Still, notwithstanding the NFL’s year-round ability to be compelling, something was happening to this sport. Football felt less confident and more precarious, at least from the outside. I wanted to immerse myself to a point that exceeded my usual fan’s engagement, beyond the preapproved all-access “experience” shows that bring us inside locker rooms and huddles and sideline confabs. For as ubiquitous as the NFL has made itself, there still remained a great mystery about the league. I had become especially curious about the closed cabal of “insiders” who owned, operated, and performed in the circus. The Rice case laid bare how little I knew about this world in a way I had not appreciated. It exposed a level of vulnerability in something that appeared so invincible. One day, a new season was set to begin, fresh with the promise of new ratings records and revenue horizons; next, this supposedly “existential crisis” hits the sport with the suddenness of a left jab on an elevator.
“Everything can change so fast in our society, for me or anyone else,’’ Goodell told me in one of the sporadic conversations we had over the last few years. ‘‘Only the paranoid survive’’ is a favorite mantra of his, and a phrase you hear a lot around NFL headquarters. It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another of the corporate clichés preferred by Goodell, someone who preambles many of his sentences with “As I say around the office . . .”
But “only the paranoid survive,” a motto associated with Intel’s Andy Grove, struck me as a telling conceit for the modern NFL. While Grove’s assertion is meant as a call to vigilance and aggressiveness, the NFL’s application of the phrase seemed more in tune with defensiveness and raw nerves. This also became clear to me as soon as I began peeking behind the Shield.
‘‘It’s like this thing I say around the office, ‘Believe in better,’’’ Goodell was telling me in January 2016. We were standing on the sidelines at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, before that season’s NFC Championship Game between the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers. Up on a Jumbotron, the Patriots and Broncos were playing in the AFC game with sound turned up to a level that accentuated the crunch of every tackle. Each blow echoed through the stadium, and a startled gasp went up in Charlotte after Patriots receiver Danny Amendola was knocked into next week by a Denver safety. Amendola appeared staggered.
Goodell kept talking. He is fond of words like “monetize.” He also talks a lot about finding new revenue streams and ‘‘growing the pie.” The league is always sharing—or leaking—its gaudy dollar-signed pie. Goodell said he wants the NFL to achieve $25 billion in gross revenue by 2027 (it stood at $14 billion as of 2017). Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner from 1960 to 1989, who steered it on the trajectory of its exploding popularity and riches, preached that it was a bad look for the league to have financial figures in the news. Goodell’s NFL has no such reticence. Today’s owners have proven again and again how much they crave big numbers; so that’s what their commissioner—their employee—serves up. Since Goodell became the league commissioner in 2006, most of the owners have seen the value of their franchises double (twenty-nine are now among the fifty most valuable sports franchises on the planet, according to Forbes).
Pie is delicious.
Yet it also felt like a moment when the beast might be getting fat, when the business and the pageant of the NFL could be overtaking the perfection of the game. Was football teetering on the edge of a darker future? Or was I just being breathless (“teetering,” always a tell), trying to overhype this as a moment of truth and sell it as a showdown between World Domination and Sudden Death? Football is just football, after all; angst is for writers.
My expedition would kick off with an email from the great Brady himself (“Tom Brady here,” the subject line said—a “yeah and I’m Santa Claus” moment if I’ve ever had one). This was a new and different caravan for me. I do not normally cover sports and have no history with any of these people. I embedded with the top executives of the sport, got drunk and passed out on Jerry Jones’s bus, attended the league’s committee meetings, parties, and tribal events, interviewed journeyman and superstar players and about half of the owners (sneak conclusion: billionaires are different from you and me). I would get doused by vomit at the draft, sprinkled by confetti at the Super Bowl, cried on by a spurned Raiders booster from Oakland, and hugged by a stricken Steelers fan I met at Heinz Field during a public viewing for the team’s longtime owner, Dan Rooney, who died in April 2017. The woman wore a Troy Polamalu jersey, said a silent prayer, and rubbed a Steelers-issued “Terrible Towel” on Mr. Rooney’s casket.
