, will inspect the livestock here along with the rest of the New England brass. (Fairley wound up signing with the Saints.) Upshaw said he had considered writing a memoir about his union ­activities—­joking that its working title was “The Last Plantation.”

       2.

       THE MONKEY’S ASS

      March ­20–­21, 2016

      I arrived at the Boca Resort on a humid Sunday afternoon, a day before the official kickoff to the 2016 meetings. Jerry Jones was the first owner I spotted. He was rounding a corner into the lobby, which set off a brief fight-or-flight commotion in the court of media carnival barkers and nugget seekers. “Nuggets” are vital currency in the NFL’s manic information economy. They are the ­bite-­size, lightweight, drive-by, ­Twitter-­ready items about who is being traded, released, signed, suspended, arrested, diagnosed with dementia, etc. They might as well be gold nuggets, given how well the likes of ESPN’s Adam Schefter are paid for their maniacal mining.

      Normally the brash and rascally King Jerry would be thrilled to preside for a few moments over the Court of Nuggets. But in this case he quickened his gait. He might have been ­gun-­shy after an encounter he had during a previous league meeting shortly after the Cowboys had signed defensive lineman Greg Hardy, the serial batterer of quarterbacks and women. Jones had a bad hip at the time and had taken a wrong turn that brought him face-to-face with about two dozen media hyenas hungry for Greg Hardy nuggets. Jones was in pain and not in a feeding mood. He tried to pivot away but could only hobble and was quickly cornered (few things are more amusing than watching a wounded billionaire gazelle laboring back to safe haven behind a velvet rope). In another world, one in which Jerral Wayne “Jerry” Jones senior was not a multibillionaire and not the most powerful owner in America’s most potent sport, he could have been just another schmuck in a hospital gown with his ass hanging out, making a break for the exits.

      There were not enough places to hide in Boca. It could also be loud. This was a problem because owners need hushed conversation spaces. To reiterate: the Boca venue was suboptimal. Few stigmas are worse in the NFL than a deficient venue. Quality of “venue” represents a kind of arms race among the owners, a marker of their pecking order; and double bonus points if you can get local pols and taxpayers to pony up.

      Jones is a venue god. He built AT&T Stadium, the 110,000-capacity pleasure palace in Arlington, Texas, known as “Jerry’s World,” with its gourmet menus, ­high-­definition video screen spanning between the 20-yard lines, and $1.15 billion price tag. It also houses a massive collection of contemporary art and many, many big photographs of the owner himself all over the stadium (there’s Jerry watching a Cowboys game in 1999 with Nelson ­Mandela—­great statesmen, both, one imprisoned by apartheid and the other by his own need to be closely involved in football decisions). Since being completed in 2009, Jerry’s World was unmatched around the league for its size and opulence, though that mantle will be threatened as soon as the L.A. Rams owner Stan Kroenke completes his gridiron Xanadu in Inglewood, California. This was no fair fight. ­Kroenke’s stadium plans were so grand, Jones had to concede, they clearly “had been sent to us from above.”

      Bringing up the rump end of the stadium parade is Raiders owner Mark Davis, spawn of the team’s outlaw founder, Al Davis. Davis sports a blond version of a Prince Valiant bowl cut and looks every bit the misfit cousin at the Membership’s Thanksgiving dinner. As a practical matter, the Davis family baggage also includes an unfortunate preexisting ­condition—­the worst ‘‘venue’’ in the league. O.co Coliseum, which the Raiders share with the Oakland A’s, exposed Davis to a most lethal contagion within the confederacy: to describe an NFL stadium as being “built for baseball” is like saying it has herpes. Add to that СКАЧАТЬ