Richardson, a small-town boy from Spring Hope, North Carolina, made his big-time fortune by buying up a bunch of Hardee’s franchises. And he resembles precisely what you’d expect a Hardee’s kingpin to look like. He has a comb-over helmet of white hair, a bulbous nose, chubby cheeks, and a face that looks like it should be jolly—like a fast-food mascot—but instead rests in a scowl. Think of the Baby Huey cartoon, but in a bad mood.
Richardson, who wore a tailored navy suit and nifty pocket squares for this occasion, had come out to perform his pregame custom of pounding four times on a massive blue-and-black drum that had been wheeled onto the field. KEEP POUNDING was imprinted twice on the drum. Ritual complete, Richardson returned his drumstick to a guy dressed up like a panther (one that eats five meals a day at Hardee’s).
He then returned to the sidelines, where Goodell leaned over the Panther Patriarch’s golf cart and engaged him in a hushed conversation. They locked eyes. This looked intense. I could not make out what the men were saying, but there were issues to work through.
The Panther Patriarch had been upset by how the Los Angeles treaty had gone down earlier in January. He had been a proponent of the Chargers-Raiders project in Carson, and did not take kindly to the late-game break in favor of the Rams in Inglewood. Richardson was seen as a loser in the L.A. clash, outmaneuvered by the big-eyed and blustering likes of Jerry Jones and the majestic ambitions (and bank account) of Stan Kroenke. Even though the Panthers were on the verge of playing in the franchise’s second-ever Super Bowl, these backroom defeats pack their own special sting for a proud member like Richardson. He was now making noises like someone who was ready to take his ball and go home, at least as it related to league matters.
The Big Cat would check out for good in late 2017 when he put the Panthers up for sale, though it had nothing to do with Los Angeles. Richardson’s self-styled reputation as a force for rectitude was incinerated in a hellfire of sexual harassment charges from team employees. A Sports Illustrated report detailed a twisted litany of accusations. They were notable for Richardson’s keen interest in women’s grooming. He was accused, among other things, of chiding female employees for not keeping their fingernails done to his liking, sponsoring their manicures, and, in multiple cases, asking if he could shave their legs for them(!). He would also, according to the SI report, arrive barefoot for private meetings with female underlings and ask for a foot massage. “Football” indeed.
* * *
—
An announcement was made for everyone to clear the field. I followed Goodell and Richardson into a tunnel where the Arizona players were waiting to be introduced. Goodell and Richardson continued their discussion while waiting for an elevator to take them up to their respective boxes. I tapped Goodell on the shoulder to thank him for his time, but he was locked into Richardson and did not move.
I joined a cluster of people who were watching the end of New England–Denver on a TV mounted to a wall. The Patriots were still down eight but now had the ball back and were driving into Bronco territory. And—whoa—Brady hit Rob Gronkowski on a fourth-and-10 bomb, followed by a 4-yard touchdown pass to Gronk to make it 20–18 with twelve seconds left. They needed just a two-point conversion to send the game to overtime.
Everyone in the tunnel was now fixated on the TV—random hangers-on, passing concessionaires, and even a few of the Cardinals players waiting to take the field. Football can be sublime. At its best, it can transcend everything—in my case driving eight hours, enduring a not-great interview with a tightly coiled commissioner with repeated interruptions; or in Brady’s case (slightly more pertinent) being harassed by a zillion-dollar NFL investigation over nothing, being called a cheater in every corner of the country save the upper Northeast, and overcoming a ruthless Denver pass rush that had been brutalizing him all afternoon, sacking him four times and hitting him fourteen times.
As the teams lined up for the conversion try, I resolved that all of this would indeed be worth it if Brady could just get himself into another Super Bowl—Super Bowl 50, in his native San Francisco, home of his boyhood team (the 49ers) that drafted two forgotten quarterbacks instead of him. No one was thinking about concussions right then, or courtroom appeals, billionaires bickering, or a stone-cold commissioner. There is something about this sport that brings the story back to its most fascinating self. I would always tell people that whenever they would ask how I could keep watching football, despite everything I saw and everything we were learning. I say this every time: the best thing football has going for itself is football.
