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Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times
Mark Leibovich
From the No.1 bestselling author of This Town comes a thrillingly raw and hysterical account of the billionaires, crooks, charlatans and scoundrels that own and run the NFL.American Football – with its celebrity players, billionaire owners, and cheerleaders with flawless teeth – is more American than apple pie. Which is why the celebrated New York Times journalist, Mark Leibovich, has chosen football as the vehicle through which to examine the troubled state of Trump’s America.Big Game chronicles a four-year odyssey that has taken Leibovich deeper inside the NFL than anyone has gone before. From the owners' meeting to the draft to the sidelines of crucial games, he takes in the show at the elbow of everyone from Tom Brady to big-name owners to the cordially despised NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell.Ultimately, this is a story of what may come to be seen as ‘peak football’ – the high point of the sport’s economic success and cultural dominance, but also the moment when the dark side began to show. It is an era of explosive revenue growth, as deluxe new stadiums spring up all over the country, but also one of creeping existential fear. Football was never thought to be easy on the body – players joke darkly that the NFL stands for ‘not for long’ for good reason – but as the true impact of concussions become inescapable background noise, it’s become increasingly difficult to enjoy the simple glory of football without the buzzkill of its obvious consequences.And that was before Donald Trump. In 2016, the NFL slammed headlong into America's culture wars. Big Game is a journey through an epic storm. Through it all, Leibovich always keeps one eye on Tom Brady and his beloved Patriots, through to the 2018 Super Bowl. Pro football, this hilarious and enthralling book proves, may not be the sport America needs, but it is most definitely the sport it deserves.
Copyright (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in the US by Penguin Press 2018
This UK edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
FIRST EDITION
Text © Mark Leibovich 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs © Kwangmooza/Getty Images (background); Darren Haggar (badge)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Mark Leibovich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Brief portions of this work, some in slightly different form, first appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine
NFL and the NFL shield design are registered trademarks of the National Football League
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Source ISBN: 9780008317614
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008317645
Version 2018-08-17
In loving memory of great friends:
my father, Miguel Leibovich,
and brother, Phil Leibovich
Contents
Cover (#uf3409cff-29cb-5a1b-ad18-4e58939a1a43)
Title Page (#u0e8e4183-e4ad-527b-821d-99c674caf82e)
Copyright (#u9966cbdb-1b8e-59a6-a32e-780b1ab3a97a)
Dedication (#ufcdbc8fd-1284-5c2d-9b11-c229bee0e896)
Introduction FOOTBALL, IN SPITE OF ITSELF (#u1dfba51e-6d09-5980-a579-1f0c4d19cb02)
Prologue RESPITE (#udc56ad86-4647-51e2-9983-14247908eac1)
Chapter 1 THE SUPER BOWL WITHOUT JOCK STRAPS (#u2a2958a7-7662-53ab-9a88-3cfc3b8c2ac7)
Chapter 2 THE MONKEY’S ASS (#u616d98b1-8c71-5077-b0fb-4bd016c75548)
Chapter 3 NUGGETS (#u06bdac38-4145-57f7-a71b-97cf3894904b)
Chapter 4 “TOM BRADY HERE” (#u05c9afe5-0cff-5ba8-80db-8d56a31e7e7c)
Chapter 5 “BEWARE THE PISSED OFF PRETTY BOY” (#u0270890d-0be2-58af-8a2f-6b6b75470354)
Chapter 6 GARISH FIST ORNAMENTS (#ua373bbb5-2b82-53c9-bba8-7def813669b2)
Chapter 7 BALLGHAZI (#u2eded3f6-eeb3-5e8d-a42d-503e3352aa74)
Chapter 8 CHEATER (#u5a68c3bb-50ce-5ae1-a7ca-d5dd8e2ec347)
Chapter 9 NO ONE BUYS TICKETS TO WATCH A MORALITY PLAY (#u5bcb7746-98e8-52a1-b17c-3fce5166ad49)
Chapter 10 DINGS? (#uf0791fc2-343f-5c40-ac7e-f39ef1f9222f)
