Читать книгу Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times - Mark Leibovich, Mark Leibovich - Страница 11
ОглавлениеNo less of a genius than Bill Belichick appeared to be lost. I watched him and ESPN’s Trey Wingo passing each other twice down the same hallway. They then pivoted and changed directions and passed each other again. Belichick was wearing flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a trademark gray hoodie with big sweat blotches on the back. He also wore his trademark “I hate this fucking league” scowl, a few notches more grim than his usual default scowl.
This aloofness goes well beyond Belichick’s well-established commitment to “ignoring the noise.” “Ignore the noise” is one of the many anodyne phrases that get elevated to branded merchandise by the Patriots because it happened to emanate from the tongues of Mr. Kraft or Coach Fucking Genius (“one of the most active organizations in sports as far as trademarking phrases goes,” ESPN reported. When 345 Park is involved, Belichick has been known to ratchet his contempt to Hall of Fame levels. A few minutes after the Patriots defeated the Seahawks in Super Bowl 49, an NFL flunky assigned to the Patriots coach mentioned a few “league things,” like interviews and posing for photos, that were expected of the winning coach. “Fuck the league,” Belichick said at this moment of pinnacle triumph. They should trademark that, too, if they haven’t already.
The closer one works to a football field, the less use one would have for a league meeting. Conversely, these are crunch-time events for the parasites, support staff, and media eavesdroppers who can get a great deal done here. In the lobby I encountered the perma-tanned Drew Rosenhaus, who pimps himself as “the NFL’s Most Ruthless Agent.” Rosenhaus stood a few feet away from the NFL’s leading media busybody, ESPN’s Schefter.
These league powwows are like Adam’s bar mitzvah. He knows everyone here. He waves to passing GMs, coaches, and agents in the lobby, holds a phone to his left ear and checks a text on another in his right hand. This is the population that makes up the “per sources” that Schefter cites whenever he tweets out a nugget to his seven million followers. Schefter is the prototype of a sports media subspecies that has gained cachet: the NFL Insider.
“Dannon goes with Cowboys QB Dak Prescott after dropping Cam Newton, per source,” Schefter tweeted after the Panthers’ quarterback went off on a sexist riff at a press conference, costing him endorsements. Schefter did not specify whether his scoop came per football or yogurt sources. But take it to the bank (an insider catchphrase) the man has sources; or even more than sources, he has “relationships,” as Schefter described them to me. “There are some that are friends,” he said. Schefter mentioned that a head coach had invited him to his son’s wedding last summer. “My friends in the sport, they call me for advice, ask what I think,” Schefter told me.
But, I asked, isn’t the notion of “friend” a bit fraught in the journalism business? Maybe, but the nugget racket is its own distinct subset. The Schefters of the space do not play for the Pulitzer Prizes (the eight-part series and textured storytelling). He was named “Most Influential Tweeter in New York” by New York magazine is more like it.
Insiders have their own reward system and play by their own rules. I asked Schefter what would happen if he had to report a critical item about one of his “friends” in the business. His tone became slightly defensive. “Hold on,” Schefter said. “How often am I writing a critical thing? That’s not what I do. My job is trafficking information—who’s hired, fired, traded, extended.”
Nuggets!
Nuggets aren’t “news” necessarily, in the same way that Chicken McNuggets aren’t really food. But they have become pleasing, even addictive, components of the fan diet nonetheless. When I was growing up, NFL transactions—like those from the other major leagues—were mostly rendered in agate type in the back of the sports pages. That’s where one would learn, for instance, that the NFL fined Steelers safety Mike Mitchell $48,620 for his late hit on Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith, or that the Redskins were signing kicker Nick Rose or that former 49ers linebacker NaVorro Bowman had struck a one-year deal with the Raiders. These items were packaged as the afterthoughts they were. Even among hard-core fans, the privilege of learning that the Colts had placed running back Robert Turbin (elbow) on injured reserve could wait until the morning. These followers did not have fantasy moves pending—because fantasy football did not exist, and neither did the Internet and neither did Adam Schefter in his multiplatform embodiment.
There is no great Big Bang theory to explain how yesterday’s agate type became the nugget cosmos that Schefty rules. Or, if there is, he isn’t pondering cosmic questions like that. I once asked Schefter whether it bothered him that the half-life of his art form—the nugget—lasted roughly as long as a single dose of Ritalin. “Everything’s fleeting,” Schefter said, shrugging. He checked his phone as if it were an involuntary brain function, like breathing.
Schefter would be loath to waste a second before discharging some morsel of “breaking news,” just as his customers would be loath to learn of a transaction one second later than they had to. With his always-refilling hoard of data snacks, Adam feeds a dynamic market of incremental news in which he is also the chief broker and disseminator.