CBS cameras kept cutting to Denver’s Peyton Manning, who was watching the last seconds from the sideline. Manning was a physical wreck and about to retire, so I guess I should admit that his ending up in the Super Bowl would be a good story, too. Brady’s pass for Julian Edelman was tipped at the goal line and intercepted. Game over. And good for football, except when it kicks you in the head.
15.
THE BIG SPLAT
April 27, 2016
Eric Winston looked like your basic Big Ugly. That was what Keith Jackson, seminal football broadcaster of my youth, used to call offensive linemen. Winston was an unsung trench worker for four NFL teams over twelve years. He was six feet seven inches and three hundred pounds; not necessarily ugly, but Jackson meant the term as an affectionate catchall for the hulking grunts who blocked for the “scatbacks” who hogged all the facetime.
Winston was a third-round draft pick out of the University of Miami by the Houston Texans in 2006. He started at right tackle in his ninth pro game and remained a first-teamer for much of his career, earning close to $30 million during his time in the league. He also played for Arizona, Kansas City, and Cincinnati, for the most part in obscurity, except for one vivid close-up.
“It’s sickening, it’s one hundred percent sickening,” Winston was saying on all the highlight shows one Sunday in 2012. “I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life to play football than at that moment right there.” This was not your usual blitz of postgame platitudes. Winston’s words came out loud and measured and his eyes were bugged. He was becoming uncomfortably philosophical about his profession. “We are not gladiators and this is not the Roman Coliseum,” Winston said. “There are long-lasting ramifications to the game we play. I’ve already kind of come to the understanding that I won’t live as long because I play this game, and that’s okay.” Was this man actually bringing up the taboo actuarial tables that players in the NFL rarely discuss, especially when surrounded by microphones?
It was the fifth week of that season when Winston, then twenty-eight and playing for the Chiefs, became briefly famous. Suddenly his scruffy visage was all over ESPN, CBS, Fox, NFL Network, YouTube, and every bit of coverage that accompanied the October 7 slate of games. The Chiefs had just lost 9–6 to the Ravens in a fully unmemorable slog, except for this big ugly rant in the locker room that followed.
Winston had been set off by a play that occurred in the final minutes of the game. The Chiefs’ struggling quarterback, Matt Cassel, was knocked over by a Ravens lineman after a pass attempt. He struck his head on the Arrowhead Stadium turf, and then Winston, who was playing left tackle, stood over his quarterback and described seeing Cassel’s eyes rolling back into his head. Trainers and doctors ran onto the field to tend to Cassel, Tom Brady’s former backup. He was traded by the Pats after the 2008 season to Kansas City, where he became the starter. Cassel performed ably in KC at times but eventually wore out his welcome in Chiefs Nation. This fall from favor was most in evidence as Cassel was being wheeled off the field, woozy and concussed. Winston and his teammates heard the crowd cheering his departure.
“This is really fucked up,” Winston told a fellow lineman, Ryan Lilja, on the field as Cassel’s backup, Brady Quinn, took over the huddle. Winston remained upset through the end of the game and into the shower. His diatribe ensued.
“Hey, if he is not the best quarter
back, he’s not the best quarterback, and that’s okay,” Winston said as the crowd of cameras grew around him. “He’s a person. And he got knocked out in a game and we’ve got seventy thousand people cheering that he got knocked out.”
Eric Winston had my attention. He was crossing lines. Athletes are never supposed to criticize fans like this, especially home fans. According to the settled norms of pro sports, customers should enjoy full absolution for any form of verbal abuse they perpetrate, by the power vested in them by their status as “fans who spend their hard-earned money”—always hard-earned—“to buy their tickets and come to games.” They pay the players’ salaries, dammit.