Chapter 11 WHUPPINGS (#uf206c252-42c3-5324-974e-ed34f3f2e2fb)
Chapter 12 “WE PAY HIM DAMN WELL TO BE NEUTRAL” (#u5b01b572-e95f-5907-98f0-a2175df29a4e)
Chapter 13 NO BROKE DICKS (#u2c473c96-a476-5e99-bae3-0a3182d5ba36)
Chapter 14 ROGER AND ME (#u24e76f7d-c242-5af9-9011-d480ec2e3afa)
Chapter 15 THE BIG SPLAT (#ub6f1ff0f-9aa2-5c76-a25f-78eb73107892)
Chapter 16 IMMORTALITY GETS OLD (#u072a01b0-ffe0-57f5-841d-9f252a40690f)
Chapter 17 “START BLOW- DRYING TEDDY KOPPEL’S HAIR ’CAUSE THIS ONE’S DONE” (#u43f50b43-b4fc-56a9-8413-fd0fddd544e2)
Chapter 18 AMERICAN CARNAGE (#u8f4e6359-cdd7-5c7e-a131-774aa884ab97)
Chapter 19 PATRIOTISM (#u891c163c-3180-55b4-bc43-f7086434dd45)
Chapter 20 CHEESEHEAD ELEGY (#uc07fb75b-6fd3-596c-ab35-34b4ac7196ea)
Chapter 21 “WE DON’T WANT YOU IN LOS ANGELES” (#u8f4297ed-b968-533f-b715-0ab52d8bd5e9)
Chapter 22 “I’M DRUNK, I’M STUPID, I’M A PATS FAN,” THE MAN TOLD POLICE (#u2bd3f202-2e13-556f-841d-bdf6ccd45d80)
Chapter 23 THE TV REPORTER IN THE BELICHICK UNDERWEAR (#u0818f6a3-e298-50b5-945b-61173a4de082)
Chapter 24 CLOCKS AND SITCOMS (#u2ab20310-eb36-5c4d-bd9f-5b45f18e620f)
Chapter 25 TURN-ONS (#uf72d569c-218f-5f0a-b5dd-9eec5048d54c)
Chapter 26 THIS MAN’S LIVER BELONGS IN CANTON (#uc5f4eef8-172c-5051-836e-7bcf74d27c7b)
Chapter 27 “FAITH, FAMILY, AND FOOTBALL . . . PROBABLY NOT IN THAT ORDER” (#u2567c40f-ffc8-5b5f-a28c-82ea060f17f5)
Chapter 28 “WE NEED A BLACK CHARLTON HESTON” (#ucbd5dee5-a2ca-5412-bf3d-1f334ce13ac6)
Chapter 29 JUST COMPARTMENTALIZE, BABY (#ubb2ff483-7f31-500a-bfcd-726a59433f6c)
Chapter 30 THE LAST VISIT (#u3151506a-1cf6-51d0-8900-9a85f3c39191)
Picture Section (#u1e20fd28-a1dc-54c7-a4be-7b71a318589e)
Acknowledgments (#ue9545420-f444-56a2-a5c1-4e1ba44a0186)
Notes (#u8b97d8ca-a9db-565c-9ea2-502385caa763)
Also by Mark Leibovich (#u419c01d4-2781-5414-8d00-be0850ca6e7f)
List of Searchable Terms (#uac78a830-e90d-50cc-800b-25287f33fce1)
About the Publisher (#ubdc38769-af21-519f-84eb-1d5f4b280785)
Introduction (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
FOOTBALL, IN SPITE OF ITSELF (#u02949727-9071-5445-a7ea-f753761c36b9)
February 4, 2018
It fell to the Brazilian First Lady to settle the punch-drunk scene. She strutted in with the self-assurance of someone who knew her aura preceded her, even in defeat. “Great game,” she said, not aware of the player’s name (he was out of his jersey, a lineman by the size of him). He knew hers. Gisele Bündchen was working the big game after chaos in a back hallway of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, seeking out Philadelphia Eagles to stun with her classy attaboys. I watched them flinch—“Uh, thanks, thanks very much.” Super Bowl 52 had just ended in a hail of confetti and an unanswered Hail Mary from her husband, New England quarterback Tom Brady.
He was already being criticized across the Hot Take Village for not sticking around the field long enough to congratulate his Philly counterpart, Nick Foles. So his supermodel wife, in Brady’s stead, was taking on his celebrity grace duties. She moved from Eagle to sweaty Eagle, representing Brady both as a sportsmanship ambassador and—in a sly way—as a killer consolation trophy to brandish over the new champs. She was the last power play in his playbook. And the Eagles had no answer for Gisele. She caught another one leaving the locker room. “Good game,” she said, startling him. “Uh, your guy’s amazing,” the Eagle muttered back.
Brady himself was behind a curtain dealing with the media. “Losing sucks,” he confirmed. “But you show up and you try to win, and sometimes you lose and that’s the way it goes.” The game had finished only fifteen minutes earlier, he reminded everyone.
Brady is an empire, like the league he plays in. Empires fall eventually, but one of their best moves is to sell the illusion of timelessness. Normal limits don’t apply. How many more big games did Brady have left? He kept getting asked this question, in so many words. “I expect to be back but we’ll see,” he said.
