Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  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.

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  —

  “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!” 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.

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  —

  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.

  4.

  “TOM BRADY HERE”

  July 2014

  What to make of Tom Brady?

  The Patriots quarterback has been defined by competing narratives for years. Neither is that compelling except in their incompatibility. The first is the familiar against-the-odds construct: Brady as the not-great high school player, up-and-down college quarterback, and 199th pick in the draft who caught stardom out of nowhere. Now over two decades of dominating a league designed to thwart dominance, a second narrative has taken hold: Brady as fairy tale and anti-underdog. He might be the most envied man in America: he dated an actress (Bridget Moynahan, with whom he has a son), married, and had two children with a Brazilian supermodel. His net worth is well into the nine figures and he plays for a team that always wins.

  Tom Brokaw, the legendary newsman, tells the story of going through cancer treatments a few years ago and generally feeling like crap. He would, on his daily walks through his Upper East Side neighborhood, pass a bus shelter adorned with Brady’s likeness on an ad poster for UGGs. “Fuck you,” Brokaw would make a point of saying to the poster. “It was less an attack on him and more a catharsis for me,” Brokaw explained, “but Brady was the perfect object.”

  Being a sports fan, generally speaking, can require a faith both blind and durable. Being a Boston fan has made this easier, in some ways, with our gaudy prosperity of late (ten rings combined this century from the four Boston/New England teams—and yes, we’re counting). But the birthright is not without its embarrassments. You love your kids and try to be proud. Yet marrying my sports identity to glum, rude, and possibly devious characters like, say, Belichick can get exhausting. (I know, fuck me, Boston fans are tiresome enough without the self-pity routine.)

  Brady’s cultivated elegance could also be a bit much. He is “that perfect blend of goofy and handsome that makes you feel simultaneously inadequate and superior,” wrote a car blogger named Matt Posky. Posky was disgusted upon learning that Brady had signed a lucrative endorsement deal with Aston Martin, the British luxury automaker preferred by Bond, James Bond. It is, apparently, a vehicle held most sacred among car bloggers (like this guy Matt Posky), and it was not just any Aston Martin car that Brady was hawking, but a DB11 model that sold for $215,000. Aston Martin’s partnership with Brady would be long-term, according to the company’s press release, and the campaign would emphasize the quarterback’s “affinity for the love of beautiful.”

  It went on: “Brady will seek to share visualizations of where he sees beauty in his sporting moments, what he sees as beautiful in life, and what continues to compel him to pursue greatness.”

  By contrast, Eli Manning has a deal with Toyota and Aaron Rodgers is a pitchman for Ford.

  Even in his younger, underdog days, Brady was always a skewed fit with his townie worshippers. While he managed to exhibit his own kind of sheepish grace within the parochial madhouse of Boston sports, Brady could seem as far away as any athlete I’d ever rooted for. This went beyond the shout-in-the-canyon remove that investing emotionally in a pro athlete will always entail. He was one of those everywhere-but-nowhere people. He would write a celebrity self-help book, promote exotic diets, and get called the NFL’s answer to Gwyneth Paltrow. Who could identify with a man photographed in GQ holding a baby goat? Brady didn’t belong to any world I would ever know. It seemed unlikely I would get close enough to venture a guess.

  Yet here was an email in my inbox. From the Greatest of All Time (GOAT). “Tom Brady here” it said in the subject heading.

  This was, in retrospect, where my expedition into the NFL began: New York, July 2, 2014, a few weeks before the Patriots were scheduled to start training camp, relatively innocent days for the NFL Reality Show. Ray Rice had only been suspended two games at that point. No one had accused Brady of cheating, or knew that the air pressure in footballs was something anyone could care about. He had yet to lend his name, at least publicly, to any Aston Martins, TAG Heuers, or Donald Trumps.

  I’d been trying to meet and write about Brady for a few years. It was a Hail Mary pursuit, I always figured, but at the very least, trying to get to him had become an occasional side project. About four years earlier, I had struck up a sporadic phone dialogue with Donald Yee, a sports agent in Los Angeles who had represented Brady since he entered the NFL in 2000. Yee had built his NFL clientele in part by signing up lower draft picks with marginal NFL prospects—the football equivalent of penny stocks. In that regard, Brady turned into a payoff for the ages.

  Brady remained loyal to Yee through his career while Yee has, not surprisingly, clung to his asset like a toddler to a blankie. He fit no archetype of the hustler agent in the Jerry Maguire mold. And while being full of shit is an occupational hazard among sports agents, I found Yee to be full of shit in such counterintuitive and even refreshing ways that I took a liking to him.

  Yee grew up in Sacramento as part of a Chinese American family that emigrated in the 1850s. His ancestors sold herbal medicines. In scouting talent, Yee told me that he looked for less traditional and “more Eastern” qualities in the college players he wished to attract. Those qualities included a mixture of quiet confidence, even temperament, and “outward tranquillity,” he said. (A more likely explanation is that Yee’s services were not in great demand among first-tier college prospects, so he took a flyer on a bargain-bin QB from the University of Michigan and got lucky as hell.)

  I told Yee I was interested in writing about Brady even though I was not a sportswriter. I was aware that Brady almost never did interviews. Yee said Brady preferred talking to people outside his usual field, so that was encouraging. It was also clear to me that Yee wanted me to think that he, himself, was more than just some fast-talking operator. The job of being a sports agent, Yee said in an interview with Sacramento’s Sactown magazine, allowed him to be “very creative in the sense that it’s very fun to try to procure a client that you have a big vision for and then see the client paint the picture.” Yee compared his work to “a white canvas” waiting to be realized. “Then I see what I would consider to be a beautiful painting. And then I try to find the person who can paint that.” I figured maybe I could humor Yee enough so that he might help me become a speck on the beautiful canvas of Tom Brady’s life.

  Yee told me to keep in touch. We checked in every year or so. Yee once tried to pitch me on doing a magazine story on another of his clients, an extreme wheelchair athlete I’d never heard of (Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham) who I guess is a big deal in “the extreme wheelchair” space. Then, a few days before the Fourth of July weekend in 2014, Yee called out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to grab lunch with Brady in New York the following Wednesday. Uh, sure, I said, I would do my best to be available, maybe move a few things around.

  I made reservations at a restaurant in SoHo called The Dutch. Brady approved, via Yee, which I took as an affirmation of my class and refinement. But then Yee went dark and stopped answering my calls and emails for several days. Part of me wondered if I was being pranked. I took a train up to New York from
my home in Washington on the night before the appointed Wednesday. Brady’s email was waiting for me when I woke up the next morning. He offered robotic pleasantries, as if the email were composed by Siri.

  “Good morning,” it read. “I hope you’re having a good week.” We confirmed our lunch. But an hour later, I received another email from Brady. He said he wanted to call “an audible” (audible!) and asked if we could meet at his apartment instead of the restaurant. Sure, sure, I said. Where was that?

  Twenty-third and Madison, Brady said.

  I was in the cab on the way there when it occurred to me that any number of homes might be found at Twenty-third and Madison. So I emailed Brady back to ask for a more precise address.

  “Hahaha, I wish I knew the address,” he replied.

  Brady didn’t know his home address? Another point in favor of the prank theory. At the very least, Brady’s casual ignorance of this most basic personal data reinforced the notion that he did not dwell in the pedestrian realm of slobs who must remember street addresses. He wrote back that he lived in the only skyscraper on the block, next to a McDonald’s. Rupert Murdoch had apparently paid $57.25 million for four floors in the building.