Because his team keeps winning championships this century, Kraft has had occasion to give several acceptance speeches upon receiving conference and Super Bowl trophies in front of the biggest television audiences of the year. Those remarks tend to be self-satisfied and somewhat unbearable, especially for non–Patriots fans. I have heard two NFL owners imitate Kraft’s slow, Boston-accented delivery; Roger Goodell himself has been known to affect a Kraftian cadence in private when quoting something RKK had said.
But the Patriots organization dutifully treats Kraft’s post–Super Bowl addresses as if they were pearls from Gettysburg. “At this time in our country . . . we are all Patriots,” Kraft shouted upon receiving his first Super Bowl trophy in February 2002, just a few months after the September 11 attacks, as red, white, and blue confetti rained down on the field. WE ARE ALL PATRIOTS is rendered in big letters on the wall near the entrance to the reception area outside his office. The term is also trademarked (goes without saying) with merchandise bearing WE ARE ALL PATRIOTS sold all over the stadium and on the team website. “Oh yeah, we’re all Patriots—until Belichick finds someone cheaper,” said one former player, no-longer-a-Patriot (and not wanting to be named so not to offend the easily offended Mr. Kraft).
At NFL headquarters in New York, big photo collages adorn the walls of the front hallway to celebrate the illustrious patrons of each team—because no one thinks of, say, Joe Namath when they think of the New York Jets. They think of Woody Johnson, right? There has been a semilegitimate mythology in the league that owners are guardians of a public trust who subvert their own interests for the “good of the game.” Examples of this selfless, league-first thinking have abounded through the history of the game. It involves its founding fathers (the Maras, Rooneys, and Halases) and fabled commissioners (Pete Rozelle and his pioneering predecessor, Bert Bell) at critical junctures managing to put aside competitive agendas and personal resentments to forge a business model rooted in competitive parity and a quasi-socialist form of revenue sharing. Their attentiveness to the greater health and future of the Shield has been credited with making pro football the megapopular and profitable sports enterprise it is today.
But when you talk to most NFL owners of the twenty-first century, the “greater good of the game” has the ring of lip service. What animates them most is self-interest—namely the fortunes of their team, on the field and on the balance sheet. Rivalries and petty grudges can play out among the Members in league meetings, but the real face-offs happen by proxy on Sunday. I talked by phone that January to Mark Wilf, co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings, a few days after the Vikings were defeated by the Seattle Seahawks in the first round of the playoffs. The game ended with the Vikings’ kicker, Blair Walsh, missing a 27-yard field goal in the final seconds (and later sobbing at his locker). Wilf grew up a Giants fan in New Jersey and used to take losses hard, he said. He remembered his father telling him, ‘‘It could be worse. You could be the owner.’’
I had watched the final seconds of that Vikings-Seahawks game on a TV in the concourse of FedExField in suburban Maryland, where the Washington Redskins were hosting the Packers in the day’s other first-round game. I have always been fascinated by Daniel M. Snyder, the Redskins’ owner. There are few such pure, straight-ahead villains as Snyder. Contempt for him represents a rare point of agreement among Democrats and Republicans in the capital. He has been pilloried on a variety of issues, from running off accomplished coaches, abusing underlings, meddling in football decisions, and refusing to change the team’s name and logo, which offends many Native Americans. Snyder, who made his fortune in various marketing ventures, is known for the aggressive revenue initiatives he has pursued, at one point even charging fans to watch his team practice in training camp.
In 2000, not long after Snyder purchased the Redskins, he appeared at a “Major League Entrepreneurs” forum along with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. He was asked by moderator Jeff Greenfield to reveal how he was able to make so much money in marketing. Snyder went on to explain that he held weekly meetings at his company, Snyder Communications, where they would discuss potential market niches. “We were looking at trend lines,” Snyder said. “We saw that the aging baby boomer demographics were coming on strong. That meant there’s going to be a lot more diabetic patients, a lot more cancer patients, et cetera. How do we capture those market segments?” One person’s heartache, in others words, could just as easily become a fat “market segment” for Danny Snyder. This might have come off as a little, uh, cold. But it was just the kind of ingenuity that allowed Snyder to buy his beloved hometown team and make it into one of the NFL’s most potent revenue machines.