Schefter is coiffed, suited, and perpetually made up. He cultivates a harried bearing, as if carrying the weight of each follower’s information needs. Increasingly, he is feeding their addiction to fantasy leagues. “There’s been a shift over time,” said Schefter, who joined ESPN in 2009 after five years at the NFL Network and more than fifteen years covering the Broncos for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. “I am rarely asked how a team is going to do, and I am regularly asked whether I should start this player or that player, draft this player, who’s a sleeper, who’s a breakout guy.” Schefter is, to paraphrase Hair Club for Men president Sy Sperling, not only the Nugget Club for Men president but also a client. He is a devout fantasy owner in his own right. His team is called “Per Sources.”
Schefter’s full-on life commitment to the hunt for nuggets is his brand animator. He enjoys the fact of his one-dimensional existence—no hobbies, no time for anything besides job, family, and venti soy chai lattes. He sleeps five fitful hours a night (“in bursts, never continuously”) and tries to get a date night in with his wife on weekends. He works out Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and never without his phone. A driver takes him the two-to-three-hour distance between ESPN’s Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters and his home on Long Island, which allows Schefter to work en route or maybe to steal an extra burst of shut-eye. “I regret to say I am not the most well-rounded individual,” he told me. He barely writes anymore beyond firing off a few lines via Twitter and TV. And that’s fine. “I’m a hit man,” he said. “I hit a story, bounce to the next one.” Schefter no longer ventures into locker rooms and attends just one game a year (the Super Bowl). He engages “per sources” almost entirely by phone and text message. This makes these league gatherings a rare opportunity to lay eyes per them.
Observing Schefter on his manic routine, I was left to wonder: would there be a day when this fully customized insider will be replaced by some Siri- or Alexa-like oracle? Maybe named “Nuggetia”? (“Nuggetia, is Adrian Peterson too injured to start on Sunday?”)
But then you see Schefter working his sources/relationships/friends, and you sense something that approximates human warmth. There is also something earnest, even winning, about how transactional his interactions are. When I interviewed Schefter, he won me over by dismissing my small-talk efforts at the outset. “Okay, you don’t have to warm me up, time is of a premium, I got it,” Schefter said, directing me to turn on my tape recorder. “I’m going to give you whatever I can. I don’t want to waste your time.” By that, Schefter meant he did not want to waste his own time, which is almost always better spent hunting his Big Game—trophy nuggets.
On the sidelines before Super Bowl 51, Schefter was actually seen hugging Bill Belichick. This would earn him a personal foul—15 yards—from certain journalism referees. But damn, you kind of marvel. No one hugs Bill Belichick, certainly not reporters. Schefter should go into the Hall of Fame for that alone.
In Boca, I watched Schefter huddle with Berj Najarian, Belichick’s longtime consigliere—or director of football/head coach administrator (former Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe once had a dozen roses sent to Najarian on Secretary’s Day16). Berj is a jittery presence generally, but particularly so whenever Belichick is not around, like a St. Bernard displaced from his master. He is just the kind of functionary whose cock-blocking and secret-keeping powers make him an essential, even feared figure inside the league. “How many people talk about the consigliere?” the retired Patriots linebacker and ESPN analyst Tedy Bruschi said by way of refusing to speak about Najarian when Bruschi was approached on the subject by the New York Times. Schefter talks to the consigliere, which is all the more impressive. It makes Berj a solid gold source/relationship/friend. Quiet chuckles emanated from the Najarian and Schefter powwow, a sense of a mutual comfort being taken.
Well-barbered ESPN insider Sal Paolantonio stood a few feet away from the duo, also yapping into his phone. “That tanned NFL guy from ESPN” is how an older gentleman in a Chicago Cubs cap described Paolantonio to his wife as they passed by the pack of media busybodies. Paolantonio has a long face and sports suede shoes and a pair of Rick Perry–vintage glasses that make him look cerebral when reporting the latest on whether quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will return to the Jets. Like many of his Hair Club for Nuggets cohorts, “Sal Pal,” as he is known, is a former print guy. He covered the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1990s. But when you see him working insider quorums such as this, Sal Pal brings the strut of someone who has fully “graduated” to TV “personality,” at least tripling or quadrupling his salary along the way. His earpiece might as well be made of gold. “I don’t want this to sound the wrong way,” he told me, “but I feel like I was born to do this.”
