Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  A little earlier at the Four Seasons, Goodell was the picture of sculpted arrogance as he administered a brief press conference. The requisite Shield logo was affixed before him—the NFL podium version of the presidential seal. In brief remarks, Goodell expressed the proper “thoughts and prayers to San Bernardino,” where fourteen people had been killed in a terrorist shooting that day. He volleyed a question about a recent spate of high-profile referee screwups (“when we talk about the integrity of the game, we strive for perfection”). He was then invited by a reporter to weigh in on “a bit of good news”: newly released statistics showing that NFL players were getting arrested at lower rates than they had been in 2011 and 2012.

  “Well, you have to give credit to the players,” the commissioner said generously. This made me chuckle. “Credit to the players . . .” for getting arrested less? Funny construction! I chuckled too conspicuously and felt the glare of the very-serious nugget seekers who had been trying to hang on the Supreme Leader’s every word. This was my first commissioner’s press conference and I had not fully appreciated its gravity.

  The exercise of covering an owners’ meeting reminded me of covering the United States Senate: a bunch of reporters waiting around for a bunch of rich white dudes, many of them elderly, to emerge from endless meetings. As with senators, NFL owners mostly adhere to a Membership code that forbids disparagement of one another, at least on the record. They reveal very little and leave their chroniclers to overinterpret body language and facial expressions and attempt to eavesdrop.

  When I first arrived at the Four Seasons, I saw Goodell and Falcons owner Arthur Blank locked in an intense discussion outside a lobby elevator. Blank, a founder of Home Depot, is the chairman of the owners’ “compensation committee.” This meant that he was the man most responsible for determining how many tens of millions more dollars the owners would fork over to Goodell for performing his primary function (i.e., making the owners billions more dollars). Goodell’s astronomical pay had become its own cause célèbre and received more attention than that of any sports commissioner in history. It was marveled upon at the highest levels of society. “I cannot believe the commissioner of football gets paid $44 million a year,” President Barack Obama said in a GQ interview with Bill Simmons, who had asked him which professional league he would most like to run.

  For his part, Blank seemed to relish his work on the compensation committee as he would a hernia. “Well, it’s not more trouble than it’s worth,” he told me. “But it’s definitely a lot of trouble.” Now a decade into Goodell’s tenure, there was a debate among owners about whether Goodell should be paid like the head of a large entertainment firm, media group, or merely a sports league. And that’s before you consider the polarizing figure Goodell has become, and his own ego. Goodell would almost never dare say anything about his salary, certainly not publicly. But it was important to Goodell that he be paid more than any other commissioner of a major American sport, especially former Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig. Selig was privately derided among NFL owners and executives as a weak and incompetent boob.

  But it was not lost on the NFL Membership—and certainly not Goodell—that Selig was paid a reported $18.4 million a year in 2011, almost twice what Goodell was then making. Goodell mentioned this imbalance in negotiating his new deal, and with good effect. On the rare occasion Goodell would talk about his new salary to anyone during that period, it was to point out that he was being paid much more than Bud Selig was.

  The reason anyone even knew about Goodell’s compensation to begin with was because the NFL had improbably been given the status of a tax-exempt trade association going back to the 1960s. It required the NFL to file a 990 form every year with the IRS that listed its top paid executives. The press became more interested in the commissioner’s number after it shot up to $44.2 million in 2012—a whopping figure on its own, but especially compared with what the chief executives of other nonprofit trade groups make: the CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, by comparison, was paid $5.6 million that year. Even the head of the nation’s largest private for-profit employer, Walmart, was paid “only” $20 million a year. These stories became so annoying to the NFL that it finally decided to start declaring itself a for-profit operation in 2015. That seemed fair since the NFL had been profiting outrageously for decades. It would cost the owners millions of dollars in accounting and legal fees, and millions more in future taxes. But such would be the price of Goodell’s getting to reap his tens of millions every year in relative privacy.

