“Eli Lilly is around here, so maybe they put fucking Prozac in the fucking drinking water or something,” Bob Kravitz was theorizing to me in a bar. Kravitz is a longtime Indy sportswriter best known for his charter status on the Deflategate Enemies List. We met a few hours before kickoff at the Claddagh Irish Pub & Restaurant up Meridian Street, where the early games were being shown on TV. I sought out Kravitz because he embodies a modern phenomenon of media notoriety: he is a longtime print hack self-transformed into a TV, web, and Twitter bulwark; a local Indy fixture who has exploded nationally with the suddenness of an early-morning tweet about football air pressure. It is almost impossible in this day and age for any reporter to not become a cause célèbre after breaking a controversial story that goes national.
Kravitz says he has read the Wells Report four times, including once on the beach in the Bahamas. He has haunted press boxes and locker rooms over a thirty-five-year career for the Bergen Record, San Diego Union-Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Indianapolis Star, among other outlets. He chews tobacco, can barely move his neck from an old hockey injury, and projects the endearing jadedness of an ink-stained journeyman. He couldn’t care less who wins and who loses, on most days. Today is not one of those days.
“After eight months of horrible abuse from Patriots fans, not only towards me but towards my wife and towards my daughters, I would love nothing more than to see the Colts shove it up their ass,” Kravitz told me. I took this to mean he did not care for my people.
He handed me his phone to reveal the up-to-the-minute greetings he had been receiving that afternoon via Twitter from his New England friends—unspeakable things, about unspeakable acts. He kept interrupting himself to point out something transpiring on nearby TVs. “I’m fifty-five and this is the first time I can remember giving a shit about the outcome of a game,” Kravitz said (“Wow, Cincinnati is kicking the shit out of Buffalo”). “I’ve been abused by so many miserable people in New England that if they are just a little more miserable tonight or tomorrow, it would make my day just a little bit brighter” (“Chicago beat Detroit, wow”).
Kravitz goes on for a few more minutes before pivoting to a more philosophical take. He calls it “the sports fan pathology.” He is not the first to identify this phenomenon, but clearly has more direct experience with it than pretty much anyone. Social media has afforded the world’s bravest cowards a flea market for their artistry. “I kind of miss when people actually had to get an envelope and stamp and put pen to paper,” Kravitz said, “or crayon to paper, in some cases.”
The bar kept erupting in cheers and oohs as the early slate of games wound down. Everyone in the place seemed to be wearing some officially licensed NFL merchandise, mostly blue-and-white Colts jerseys. It is no longer enough for NFL customers to merely root for their teams; they must also dress exactly like the players. “Fans now actually think they’re playing in the game,” Kravitz said.
Notions of “vicarious” keep shrinking. The action is right here, fans inhabiting this intimate crush via high definition. Many of them “own” teams and players in fantasy leagues. A Colts fan devastated when Peyton Manning departed the Colts in 2012 can still profit from his success via fantasy. “People are so isolated in their gadgets and desperate to be part of something bigger than themselves,” said Kravitz (“Oh, that was one killer hit in the Browns game!”). The prickly sportswriter was now going full Philosopher King. “We don’t put trust or faith in any institution, really,” Kravitz said. “But strangely enough, we choose to put trust and faith in the one institution that gives us CTE and painkiller addiction and things like that.”
Playing his final season for the Broncos and looking as if he could barely move his arms, Manning threw a bad interception up on the TV. Crushed again, the man in a #11 Colts jersey keeled over in disappointment (“Oh, Peyton”). Every sports bar in the nation is at this moment incubating a similar stew of emotion. Do this many Americans go to church on any given Sunday? Peyton might prove a humble mortal next to God, but my money says he puts up bigger numbers.
In other news, I still needed a ticket to the game.
* * *
—
I left Kravitz at the Claddagh and headed south on Meridian toward the stadium. A few blocks down, I struck up a conversation with Juan Collier, a gap-toothed African American gentleman from Cincinnati whom I found standing in front of a bar called the Slippery Noodle Inn. He was high-fiving anyone who was dressed in New England gear, and while I was not, I introduced myself to him as family.