So it was not surprising that Winston would catch heat within Chiefs Nation. Local fans and media became defensive, questioned whether in fact “seventy thousand people” were cheering Cassel’s knockout and not just a scattered few. Or maybe some of the cheers were for Quinn entering the game. Winston stood by his outrage.
“This is a game that is going to cost us a lot down the road, that’s okay, we picked it,” Winston said, finishing his speech. “But we’ve got a lot of problems as a society if people think that’s okay.”
Winston’s disillusionment had been building since he entered the league. Over time, he had come to realize that the majority of NFL fans cared about him only as a football player, not as a human being. He was merely a dancing elephant paid to perform. This should have been obvious all along but was placed into relief for him in 2011 when the owners instituted a 132-day lockout. The prevailing sentiment Winston heard from fans during that time was that players were paid well; they should just shut up and play. Then came the Cassel incident, and Winston’s speech, which became a viral sensation. Winston was mostly praised in the national media. Fellow players, including some on opposing teams, sought him out on the field to thank him. Winston had struck a blow against the faceless noise machine of fantasy tough guys and message board heroes.
As soon as I saw Winston’s harangue, he became someone I wanted to hear more from. Others did, too. He was inundated with interview requests and offered his own radio show. But he had to decline, at the urging of the Chiefs. They didn’t need this “distraction” from an outspoken lineman. It violated the common football rule that no one, even when speaking in support of his brothers, should bring too much attention upon himself.
Winston’s career would continue for another five seasons, mostly with the Bengals. In 2014, he was elected president of the NFL Players Association. I first met him in the spring of 2016 at the NFL Draft in Chicago. DeMaurice “De” Smith, the NFLPA’s executive director, had invited me to a party the night before for incoming draft prospects at an Italian steakhouse (to be clear, I was not an incoming draft prospect, though I’m told I move well for a fifty-two-year-old with two reconstructed ACLs). Smith had been head of the union during the 2011 lockout, a bitter period in which the league was believed to have gotten the better of the eventual ten-year collective bargaining agreement. Of all the major sports unions, the NFLPA occupies the toughest bargaining position. Football players, who mostly play on nonguaranteed contracts, have the shortest careers and in most cases get paid only sixteen weeks out of the year to play in their injury-riddled league. Any time lost would cost them relatively large proportions of their career earning potential. It is difficult for that reason to keep unions together for a work stoppage.
In addition, football’s view of the collective tends to follow the military model of top-down deference to coach and, especially, owner. NFL owners tend to have a greater need to flaunt their place atop the sports hierarchy than owners in other sports do. They feel the need, for whatever reason, to reinforce the Tex Schramm “You guys are cattle and we’re the ranchers” sensibility. Such is the fragility of their egos and, perhaps, empires. Still, the violent foxholes that players endure together nurture bonds.
Banners and signs that said WELCOME TO THE FAMILY were draped all over Chicago. It was in keeping with the league’s “Football Is Family” ad campaign then in full swing. But the question of whose family these wide-eyed bruisers were being welcomed into yielded different answers depending on whom you asked. At the very least, the draft extravaganza offered an early glimpse into the competing infantries that players serve.
The union recoiled at any notion that the Shield would be anything more than a short-term employer, much less a “family.” Fans could be similarly jaded at the notion of a familial bond with the players they root for.
“Ownership” is another charged concept within the NFL, as is loyalty. I was at a party in D.C. several years ago and saw Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Redskins, parading around his newest quarterback-savior, Donovan McNabb. Snyder kept walking a few steps ahead of McNabb as if he were leading him on a leash, until McNabb got sidetracked to sign an autograph while Snyder continued into another room. “Hey, I’ve lost my owner,” McNabb said. You often hear players referring to “my owner,” innocently enough, but it’s always jarring to hear. (Snyder might have been “my owner” at that moment, but McNabb’s coach—Mike Shanahan—still disowned him at the end of his one season with the Redskins.)
