Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
listing all the accomplishments (the Super Bowls, conference championship games, the consecutive sellouts). He does again: “It’s nice to step back a little bit and contemplate,” he said. But what RKK really wanted to say is that he is still angry over Deflategate. It’s important for New England fans to hear that, because they, too, are still angry and probably will be even if Brady wins another ten Super Bowls.
“I want our fans to know that I empathize with the way they feel,” Kraft said. (Robert is a mogul of empathy kill!) Not only that, but he has written a letter—a letter!—requesting that the commissioner return the first- and fourth-round draft picks he had docked the Pats over Brady’s alleged and horrible crimes. Kraft said the league was derelict in not considering the Ideal Gas Law when determining the team’s guilt or innocence (the Ideal Gas Law, as Joey from Quincy and most the rest of Pats Nation could explain much better than me, is an old physics rule explaining why a football might naturally lose air pressure in cold weather without the intervention of, say, a needle administered by a locker room attendant whose nickname is “The Deflator”). You can be certain that Mr. Kraft’s letter was a succinct biting missive written in his own hand, perhaps on stationery from the Ritz Paris.
This flaccid protest was Kraft’s attempt to pander to New England fans while not losing his seat at the Membership Big Boy table or jeopardizing his still-close relationship with Goodell. He tries to have it both ways, which elicits eye-rolls from owners and league officials who are on to him. They call him “Krafty” (behind his back) and “needy Bob Kraft” (longtime Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy).
One nugget-hungry pest in Boca asked Kraft the requisite question about concussions. He parried it with the requisite sound bites about how “the game has never been safer” and how he used to play football himself (“lightweight” football at Columbia, gives him a certain authority). Another reporter pressed him to assess the overall performance of Goodell, who had just completed his tenth season as commissioner. “Putting personal situations aside,” Kraft straddled, “I think he’s done a very good job.”
Translation: forgiveness comes easier when you’re making reams of cash.
The Patriots’ longtime PR man Stacey James halted the session with a “thanks guys” in time for me to catch Woody Johnson doing a similar gaggle in a nearby conference room. Johnson does not often speak publicly. This is not atypical for hapless franchise bosses who oversee periodic coach and GM shake-ups in big media markets like Woody and the New York J-E-T-S, JETS JETS JETS! Johnson also has an amusing gift for knucklehead statements, which makes him a recurring character on Shit the Membership Says (a sitcom I plan to develop someday). My favorite Woody wisdom occurred after Schefter had produced a nugget quoting an anonymous Jets assistant coach critical of quarterback Christian Hackenberg. The Jets rookie, according to the 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