Collier told me he’d been a Patriots fan since Drew Bledsoe was drafted first overall by the team in 1993. “You never know how these rooting things start, you know?” he said. One day, the Pats were just a terrible, anonymous team. Few people outside of New England ever thought about them. (Brady’s dad once told me that before the Patriots drafted his son, they might as well have been the Jacksonville Jaguars.) Then New England drafted Bledsoe, eight-year-old Juan decided he liked the rocket-armed quarterback, and the Patriots became his team. And here he was in front of the Slippery Noodle two decades later taunting strangers in Colts jerseys.
One of Collier’s tauntees had an extra ticket to the game, which he sold to me for $100. It was on the 20-yard line and the guy assured me I could see the entire field from the seat. This was technically true, in the same way that you can see the entire city block below from the top of the Empire State Building. But whatever, if you’re going to go to a football game, chances are you’re not going to improve on the TV view no matter where you sit. You just embrace the being there.
The stadium roof was closed and the crowd’s Sensurround roar made it seem as if we were inside a massive sound studio. We effectively were, all of us extras in the weekly TV extravaganza that, per usual, would be the most watched show in America that week. I carried a cheeseburger plate to my seat.
The Colts mascot—a giant stuffed animal of undetermined breed named “Blue”—delivered a theatrical pummeling of a Pats mascot facsimile in the end zone. It fired up the crowd, in a kind of pro forma way. A CHEATERS LOOK UP sign greeted Brady as he ran out of the tunnel. Frank Sinatra Jr. sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a Colts sweatshirt; quarterback Andrew Luck appeared on the Jumbotron to remind everyone to refrain from using abusive language. Another PSA urged fans to wash their hands to avoid the spread of germs.
As kickoff approached, a video montage came on featuring highlights from the Colts’ thirty-one-year history in Indianapolis. It began with a brief shot of the Mayflower moving trucks pulling out of Baltimore on a snowy night in 1984. This is an iconic image in the history of the NFL, and not in a good way. The Mayflowers represent the heartlessness of NFL oligarchs at their worst: in this infamous case, they signified the nerve of the late, loathed owner of the Colts, Robert “Tiger” Irsay, who uprooted the team from its longtime home under cover of darkness. This act of betrayal remains remarkable for its audacity and cowardice over three decades later. Even more remarkable was that Irsay’s caper would be included in a testimonial to the Colts in their current residence, the city that inherited the team—or “stole” the team, as they still say in Baltimore.
The flight of the Colts illustrates both the best and worst facets of the NFL. Except for maybe Green Bay, no community in America was identified more closely with its football franchise than Baltimore was with its Colts. No community embraced its team harder and no population saw its identity more proudly reflected on its home field. When any serious fan considers the glory days of the NFL, the period when the league gained its foothold as the most popular sport in America in the 1950s and 1960s, it is impossible not to think of those vintage Baltimore teams of Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and the Sudden Death NFL Championship Game of 1958 at Yankee Stadium. It was won by Unitas’s Colts over Frank Gifford’s Giants, 23–17, in what came to be known as the “Greatest Game Ever Played.”
Sadly, Baltimore would also bec
ome the exemplar of how one terrible owner can wreck an idyllic football marriage. The reign of Tiger Irsay was a circus from the start. It was marked by the leading clown’s flamboyant need to flaunt his ability to move the Colts at his whim. He flirted with cities like Memphis and Jacksonville because why shouldn’t he? The team is “my candy store and I can move it wherever I want to,” he would say. Commissioner Pete Rozelle believed he had persuaded Irsay to stay in Baltimore. But then off went the Mayflowers bound for Indy, an image that will endure in permanent infamy in Baltimore.