Should a player’s primary loyalty be to the organization he plays for, which will remain loyal in return—right up until the moment it decides to cut him? Should a player’s loyalty be to his teammates, who might be competing for the same job or lined up on an opposing team a week later? Or should it be to his actual family, given that he has a very small window to make a living in a sport that, as Winston said, will likely inflict a long-term health cost? Prospects are pulled in a million different directions, nowhere more acutely than here.
George Atallah, the NFLPA’s assistant executive director of external affairs, greeted me when I walked into the predraft party. He introduced me to Winston, as hulking as listed, who had a cluster of people around him trying to get a word in. It is a busy night for the president of the union, and Winston had a slightly harried and put-off vibe. “I loved that Matt Cassel thing you did,” one man said upon meeting him, as if Winston had done nothing else in his career.
Atallah then led me up to a room where a group of draft prospects had assembled. They were, of course, supremely well conditioned and dressed in designer suits tailored for the occasion. I struck up a conversation with Shaq Lawson, a defensive end from Clemson who had just finished being photographed. Lawson told me he was intent on being one of the top fifteen players picked in the draft. He then showed off an impressive recall of the exact draft order of teams, one through fifteen. I asked Lawson whether he would rather be drafted to a team that he badly wanted to play for with the sixteenth pick (Tennessee) as opposed to a team he did not wish to play for, at fourteen (Oakland). Fourteen, Lawson said, no matter what team it was. It was a dream of his to go top-fifteen and that was that, end of discussion. I mentioned this later to Winston, who just shook his head. “These guys don’t have a clue,” he said. (Lawson wound up dropping to Buffalo at nineteenth, due to health concerns. He underwent shoulder surgery the next month and did not make his rookie debut until late October.)
Jermichael Finley, a former Packer, was sitting at a reserved table with his family. Atallah brought me over and asked if I knew who he was. Sure, I remembered Jermichael Finley: stud tight end, could motor for his size, tough to bring down. Whatever happened to him? Same thing that usually happens: “Most guys don’t get to decide for themselves when they’re done with the game,” Finley said. “The game lets you know when it’s done with you.” The game—namely the Packers—let Finley know after six years in the league. He had suffered five concussions and a gruesome spinal injury to end his season in 2013. Finley received interest from a few teams but failed a physical with Seattle in 2014 and made his retirement official in October 2015, a few months before I met him in Chicago.
Finley was here with his wife and son, who was then seven. A $10 million insurance settlement had allowed him the financial security to su
pport his family after leaving football at age twenty-eight. But Finley’s transition had been difficult otherwise. So had the physical toll his career had taken on him, particularly his brain. He described the depression, memory loss, and irritability among the now-familiar laundry list of ailments you hear from former players. He missed the brotherhood of the locker room and felt increasingly isolated.
Finally, Finley had sought help from a holistic treatment and recovery center in Oxnard, California, where he underwent a thirty-day program of brain testing, meditation, therapy, and cognitive exercises. It helped, Finley said, to a point where if he didn’t seek treatment, “ten years from now, I might have ended up one of those former players who put a bullet in his chest.” But mostly Finley says his wife and four children have been his salvation. “I finally came to the realization that my relationship with the NFL was temporary,” Finley said. “But my relationship with my wife and kids is permanent. It’s forever.” Everything else was “on the clock,” to use the draft terminology.
Taking leave of Finley, Atallah wanted to make sure the former tight end knew who his real brothers were. The NFLPA was there for him. “We’re your family, too,” Atallah said. Finley just smiled and thanked the union for the party.
Chicago, this great urban melting pot and crossroads of America, had been transformed for a few late-April days into a Dungeons & Dragons convention for testosterone-addled sects. Fans of the Lions, Dolphins, and Bears (oh my), tribal denominations represented in face paint and by officially licensed jerseys: Chiefs reds, Cowboys blues, and Raiders silver and blacks; Cheeseheads, Viking horns, Steeler hardhats and Terrible Towels.
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