I met Snyder for the first time a few days after the Packers had ended the Redskins’ season, 35–18, in the wild card game. We were in Houston at the time, during another owners’ meeting. I told Snyder, by way of an icebreaker, that I lived in Washington and he immediately asked if I was a Redskins fan. Not really, I said, and told him I grew up in New England and, well . . . the Pats.
What I didn’t mention to Snyder was that in addition to rooting for the Patriots, I root almost as hard for whatever team happens to be playing against the fucking Redskins. Generally speaking, I have never been able to adopt pro teams in the places outside of New England where I have lived—Detroit, the Bay Area, and D.C. My rationale is that it is not enough that my own teams should win, I always feel better if every fan around me in my adopted hometown is miserable—because that’s just the kind of big-hearted sports fan I am (okay, I’m not proud of this).
But my joy in seeing the local football team lose has been exponentially greater since I moved to Washington twenty years ago. And this has almost nothing to do with the fact that Detroit, San Francisco, and Oakland did not have teams with racist nicknames. Largely, it is because of Snyder. He purchased the Redskins for $800 million in 1999, two years after I arrived in D.C. He ushered in a period of consistent losing and fiasco that has coincided with my time here. It has been deliciously fun to watch this play out in the same way that it never gets old to see the pro wrestling heel get his tights pulled down over and over again. If Vince McMahon ran the NFL, he would have to invent a Dan Snyder.
Snyder is not well liked by his fellow owners, either, though he earns big respect for his ability to squeeze revenue out of the Redskins. His one BFF among the Membership—maybe his only FF among the Membership—is Jerry Jones, Snyder’s NFC East rival. Jones must have ascertained my look of surprise when he told me that he and Snyder actually take vacations together. “Yes, yes he is,” Jones said when I asked if Snyder would be characterized as “fun.” “I think a lot of him,” Jones said. “I’m crazy about his family. Dan puts up with my frailties, I put up with his frailties.”
Snyder was hardly charismatic, though in the brief time we were together in Houston, he did not appear to be the monster he’d been portrayed as. I found him more jittery and vulnerable than anything else; trying to make a good impression but struggling to keep eye contact. What struck me most about Snyder was the devastation that came over him when he brought up his team’s loss to the Packers—which he did six separate times in fifteen minutes.
‘‘I can’t even talk about it,’’ Snyder said, shaking his head, and then talking about it. ‘‘I thought we were going to win that game, man.’’ He marveled over how great Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers played. ‘‘God almighty, this is just terrible,’’ he said. ‘‘This really, really hurts.’’ He said he grows jealous of other owners whose teams are still playing. I asked Snyder how long it would take him to recover from a loss like this. It appeared for a second that he might actually cry. ‘‘I’ll probably start to feel better after the Super Bowl,’’ Snyder said after a pause, ‘‘when all the teams are unbeaten again.’’
Though Goodell would never admit this publicly, certain members of the Membership are more influential than others. Paul All
en, a Microsoft founder and the owner of the Seahawks, is almost never seen or heard from by the league. Neither is the Lions’ matriarch, Martha Firestone Ford, although she did browbeat Goodell at an owners’ meeting in 2015 over lousy officiating. Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti held lingering resentment over how the NFL handled the case involving his star running back, Ray Rice, and has basically taken his ball and gone home on his league involvement. But when the agenda moves to big and sensitive matters, like L.A., the debate tends to be dominated by the affected parties and the usual centers of influence.
Los Angeles was an unprecedented circumstance. Never had there been three business partners vying to occupy the same Promised Land, albeit a Promised Land that had gotten along fine since the Rams and Raiders fled from there over two decades earlier. This particular Game of Thrones came down to two competing stadium projects: one in Carson, California, about twenty miles south of L.A., was being pushed by a tag team of legacy owners, the Raiders’ Mark Davis and Chargers’ Dean Spanos; and another in Inglewood, a “transformational” complex envisioned by Rams owner Stan Kroenke. After the matter remained unresolved following the November confab in Dallas, Goodell reconvened the Membership in January for a special session in Houston. For pure owner intrigue, this was once-in-a-generation. When I mentioned later to Goodell that ‘‘the Membership’’ might be a good name for a reality-TV series (also for a Mafia movie), he assured me: ‘‘Oh, you could have a real good reality-TV show in our owners’ meetings.’’
