Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  After a while, you learn to accept the addiction. The players and teams you root for become part of a shared birthright, seasonal pieces of our thought sceneries. In my case, even though I haven’t lived there for a while, I will always belong to the Boston/New England chapter of fans. We are one of but several wings in a big loud mental ward.

  People have asked me over the years why I did not just become a sportswriter. My answer, more flip than anything else, was that I did not want to pollute the joys of being a fan with professional stress. As soon as sports became a job, part of my love for it would die.

  Between the sidelines, NFL football is for the most part a clean meritocracy, with some exceptions (one being an otherwise employable quarterback who kneels in protest during the national anthem). This is why any suggestion of cheating—of skirting rules or fixing games or using banned substances—can be such fighting words. That is why the word “integrity” might be the single most important tool in the league’s propaganda kit. “Integrity” is etched onto the NFL’s most hallowed walls, embedded into its mission statements and everywhere in the commissioner’s declarations. Goodell invokes the “integrity of the game” with the same righteousness as a Fox News anchor asserts that the network is “Fair and Balanced.” Say it enough and it becomes part of the Shield.

  Everyone is expected, at the very least, to be on the level. Now Tom Brady was a cheater. Again. Deflategate had subsided in the months after the Super Bowl but made a sudden comeback May 6. The league released its report on the matter from its special Deflategate detective, attorney Ted Wells. Clinically titled “Investigative Report Concerning Footballs Used During the AFC Championship Game on January 18, 2015,” the report landed as I was downing a Chinese lunch near my D.C. office. I emerged from the restaurant to find a distended inbox of emails and texts on my phone.

  The subject lines were filled with headings such as “Cheater” and “Brady” and “Wow.”

  The Wells Report had been hanging out there for months. Why was it taking so long? Personally I had interpreted the absence of news as a sign that Wells had found nothing; that Deflategate was fizzling into the goofy afterthought it should have been from the start. Bad read.

  The Wells Report dropped like a ton of cement on the village. It turned out to be a flawed but plenty damning document for Tom Brady, the Patriots, and leapers-of-faith like me. That was my takeaway from an initial read of the 243 pages of lawyer porn that was the Wells Report. The overriding impression was that the Patriots were, to say the least, difficult to deal with. No upset there.

  It sounded like the Patriots dealt with league investigators with the same arrogance and hyperregulation that they have with much of the outside world during the Belichick years. While most parties on the other side of this treatment—say, the media—have little choice but to swallow it, the league does not. This was per the authority vested in the commissioner by the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement and Goodell’s own zest for being the Man in Charge. The commissioner enjoys full disciplinary authority over his thirty-two bosses and their teams. What’s unusual about this arrangement is that he also serves at the pleasure of the thirty-two owners and carries out their wishes—except when he is fining them and taking away their draft picks and damaging their reputations.

  Brady was fingered as the main perpetrator in the report even though Wells’s evidence was circumstantial and his conclusion heavily caveated: “It is more probable than not” that Jim McNally and John Jastremski participated in a deliberate effort to release air from the Patriots game balls after the balls were examined by the referee, the report said, referring to the locker-room lackey-accomplices. It also concluded (kind of, sort of, maybe, perhaps) that it was “more probable than not that Tom Brady . . . was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski.”

  At worst, whatever more-likely-than-not offense this was would seem classifiable as an “equipment violation.” Using an illegal Stickum-like substance on a towel or uniform might also be listed as such, which the Chargers were caught doing in 2012. The league fined them $20,000 for not cooperating with the game official who noticed the infraction (this was later overturned on appeal). You could dwell on some version of the “everyone-does-it” explanation and find examples of NFL quarterbacks (Aaron Rodgers, Peyton Manning, among others) voicing preferences for having their essential professional tool—a football—prepared in a certain way. I guess you could compare this to Yo-Yo Ma liking his cello tuned in a certain way, albeit without a pack of three-hundred-pound rival cellists trying to behead him while he performed. (Fun fact: Yo-Yo is a Pats fan, I think I heard that somewhere.)

