Читать книгу Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times - Mark Leibovich, Mark Leibovich - Страница 10
ОглавлениеMarch 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 Benson, then eighty-eight, was wheeled through the front entrance with a big grin on his face belying the battles he has fought with the league over the years (and more recently with his children in court over control of 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 in a particularly striking fashion. McNair told me he was not offended by the name “Redskins” and explained that he had grown up in North Carolina around many Cherokee Indians. ‘‘Everybody respected their courage,’’ McNair said of the Cherokees. ‘‘They might not have respected the way they held their whiskey, but . . .’’ McNair laughed.
This not surprisingly drew criticism from offended Native American groups, anti–Redskins name protesters, and people who can appreciate the irony of headlines like this one, on Deadspin: nfl assures
fans there’s no tolerance for racial slurs at redskins games. But I had been told that McNair was mad since the “Redskins” name was not the designated topic of our interview (the unquestioned greatness of Roger Goodell was said designated topic). As for the commissioner, I had asked the Texans owner whether he was concerned about the volume of criticism Goodell had been receiving. With success comes scrutiny, was how McNair had replied, although once again he said it in a much more excellent way. “It’s like the old saying,’’ McNair said. ‘‘The higher up the palm tree the monkey climbs, the more of his ass is exposed.’’ McNair laughed. If the commish objected to being compared with a monkey’s ass by one of his bosses, he had about 40 million reasons this year to take it like a man.
MCNAIR, THEN SEVENTY-NINE, HAS A BALD OVAL HEAD AND A slight resemblance to Mr. Clean. I saw him standing with his wife at the reception looking clean in a pressed white suit. I surveyed the monkey’s ass in full. Everyone was dressed for leisure: Kraft in a too-unbuttoned dress shirt and his customized Nikes; Jones in a powder-blue blazer, no tie, and a glass (sorry, tumbler) of something; Ravens chief Steve Bisciotti in beautifully pressed jeans, white shirt with an open collar, and loafers without socks.
49ers coach Chip Kelly elbowed his way up next to me at the paella table. He had been talking to Rex Ryan, who was then coaching the Bills and whom I barely recognized after he had lost considerable weight following a lap band procedure in 2010 (Kelly might consider this). I had, for the record, never seen so much paella in my life. The league does know how to feed itself.
After a few minutes, I gravitated to a mountain of lobster meat, crab, and shrimp. And also to Woody Johnson. I was eager to discuss politics with the Wood Man given his longtime involvement with the Republican Party. He had been the national finance chairman of Jeb Bush’s ill-fated presidential campaign until it had been officially euthanized a few weeks earlier. Trump had taunted Johnson via a tweet, saying, “If Woody would’ve been w/ me, he would’ve been in the playoffs, at least!” The Jets owner was now slowly warming to Trump.
He gushed to me about how brilliant “build a wall” was as Trump’s signature theme. The phrase sent a simple, elegant message of what he stood for and what his campaign was about. Johnson was hopeful that Trump could act in a more restrained and presidential manner going forward—hopeful enough that Johnson would eventually raise nearly $25 million for the future president, much of it from fellow NFL owners.15
ESPN’s Herm Edwards, the former Eagles defensive back and Jets head coach, came over to say hello to Johnson. “Love you, man,” the owner said, greeting his former coach. Johnson had also professed his “love” for Herm following the 2005 season exactly six weeks before “releasing him from his contract” under mysterious circumstances. I excused myself from this discussion, walked about ten feet, and found myself face-to-face with Goodell. “Good to see you,” Goodell said to me, and I reminded him I had interviewed him two months earlier for a story he claimed not to read. Suddenly there was a loud pop. I turned my head to see that a kid’s balloon had burst and its poor owner had burst into tears. By the time I turned back around the commissioner was gone, escaping behind a wall of owners.
The highlight of the evening came about a half hour later. Cynthia Hogan, then the league’s head of public policy and government affairs, walked over and introduced me to Jane Skinner Goodell, Roger’s wife. Her Majesty is a former Fox News anchor and the daughter of Samuel Skinner, a former transportation secretary and White House chief of staff under George H. W. Bush. I felt immediately at ease with Mrs. Goodell, though it might have been the booze. I asked her if she could help get the Pats’ stolen draft picks back after the Deflategate travesty. She chuckled, and then I asked her how many Shields Roger insisted they display around their estate in Bronxville, New York. “Only one,” she said evenly. “It’s tattooed on his chest.” I had heard rumors that Mrs. Goodell had an actual sense of humor, despite her husband’s being the enemy of lightness in any form. This confirmed it. She had a friend in me for life at that point.
“It doesn’t sound sexy,” Mrs. Goodell elaborated on her husband’s Shield tattoo. “But there are times . . .” Her voice trailed off and everyone who was listening laughed. But then she appeared to become nervous. “Okay, the tattoo on the chest is off the record,” she insisted to me. No way, I replied, and so the Queen of the Shield doubled down: “I didn’t say anything about the tattoo on his ass,” she said.
