Perhaps the biggest drawback about Boca is that the grounds get congested. Unlike you-know-where. But apparently the Breakers had decided this year that it could do better charging regular rates during a peak spring break week than by offering the NFL a group package. Insulting! Who said no to the mighty NFL? Was the Breakers making a statement?
League meetings are typically held between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft. They represent the first official event of the new NFL year, which officially began on March 9 at 4:00 p.m., 345 Park Avenue time. Big Football is such a force that it abides by its own calendar and revolves around its own sun. Execution matters. 345 Park Ave (simply “345” as the entity can be known in shorthand) must demonstrate to its internal audience—particularly the most important internal audience, its thirty-two owner-bosses—that it is vigilant about all threats, foreign and domestic and homemade; that it is capable of striking a proper balance between aristocratic fun and the all-business collusion of gathered mob factions. And this could be such a perfect sunny environment for an existential crisis. So, game faces everyone.
And Shields, many Shields. The grounds were properly decked out with the star-studded, upside-down medallions with a football floating on top. Large golden Shields dominated walls. They were slapped on doors, carved into ice sculptures, and etched into cuff links. The Shield is a symbol of almost mystical power. It stands for big notions, like ‘‘Respect,’’ ‘‘Resiliency,’’ ‘‘Integrity,’’ and ‘‘Responsibility to Team’’ (imprinted in big letters on the glass entrances at 345 Park). Hotel personnel wore tiny Shield pins (valet lady: “They made us wear ’em this week”). The Shield might be a commercial insignia, but at league meetings they also function as icons among the initiated, like Scientology crosses.
It had been a rough few months for the Shield, if not the coffers of those in charge. Fans were craving football more than ever while at the same time finding reason to despise the league. A messy intra-mogul tangle had just culminated over which team, or teams, would win the right to move to Los Angeles, home to the second-biggest TV market in the country (made up of millions of actual people who had seemed perfectly content without an NFL team, let alone two NFL teams, for twenty-one years). Bad feeling would linger between owner factions loyal to the competing stadium projects. Fresh generations of embittered fans were being turned out into the world via the spurned cities of St. Louis and eventually San Diego and Oakland.
The just-completed season began with the Patriots hosting the Steelers in the NFL Kickoff Game, which occurred one week after a federal judge vacated Goodell’s four-game suspension of Brady over his alleged role in the Deflategate saga, which still had a whole season left to run. Deflategate was the consummate NFL reality show featuring perfectly unsympathetic perpetrator/victims (the most loathed franchise in the league), as well as an even less sympathetic Keystone Kop (the sanctimonious commissioner) at the controls. But then (plot twist!) the judge overturned the suspension and the pretty-boy quarterback got to play the entire season and the commissioner was nowhere to be seen at his own NFL Kickoff Game. Robert Kraft strutted before the bloodthirsty crowd on Opening Night and hoisted the Patriots’ latest Super Bowl trophy, WWE style.
Joe Thomas, an All-Pro offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns, compared Goodell with the professional-wrestling impresario Vince McMahon. He called the commissioner’s tactics ‘‘brilliant.” ‘‘He’s made the NFL relevant 365 [days a year] by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,’’ Thomas said of Goodell in the midst of Deflategate. ‘‘It’s made the game more popular than ever, and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business, and it’s making so much money.’’ He added: ‘‘It’s almost like the Kim Kardashian factor—that any news is good news when you’re in the NFL.’’
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The NFL is too self-serious to accept any comparisons with Kim Kardashian or Vince McMahon or Donald Trump. But it’s also obvious that even embarrassing episodes—like Deflategate—can provide helpful “entertainment” that diverts from Existential Issue One in football: concussions. Reports of players leaving the game with mangled brains, or prematurely retiring over safety concerns, or the latest retiree discussing how compromised his mind and body are at a young age, have become boilerplate accompaniments to your weekly betting lines, injury reports, and fantasy stats. At what point would fans of the game become rattled? Lawyers, parents, and the media had taken notice. But based on TV ratings and league revenues, customers to this point had proven immune from any repetitive trauma. Denial is itself a powerful shield.