NFL evangelists are always couching their product as a gift of escape. Football provides its disciples “a chance to really celebrate and come together and get away from our everyday troubles,” Goodell said in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer before the Super Bowl a few years ago. In Goodell’s telling, life is hard, but Sundays liberate and give solace. Games are confined to about three hours and offer us a thrilling parenthetical escape from our “troubles.”
‘‘We offer a respite,’’ the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, told me. ‘‘We are a respite that moves you away from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps.’’ Jones is in many ways the embodiment of today’s NFL: rich, audacious, distracted, shameless, and a veteran of more than a few trials and missteps of his own.
For me football was a respite from my day job, and from Donald J. Trump, insofar as Trump could be avoided at all.
In 2013, I wrote a book about another cozy and embattled dominion, Washington, D.C. This Town, it was called. I wanted to capture that world at a moment when it seemed Washington had reached a saturation point of self-congratulation as the rest of the country looked on with venomous fascination. I wanted to portray life inside the debauched seat of the capital at a formative moment. The orgy felt overdue for a reckoning. Populist tension was getting too hot outside the Beltway, and conditions seemed primed for an invading agent. I was as shocked as anyone by Trump’s election, but not that the puffed-up world of D.C. would ignite a counterforce that could blow up politics as we knew it.
I wanted to do something similar with the NFL: to take a fuller anthropological measure of an empire that seems impossible to imagine America without, and yet whose status quo feels unsustainable.
To much of the American heartland, in football hotbeds like Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Texas, the game represents a way of life under attack. Fans, coaches, and many players resent the boutique coastal sensibilities that they believe exaggerate the risks of brain injuries. Football’s biggest critics, they say, never played the game or felt the passion of a Friday Night Lights town. I became conscious of this disconnect as someone residing in a Northeast media bubble that so badly missed where the country was headed during the 2016 election.
We are products of the tribes we inhabit and our groupthink assumptions. As sports fans, we self-select parochial enclaves. Every Pats fan I know is certain that Goodell royally screwed our Greatest Quarterback Evah in Deflategate. Then there’s the 90 percent of the rest of the country that roots for other teams and whose worldviews skew accordingly. Ravens fans held rallies in support of Ray Rice postelevator and still could be seen wearing Rice’s #27 jersey all over Maryland. This is your brain on football.
Jerry Jones described the beauty of the NFL to me as a weekly Coliseum clash in which representatives from my town and your town met up. ‘‘And we’ll just have a big old time, being relevant to one another,’’ Jones told me. ‘‘Relevant’’ is a term you hear a lot around the league. It is a curiously timid concept given the financial and cultural dynasty the NFL has maintained for five decades (were the Beatles “relevant” to rock ’n’ roll?). Why mention relevance? It goes to the insecurity, maybe, or paranoia at the thought that some disruption could come along as easily as Trump did, descending from an escalator and dragging norms down with him.
The NFL is a norm. It is also a swamp. You learn that soon enough, a ro
iled and interconnected habitat. Everyone up and down can be a part of the same Big Game.
Another thing I have learned writing about Washington: if you’re well positioned, the swamp is a warm bath. I keep thinking, for some reason, of a story told by Leigh Steinberg, the once-high-flying agent who represented the league’s elite players for about twenty-five years before plummeting into an abyss of lawsuits, bankruptcy, addiction, etc. Back when he was still a “Super Agent” in the 1990s, Steinberg negotiated a contract extension for Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. To celebrate, he and Robert Kraft repaired to the owner’s home on Cape Cod for a special champagne toast—together in Mr. Kraft’s hot tub. “I can’t think of another owner in the NFL I would have rather shared a hot tub with,” Steinberg wrote warmly in his memoir. This, too, is football.
1.
THE SUPER BOWL WITHOUT JOCK STRAPS
March 20, 2016
The Membership is not at all pleased with these accommodations. Who found this place? Heads need to roll. Kids on spring break keep running through the lobby in bathing suits, like this is Six Flags over Boca or something. They are carrying milk shakes and ice cream cones with rainbow sprinkles.