Four years earlier, in the Almighty’s den, Brady and I had discussed the “How much longer” question too: issues of age, mortality, and the actuarial tables that he knew were running against him in the NFL, or “Not for Long” as players call a league where the average career lasts 3.3 years. Barely anyone still plays in these big games—much less excels—past forty, Brady’s present age.
I wondered why he kept doing this, and whether he worried about confronting a void after he finished. “When I don’t have the purpose of football, I know that’s going to be a really hard thing for me,” Brady told me then. There was melancholy to him when he said this, one I’ve sensed in Brady sometimes, even in his pinnacle moments—of which this batshit shootout in Minnesota was not one. He headed off his temporary stage and met up with his football goddess in a hallway. They shared a group hug with the kids, Instagrammed for proof.
Brady’s Patriot teammate Rob Gronkowski walked by en route to another makeshift podium. Gronk appeared dazed, more so than his usual stupor. He also had processing to do. Only twenty-eight, the tight end had filled up an impressive share of stat sheets and medical charts over his eight seasons. How much more? He got that question, too. “I am definitely going to look at my future, for sure,” Gronkowski said, maybe more candidly than he expected. “I am going to sit down the next couple of weeks and see where I’m at.”
No one could blame him if he quit. His working life had been a pained procession of broken bones, concussions, surgeries, and rehabs. Even when health allowed, he performed under a doleful tyrant of a coach for a below-market contract in what sure looked to be a cheerless work environment. He had plenty of money, two Super Bowl rings, and Hall of Fame credentials. He could move into any number of Gronk-suitable existences—WWE, action movies, or some reality show.
But Gronkowski was also born to play this game, as much as any mortal body can be. He was Peak Football, both in size (six foot six inches, 260) and temperament (beast). He could still dominate if he wanted to or—more to the point—he should still dominate because I really wanted him to still dominate. Yes, I want Gronk to keep playing because he helps my team win. That’s my selfish disclaimer: the Patriots are a disease I contracted early, growing up in Massachusetts. I still root for them, and am still trying to grow up (no longer in Massachusetts). The team has been great and interesting and despised for a long time. They make me feel like a winner, superior to my friends who root for other teams, and that’s important, God knows.
Allegiance to the Pats can be tricky. We lead the league in crosses to bear. Our owner can be a whiny star-fucker and sniveling in victory. Everyone who follows pro football outside of New England is sick of us (excluding Donald Trump, Jon Bon Jovi, and maybe a few others). Big portions of the Patriots’ fan base have become entitled assholes. And yes, I might be one of them. Yet I am loyal to the Pats pretty much unconditionally, give or take the odd cheating rap or occasional Aaron Hernandez.
If anything, my infatuation with pro football has only deepened, even as I’ve supposedly become instilled with more mature priorities and a fuller knowledge of how the game operates and the kinds of people who operate it. It started in second grade, when my best friend, Josh, and I wrote a letter to our favorite player, Jim Plunkett, and invited the young Patriots quarterback to Josh’s house for dinner (he never responded). This attachment has endured through the years and withstood a steady helmet-slapping of cognitive dissonance over whether I should know better than to keep following this sport as closely as I do. Scary research on posthumous football brains has been as impossible to miss as the testimonials from still-living retirees about the sad state of their bodies. (To wit: “My life sucks,” Jim Plunkett, then sixty-nine, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2017. “Everything hurts.”)
If you love football, you get good at blind spots and blind sides. NFL Network and NFL Films captivate with round-the-clock fairy tales: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun!” A football life can be irresistibly Hollywood and parable-ready—like the up-from-dirt saga of lineman Michael Oher, the protagonist in Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. But it’s easier to ignore how his story ends, if anyone even noticed: Oher missed most of the 2016 season with the Carolina Panthers after a series of concussions. He posted a photo of ten pill bottles on Instagram and captioned it “All for the brain smh.” Oher eventually deleted the post from Instagram, and the Panthers eventually deleted Oher from their roster.
The Lords of the League can appear overmatched by the moral and cultural moment that confronts them. Roger Goodell, the game’s embattled commissioner, who in late 2017 received a contract extension that could pay him up to $200 million, always seems to be presiding over some self-inflicted mess. Under his watch, the NFL has gone from being one of the most unifying institutions in America to the country’s most polarizing sports brand. Goodell himself seems not inclined to accept much blame for this trajectory. “I think it’s a little more reflective of how somewhat divided our society is at this stage,” he told me in his New York office a few weeks before the Super Bowl.