Baltimore wound up getting another team in 1995 after the Browns’ (late, loathed) owner Art Modell pulled an Irsay on the city of Cleveland and moved his team to Baltimore. Modell’s escapade rivaled Irsay’s in terms of pure chutzpah, not only because the Browns also had a long connection with Cleveland and their home fans, but also because Modell had been a vocal critic of NFL franchise relocations. “We can’t hopscotch franchises around the country,” Modell said. “We have built this business on the trust of fans. If we treat that as if it doesn’t count, it isn’t going to wash.”
Modell never set foot again in Cleveland after the Browns bolted. Smart move. “It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had other than when Kennedy was killed,” said Browns legend Jim Brown of the team’s leaving Cleveland. The newly renamed Baltimore Ravens found more success on the field than the Browns had in Cleveland in several decades (the Ravens won the franchise’s first Super Bowl in 2000); likewise, the league granted Cleveland a replacement Browns franchise, which started up again in 1999. The sparkling new Cleveland Browns Stadium was just the kind of gridiron palace that Modell had been craving for years but that the city of Cleveland would never build until he was gone.
You could make the point that all’s well that ends well. Baltimore and Cleveland were both eventually made whole by the league. NFL teams have after all been moving around the country since the league’s inception (Cleveland was home to the Rams until the team moved to Los Angeles in 1946, before it left again—in 1995—for St. Louis). And we all understand that football is big business and that the NFL didn’t fatten into this most golden of geese by being hung up on sentiment. “Relocation is always a painful process,” I’ve heard Goodell say about a million times. He affirms this in that frigid, doctorlike way of his, as if he were describing the passage of a kidney stone.
Growing up in the seventies, I always liked the Baltimore Colts. They were in the Pats’ division back then, but unlike our other AFC East rivals (mainly the Dolphins and the Jets), I found them charming, even venerable in their stately blue-and-white jerseys. My favorite non-Patriots player was Bert Jones, Unitas’s heir apparent with the Colts. He was the MVP of the league in 1976 and, a few years later, became the first quarterback in NFL history ever to be sacked twelve times in a single game (the record still stands).
The Indy incarnation of the Colts has enjoyed its share of success, most of it during Peyton Manning’s time. Jim Irsay, a recovering addict and an eclectic figure inside the league, is by no means a model owner but still an upgrade over his late father. Indianapolis has fine fans and hosts a perfectly serviceable NFL experience. The Colts won a Super Bowl in 2007 and hosted one in 2012.
But as a notion, the Indianapolis Colts have never sat right. There is a remote white-noise quality to them, as if the team with the iconic horseshoe helmets doesn’t really play anywhere. Once they left Baltimore, where they belonged, they might as well have been dropped on San Antonio or Columbus or Sacramento and it wouldn’t have mattered. Indianapolis merely spent itself into being the most opportunistic landing spot for NFL’s next studio. And more power to Indy, if not its taxpayers.
The Indianapolis Colts are one of a handful of NFL teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars or Tennessee Titans that could vaporize tomorrow and few people outside of those places would miss them. They are, in the spreadsheet calculus of the NFL, second-tier markets. But I was still struck that the Colts would actually show the Mayflower trucks pulling out of Baltimore. The image was thrown up as the drive-by origin story for this Indian–no place chapter of the Colts. Few people in the stadium seemed to give this karmic spike a second thought, or appeared troubled that the team they’ve been rooting for all these years might be an ill-gotten gain. Is our mercenary, transient nature so baked into the fan experience that one city’s heartbreak can so easily be shrunk down into another’s Jumbotron fodder?
Or maybe I’m overthinking this. No one buys tickets to watch a morality play.
10.
DINGS?
Thanksgiving 2015
Enduring this twenty-week colonoscopy of a season was one long “painful process.” Not only was the league reeling from Ray Rice, Deflategate, and other player discipline/court messes involving child and domestic abusers (Adrian Peterson, Greg Hardy, respectively); it was also facing the quandary of having three owners desperate to move their teams into the same “market”—or alleged “super-market,” in this case, Los Angeles.
