I came to respect Eagles fans, grudgingly—very, very grudgingly—as their desperation added a visceral edge. Could they handle ultimate victory? What would the city look like in the aftermath? Philadelphia police slathered Crisco on city poles to discourage celebratory climbing after the Eagles’ win in the NFC Championship Game. The precaution—which based on news photos appeared not to work—joined an instant pantheon of nationally recognized “Philly things.” Before the game, I spoke to many Philadelphia fans who fully expected calamity to intervene to ruin the ride. This is what being a Red Sox fan used to be like before we won in 2004, back in our lovable loser days (we are now neither).
In December, I was at the Eagles-Rams game in the Los Angeles Coliseum in which the Eagles’ brilliant young quarterback Carson Wentz hurt his knee on a third-quarter scramble. The injury did not appear serious at first, but Wentz was replaced as a precaution by his backup, Foles, who managed to hold a late lead. Philly fans—a vocal majority in that stadium, too—were joyous as they filed out of the Coliseum after a 43–35 victory over the NFC West–leading Rams, only to get the news upon checking their phones that Wentz’s injury was in fact a season-ending ACL tear. Elation to deflation, just like that. People were actually in tears. It was hard not to feel for the poor hooligans.
Nick Foles? Maybe a serviceable backup; but when posited as a viable Super Bowl quarterback, his name became a punch line. Foles had performed well as the Eagles’ starter in 2013 and part of 2014, but had worn out his welcome by season’s end—to the extent anyone ever gets “welcomed” in Philly to begin with. Not a single Eagles fan I spoke to believed that the team had any hope without Wentz and with Foles. But somehow Philadelphia kept on winning with the journeyman backup. They were underdogs at home in the playoffs against Atlanta and Minnesota, but won both games. New England was solidly favored in the Super Bowl, despite the Eagles’ being better at nearly every position—except for the most important one on the field, quarterback, where the Patriots and Brady held what looked to be a historic advantage.
This is why it can be hard to turn away from football. The most unlikely of performers can electrify on the biggest of stages, and when you least expect it. This game was just deranged. Thrills came nonstop—except when it all stopped.
A terrifying episode nearly ruined the whole party. In the second quarter, Patriots receiver Brandin Cooks caught a 23-yard pass over the middle, danced around for extra yardage, and never saw Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins charging at him and BOOM! The helmet-to-helmet hit—deemed legal—elicited another category of football gasp, the sickened kind. Everything went quiet and Cooks was not moving and holy shit. Things got solemn fast.
Football is the “secret vice” of the civilized, wrote William Phillips in the journal Commentary in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.” This is true enough, but the notion is predicated on damage staying within bounds. The year had been filled with serious injuries to star players (Aaron Rodgers, J. J. Watt, Wentz, and a host of others). But none of them threatened vital organs or functions, with the catastrophic exception of the Steelers’ young linebacker Ryan Shazier, who suffered a spinal injury in a Monday night game against Cincinnati that jeopardized his playing career and (as of early 2018) his ability to walk normally again. Otherwise, even in the season-ending cases, the injuries remained in bounds. As long as the gladiator is still breathing—maybe favors us with a thumbs-up while being carted off—we know we’ve remained safely on the right side of what our football stomachs can digest. Pass the bean dip.
But Cooks was motionless for two, maybe three minutes. The silence in the stadium was becoming gruesome. Not respectable. To state the unspeakable, and at the risk of sounding glib: the Super Bowl would be a most inopportune stage to have a player die on—the NFL’s worst nightmare. My colleague Joe Drape, who covers horse racing for the New York Times and sat next to me in the press box, mentioned at this moment a tragedy from 2008 in which a filly had died on the track after finishing second in the Kentucky Derby. Since then, the sport’s leadership has lived in fear of a replay, believing horse racing might not survive another televised extravaganza that turned into a thoroughbred snuff event. It was obvious why Joe mentioned this now. Would they keep playing this game if Cooks died? Again, maybe this was needlessly glib and morbid (press boxes bring out the glib and morbid). But the NFL had almost certainly game-planned for this scenario, figured out some contingency in the event of sudden death.