Still, my four-year incursion into the NFL has also led me to another impression: that for whatever reckoning might be in store for the sport—and whether that reckoning comes now or later—the game’s appeal is powerful and durable, and its redemptions are never far away. The sport has a way of grabbing you back. It happened here in Minnesota three weeks earlier, when the Vikings quarterback Case Keenum threw a 61-yard touchdown pass as time expired to shock the Saints in the NFC Divisional Playoffs. The play sent Twin Cities fans into merry conniptions, lasting right up until the moment their team got spanked a week later by the Eagles. It would be relived and rehashed around the country for several days, no doubt by people who a few months earlier were declaring themselves “done” with football over some kneeling player, lousy ref’s call, or other such outrage.
What to make of this beautiful shit-show of a league? I get asked existential versions of the “How much longer?” question myself. Which camp was I in? The true believer camp (“If we lose football,” said David Baker, the president of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “I don’t know if America can survive”
) or the cataclysm camp (“In twenty-five years, no one in America will play football,”
said Malcolm Gladwell)?
Are we witnessing the NFL’s last gasp as the great spectacle of American life? I’d probably put the game’s long-term survival as a slight favorite over the doom scenarios. Pro football has prevailed too many times to bet against, in spite of itself.
Beyond that, I’m punting, or turning the question back on ourselves—the hundreds of millions of us who have made the National Football League the superpower it is. Why does this game still mean so much, and why are we still here?
THE WORST THING ABOUT PRO FOOTBALL IS THAT A LOT OF IT HAS nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on TV—and then you supersize all of it, stretch it over a week, and here we have the Super Bowl.
Our hosts did not disappoint. Neither did the weather. It was a frigid week in the “Bold North,” as Minnesota is apparently now calling itself, courtesy of its Super Bowl 52 host committee. I hadn’t heard “Bold North” before, just like I had no idea why Philly fans had taken to wearing German shepherd masks as their trademark identifiers instead of something, say, more majestic and birdlike (apparently the canine masks were meant to evoke the Eagles’ underdog status—got it). This 2018 gridiron carnival played out in a dream sequence that featured the various parading werewolves of the NFL: “I saw Bud Grant walking with the queen. I saw Odell Beckham Jr. walking with the queen. I saw (Boomer) Esiason drinking a Starbucks at the Loews Hotel. And his hair was perfect.”
Both the Eagles and Patriots, and most of the international media, were based out at the Mall of America in Bloomington, next to the airport. By Friday, the warring Taliban factions
from Massholia and Phillystan had descended on this retail colossus—big enough, by the way, to fit 7 Yankee Stadiums, 32 Boeing 747s, or 258 Statues of Liberty. The MOA also has its own in-house counterterrorism unit for our safety. Fans pestered players at the food court, a Chinese TV crew broadcast from the Splat-O-Sphere (at the Mall amusement park), and armed SWAT teams prowled among the Buffalo Wild Wings, Kiehl’s, and Benihana. Philadelphians were warned, as a security precaution, not to don their German shepherd masks inside the complex or to break into their menacing renditions of “Fly, Eagles, Fly.” They appeared undeterred by the counterterrorism unit.
As happens whenever large bunches of media people assemble in one place, there was no shortage of bitching about something or another. This week’s über-complaint, obviously, involved why on God’s frozen earth we were here. As in, why would the league plunk down its marquee event in this NFC North Siberia? The consensus is that pro football has been overtaken by a “biblical plague of dickheads,” to paraphrase the late writer Richard Ben Cramer (granted, he was talking about journalism).
Like many things with the NFL, the real answer included dollar signs. This was all bribery fodder, essentially, or a Bold North variant on the civic blackmail and corporate welfare model that’s gotten many grand NFL edifices built and paid for. Football had awarded its grandest pageant to the Twin Cities in order to sweeten an already sweetheart deal in which state officials had agreed to subsidize a new billion-dollar stadium for the billionaire owners of the Vikings. And taxpayers would foot about half the bill for a football Versailles whose primary beneficiaries—a pair of New Jersey real estate barons—cared little about the cash-strapped predicament of Minnesota schools, roads, and “essential” services that were less essential than football.
And then came the extra point: local fans/taxpayers were also forced to play host to the marauding followers of the team that two weeks earlier had defeated the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia—and, for good measure, had pelted their kindly midwestern visitors with a Philly Special of profanity, hurled objects, and beer showers as they attempted to flee their beating.
All that said: the “Minnesota Nice” thing is legit. People are unfailingly friendly, even to outsiders who don’t deserve it. “I will always live in Minneapolis,”
Prince once told Oprah. “It’s so cold it keeps the bad people out.” Prince, however, did not live to see this invasion of Eagles and Pats fans at the Mall of America.
Yet just when you’re ready to pronounce the NFL dead beneath an avalanche of its own greed and bullshit—hell, even declare the Super Bowl to be a trope for the decline of America—you hit the payoff. The game starts, and with it the best part of pro football: football.