“What is this, summer camp?” said Steve Tisch, the film producer and chairman of the New York Giants. If you own a football team, yes, in a sense it is—summer camp for superrich postmenopausal dudes. The National Football League offers them round-the-calendar recreation, delicious food, and a dedicated counselor/commissioner to hold their hands and buckle their big-boy pants. Tisch is known among certain campers as “the Tush.” He is a model bunkmate: well liked, good company, and always helpful about hooking his NFL partners up with party invitations and tickets to the big Hollywood award shows when they come through L.A. He introduced Bob Kraft to his kid girlfriend, the model-actress Ricki Noel Lander, at a party at Chez Tush. Tisch owns the distinction of having won both a Super Bowl and an Oscar (as a producer of Forrest Gump). He displays both trophies in the den of his home in Beverly Hills.
“Look at these,” Tisch told me as he admired the twin booty when I visited him at his hillside mansion. “They were great to show off when I was dating.” That was before Tisch met his newest trophy, the gorgeous Katia Francesconi, whom he celebrates with a photo display in his front entryway. She speaks five languages, Katia does, and for their first “serious” date, Tisch flew her to the Toronto film festival, then to Pittsburgh for a Giants-Steelers game, then to Spain. He proposed in Portuguese.
Tisch has a certain dumbfounded charm about him. You could even call it Gump-like in how he projects both a lurking detachment and an utter sense of belonging to the privileged jungles he occupies. He is easily amused. When I first met him, at a Super Bowl party, Tisch told me to call him on his cell phone. He would be more than happy to share with me his impressions of America’s most successful sports league and the sanctified club he belonged to as an NFL owner (“Junior high school for billionaires,” as he described this confederacy). I asked Tisch for his phone number. “Sure,” he replied. “Just dial 310 Take-A-Hike.” And the happy camper laughed a little harder than I might have expected him to. It’s good to be the Tush. He told me to call anytime. Once, I asked Tisch if he was in fact the only person on the planet with both an Oscar and a Super Bowl trophy. “I have two Super Bowl trophies, asshole,” the Tush corrected me, and further amused himself.
But he is no fan of this Boca Raton Resort and Club. Neither are his fellow owners. It will not do, and the head counselor will hear about this. There are too many kids—real kids—making noise amid this great gathering of sportsmen. What use would any titan of great means and legacy have for the Flow Rider Wave Simulator out by the cabanas? It strikes a discordant note with the important business the No Fun League is trying to conduct here.
Ideally, the NFL’s winter huddle would take place about an hour to the north. The Breakers in Palm Beach would be everyone’s first choice. Boca is okay, and the Resort and Club, a Waldorf property, has its appeal (an ice cream store off the lobby, and who doesn’t love ice cream?). But it’s not close enough to the water, the layout is strange, and besides, it’s hard to be satisfied with anything when you’ve known the best. As a football potentate, you’re in this for the brass ring, and the Breakers—apex of taste, luxury, and convenience—represented the brass ring. About one-quarter of NFL owners have homes within an hour of the premium resort. Built in the 1890s, the Breakers is a playground for this particular kind of tycoon. “After fires in both 1903 and 1925, the hotel reemerged more opulent each time,” the Breakers’ website reads. The football emperors would hope to say the same someday about their sport; would that their current set of conflagrations end up as only brushfires.
The Breakers is respectable and resilient, just as the league and its patrons believe themselves to be. At any given time, the Breakers’ guest register “read[s] like a who’s who of early 20th-century America: Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, vacationing alongside US presidents and European nobility.” Or so says the Breakers’ website.
In any event, that is more in line with how NFL owners view themselves. They are not just hobbyists, but more like ministers, or actual figures of history; certainly they’ve earned the right to be called philanthropists, right? With all they’ve contributed?
They talk a lot about all the “quiet giving” they do, or have their PR people do it (while mentioning, of course, how “Mr. So-and-So does not like to call attention to himself”). They are rich enough to care about their legacies. At the very least the owners fashion themselves as pillars of their communities, although many of them are in fact despised in their hometowns and remain stubbornly out of view. It’s hard to dislodge a pillar.