  At the very least, this smacked of selective enforcement, involving the NFL’s most successful and resented team and star. This was also not the first time the Patriots had been called to the principal’s office. In 2007, the newly named Commissioner Goodell docked the Patriots a first-round draft pick after the aforementioned team official was caught videotaping Jets coaches sending in plays via hand signals—“Spygate.” That revelation also triggered talk of asterisks and poisoned achievements and freighted legacies.

  I admit the “cheater” rap bothered me. It messed with my irrational but powerful fan’s belief that I was on the side of the righteous winners, if not the angels. That was my stab at a higher cause.

  The inflated scandals also disturbed the creed of the Patriot Way, whose mythos I liked to believe incorporated an adherence to fair play. Were the Patriots’ victories a sham? Were the Super Bowls tainted? Was I tainted? Maybe the Patriots’ success was always too good to be true. Maybe they were all impostors, like me. Sports can trigger all kinds of psychological demons.

  It has never been clear to me how big of a deal Spygate was. No one ever gave a good answer about why it would be so wrong for a team official to videotape opposing coaches from the field but okay for anyone—even that same team official—to buy a ticket and videotape the same coaches from the stands. Belichick made this point during his post-Deflategate/Mona Lisa Vito tutorial in January in response to a reporter’s question that referenced the then-seven-year-old videotaping matter. “The guy’s giving signals in front of eighty thousand people, okay?” Belichick said. “So we filmed him making signals out in front of eighty thousand people like there were a lot of other teams doing at the time, too.”

  I asked Kraft about Spygate, which he has pinned on Belichick over the years while insisting that he knew nothing about the team’s taping practices. He shrugged, assumed a reflexively pained look, and proceeded to tell me a story. After the Pats were busted in 2007, Kraft asked Belichick how much competitive benefit the taping had gained him on a scale of one to one hundred—especially in light of the penalties and embarrassment the team suffered after getting caught. About a 1 percent benefit, Belichick replied to his boss (no doubt looking him in the eye). “Then you’re a schmuck,” Kraft told Belichick.

  Kraft relayed this conversation to me in a quiet and oddly conspiratorial way, as if he were taking me into his confidence by sharing it. In fact he has recounted this “schmuck” exchange many times over the years. It is a go-to sound bite from Kraft’s Spygate repertoire. And I’ve always been puzzled over why Kraft is so fond of this explanation, other than his seizing the opportunity to use a naughty Yiddish word (“schmuck”), which I can respect. The explanation raised more questions than answers. Kraft seemed to be saying, in essence, that the minuscule payoff the Patriots might have gained had not been worth the trouble.

  But what if Belichick’s answer had come back higher, say 10 or 15 percent? Would that make the cheating kosher?

  Kraft had no comparable “you’re a schmuck” story for Deflategate other than saying Brady had assured him he had had nothing to do with removing any air from footballs. Brady was suspended four games for his more-probable-than-not/at-least-generally-aware link to the alleged caper.

  I could reli
tigate Deflategate up and down, which I am not proud of and won’t bore anyone further with. It was, in retrospect, a dark period in my annals of time management. Several times a day I would refresh the various sports websites for fresh nuggets and to see if justice was any closer to prevailing. It was like watching a playoff game in progress with the stadium lights off. I read the Wells Report three times (729 pages in total), and then (at least twice) the Patriots’ rebuttal to the Wells Report titled “The Wells Report in Context” (another catchy title), which still resides online. I could give tutorials on the Ideal Gas Law and how the league scorched Brady’s reputation over nothing.

  I listened a lot to Boston’s sports radio stations online. It always makes me feel so smart and well informed, to a point where I can now probably teach a college course on the PSI saga, except that a law professor at the University of New Hampshire, Michael McCann, beat me to it (INCO 460: “Deflategate: The intersection of sports, law and journalism”). The Boston sports media was almost comically in synch with its outraged customers.

