Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
Reporters and cameramen positioned themselves to best receive their boilerplate meals. Bengals coach Marvin Lewis vowed to “take each day as it comes,” and Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said running back Le’Veon Bell was recovering nicely from his knee injury, and then-Broncos coach Gary Kubiak said he had no time to savor his team’s Super Bowl win—or, for that matter, the plate of cold breakfast meats placed before him. Life is hard.
Ravens coach John Harbaugh was sitting a few tables away, announcing that he is “passionate about football.” He launched into a defense of the sport. There was a lot of this all week, especially from coaches. You mention concussions enough, and the parents who won’t let their kids play and all the damning media portrayals, and it gets them going.
“Half our time here was spent talking about this issue,” Harbaugh said of concussions, sounding exasperated in response to a question from Peter King about the future of football. “I see a lot of people out there who are pretty passionate about attacking football,” he said. It was time to fight back. He spoke for an empire under siege. “I think it’s about time some people are passionate about defending football. And all of us that know what football’s about should stand up and do that.” King asked Harbaugh what he was running for. He suggested that the Ravens coach be appointed America’s “President of Football.”
NFL coaches naturally make fervent evangelists for the game. But there has always been a flavor of exceptionalism around the sport, too, that suddenly felt outdated. “Presidents of Football” have long pushed the idea that football, and only football, can instill the character traits that are essential to what makes men Men. “Football requires and develops courage, cooperation, loyalty, obedience and self-sacrifice,” the legendary coach Pop Warner himself wrote in his 1927 bible, Football for Coaches and Players. “It develops cool-headedness under stress, it promotes clean living and habits.” Implicit here is that football promotes such virtues to a degree that basketball, soccer, or tennis never could. But it’s also more complicated than it used to be.
THE ONE ESSENTIAL PERFORMANCE AT THE COACHES' BREAKFAST was Mr. Personality himself, Belichick. He had managed to skip out on many of the week’s other functions, such as the annual group coaches’ photo (along with his pal Andy Reid, the Chiefs’ coach, apparently to go golfing). But the breakfast was as close to mandatory as it got for the future Hall of Fame headsetter. The cliffhanger to be resolved: How contemptuous could Belichick make himself? What was the minimum he could do to fulfill his obligation?
Breakfast with Belichick has become its own perverse attraction. He is not just his usual smirking, grunting crank, but something more here—a talking halitosis that you could actually see and (barely) hear. He exuded a kind of personality antimatter with its own gravitational pull.
At the previous year’s league meeting in Arizona, Belichick had shown up twenty minutes late, and his rudeness had triggered a small tantrum by the Daily News’ NFL writer Gary Myers (the brunt of which was felt by the Patriots PR shield Stacey James). Whether related or not, Belichick showed up more or less on time in Boca. He wore a light blue Johns Hopkins lacrosse hoodie and mumbled something at the outset in tribute to the just-retired Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo. “We’re happy to add all the players that we’ve added,” Belichick said about some recent addition to the team. He slurped between words. (“When we’re out there, we’ll see how it goes.”) He smacked his lips. A reporter tried to place an NFL Network microphone in front of Belichick, which inspired his pièce de résistance of the morning and a viral video clip for the ages: Belichick moved the NFL Network mic as far as he could reach and then cleared away a bunch of tape recorders in front of him with his forearms.
Belichick’s valet Berj Najarian, who had been huddled with Schefter against a nearby wall, walked over at one point and placed a cup of icy water in front of the coach to warm him up. Finally, a Patriots beat reporter, Tom E. Curran of Comcast SportsNet New England, managed to get a small rise out of Belichick by asking where the coach’s breakfast rated on his list of favorite things to do. “It’s just part of the exciting week that is the NFL owners’ meeting,” Belichick said in a way that could be described as buoyant for him but deadpan for anyone else. Curran’s Comcast colleague Ray Ratto, a longtime Bay Area sportswriter, observed via Twitter that Belichick could have used his forty minutes more wisely by setting a league employee on fire. “Missed opportunity there,” Ratto lamented.
A few minutes later, Belichick stood up, threw his backpack over his right shoulder, latched on to Berj like a teddy bear, and departed the premises.
July 2014
What to make of Tom Brady?
The Patriots quarterback has been defined by competing narratives for years. Neither is that compelling except in their incompatibility. The first is the familiar against-the-odds construct: Brady as the not-great high school player, up-and-down college quarterback, and 199th pick in the draft who caught stardom out of nowhere. Now over two decades of dominating a league designed to thwart dominance, a second narrative has taken hold: Brady as fairy tale and anti-underdog. He might be the most envied man in America: he dated an actress (Bridget Moynahan, with whom he has a son), married, and had two children with a Brazilian supermodel. His net worth is well into the nine figures and he plays for a team that always wins.
Tom Brokaw, the legendary newsman, tells the story of going through cancer treatments a few years ago and generally feeling like crap. He would, on his daily walks through his Upper East Side neighborhood, pass a bus shelter adorned with Brady’s likeness on an ad poster for UGGs. “Fuck you,” Brokaw would make a point of saying to the poster. “It was less an attack on him and more a catharsis for me,” Brokaw explained, “but Brady was the perfect object.”
Being a sports fan, generally speaking, can require a faith both blind and durable. Being a Boston fan has made this easier, in some ways, with our gaudy prosperity of late (ten rings combined this century from the four Boston/New England teams—and yes, we’re counting). But the birthright is not without its embarrassments. You love your kids and try to be proud. Yet marrying my sports identity to glum, rude, and possibly devious characters like, say, Belichick can get exhausting. (I know, fuck me, Boston fans are tiresome enough without the self-pity routine.)
Brady’s cultivated elegance could also be a bit much. He is “that perfect blend of goofy and handsome that makes you feel simultaneously inadequate and superior,” wrote a car blogger named Matt Posky. Posky was disgusted upon learning that Brady had signed a lucrative endorsement deal with Aston Martin, the British luxury automaker preferred by Bond, James Bond. It is, apparently, a vehicle held most sacred among car bloggers (like this guy Matt Posky), and it was not just any Aston Martin car that Brady was hawking, but a DB11 model that sold for $215,000. Aston Martin’s partnership with Brady would be long-term, according to the company’s press release, and the campaign would emphasize the quarterback’s “affinity for the love of beautiful.”
It went on: “Brady will seek to share visualizations of where he sees beauty in his sporting moments, what he sees as beautiful in life, and what continues to compel him to pursue greatness.”
By contrast, Eli Manning has a deal with Toyota and Aaron Rodgers is a pitchman for Ford.
Even in his younger, underdog days, Brady was always a skewed fit with his townie worshippers. While he managed to exhibit his own kind of sheepish grace within the parochial madhouse of Boston sports, Brady could seem as far away as any athlete I’d ever rooted for. This went beyond the shout-in-the-canyon remove that investing emotionally in a pro athlete will always entail. He was one of those everywhere-but-nowhere people. He would write a celebrity self-help book, promote exotic diets, and get called the NFL’s answer to Gwyneth Paltrow. Who could identify with a man photographed in GQ holding a baby goat? Brady didn’t belong to any world I would ever know. It seemed unlikely I would get close enough