“There is the Breakers and then there’s everything else,” one of the owners told me as he surveyed the riffraff in the crowded lobby in Boca. He asked that I not reveal his name “because I don’t want to come off like a spoiled rich guy.”
Not to overstate the gravity of this Boca Raton failure. A subpar resort for the NFL’s annual meetings will make no one’s roster of “existential” matters that supposedly threaten the league; nothing like the drop in youth-football participation, nor lawsuits, regulatory roadblocks, and disruptions to the broadcast model that the league’s modern business has been built on. Nor would it rank among the battery of blows that Commissioner Goodell manages to suffer, or self-inflict, or aggravate, every few months. But it’s also of a piece with something being off-kilter with America’s beloved blood sport. You hear about “statements” being made in the NFL; as how the Dolphins can “make a statement” to the league by beating the Patriots on a Monday night, or how Adam “Pacman” Jones, the Bengals cornerback with long dreadlocks and a rap sheet to match, can “make a statement” by concussing the Steelers’ Antonio Brown with a big hit on a crossing pattern.
NFL meetings also make a statement. They should assert an elegant show of force from a superpower league. The syndicate operates as a drug kingpin of sports and entertainment in a nation packed coast to coast with junkies. Who can’t leverage a setup like this? “Hey, even the worst bartender at spring break does pretty well,” pooh-poohed Eric Winston, a journeyman offensive lineman, last with the Bengals, belittling Goodell’s performance.
Had Peak Football been achieved? As with any empire, there is a sense that for all its riches and popularity, the NFL is never far from some catastrophic demise—or at least might be flying close to the top of the dome.
It was thus vital that this annual meeting convey every confidence at a moment of great prosperity and unease. The owners should feel reassured. Pro football might be played by bulked-up exhibits before tens of millions of viewers, but it’s these puffed-up billionaires who own the store. These are the freaks, the club that Trump couldn’t crack. They are known in their collective as “the Membership.” “The Thirty-two” is an alternative shorthand, or thirty-one if
you don’t count the shareholder-owned Green Bay Packers (on the other hand, it still totals thirty-two since the Giants are co-owned by two families, the Tisches and Maras). These members envision themselves as noble stewards of their communities and wield their status with an assumption of permanence—a safe assumption since there are venereal diseases easier to get rid of than, say, the Washington Redskins’ owner, Daniel Snyder. Plus, the Membership gets to keep most of the NFL money and none of the brain damage.
Network cameras focus on the bespoke Caligulas in their owner’s boxes at least once a game. This is a strange NFL custom. We as viewers must always be favored with reaction shots from the owner’s box—their awkward high fives and crestfallen stares. It is as if we could never fully appreciate what we’ve seen on the field unless we also witness its real-time impact upon the presiding plutocrats. The human toll! Do owners in any other sport receive this much TV time during games? Maybe horse racing. There is something distinctly Roman about this.
* * *
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These league convocations are heavily anticipated and carefully planned. In the NFL’s perennial season of external hype and internal hand-wringing, they are compulsory retreats. Every prime and middling mover from the league is here, though the actual players—with a few scattered exceptions—are not invited. Club executives with team lapel pins cavort with coaches, front-office types, and their hangers-on; agents, “friends of the league” and various appendages, stooges, functionaries from the 345 Park Avenue league headquarters, and TV “insider” types in their perpetual pancake makeup. League meetings are the NFL’s Super Bowl without jockstraps.
Boca represented its own special NFL-through-the-looking-glass spectacle for interlopers like me. In the context of today’s NFL, there was something elemental about watching the league self-examining and self-celebrating its efforts. The Shield credentialed 310 media members for its 2016 league meeting (compared with 1,711 for the next month’s draft), though it seemed like half the people “covering” it either worked for the NFL or one of its team websites or an outlet (ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS) that paid billions of dollars to the NFL for the rights to televise its games and to be a “valued broadcast partner.” Everything feels so perfectly symbiotic.
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