  One exception was Michael Felger, a former Boston Herald football writer who grew up in Wisconsin and went on to become a contrarian fixture on “The Sports Hub,” one of the city’s two radio sports outlets. I was driving around Boston one day while visiting my mother and happened to catch a heated back-and-forth between Felger and a cohost. The cohost kept imploring “Felgie” to, for just one second, “try to put yourself in the position of the average Patriots fan.” To which Felger calmly replied: “But that would require a frontal lobotomy.” I considered that to be a valid point.

  Boston fans were fluent in the nuances of this rolling injustice. What was especially galling was how the original narrative was set in motion. Someone, almost certainly employed at league headquarters, had given the bad air pressure numbers to Chris Mortensen a few days after the AFC Championship Game. ESPN (a valued NFL broadcast partner) went months without correcting the record even after it learned the information was wrong. In other words, the NFL was complicit in creating the outrage, stoking it, and then declining to kill it, even after the league knew it was wrong. It’s hard to think this was not part of some NFL-driven PR campaign, if not to persecute the Patriots per se, to propel the story in a direction the league wanted. Damn, I feel myself getting worked up again, about fucking air pressure. In footballs.

  Whatever.

  “I have never been involved in a national story that transcended all common sense like this,” said Bob Kravitz, the Indianapolis sports commentator whose tweet a few hours after the AFC title game started the whole thing—making him the Johnny Appleseed of the Deflategate media forest. “Not only do you have an eighteen-month clusterfuck that ends up in federal court, I’ve had an entire city threatening my well-being.”

  ESPN’s Mortensen received a similar pelting even after he was diagnosed with throat cancer and off the air for a stretch. “People for the most part feel free to say anything they want to on social media,” he told me. That included in Mortensen’s case a series of death threats. “Listen, I’m a big boy, I really am,” Mortensen said. His concern was for his wife, who he said was shaken by the barrage and whom he urged to avoid New England—not easy since her husband has to spend a lot of time in Connecticut, where ESPN is based.

  Certainly Mortensen screwed up, but I’ve always respected him for not burning his source, no matter how badly the source burned him. He told me Robert and Jonathan Kraft had been nothing but gracious to him in the aftermath. What was more relevant to me was that the league seemed very much to be driving an agenda here.

  The main target of New England ire was Goodell, serving as the heat shield for the Shield—or, more to the point, heat shield for the thirty-one non-Kraft owners. “A lot of the reason Roger is paid a lot of money is that Roger takes a lot of fucking arrows for a lot of owners,” Falcons owner Arthur Blank told me.

  Or bullets, figuratively speaking—so one would hope. A Boston sports radio host called for Goodell to be murdered (he claimed to be kidding) while effigies of the commissioner were being burned across New England and another faux-Roger was being tied up to be burned at the stake as part of some clever fan’s Halloween display—so puritanical! Special police protection was provided to Goodell’s summer home in Maine. Sports fans are not known for benevolent impulses. But then, they were fighting for a cause bigger than themselves: their football team.

  9.

  NO ONE BUYS TICKETS TO WATCH A MORALITY PLAY

  October 19, 2015

  Somewhere along the way, mere “stories” were deemed insufficient. They had to be inflated. Or deflated. They had to become “storylines,” or “backstories,” or if the storytellers were feeling really literary, “narratives.”

  In October, the reality show caught itself a nice storyline in Indianapolis, where the Colts would be hosting the Patriots in a Sunday night rematch of the AFC Championship Game, billed “the Deflategate Bowl.” NBC had at its disposal one of the world’s most time honored of storylines: revenge. The network did not disappoint. Neither did the two fan bases (as what used to just be “fans” are now called). Even then–Indiana governor Mike Pence got in on the fun, posting a totally original tweet of a deflated football sitting on his desk. Apparently Pence was always a laugh riot.

  Indy’s autumn air was spiced with the scent of payback. Not only did the Colts dime out the Pats over their alleged air pressure antics the previous January, they had set in motion this whole interminable saga that rained asterisks down upon the enemy helmets. “I’d like to see them put 60 points on the board,” Tom Brady Sr. had told the New York Daily News a few days earlier, “and I’d love to see Tom throw for 500 yards and eight touchdowns.”