Thank goodness, Cooks survived the ground and the blow that planted him there. He finally picked himself up and walked off and we could all get on with our fun. Cooks was ruled out the rest of the night with a head injury, but everyone else was free to resume pounding. It took just a few seconds to feel the game rumbling back to life, like a restarted locomotive. Drape headed off on a beer run.
Spoiler alert: The Eagles won, 41–33. Brady, who had been named the league’s MVP for the third time the night before, was his usual New Age Ninja self, finishing with 505 yards and three touchdowns. His last-ditch 51-yard heave, intended for Gronk, was batted away in the end zone. As soon as the leather hit the turf, everyone’s first instinct—mine, yours, Brady’s—was to glance up at the clock to see if ticks remained. The zeros confirmed that time and Philly had beaten Tom, at least for this season.
“We never had control of the game,” Brady was saying afterward to punctuate a season in which the NFL had itself felt at the mercy of uncontrollable events and actors—protesting players, rogue owners, and, not least, a U.S. president using our most popular sport as ammunition in the country’s culture wars. Football no longer felt safely bubbled off from the messiness and politics of the larger American reality show.
This would all take time to process. The sport felt exhausted and unsettled, even as the Big Game euphoria spilled onto the arctic streets. Eagles fans were delirious and also dumbfounded. They were the underdogs who caught the car, and now what? Reckoning and redemption stories are always getting tangled up in football, boom versus doom in a grudge match. It felt strange to experience Peak Football and have it also feel like the end of something.
Prologue
RESPITE
April 28, 2017
Goodell is a Douchebag!
—SIGN AT THE NFL DRAFT, PHILADELPHIA
Again, Philly.
The season ended here with a parade and started with one, too—a parade of soon-to-be rookies ambling across a stage. The first NFL Draft ever to be held outdoors took place on a warm spring night, ten months and a very different identity ago for this proud and prickly town. Philadelphia had yet to achieve its unlikely Peak Football status. This was before Crisco poles and doggie masks and Nick Foles had also become celebrated Philly “things” (Foles had previously been a Philly “thing,” for sure, but mainly just a thing to heckle).
I joined a sweaty throng outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, near the Rocky statue. The City of Brotherly Love had been conferred by the NFL with the 2017 edition of its annual cattle call, kicking off a new tradition of the draft’s being held in alternating cities (it was in New York for decades, then Chicago for the previous few years). Philadelphia, of course, makes a curious welcome center for a nervous young man. The town owns an ignominious reputation for drunken and derelict fan behavior—home to a population that allegedly booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs during an Eagles game at Franklin Field in 1968. Local fans have disputed L’Affaire Santa/Snowball for years (thus “allegedly”), or at least the intensity of the invective aimed at the bearded saint. They can get pretty worked up about this alleged libel, too (as they do), but the city’s reputation for fan loutishness has very much endured and been affirmed over the years. In 1997, the Eagles even established a court and jail in the bowels of Veterans Stadium to more efficiently deal with their unruly darlings.
Nearl
y two decades later, the prospect of an NFL Draft in Philadelphia shaped up as a potential dream matchup between the country’s most abusive fans and the sports world’s most abused commissioner.
My view was blocked by a guy in a Carson Wentz #11 jersey hoisting the aforementioned GOODELL IS A DOUCHEBAG! placard. Revelers chanted, screamed, and booed Commissioner Douchebag with impressive bloodlust. They included many drunken Eagles fans (redundant?) chanting “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!” in responsive intervals. Face-painted toddlers chased around little green footballs. It was quite a scene, especially for a tableau whose primary action involved a stiff man in a suit reading young men’s names off index cards and then hugging them.
