Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
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.”
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 the rowdy occupants of the so-called Black Hole, a hybrid of silver-and-black face-painted biker-Goth–Gangsta Rap–Heavy Metal costumes to honor the marauder identity of Raider Nation, and you have one terrifying
assembly. If NFL teams and their home fields are properties on a Monopoly board, think of AT&T Stadium as Boardwalk—and O.co Coliseum as jail.
Davis is fully aware of his runt-of-the-litter standing. His fellow owners find him amiable, though they treat him like their pet rock. But Davis also knows that to own an NFL team is akin to holding a precious lottery ticket. ‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis told me. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’ Yes he does. And what makes Davis a really Big Man in Boca is that he was, at that point, looking to move his team the hell out of Oakland. He was a free agent and ready to roam—the Raiders were “in play.” Davis might frequent Hooters for its all-you-can-eat-wings specials and wear a fanny pack. But don’t for a second think he is not royalty in Pigskin America. Davis moved coolly through the lobby in a black and white pin-striped suit, taking questions about his plans.
This was a few months after Davis’s fellow owners, in late 2015, had thwarted his attempt to move the Raiders to a new stadium in Los Angeles. The Membership preferred that the St. Louis Rams and eventually the San Diego Chargers go there instead. The league had multiple concerns about the Raiders in L.A., not least of which was making Davis the face of the NFL in the country’s second-biggest market. Cue parable: “You get your butt kicked, you get off the ground, you move forward,” Davis went on. “That’s what you do in life. And you learn that in this business on Sundays.”
Football never lacks for parables. Keep moving the ball down the field. Mind your blocking and tackling. Run to Daylight (a gridiron philosophy immortalized by Vince Lombardi). For Davis daylight represented anywhere but Oakland. Las Vegas was very much on the radar, he said. Putting an NFL team in the gambling capital of the world held a certain danger and allure, like the Raiders themselves. In general, there will be no shortage of civic suitors waving their thongs in the faces of NFL owners stuck in bad stadium marriages. (James Carville’s line about Bill Clinton’s extramarital accusers kept jumping to mind: “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park and you never know what you’ll find.”)
“St. Louis, as you may have noticed, doesn’t have a team,” a reporter from the just-abandoned home of the Rams was saying to Davis in Boca. “St. Louis would love to have the Raiders,” the reporter persisted to Davis, sounding more and more desperate.
“Why aren’t you interested in St. Louis?”
Davis said he understood the man’s anguish. He assumed a tone of empathy as he let the man down in gentle buzzwords: “The Raider brand is a different brand that St. Louis would not maximize,” he explained.
“Would Las Vegas maximize the Raider brand?” another reporter asked.
“I think the Raiders would maximize Las Vegas.” The moving gallery behind Davis laughed, except the intrepid St. Louis reporter.
“St. Louis doesn’t have enough of a Raiders image?” he said, a little sadly. “It has beautiful land, a nice stadium.”
“I don’t feel it in my heart,” Davis said. “Sorry, man.”
THE REST OF THE MEMBERSHIP ROLLED INTO THE RESORT BY Town Car and wheelchair. By league convention, they must always be referred to as “Mr. So-and-So,” befitting their status and genders (among the rare female members of the Membership is a widow, the Detroit Lions’ then-ninety-year-old Martha Firestone Ford, wife of the team’s late owner William Clay Ford; Virginia McCaskey, the then-ninety-three-year-old “Corporate Secretary” of the Bears, is the eldest daughter of the team’s late founder, coach, and owner, George Halas). The first batch of arrivals resembled one of those reunions of ancient World War II squadrons, minus the flags and applause. New Orleans Saints owner Tom