Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
the Saints, among other toys).
Jones, who entered wearing dark aviator glasses, was nearly chop-blocked by a pair of runaway kids. He was holding a tumbler of something—never just a glass with Jerry, always a tumbler, even if it’s milk, which it rarely is. He loves a “big old time” and can be irresistibly fun, with a big taste for Scotch, a gleam in his icy aqua eyes, and a penchant for circuitous lectures that he will often stumble over but that will still make a strange kind of sense—sometimes.
When I asked Jones why the NFL could hum along despite the perennial crises it faces, Jones launched into something he once heard from a friend who owned a chain of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. He asked his friend how HoJo’s could keep the tastes and flavors of the food consistent from franchise to franchise. The answer: intensity. ‘‘If something is supposed to be cold, make it as cold as hot ice,’’ Jones said. ‘‘If it’s supposed to be hot, have it burn the roof of their mouth. Intensity covers up a lot of frailty in the taste and preparation.’’ Thus, he concluded, the hot intensity and drama of football can obscure the dangers and degeneracy inherent to the sport.
Next down the virtual red carpet was Patriots owner Robert Kraft, strutting through the front entrance in his Nike customized sneakers (“Air Force 1’s”) and silvery hair stuck straight up in the wind. If you achieve a status of “influential owner” around the league, as Mr. Kraft has with his multiple Lombardi trophies, sexy young girlfriends, and perceived closeness with Goodell, you get called by enhanced names, or better yet, initials. Mr. Kraft was merely “Bob Kraft” when he bought the team in 1994, but at some point graduated to “Robert Kraft” and then eventually “RKK,” at least among certain initiated sectors of Foxborough and 345 Park Ave. You know you’re exalted when you achieve initials status. “Brady calls me RKK,” I heard Kraft boast to Adam Schefter when they passed each other in the hallway. If RKK is good enough for Brady—“a fellow Michigan man,” Schefter pointed out—it’s good enough for King Nugget.
Kraft had been making a big show of still being mad at the league over the endless Deflategate saga. He believed Goodell and a group of his bitter rivals are intent on messing with his dynasty, stealing his draft picks, soiling his reputation, and railroading his quarterback. “Jealousy and envy are incurable diseases” had become Kraft’s signature refrain.
Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, trailed several paces behind Kraft in the lobby, as he has for years in the AFC East. He wore a white Jets cap and crooked backpack. Kraft would diagnose Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV with the “incurable disease.” On the day that the league announced its sanctions against the Patriots and Brady, Johnson’s wife, Suzanne, tweeted out a smiley face emoji before deleting it. Even worse was when the Wood Man himself “favorited” a tweet calling for his own general manager at the time (John Idzik) to be fired. Johnson apologized and called the move “inadvertent.”
There is much about the Membership that is “inadvertent,” starting with who gets to join this freakish assembly. They are quite a bunch: old money and new, recovering drug addicts and born-again Christians and Orthodox Jews; sweethearts, criminals, and a fair number of Dirty Old Men. They are tycoons of enlarged ego, delusion, and prostate whose ranks include heir-owners like the Maras, Rooneys, and Hunts, of the Giants, Steelers, and Chiefs, respectively, whose family names conjure league history and muddy fields, sideline fedoras and NFL Films. There is also a truck-stop operator10 whose company admitted to defrauding its customers in a $92 million judicial settlement, a duo of New Jersey real estate developers who were forced to pay $84.5 million in compensatory damages11 because, according to a judge, they “used organized crime–type activities”12 to fleece their business partners, an energy baron who funded an antigay initiative13, a real estate giant married to a Walmart heiress14, tax evaders, etc. One imagines those black felt pictures from the seventies with dogs playing poker around a table. Trails of ex-wives, litigants, estranged children, and fired coaches populate their histories.
Shopping mall developer Edward John “Eddie” DeBartolo Jr., the beloved 49ers owner who won five Super Bowl championships during his twenty-three-year tenure, was suspended by the league for a year and eventually gave up control of the team to his sister after pleading guilty to his role in a gambling fraud scandal in Louisiana. In an ill-fated effort to get a riverboat gambling license, DeBartolo had agreed to pay Governor Edwin Edwards $400,000 in $100 bills. Somehow “Eddie D” managed to avoid prison and was sentenced instead to the pro football Hall of Fame in 2016.
Membership positions come with no term limits, let alone reelection campaigns. “I own this football team,” 49ers CEO Jed York, DeBartolo’s nephew, told a group of reporters after firing his general manager and third coach in three years after the 2016–17 season. “You don’t dismiss owners,” he felt the need to remind everyone. In an otherwise defensive and bumbling performance, this was York’s one indisputable line. Technically, York’s mother owned the team and she could fire him (as Panthers owner Jerry Richardson once made his sons resign). But his larger point was clear: York served at the pleasure of the roost he then ruled, and so did everyone else.
League meetings offer incidental bits of access at an oligarchic theme park. Normally reclusive and fortified figures favor us with happenstance encounters. Niners cochairman John York happened to be standing next to me in the valet parking line; he is a retired cancer research pathologist and brilliantly credentialed to own an NFL team. How? Because he was smart enough to marry Eddie DeBartolo’s sister years before model owner Eddie D became a felon and lost his team. I introduced myself to Mr. York, asked him how the 49ers were looking, and mentioned that I was a reporter, which appeared to stun and terrify him. “We are very excited about our team under Coach Kelly,” he said, referring to the team’s newly hired coach, Chip Kelly. I wished Mr. York luck in the coming season, by the end of which it would be “former coach Chip Kelly.”
AS IT DOES EVERY YEAR, THE LEAGUE KICKED OFF ITS ANNUAL meeting with a welcome party that was open to all branches of the family. There were splendid buffets, a live band, bright renderings of the Shield in various forms, and even a magician for the kids. Guests balanced cocktails and plates of food around a swimming pool. Everyone was there, Roger and the Membership on down to the lowliest league officials. Even Dr. Elliot Pellman was attending, the notorious former Jets team doctor who went on to become the league’s go-to concussion denier for many years. He had chaired the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee despite turning out to be a rheumatologist who was trained in Guadalajara and had limited expertise in heads. As best anyone could tell, Pellman’s chief qualification for the job seemed to be that he was former commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s personal physician.
“Is that Elliot Pellman?” I asked a league executive. I recognized Pellman from the various reports I’d watched and read over the years about the league’s fumbling of its concussion problem. “Yep, he’s still here,” the league official said, head shaking. I suggested that maybe the magician could make Dr. Pellman disappear. The executive laughed, but it turns out the league was already on the case. “He’s retiring,” the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety policy, Jeff Miller, told USA Today the very next day.
My main goal for the reception was to eat as much shellfish as possible and to specifically avoid two people. The first was Tony Wyllie, the antagonistic head of communications for the Washington Redskins. He was mad at me because of a story I had written for the New York Times Magazine about Goodell a few months earlier. Wyllie had arranged a brief interview for me to discuss Goodell with Redskins owner Dan Snyder. It was a session that essentially amounted to Snyder’s telling me about one hundred different ways in fifteen minutes that Goodell “always protects the Shield.” Wyllie monitored our interview (as PR guys do), or “babysat,” as I described Wyllie’s role. Wyllie registered his displeasure to me earlier at being called a “babysitter.”
“We’re done,” Wyllie told me, after also saying that I had no right in the story to mention the issue of the name “Redskins” being offensive to Native Americans. I had indeed mentioned the Redskins name in the story, mostly because Houston Texans owner Bob McNair had weighed in on the issue