NFL drafts have become like solstice festivals to mark the unofficial peak of the football off-season. “Off-season” has in fact become a misnomer and even a dirty word inside the modern NFL. “Off”-anything is an affront to the manifest destiny of a sport whose mission is predicated year-round upon the conquering of American downtime. No hour of the year should be safe from the league’s revenue grabs. Previously low-key events like the NFL Draft, NFL Scouting Combine (March), and Hall of Fame inductions (August) have now become jacked-up merchandise and media extravaganzas unfolding over several days. The NFL is no longer just training camps, coaching carousels, and football games, but a series of highly produced set pieces, jubilees, and roving “fan experience” exposition parks in revolving venues.
The 2017 draft would be watched by 4.6 million people on two networks over three days, universes removed from the last time the draft was held in Philly, in 1960, when a few chain-smoking sportswriters showed up at a hotel ballroom. “C’mon, Philly, come on!” Goodell implored about twenty seconds after he took the stage, inciting louder boos. At an aide’s suggestion, Goodell had considered a Santa-themed joke, something to the effect that “now I know how Santa felt,” but opted against it—in keeping with the commissioner’s general approach to humor (essentially nonexistent). He waved his hands toward his chest in the universal “bring it on” taunt. And it was on.
Sustained howls of derision. Greg Aiello, the NFL’s longtime flack, scolded the ingrate masses via Twitter for their unpleasant reception. “If those 70,000+ fans in Philly like the Draft being there, they should cheer Roger Goodell,” Aiello tweeted. Apparently we were all doing this wrong. “He’s the reason the Draft is on the road,” Aiello continued in defense of his battered boss. This did nothing to stop the booing.
Next to me on the grass stood a Cleveland Browns fan named Mike Carr, who had driven fifteen hours from his home in Lansing, Michigan. Carr was intent upon learning in person the identity of the player his team would select first overall. He could have watched from home, as he did over hours and days of coverage devoted to the previews, player capsules, and mock drafts in the run-up. He could have learned, in real time, what scouts were saying about the drafted players; that Ohio State cornerback Marshon Lattimore, for instance, was “genetically gifted,” according to an NFL Network chyron.
But Carr preferred to be here, both to represent his native Cleveland and to shout down Goodell—the latter being as basic to this experience as candy on Halloween.
Carr does not care for the commissioner for many reasons. He mentions his bungling of the Ray Rice fiancée-battering episode from a few years ago. But mostly he spoke of jeering Goodell as a civic duty, a kind of proxy for the love-hate addiction our adrenaline-addled country has for this sport (that so many love) and this league (that so many love to hate). This was a Maximum American moment, courtesy of your favorite pro sports league and oligarchy.
“Freedom of association is a powerful thing,” Michael MacCambridge wrote in America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. “Every organization in America is someone’s version of utopia.” Even the Cleveland Browns. Carr will love them through thick, thin, and Johnny Manziel. He wore a JOHNNY REHAB T-shirt to memorialize his team’s train wreck of a first-round pick from a few years ago—a one-man reality show in his own right. “I hope the Browns take Myles Garrett,” Carr told me, referring to the defensive end from Manziel’s alma mater, Texas A&M. “But I’m mostly really looking forward to booing Goodell.” It would prove a satisfying night all around.
Goodell bear-hugged draftees as they walked onstage. Every few picks, the commissioner would bring human shields with him up to the podium, maybe in an effort to discourage booing: these were the Make-A-Wish Foundation kids, elderly Hall of Famers, and beloved former Eagles whom no one would possibly hate, even in Philly. Who could badger even Roger when he was accompanied by a cancer-stricken fourteen-year-old Ravens fan who read the name of Baltimore’s first-round selection? In an upset, the mob behaved itself and gave the kid a nice moment. The outdoor draft in general played to upbeat reviews, even evoked the Big Game ambience of a fall Sunday at certain points.
“Especially when they played the national anthem, I caught chills,” John Ross, a University of Washington wide receiver who was chosen in the ninth spot by the Cincinnati Bengals, said later. “I thought we were going to strap it up and play.” On nights like this, the NFL’s iconic logo, or “Shield,” might as well be the American flag.