Also reporting for nugget duty was another NFL insider, ESPN’s John Clayton, who might have been my personal favorite. Slight and unassuming, Clayton looks like a parakeet with glasses, or maybe a math teacher. But he is also a machine, and one of the small victories of my career was to persuade my bosses at the Times Magazine to assign a Q and A with Clayton on the eve of the 2013 season. (First question: “You just covered twelve different team practices in the last eleven days. What did you dream about being when you grew up?”)
After I summoned the nerve to introduce myself, Clayton confirmed a previous nugget I had extracted from Sports Illustrated’s NFL kingfish Peter King: that a woman wearing an i love john clayton T-shirt had traveled to Indianapolis during the NFL Scouting Combine to track Clayton down and announce herself to him as a John Clayton groupie. “Her name was Candy,” Clayton told me (of course it was). “The whole groupie thing is definitely a little bit creepy,” Clayton added. It’s safe to say that Clayton, who would be let go by ESPN a year later, could still walk through any airport in the United States and get hit up for more autographs and photos than the vast majority of NFL players, U.S. senators, and Nobel Prize winners.
Our quadrant of the lobby had by now also come to include Sports Illustrated’s King and Profootballtalk.com’s Mike Florio. It made for quite the impressive cluster of NFL media yentas from the Nugget Industrial Complex. If God forbid a bomb went off in here and wiped everyone out, we would suffer an immediate nugget famine, necessitating an emergency airlift to fantasy players. Seeing all of them clustered, waiting to do their “stand-ups”—or “hits”—my mind jumped to the ESPN ad tagline “We Are Men Wearing Makeup Talking About Sports.” That is indeed what they are, but it misses how dead serious their rat race is.
Nugget dealers run in a pack, and most do their best to be classy about giving shout-outs where due. (“Bengals Rey Maualuga checking into Betty Ford later this month, according to Adam Schefter,” praised Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “Good Nugget.” Credit for nugget recognition in this particular case: Deadspin’s Drew Magary.) But some do not give proper shout-outs, which can be a sore spot and invite pariah status in the academy. Don’t get Schefter started, for instance, on his former employer, NFL Network, and how derelict they can be about giving props. Actually, I did get him started. He was being driven in to work one morning during the season and listening to some NFL show on Sirius Satellite Radio. “They’re saying [Bengals tight end] Tyler Eifert is going to have back surgery and be out four to six months. I’m like, ‘Really, where did you get that from?’ Nothing about ESPN. Nothing! Nothing. If I ever did that to somebody, what is done regularly to ESPN, I would be called on it every time.” Not cool!
No doubt, things can get heated inside the kettle of nuggets. Florio, of ProFootballTalk (PFT) and NBC, has developed a devoted following for his aggressive and increasingly combative tone. Several team and league officials told me they check ProFootballTalk—and Florio’s Twitter feed—first thing in the morning and several times a day. He can be refreshingly edgy toward subjects and competitors alike—though not everyone finds him refreshing. “He’s not a journalist,” ESPN nugget-monger Chris Mortensen said dismissively to me about Florio. “He’s really not a good person.”
Florio has even been accused of being (gasp) unclassy! After the 2018 Super Bowl, Florio went out on a lonely limb to report that Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels was having second thoughts about becoming the next coach of the Colts—though several outlets had reported his hiring as a done deal. When Schefter reported that McDaniels would be staying in New England after all, Florio made a point of tweeting thus: “Attention everyone who assumed I was making it all up: SUCK IT.”
FOR AS FOCUSED AS THEY ARE ON THEIR PHONES AND NEXT HITS and receiving their just shout-outs, nugget hunters have a sixth sense whenever Big Game enters their perimeter: a head coach or chatty owner, perhaps, or the occasional Moby-Dick himself. As Goodell moved through the summit grounds like a traveling sheikh, a siren might as well have sounded in Insider Village, such was the state of high alert. No one would expect the commissioner to actually feed anybody anything, but still, witness must be borne to the ruddy-faced emperor. The son of the late Republican senator of New York Charles Goodell, the commissioner’s politician genes are evident. He is a most prodigious slapper of backs, knower of names, gladder of hands, and toucher of bases. He moved among his constituents in a former jock’s ballet of bro hugs and two-handed handgrips and shoulder squeezes punctuated with backslaps. He received guests, laughing easily, maybe for real, or maybe not.
“Good to see you, Coach,” Goodell called out to Carolina Panthers headman Ron Rivera in a central patio. Goodell’s orange hair looks especially bright and shiny in the sunlit room, as does the Creamsicle hue of his face. “Great season this year,” Goodell tells Coach Rivera. Their handshake flowers into a hug. Goodell then sees the Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, one of the thirty-two most important bases he has to touch, walking in his direction. He stops and has a word. The commissioner nods and is listening, quite clearly.