At his Super Bowl “State of the League” press conference the month before, Goodell was asked about a spate of youth football players who had died the previous season. “Tragic,” he said, and then touted all that the league is doing to teach safer tackling techniques. “There is risk in life,” Goodell concluded. “There is risk in sitting on the couch.”
“Roger’s couch remark,” as it became known, did not go over well among the increasingly vocal set of crippled former players and the surviving family members of dead ones. “These men and their families deserve better,” said Tregg Duerson, son of the Bears safety Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in 2011 at age fifty and was later diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease found in scores of deceased players. Duerson spent eleven seasons on the couch.
Goodell is always touting the league’s virtues as a moral force. ‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ he told me. Football provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community, religious, and family institutions is weakening. ‘‘It unites people,” Goodell continued. “It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’
League meetings also give people—needy billionaires in this case—a chance to sort of come together. Would they ever choose one another as business partners? Probably not, but that’s the nature of a cartel. You don’t always get to choose. NFL owners are stuck in a vicious marriage, but no one wants a divorce and why would they?
Really, what signature player of the twenty-first century would not want a piece of the Shield? Put it on TV, and people will watch; stick it on a jersey, they will wear it. The price of television ads during the Super Bowl has increased by more than 75 percent over the last decade.
If greed is ever a topic among owners, the conversation is mostly rhetorical. Is it worth more pie—maybe another billion or two of dollars in annual revenue for a league—for a franchise (say, the Oakland Raiders) to rip the hearts out of some of the most devout fans in the country to grab a much sweeter deal in a city like Las Vegas? Is it the league’s problem that Vegas is willing to shell out three-quarters of a billion dollars to build a stadium even though its schools are underfunded and its roads are medieval? Takeaway: Rhetorical quandaries are tiresome. And they can cost you money.
“You guys are cattle and we’re the ranchers,” the late Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm once told Hall of Fame offensive lineman Gene Upshaw during a collective bargaining negotiation. It is an oft-quoted line that encapsulates the whole setup. Players get prodded, milked for all they’re worth, sold off, put out to pasture, and slaughtered. Implicit also here is that the cattle’s time is fleeting, like Not for Long football careers. “And ranchers can always get more cattle” is how Schramm’s quote concludes.
Likewise, the Patriots can always get another defensive lineman, which is why Nick Fairley, a veteran free agent previously of the Rams, was being whisked through the Boca Resort. Fairley is the rare cattle to be seen at this ranchers’ convention. Bill Belichick, the head coach, will inspect the livestock here along with the rest of the New England brass. (Fairley wound up signing with the Saints.) Upshaw said he had considered writing a memoir about his union activities—joking that its working title was “The Last Plantation.”
2.
THE MONKEY’S ASS
March 20–21, 2016
I arrived at the Boca Resort on a humid Sunday afternoon, a day before the official kickoff to the 2016 meetings. Jerry Jones was the first owner I spotted. He was rounding a corner into the lobby, which set off a brief fight-or-flight commotion in the court of media carnival barkers and nugget seekers. “Nuggets” are vital currency in the NFL’s manic information economy. They are the bite-size, lightweight, drive-by, Twitter-ready items about who is being traded, released, signed, suspended, arrested, diagnosed with dementia, etc. They might as well be gold nuggets, given how well the likes of ESPN’s Adam Schefter are paid for their maniacal mining.