This being the twenty-first-century NFL, even these shiny scenes are destined to get shaded with something. The well-played draft followed an incomparable Super Bowl—with the Pats’ overcoming a 28–3 deficit to stun the Falcons—but it was all being interspersed with one buzzkill or another. If it’s Monday, we were learning that Dwight Clark, the great 49ers receiver, had been diagnosed with ALS, probably related to his career choice; Tuesday brings news that the Bears’ Hall of Fame running back Gale Sayers is suffering from dementia. I caught brief word about the Clark and Sayers diagnoses on the NFL Network, which then moved seamlessly into another mock draft. Former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who was serving a life sentence for a murder conviction, was found hanging from a bed sheet in his Massachusetts prison cell on April 19. He died, at twenty-seven, with what researchers would later describe as the most severe case of CTE they had ever seen in a person his age. Hernandez also died, at the very least, with a dark sense of timing: that was also the day the Patriots were scheduled to make their post–Super Bowl visit to the White House.
Politics always seemed to be intruding somehow. This was very much a product of Donald J. Trump, and his ability to swallow up as much attention as possible from this bizarre American moment he was leading the nation through. Why should football be safe? Indeed, minutes after Super Bowl 51 ended members of the Patriots—a team Trump had very publicly adopted as his own—were being asked whether they would visit the White House, given the polarizing ways of the new president. Patriots tight end Martellus Bennett was the first to say no thanks, and a running tally would ensue over who else would demur. Six Patriot players said they would skip the traditional visit, and there were several additional blow-offs on game day. Brady himself came under heavy pressure to pass from his wife, his liberal Bay Area family, and assorted other anti-Trump friends (Brady had known Trump for years, judged a beauty pageant, and golfed with him a bunch of times). On the appointed day, Brady was a no-show, citing “personal family matters”—as in, his family, especially his wife, would have killed him if he had gone. Brady’s absence put the starstruck Trump in a foul mood. He did not mention Brady in his Rose Garden remarks and did not take a phone call from the quarterback that night. Sad!
* * *
—
I have written about American politics and campaigns for sixteen years. Politics in that time has become a rolling entertainment spectacle, and perhaps the only real-stakes reality show that Americans were following as closely as they were the NFL. Politics grew hotter, as football did, under the raw nihilism of today’s culture. And that was even before Donald Trump was running for anything.
Trump’s presidential campaign featured many of the conditions that the NFL had enjoyed for years. He generated news e
very day, not all flattering, but enough to make him inescapable. He was covered by a pack of political reporters who often treated campaigns like Big Games themselves (with “pre- and postgame” coverage of debates), as opposed to complicated issue slogs with real-life consequences. Trump was his own Big Game, seemingly the only one people and media were paying attention to. He elicited passion pro and con. He appealed to a white male confirmation bias and sense of siege present in many who love football.
Every fan at some point becomes convinced the league office, other teams, referees, and announcers have it in for their utopia. The system is rigged against us. Like most Patriots devotees, I started hating Goodell for his punishment of Brady over Deflategate, the football air pressure debacle that (as Stephen Colbert correctly noted) was the rare sports scandal about shrinking balls that does not involve steroids. Did being mad at the league stop me from shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for tickets, DirecTV, NFL Sunday Ticket, RedZone, and the tools of dependence the cartel keeps pushing my way? That’s funny.
As with any decent reality show, the NFL is juiced by controversy, in many cases of its own making. Deflategate provided a trivial diversion after the previous season’s nightmare of a reality show, the one featuring the star running back cold-cocking his fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator and then dragging her limp body into the casino. Goodell suspended Ray Rice for two games only to have—plot twist—the security video of Rice’s knockout turn up on TMZ. This led Goodell to make Rice’s suspension “indefinite” and to months of recriminations over how the league could not have known about the video as it had claimed. It also raised fundamental questions about whether the NFL cared about domestic violence and—even more—about whether Goodell should keep his job. Reality TV does love a deathwatch.
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