  Outside the lobby elevator, Goodell listened to Blank with a solemn countenance that made him look deeply preoccupied, even stricken. The Falcons’ monarch mirrored the commissioner’s grave expression, though that tends to be his default visage to begin with—Blank’s heavy-hooded eyes, thin mustache, and bespoke suits lend him the sinister air of a comic book villain or undertaker or art thief (he’s also kind of a dead ringer for Grandpa from The Munsters). Goodell was nodding slowly at Blank as if he’d just received a bad diagnosis. I imagined this could be the fateful discussion, right there in front of me at the lobby elevators, where Blank might be informing the commissioner whether 2015 would be a $30 million season for him or a $40 million season—and the Goodells could then determine their family budget for the year because, let’s face it, all those private SoulCycle and Pilates classes are not free.

  Later, during a break, Goodell darted past a bank of reporters and into a men’s room. Robert Kraft followed behind him like a beagle. A security guard stationed himself outside the door, temporarily restricting the lavatory to Membership only. Oh to be a fly on the soap dispenser for this toilet tête-à-tête. Not only was the onetime “assistant commissioner Kraft” still supposedly furious at Goodell’s actions over Deflategate, but the league had just kept amplifying its malevolent characterizations of Tom Brady’s “scheme” to remove air from footballs. NFL lawyers had a few weeks earlier filed a brief in the league’s appeal of Judge Richard Berman’s ruling that stayed Brady’s four-game suspension. In its brief, the league had compared whatever air pressure shenanigans had gone on in Foxborough with the Black Sox scandal of a century earlier—arguably the most infamous calumny in sports history in which eight Chicago White Sox players, including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson, were accused of taking money from gamblers in exchange for throwing World Series games. The NFL likening Deflategate to the Black Sox occurred a few months after Goodell had compared the “more probable than not” behavior of Shoeless Tom Brady with a player using steroids.

  Kraft and Goodell remained inside the sanctum for about a minute and a half—roughly the amount of time that the former Patriots equipment man and Deflategate “Person of Interest” had inhabited the Gillette Stadium men’s room with his allegedly dirty bag of balls. Arthur Blank came in, too, after a certain point, and then Rams owner Stan Kroenke, the megabillionaire who at the moment was holding a post position in the race for L.A. gold. Here was a convergence of four pivotal figures with big money and legacies at stake, all holding their dicks.

  Finally Kraft and Goodell walked out of the Four Seasons john together, laughing.

  Goodell is clearly gifted at working the Members. He makes them feel important and heard. And he is especially good at gratifying the older members, whom he cultivates as mentors, even quasi–father figures. Goodell was the middle of five boys born in seven years to Jean and Charles Goodell. His father was a moderate Republican congressman from New York who was appointed to succeed Senator Robert F. Kennedy after Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. He was known as cerebral and somewhat removed, with a custom of reading the dictionary each night before bed in order to enhance his vocabulary. Charles Goodell was a favorite of President Richard M. Nixon’s until he turned against the Vietnam War and introduced a bill to end it. The White House then turned against Goodell and worked to defeat him in the 1970 election.

  Roger, only a boy, followed his father everywhe
re on the campaign trail. From this, the commissioner says he learned the value of making tough and principled decisions. He keeps a copy of his father’s Vietnam Disengagement Act on the wall of his office. ‘‘If there is one thing I want to accomplish in my life besides becoming commissioner of the N.F.L.,’’ the young Goodell wrote in a letter to his father while in high school, ‘‘it is to make you proud of me.’’

  When you hear Goodell speak around his owner-bosses, he can evince a similar tone of an approval-seeking son. He leans on authority-figure words, such as “proud” and “disappointed.” He is prone to assessing character and deeds in binary, parental terms. “I no longer wanted to disappoint my mom and dad,” Goodell said, explaining that he had been an underachieving student in high school before getting serious at Washington & Jefferson College in western Pennsylvania.

  Charles and Jean Goodell divorced when Roger was a teenager. By the time their middle son graduated from college, Jean Goodell was dying of breast cancer. Roger moved in with and cared for her during her final years, as he began work at the NFL, the only workplace he would ever know.