Normally the brash and rascally King Jerry would be thrilled to preside for a few moments over the Court of Nuggets. But in this case he quickened his gait. He might have been gun-shy after an encounter he had during a previous league meeting shortly after the Cowboys had signed defensive lineman Greg Hardy, the serial batterer of quarterbacks and women. Jones had a bad hip at the time and had taken a wrong turn that brought him face-to-face with about two dozen media hyenas hungry for Greg Hardy nuggets. Jones was in pain and not in a feeding mood. He tried to pivot away but could only hobble and was quickly cornered (few things are more amusing than watching a wounded billionaire gazelle laboring back to safe haven behind a velvet rope). In another world, one in which Jerral Wayne “Jerry” Jones senior was not a multibillionaire and not the most powerful owner in America’s most potent sport, he could have been just another schmuck in a hospital gown with his ass hanging out, making a break for the exits.
There were not enough places to hide in Boca. It could also be loud. This was a problem because owners need hushed conversation spaces. To reiterate: the Boca venue was suboptimal. Few stigmas are worse in the NFL than a deficient venue. Quality of “venue” represents a kind of arms race among the owners, a marker of their pecking order; and double bonus points if you can get local pols and taxpayers to pony up.
Jones is a venue god. He built AT&T Stadium, the 110,000-capacity pleasure palace in Arlington, Texas, known as “Jerry’s World,” with its gourmet menus, high-definition video screen spanning between the 20-yard lines, and $1.15 billion price tag. It also houses a massive collection of contemporary art and many, many big photographs of the owner himself all over the stadium (there’s Jerry watching a Cowboys game in 1999 with Nelson Mandela—great statesmen, both, one imprisoned by apartheid and the other by his own need to be closely involved in football decisions). Since being completed in 2009, Jerry’s World was unmatched around the league for its size and opulence, though that mantle will be threatened as soon as the L.A. Rams owner Stan Kroenke completes his gridiron Xanadu in Inglewood, California. This was no fair fight. Kroenke’s stadium plans were so grand, Jones had to concede, they clearly “had been sent to us from above.”
Bringing up the rump end of the stadium parade is Raiders owner Mark Davis, spawn of the team’s outlaw founder, Al Davis. Davis sports a blond version of a Prince Valiant bowl cut and looks every bit the misfit cousin at the Membership’s Thanksgiving dinner. As a practical matter, the Davis family baggage also includes an unfortunate preexisting condition—the worst ‘‘venue’’ in the league. O.co Coliseum, which the Raiders share with the Oakland A’s, exposed Davis to a most lethal contagion within the confederacy: to describe an NFL stadium as being “built for baseball” is like saying it has herpes. Add to that the rowdy occupants of the so-called Black Hole, a hybrid of silver-and-black face-painted biker-Goth–Gangsta Rap–Heavy Metal costumes to honor the marauder identity of Raider Nation, and you have one terrifying assembly. If NFL teams and their home fields are properties on a Monopoly board, think of AT&T Stadium as Boardwalk—and O.co Coliseum as jail.
Davis is fully aware of his runt-of-the-litter standing. His fellow owners find him amiable, though they treat him like their pet rock. But Davis also knows that to own an NFL team is akin to holding a precious lottery ticket. ‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis told me. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’ Yes he does. And what makes Davis a really Big Man in Boca is that he was, at that point, looking to move his team the hell out of Oakland. He was a free agent and ready to roam—the Raiders were “in play.” Davis might frequent Hooters for its all-you-can-eat-wings specials and wear a fanny pack. But don’t for a second think he is not royalty in Pigskin America. Davis moved coolly through the lobby in a black and white pin-striped suit, taking questions about his plans.
This was a few months after Davis’s fellow owners, in late 2015, had thwarted his attempt to move the Raiders to a new stadium in Los Angeles. The Membership preferred that the St. Louis Rams and eventually the San Diego Chargers go there instead. The league had multiple concerns about the Raiders in L.A., not least of which was making Davis the face of the NFL in the country’s second-biggest market. Cue parable: “You get your butt kicked, you get off the ground, you move forward,” Davis went on. “That’s what you do in life. And you learn that in this business on Sundays.”