  Not to belabor this, but—oh, let’s belabor this: the Colts had it coming.

  They were the worst kinds of snitches: self-righteous ones. Ryan Grigson, then the Colts’ general manager, had written a beaut of an email to the NFL operations department before the AFC Championship Game, urging the league to be on the lookout for funny business by the Pats. The Colts’ equipment manager had heard through the grapevine that the Patriots preferred playing with smaller footballs. They had been known to fiddle with their pigskins after the referees had inspected them. “All the Indianapolis Colts want is a completely level playing field,” Grigson wrote. “Thank you for being vigilant stewards of that not only for us but for the shield and overall integrity of our game.”

  The Colts couldn’t just take their 38-point beating in the AFC Championship Game like men; they had to also become the league’s leading-edge bitches and the first to cry “cheater” over air pressure. Of course, everyone on both teams had to refrain from saying anything that might provide “bulletin board” fodder for the opposition. By the anesthetic norms of football-speak, they would treat NE @ IND on Week 6 as just any other regular season game.

  And it was just any other regular season game—except for all the people walking through downtown Indy with deflated footballs on their heads.

  The festive mood around Lucas Oil Stadium was nations removed from the “bitter celebration” that Cris Collinsworth described in Foxborough a few weeks before at the Patriots’ latest banner-raising ceremony. While it is no vibrant megalopolis, Indianapolis was no longer the bleak picture that native son David Letterman would compare with “a minimum-security prison with a racetrack.” Friendly and well-liquored Hoosiers paraded toward the stadium past the various Deflategate-themed displays that were set up inside the tailgating area at the corner of Meridian and South streets. A local bakery was selling limited-edition cakes in the shape of sagging footballs; one buffet featured a centerpiece of Brady on a box of Wheaties defaced to say “Cheaties.” Fun!

  Well, except for oversensitive Pats fans. Even casual ones could become prickly at being called cheaters, to say nothing of people close to Brady, the no-longer-stainless signal caller. Tom Senior and Galynn took the ordeal hard. They abs
orbed all the noise their son was adept at sealing off. They stopped attending Tom’s away games, which they had done without fail every season of his college and pro careers. The taunts and abuse and CHEATERS LOOK UP signs—which became a fixture of enemy stadia—made them quick to anger. “It’s just not worth it,” Tom Senior told me. “Life’s too short.” One afternoon, Tom Senior was driving around the Bay Area when he heard a radio host refer to his son as a liar and cheater. He pulled his car over and called in to KGO, the San Francisco radio station whose host—Chip Franklin—made the charge. The producer put Mr. Brady right on the air.

  “You are full of crap,” he began, his voice jumping from agitation to full-on rage. In an epic five-minute rant, Mr. Brady would refer to the whole investigation as “a kangaroo court,” dismiss the NFL’s “propaganda,” and denounce Goodell as a “flaming liar.”

  All things being equal, it’s probably a good thing the Brady Bunch was not in Indy. Tom Senior might not have been able to control himself, and could have gotten up in the face of Wayne Gainey, a goateed Chevy dealer in Noblesville, Indiana, who was showing off a display of a dummy dressed in Brady’s #12 reposed in a coffin. “You got one life, you might as well live it up,” Gainey rhapsodized to me, deploying for me his personal motto (and vanity plate: LIVITUP).

  * * *

  —

  A white van with Rhode Island plates pulled into the tailgating lot. Face-painted Pats fans, about half a dozen of them, filed out into the enemy throng. No great commotion ensued: lighthearted taunts were exchanged—something about Brady’s balls. Bratwursts were offered and consumed by Pats fans, and cans of Miller Lite were touched in fellowship. While it’s been said before, tailgating is one of the truly great remnants of American unity, creativity, and appetite in an otherwise barbaric realm. This was football in America at its happiest—with refreshments and before kickoff.