Unfortunately, I was not allowed inside during the L.A. finale, and neither were any of the two hundred or so media types locked in for this season finale in Houston. Citizens of the fan kingdoms massed at various points in the lobby and outside of the Westin Houston, Memorial City hotel. I befriended a group of Oakland Raiders diehards clustered on the sidewalk. They had traveled here, many from Northern California, to display a giant black-and-silver flag and show support for their team’s staying in Oakland. They were joined, in smaller numbers, by advocates of the Chargers’ staying in San Diego and the Rams in St. Louis.
‘‘The Raiders are bigger than football,’’ a college student named Ray Perez told me. They are certainly synonymous with Oakland, and to a remarkable degree. Even when the Raiders moved to Los Angeles for twelve years, many people were still calling them “the Oakland Raiders.” Oakland native Tom Hanks has said that when he travels the world and tells people where he’s from, the first thing they ask is “Is that where the Raiders play?” Unlike the more glamorous San Francisco, Oakland views itself—rightly—as the tougher and grittier champion, whose identity has been so colorfully (or menacingly) expressed by the Silver and Black. Oakland might be doomed to be associated with the Gertrude Stein line “There is no there there” (she claimed to be referring to the razed Oakland neighborhood of her childhood, not the whole city), but Stein did not live to see the Raiders in Oakland. At least the Raiders were “there” in Oakland, no matter what else the city was struggling with. But now the city’s futility in building a new stadium for the Raiders was leading Davis to the exits.
Perez, who calls himself “Dr. Death,” was plaintive and sincere, though I was distracted by the frizzy black wig he was wearing under a silver helmet lined with a Mohawk of daggers. He relayed to me an important lesson that his Raider Nation mentor, “Raider Jerry,” had once imparted. Being a part of this brotherhood involves much more than being a sports fan. It is a form of giving back. Raider Nation is not a club, it’s a movement. ‘‘And it is a people-driven movement,’’ Dr. Death added. ‘‘We show the power of people coming together for something that we love and believe in.’’
The people’s power was limited here. The Membership ground through their day of private deliberations. They debated the merits of the Chargers-Raiders complex in Carson, and Stan Kroenke’s extravaganza in Inglewood on a 298-acre tract near Hollywood Park. Late in the day, Jerry Jones announced to the commissioner that if discussions went on much longer, he would have no choice but to escape to the bar with his Lioness, Martha Ford (beer and wine were brought into the meeting room). The Seahawks’ Paul Allen, who never attends league meetings, showed up for the first time in five years and, according to one owner afterward, ‘‘didn’t shut up.’’
Reports trickled out that momentum had shifted in the direction of Kroenke and Inglewood. This was a minor upset since the Carson project, which was backed by Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger, had been endorsed by a 5–1 vote by the relocation committee. Goodell was cautious about not getting between factions. Passions were high on both sides. “Roger did not want to get involved in the abortion debate,” Jaguars owner Shad Khan said.
Kevin Demoff, the chief operating officer of the Rams, presented on behalf of Kroenke, the Missouri native-son-turned-pariah. By most accounts inside the room, Demoff blew away the Carson pitch, which changed the scent of the bake-off. Demoff took aim at what Jerry Jones called “the Big Wow Factor.” He stressed the “transformational” nature of “Stan’s vision.” The project would be less of a stadium than a spectacle. It would not be merely the home of one or two teams, but the league’s West Coast capital—a prospective home of the NFL Network, NFL.com, and many of the league’s sprawling collection of ventures. “We could host Super Bowls, Final Fours, the college football playoffs, the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics,” Demoff said. He imagined an iconic dwelling, a destination site, and a must-see landmark for fliers to locate from the air when coming in and out of LAX.