  Goodell attached himself to Pete Rozelle, the legendary commissioner who had been his idol going back to his teenage years. What football-loving kid grows up idolizing a sports commissioner? He did not dream of being Johnny Unitas or Bart Starr, but Pete Rozelle? (“Probably a little odd,” Goodell conceded to me.) But Rozelle was also a giant, maybe the most transformational commissioner in the history of American sports. His mix of personal charm, toughness, business foresight, and political touch steered the league through a remarkable period of growth, prosperity, and turmoil in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. He was a buoyant, chain-smoking, and cocktail-sipping PR man who exuded confidence. He made himself so synonymous with the modern juggernaut that it became impossible to imagine the NFL without Rozelle.

  “Can he dare retire?” Frank Deford pondered in a Sports Illustrated profile of Rozelle from 1980. “Surely, if Rozelle ever leaves the NFL, it will turn back into the Decatur Staleys and the Frankford Yellow Jackets, and Sundays will revert back to God, Monday nights to bowling.”

  Goodell arrived at the league in 1982 as an administrative intern, and Rozelle would remain commissioner through the decade. This allowed plenty of time for Goodell to ingratiate himself and absorb Rozelle’s lessons. One of them, which Goodell no doubt internalized—if not then, certainly now—was the credo, “No one is cheering for the commissioner.” This has not been a problem for Goodell.

  Fans love football, their favorite players and teams, Rozelle would say. But they never love the guy in charge. Goodell was undeterred. He volunteered to be Rozelle’s driver at the Super Bowl in New Orleans in 1983.

  “I’d do anything,” Goodell told Time in 2012. “I wanted any opportunity that would keep me around. I practically lived with him.” He said he wanted Rozelle to see “how I managed people, managed situations.”

  Goodell comes off as adept at and attentive to impressing older men. He clearly spent much of his childhood in adult company. This has proved to be useful given that most of the “key owners” during Goodell’s tenure have been in their seventies and eighties (Blank, Kraft, Jones, McNair, Richardson, and Dan Rooney of the Steelers, until his death in 2017). Four different owners told me that Goodell has at one time or another referred to them as mentors. Whether or not Goodell is being genuine, or if he’s just showing a knack for flattery and seduction, the move is clearly effective. His owner-bosses become stakeholders in his career. “I will work tirelessly to make you proud of me” is how Goodell closed a letter to Arthur Blank in 2011, echoing the exact words Goodell wrote in the letter to his father from college. Blank still keeps the letter displayed on the wall of his office.

  When I began reporting on Goodell, his various publicists wanted to stress that for as much of a strict disciplinarian as the commissioner is, he had also built important bonds with some of the people he had previously disciplined. They offered up Michael Vick, the former star quarterback whom Goodell had suspended indefinitely without pay in August 2007 after he pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in a dog-fighting ring. Vick spent twenty-one months in federal prison and was jettisoned by the Atlanta Falcons; after his release from prison, Vick applied for and was granted reinstatement from the league. He signed with the Eagles in 2009 and played a few more productive years before officially retiring in 2017.

  When I reached him, via the league, Vick was playing out the final days of his career as a backup for the Steelers. It was a strange and awkward conversation. Vick did not really have much to say. He did not seem to know why the league had asked him to talk to me at all. After a few minutes, I wondered the same. Vick said that from time to time, Goodell would check in with him. Vick managed to stay out of trouble following his reinstatement with the exception of a 2010 incident in which a codefendant in Vick’s dog-fighting case was shot outside a restaurant where Vick had been present (no charges were filed, and Goodell said Vick would not be disciplined).

  “He says he’s proud of me,” Vick said of Goodell.

  A key to being a good politician is an ability to prioritize constituencies. Goodell keeps a call sheet at his desk with the names of all the team owners. He checks in with the Members at least once a month. “You have to be able to deal with and get along with thirty-two different personalities,” New York Giants co-owner John Mara told me. “We range from people like me who were born in a family business, and people who are self-made billionaires who think they know everything about everything.” Goodell is solicitous and attentive, identifies quirks and peeves. He learns what issues are important to each owner, as a good legislative leader would do with his caucus. He humors them over the phone, in meetings, or at urinals. “The job is like attending 10 weddings at the same time,” Kraft once said, “and making every bride and groom feel like they’re the ones.”