Football never lacks for parables. Keep moving the ball down the field. Mind your blocking and tackling. Run to Daylight (a gridiron philosophy immortalized by Vince Lombardi). For Davis daylight represented anywhere but Oakland. Las Vegas was very much on the radar, he said. Putting an NFL team in the gambling capital of the world held a certain danger and allure, like the Raiders themselves. In general, there will be no shortage of civic suitors waving their thongs in the faces of NFL owners stuck in bad stadium marriages. (James Carville’s line about Bill Clinton’s extramarital accusers kept jumping to mind: “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park and you never know what you’ll find.”)
“St. Louis, as you may have noticed, doesn’t have a team,” a reporter from the just-abandoned home of the Rams was saying to Davis in Boca. “St. Louis would love to have the Raiders,” the reporter persisted to Davis, sounding more and more desperate.
“Why aren’t you interested in St. Louis?”
Davis said he understood the man’s anguish. He assumed a tone of empathy as he let the man down in gentle buzzwords: “The Raider brand is a different brand that St. Louis would not maximize,” he explained.
“Would Las Vegas maximize the Raider brand?” another reporter asked.
“I think the Raiders would maximize Las Vegas.” The moving gallery behind Davis laughed, except the intrepid St. Louis reporter.
“St. Louis doesn’t have enough of a Raiders image?” he said, a little sadly. “It has beautiful land, a nice stadium.”
“I don’t feel it in my heart,” Davis said. “Sorry, man.”
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The rest of the Membership rolled into the resort by Town Car and wheelchair. By league convention, they must always be referred to as “Mr. So-and-So,” befitting their status and genders (among the rare female members of the Membership is a widow, the Detroit Lions’ then-ninety-year-old Martha Firestone Ford, wife of the team’s late owner William Clay Ford; Virginia McCaskey, the then-ninety-three-year-old “Corporate Secretary” of the Bears, is the eldest daughter of the team’s late founder, coach, and owner, George Halas). The first batch of arrivals resembled one of those reunions of ancient World War II squadrons, minus the flags and applause. New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson, then eighty-eight, was wheeled through the front entrance with a big grin on his face belying the battles he has fought with the league over the years (and more recently with his children in court over control of the Saints, among other toys).
Jones, who entered wearing dark aviator glasses, was nearly chop-blocked by a pair of runaway kids. He was holding a tumbler of something—never just a glass with Jerry, always a tumbler, even if it’s milk, which it rarely is. He loves a “big old time” and can be irresistibly fun, with a big taste for Scotch, a gleam in his icy aqua eyes, and a penchant for circuitous lectures that he will of
ten stumble over but that will still make a strange kind of sense—sometimes.
When I asked Jones why the NFL could hum along despite the perennial crises it faces, Jones launched into something he once heard from a friend who owned a chain of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. He asked his friend how HoJo’s could keep the tastes and flavors of the food consistent from franchise to franchise. The answer: intensity. ‘‘If something is supposed to be cold, make it as cold as hot ice,’’ Jones said. ‘‘If it’s supposed to be hot, have it burn the roof of their mouth. Intensity covers up a lot of frailty in the taste and preparation.’’ Thus, he concluded, the hot intensity and drama of football can obscure the dangers and degeneracy inherent to the sport.
Next down the virtual red carpet was Patriots owner Robert Kraft, strutting through the front entrance in his Nike customized sneakers (“Air Force 1’s”) and silvery hair stuck straight up in the wind. If you achieve a status of “influential owner” around the league, as Mr. Kraft has with his multiple Lombardi trophies, sexy young girlfriends, and perceived closeness with Goodell, you get called by enhanced names, or better yet, initials. Mr. Kraft was merely “Bob Kraft” when he bought the team in 1994, but at some point graduated to “Robert Kraft” and then eventually “RKK,” at least among certain initiated sectors of Foxborough and 345 Park Ave. You know you’re exalted when you achieve initials status. “Brady calls me RKK,” I heard Kraft boast to Adam Schefter when they passed each other in the hallway. If RKK is good enough for Brady—“a fellow Michigan man,” Schefter pointed out—it’s good enough for King Nugget.
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