This is Roger’s element. He looks freshly worked out. It would please him very much to hear me say that. He works out a great deal. And he loves to talk about how he works out a lot (SoulCycle, Pilates), and also mention exactly for how long he worked out that day. Goodell likes to trash-talk colleagues who don’t get to the gym at the early hour he does. “Good afternoon,” he will taunt them as they straggle in before 7 a.m. He runs an annual 40-yard dash in his work clothes, following up on a gimmick that NFL Network’s Rich Eisen performs every year at the Scouting Combine. Before the Super Bowl, Goodell holds a press conference where he typically takes a question planted with a kid reporter who might toss up some puffball about a league public service program, like one that encourages kids to exercise for at least sixty minutes a day—“Play 60,” the initiative is called.
“Mr. Commissioner, how do YOU play sixty?” a kid asked Goodell before Super Bowl 49 in Glendale, Arizona. The beast pounced: “I played sixty-five this morning on the elliptical,” Goodell preened. I am going to venture that you’ll never meet a man in his late fifties with such rock-hard abs.
Goodell also likes to talk about how he used to play The Game himself. He played through high school till he wrecked his knee. But playing football was such a great experience for him. It gave Roger so much camaraderie and instilled so much character. If he had sons, instead of teenage twin daughters, he would by all means encourage them to play football. Other prominent parents have said they would not be so sure—Barack Obama and LeBron James have expressed ambivalence, as well as the actual father of Tom Brady, knowing what we know now; Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, too, and a bunch of others. But Goodell says there are no sure things in life, whether you’re football playing or couch sitting, and he does his best to make the case.
Goodell is apparently required to say that his first job is to “protect the Shield” x number of times a day as a condition of the $111 million in salary and benefits his owner-bosses paid him between 2013 and 201517. The Shield evokes gallant warriors and immovable forces, but it is also a reminder that the enterprise itself requires protection—a shield for the Shield. When Goodell sits at his desk, he gazes upon a large rendering of the Shield on a back wall of his office. ‘‘It is a reminder to look out,’’ he says.
“Protecting the Shield” roughly equates to protecting “the integrity of the game,” which is another platitude the commissioner throws out all the time. What all of that essentially means is that Goodell’s first job is to protect the Membership, and often from itself.
The league, for instance, would prefer it if the Membership left the discussion of brain health to the experts, or at least to Dr. Goodell. It is part of the commissioner’s job, after all, to cushion billionaire brain farts on this issue. When health and safety questions are asked of the Membership, as they inevitably are, the moguls are careful to inflict the repetitive sound-bite trauma that the league arms them with (“the game has never been safer”). They then move on as quickly as possible.
But owners can’t always help themselves, and at least one of them seems intent on proving this every few months. Colts owner Jim Irsay, for instance, sat in a golf cart in Boca, smoking a cigarette and holding forth with Dan Kaplan of the SportsBusiness Journal about the varying side effects of playing the sport. He likened the risks to the possible side effects of taking aspirin. “You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin,” Irsay said. “It might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body may reject it, where I would be fine.” This caused an Excedrin headache at the annual meeting, which Jerry Jones decided to assuage by brushing aside the rather obvious link between chronic traumatic encephalopathy and football. “No, that’s absurd” was Jerry’s take on whether playing football can result in CTE.
Candor can prove as problematic as ignorance. Bills general manager Doug Whaley, for instance, was trying to be philosophical when making the obvious point that football is a dangerous sport and that injuries are inevitable. “It’s a violent game,” Whaley told WGR 550 radio. It would have been fine if he ended the sentence here. But instead, Whaley ended the sentence with “. . . that I personally don’t think humans are supposed to play.” And the headline wrote itself.
Bills GM: I “don’t think humans are supposed to play” football
This was problematic since football-playing robots had not yet been invented. What’s more, Whaley was trying to convince actual human beings to come play for the Buffalo Bills. You can imagine the GM was frog-marched up to the Bills’ PR office for cleanup duty. “Clearly I used a poor choice of words,” Whaley clarified in a statement the next day. He is human after all.
So are NFL owners, just like us, although their positions grant them superhuman deference and platforms that can be irresistible. That is why league meetings, teeming with media, can be so treacherous. The Membership is forced into the sunlight—when in fact most of them are suited to the shadows. Robert Kraft made himself available to the media for twelve minutes on a back patio. RKK had a message to convey. His audience was about twenty reporters and camera people, most from New England outlets. Kraft said he is proud of all the great things the Patriots have accomplished during his twenty-three years as owner. We know this because he is always saying so and 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 for the Bills, for whom the playoffs have also been unattainable for seventeen years.
Coaches took up their stations at assigned tables. 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.