  Goodell’s mentor viewed the commissioner’s job as a hybrid between being the executive director of a big corporation and the director of a trade association. “I inherited a strong constitution and an office that held respect,” Rozelle said. “But the whole thing, no matter what the constitution says, is getting the confidence of the owners.”

  In public statements, Goodell will sometimes suggest that he works on behalf of the entire league—players, fans, and all of the virtues and entities that the Shield embodies. “Roger sees his constituencies as plural, more than just the owners,” Steelers owner Art Rooney II assured me. The conceit is nonsense, but the claim is nothing new. NFL commissioners have been proffering this lie of even-handedness for decades. Rozelle used to always go on about how he was a “neutral” broker between management and players. Former NFLPA head Ed Garvey complained endlessly to Rozelle about this, insisting that in fact the commissioner works for only one entity and one entity only, the owners. The commissioner serves at the pleasure of the Membership and is quite literally bought and paid for—and paid extremely well—by the owners.

  “Dammit, don’t be telling us Rozelle’s not neutral,” one owner complained to Garvey. “We pay him damn well to be neutral.”

  In 2010, Goodell made a series of training camp visits during a tense period that preceded a player lockout. One meeting, with the Colts, became hostile enough that the team’s player representative, center Jeff Saturday, had to escort the commissioner off the premises. “What offended them is that he told them he was neutral and he actually thought they’d believe it,” NFL Players Association chief DeMaurice Smith told ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. a few years after the incident.

  “He’s the face of the owners,” said Jacksonville Jaguars defensive lineman Jared Odrick of the commissioner. “He gets paid, what, $40 million a year just to take the heat and speak so the owners can remain faceless. Is it smart? Hell yeah, it’s smart. I’ll take $40 million a year to be NFL commissioner and be a politician.”

  13.

  NO BROKE DICKSr />
  January 12, 2016

  Goodell’s political skills were taxed to the extreme by the Los Angeles decision. It is one thing to perpetrate an illusion of neutrality when working in the collective interests of the owners; but it’s quite another when the quagmire pits owner against owner against owner. Goodell really did have to stay nonpartisan, or at least finesse it in a way that would not alienate any of his thirty-two bosses.

  L.A. was a classic example of how NFL football might conjure images of dirt-streaked tough guys, but the business orbits around the delicate axes of billionaire egos. Owners tend to think of themselves as the geniuses behind the magic. They are the ones who build the stadiums, lead the committees, spend their own money, and then see their egos tossed up and down on a scoreboard every week.

  “This is our deal, it belongs to us,” Jerry Jones told me. By “our” he meant the Membership, which he was juxtaposing against the overpaid worrywarts they hire to “run our deal” in New York. By “it,” Jones meant the league. And that’s what owners do: they own. Everyone else works for them.

  Owners can pay astronomical prices for their membership, not just financial. They are, quite often, abused by their fans, which they’re reminded of if they ever have occasion to venture onto the field. “There are only two times the owner is not going to get booed,” John Mara told me. “One is when you’re holding the championship trophy, and two is when you’re dead and they’re carrying your body out. And there’s no guarantee on number two.”

  Owners tend to explain their pariah status as the price of doing business. They are versed in all the self-aggrandizing rationalizations that marginal leaders like to delude themselves with (they are paying for the price of being Men in the ARENA!). But damn right they should be recognized as the Men in Charge, from Park Ave on down to their own palaces. When you arrive, for instance, at “Jerry’s World” in Dallas, you are greeted by the Voice of God himself, Mr. Jones, welcoming you via loudspeaker to AT&T Stadium. Stroll into the consumer arcadia that is the New England Patriots Pro Shop at Gillette Stadium and you are soothed by the grandiloquence of benefactor Robert K. Kraft delivering his nasally gratitude on the field while accepting the Patriots’ third Super Bowl trophy in 2005.