Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
level of vulnerability in something that appeared so invincible. One day, a new season was set to begin, fresh with the promise of new ratings records and revenue horizons; next, this supposedly “existential crisis” hits the sport with the suddenness of a left jab on an elevator.
“Everything can change so fast in our society, for me or anyone else,’’ Goodell told me in one of the sporadic conversations we had over the last few years. ‘‘Only the paranoid survive’’ is a favorite mantra of his, and a phrase you hear a lot around NFL headquarters. It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another of the corporate clichés preferred by Goodell, someone who preambles many of his sentences with “As I say around the office . . .”
But “only the paranoid survive,” a motto associated with Intel’s Andy Grove, struck me as a telling conceit for the modern NFL. While Grove’s assertion is meant as a call to vigilance and aggressiveness, the NFL’s application of the phrase seemed more in tune with defensiveness and raw nerves. This also became clear to me as soon as I began peeking behind the Shield.
‘‘It’s like this thing I say around the office, ‘Believe in better,’’’ Goodell was telling me in January 2016. We were standing on the sidelines at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, before that season’s NFC Championship Game between the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers. Up on a Jumbotron, the Patriots and Broncos were playing in the AFC game with sound turned up to a level that accentuated the crunch of every tackle. Each blow echoed through the stadium, and a startled gasp went up in Charlotte after Patriots receiver Danny Amendola was knocked into next week by a Denver safety. Amendola appeared staggered.
Goodell kept talking. He is fond of words like “monetize.” He also talks a lot about finding new revenue streams and ‘‘growing the pie.” The league is always sharing—or leaking—its gaudy dollar-signed pie. Goodell said he wants the NFL to achieve $25 billion in gross revenue by 2027 (it stood at $14 billion as of 2017). Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner from 1960 to 1989, who steered it on the trajectory of its exploding popularity and riches, preached that it was a bad look for the league to have financial figures in the news. Goodell’s NFL has no such reticence. Today’s owners have proven again and again how much they crave big numbers; so that’s what their commissioner—their employee—serves up. Since Goodell became the league commissioner in 2006, most of the owners have seen the value of their franchises double (twenty-nine are now among the fifty most valuable sports franchises on the planet, according to Forbes).
Pie is delicious.
Yet it also felt like a moment when the beast might be getting fat, when the business and the pageant of the NFL could be overtaking the perfection of the game. Was football teetering on the edge of a darker future? Or was I just being breathless (“teetering,” always a tell), trying to overhype this as a moment of truth and sell it as a showdown between World Domination and Sudden Death? Football is just football, after all; angst is for writers.
My expedition would kick off with an email from the great Brady himself (“Tom Brady here,” the subject line said—a “yeah and I’m Santa Claus” moment if I’ve ever had one). This was a new and different caravan for me. I do not normally cover sports and have no history with any of these people. I embedded with the top executives of the sport, got drunk and passed out on Jerry Jones’s bus, attended the league’s committee meetings, parties, and tribal events, interviewed journeyman and superstar players and about half of the owners (sneak conclusion: billionaires are different from you and me). I would get doused by vomit at the draft, sprinkled by confetti at the Super Bowl, cried on by a spurned Raiders booster from Oakland, and hugged by a stricken Steelers fan I met at Heinz Field during a public viewing for the team’s longtime owner, Dan Rooney, who died in April 2017. The woman wore a Troy Polamalu jersey, said a silent prayer, and rubbed a Steelers-issued “Terrible Towel” on Mr. Rooney’s casket.
NFL evangelists are always couching their product as a gift of escape. Football provides its disciples “a chance to really celebrate and come together and get away from our everyday troubles,” Goodell said in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer before the Super Bowl a few years ago. In Goodell’s telling, life is hard, but Sundays liberate and give solace. Games are confined to about three hours and offer us a thrilling parenthetical escape from our “troubles.”
‘‘We offer a respite,’’ the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, told me. ‘‘We are a respite that moves you away from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps.’’ Jones is in many ways the embodiment of today’s NFL: rich, audacious, distracted, shameless, and a veteran of more than a few trials and missteps of his own.
For me football was a respite from my day job, and from Donald J. Trump, insofar as Trump could be avoided at all.
In 2013, I wrote a book about another cozy and embattled dominion, Washington, D.C. This Town, it was called. I wanted to capture that world at a moment when it seemed Washington had reached a saturation point of self-congratulation as the rest of the country looked on with venomous fascination. I wanted to portray life inside the debauched seat of the capital at a formative moment. The orgy felt overdue for a reckoning. Populist tension was getting too hot outside the Beltway, and conditions seemed primed for an invading agent. I was as shocked as anyone by Trump’s election, but not that the puffed-up world of D.C. would ignite a counterforce that could blow up politics as we knew it.
I wanted to do something similar with the NFL: to take a fuller anthropological measure of an empire that seems impossible to imagine America without, and yet whose status quo feels unsustainable.
To much of the American heartland, in football hotbeds like Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Texas, the game represents a way of life under attack. Fans, coaches, and many players resent the boutique coastal sensibilities that they believe exaggerate the risks of brain injuries. Football’s biggest critics, they say, never played the game or felt the passion of a Friday Night Lights town. I became conscious of this disconnect as someone residing in a Northeast media bubble that so badly missed where the country was headed during the 2016 election.
We are products of the tribes we inhabit and our groupthink assumptions. As sports fans, we self-select parochial enclaves. Every Pats fan I know is certain that Goodell royally screwed our Greatest Quarterback Evah in Deflategate. Then there’s the 90 percent of the rest of the country that roots for other teams and whose worldviews skew accordingly. Ravens fans held rallies in support of Ray Rice postelevator and still could be seen wearing Rice’s #27 jersey all over Maryland. This is your brain on football.
Jerry Jones described the beauty of the NFL to me as a weekly Coliseum clash in which representatives from my town and your town met up. ‘‘And we’ll just have a big old time, being relevant to one another,’’ Jones told me. ‘‘Relevant’’ is a term you hear a lot around the league. It is a curiously timid concept given the financial and cultural dynasty the NFL has maintained for five decades (were the Beatles “relevant” to rock ’n’ roll?). Why mention relevance? It goes to the insecurity, maybe, or paranoia at the thought that some disruption could come along as easily as Trump did, descending from an escalator and dragging norms down with him.
The NFL is a norm. It is also a swamp. You learn that soon enough, a roiled and interconnected habitat. Everyone up and down can be a part of the same Big Game.
Another thing I have learned writing about Washington: if you’re well positioned, the swamp is a warm bath. I keep thinking, for some reason, of a story told by Leigh Steinberg, the once-high-flying agent who represented the league’s elite players for about twenty-five years before plummeting into an abyss of lawsuits, bankruptcy, addiction, etc. Back when he was still a “Super Agent” in the 1990s, Steinberg negotiated a contract extension for Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. To celebrate, he and Robert Kraft repaired to the owner’s home on Cape Cod for a special champagne toast—together in Mr. Kraft’s hot tub. “I can’t think of another owner in the NFL I would have rather shared a hot tub with,”6 Steinberg wrote warmly in his memoir. This, too, is football.