On the eve of one of football’s High Holidays, Thanksgiving, the family of Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, who died the previous August, announced that Gifford had experienced “first hand symptoms” associated with CTE. Raiders quarterback Ken “The Snake” Stabler, who died in July, was elected posthumously into the Hall of Fame just days after a front-page New York Times story by John Branch described the rapid decline in Stabler’s cognitive function—the severe headaches, lost sense of direction, his torture at loud noises. “I think Kenny’s head rattled for about 10 years,” Stabler’s longtime partner Kim Bush said.
Concussion was set to be released a few weeks later, just in time to rattle the league for Christmas. The league feared that the Sony Pictures film, starring Will Smith, would be a blockbuster that furthered the impression that football was an unsafe and amoral spectacle—and also that the NFL had been shielding the game’s true dangers for decades. Smith played Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born forensic neuropathologist in Pittsburgh who performed the autopsy of the great Steelers center Mike Webster in 2002. Webster, the gap-toothed battering ram who epitomized the Pittsburgh dynasty of the seventies, died at fifty after suffering from dementia and depression and falling into a gruesome spiral of homelessness and addiction. In studying Webster’s brain, Omalu discovered the distinct tangles of tau protein that were consistent with what would become known as CTE. Suddenly Webster went from being an archetype of old-school football to the broken face of its toll.
Concussion was less of an exposé than it was a big-budget dramatization of football’s most elemental problem: that it was becoming harder to ignore the game’s inherent danger. Whether or not the game really has “never been safer,” as the league is always saying, the volume of new research, laments from gimpy retirees, increase in former players willing to donate their posthumous brains to research, and stories like Webster’s kept pounding home the inescapable follow-up question: If the game has never been safer—safer than what exactly? And was the NFL, with its souped-up performers, ever going to be safe at any speed?
There is an oft-quoted line from the film in which a doctor (played by Albert Brooks) warns Dr. Omalu about the dangers of taking on “a corporation that has twenty million people on a weekly basis craving their product.” The NFL “owns a day of the week,” he said. “The same day the church used to own.” The NFL has proven durable and won again and again.
The NFL was concerned enough about Concussion’s impact that it convened a series of focus groups to gauge how it should react. Based on the market research, the league concluded that it should mention the movie as little as possible, if at all; that any kind of response would make it look defensive and appear as if it were hiding something. A team of PR specialists addressed the league’s December meeting in Dallas to rearm the owners with some proper sound bites (all the different ways to communicate that the game has never been safer and that the league had given tons of money to research on brain healt
h). Earlier in the season, the Times’s Ken Belson had reported that in internal emails revealed in a hack of Sony’s computers, executives and filmmakers had discussed altering the movie and its marketing plan to avoid antagonizing the league. One email from August 2014 stated that “unflattering moments for the NFL” were deleted or altered; another email from the previous month claimed that a Sony lawyer had taken “most of the bite” out of the film “for legal reasons with the NFL.”
Jerry Jones believed the league’s preoccupation with Concussion was overstated—both the movie and the real-life hazard on the field. “This is a pimple on a baby’s ass,” Jones said at a previous owners’ meeting, according to an account in ESPN The Magazine. Even so, the league’s apparatus was in place to soften the film’s impact. At the very least, NFL authorities were learning to talk a good game about concussions, even if that contradicted the actual message the game sends its players. Nate Jackson, the former Broncos tight end and author of the football memoir Slow Getting Up, said that for all of the league’s evangelism about making the game safer, back in the locker room it’s always the same conversation. “Hit them as hard as you fucking can,” Jackson told me. If you ask most players what they love about football, none of them will tout how safe the game is.
“Literally, if I had a perfect place to die, I would die on the field,” said Jamal Adams, a young safety for the Jets in response to a question about his level of concern over CTE. Adams was appearing alongside Goodell at an event for about 150 Jets season ticket holders, who applauded his remark. “I would be at peace,” he added of his final breaths on the gridiron. The gladiatorial fatalism of Adams’s words drew stark headlines and a follow-up question to Goodell after the session. “I think what he was really making the point of is how much he loves the game and how passionate he is for the game,” the commissioner said. “It’s just something that means a great deal to him.”
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