“L.A. has always been where fantasy becomes reality and where dreams come true,” Demoff told me. This was the kind of “big vision” that had eluded the NFL in its twenty-one-year sabbatical from La-La Land. And the stadium would be set to open by 2020, in time for the NFL’s one hundredth birthday. “The Inglewood thing was more like a massive art exhibit than a stadium proposal,” one owner said, comparing the presentation with a Hollywood production with special effects. “You know, we’re pretty good at some things, and one of them is real estate development,” Kroenke told me. “We went ahead and showed the committee, and I think there were members of the committee, no matter how they ended up voting, when they saw what we had, they went ‘Whoa.’ And I think that spread around the league a little bit.”
Owners felt free to contemplate the possibilities beyond the less ambitious alternative in Carson. “It was like the Arab Spring,” said Khan, a native of Pakistan, in the lobby of the Westin afterward. (Khan, who purchased the Jaguars in 2011, is the first member of an ethnic minority to own an NFL team.)
Falcons owner Arthur Blank describes a dynamic in meetings where a few powerful owners—he mentioned McNair, Mara, and Rooney—tend to remain quiet for long stretches, but carry a great deal of influence when they finally do speak. “That’s the E. F. Hutton,” Blank said. “When they stand, people listen.” He contrasts that with a certain blustering baron from the NFC East, Jerry Jones. Blank did not seem to mean this in a nice way. In recent years, a few owners have complained that Jones has become increasingly given to long-winded speeches that have set more than a few billionaire eyes a-roll. Even so, none of the thirty-two would downplay Jones as a force inside the room.
Kroenke and Demoff had succeeded in getting Jones fantasizing. This, the fantasy space, can be a danger for Jerral Wayne Jones. But he is also a powerful ally. “Look, you pay attention to Jerry,” Kroenke said. “Jerry has done something unique in this league. He built the biggest stadium. I know it’s [Dallas] a tremendously important market, and he had executed and delivered revenues at a level that people had to take notice.”
Jones became the Inglewood project’s prime mover and carnival barker. In his seventy-five years, he has sold everything from shoes to insurance policies to pizza. He considers himself a connoisseur of the American hustle.
Jones’s father and hero, J. W. “Pat” Jones, owned a grocery store in North Little Rock, Arkansas. He was an audacious seller himself. He put on talent shows
and built a bandstand in the middle of Pat’s Supermarket to create a wow factor around the store. Jerry learned at his knee. “There’s always got to be a little bit of scheme to it,” Jones told me. Once, he was riding around with his dad and happened to mention that a certain company was worth five million dollars. His father was aghast. “Jerry, don’t ever say ‘million dollars’ like it’s casual,” he scolded. “‘You always say it very slowly. One. Million. Dollars. Honor it. Respect it. Let it roll. One. Million. Dollars.’ It might take him the whole ride from Springfield to St. Louis for ‘one million’ to come off the tongue.”
Jones is a sucker for big swings. In the last category, the Rams’ Inglewood project delivered in both price ($3 billion) and the bandleader’s wallet (Kroenke was worth $8 billion in 2016, per Forbes). He explained his thinking to me about L.A. with a dizzying triple backflip of mixed metaphor: “It’s one thing to be an arm waver,” Jones said. “It’s another thing to be a dreamer. But when you put meat on the bone, they know you mean business.”
This was one of those instances where Jerry Logic can stagger his audience straight into the concussion protocol. And yet as he keeps going, you find yourself hypnotized into something that approaches comprehension, if not lucidity. Certain owners, Jones said, resent the wave of stunning new stadiums being built around the league. They get up in the meetings, these small-thinking owners do, and complain about the arms race mentality. They feel pressured to keep up with the biggest and grandest new venues that their partners are building in other cities. Why is it necessary to spend so much on stadiums when the league derives 60 percent of its revenue from TV rights? “But I get up and I say, ‘But stadiums are about television rights,’” Jones said. “Do you think these networks pay these rights fees to broke dicks? With their ass hanging out?”
Big Game Page 17