I introduced myself to Eisen, the only NFL Network employee who has his own PR guy (I know this because I’d tried to reach him previously through official channels). As with Adam Schefter, Eisen was another University of Michigan alumnus. We bonded over Ann Arbor and Michigan football for a few minutes until another Hall of Famer, Warren Sapp, entered the bar and made a beeline for Faulk, Eisen, and, by proximity, me.
Sapp, a handful of a defensive tackle for the Buccaneers and Raiders, had a career checkered with “other issues” as well. He had also been part of the NFL Network’s full-employment program for Gold Jackets until he was dismissed the previous year following his arrest on suspicion of soliciting a prostitute and two counts of assault. (Unlike the Hall of Fame, the NFL Network does enforce standards of conduct. Charges against Sapp were eventually dismissed. Faulk was eventually dumped by the network, too, in his case over sexual harassment complaints.) As Sapp joined our scrum, wearing a University of Miami polo shirt, he and Eisen engaged in the following dialogue:
SAPP (pointing at Eisen): “Dude!”
EISEN (pointing at Sapp): “Dude!”
SAPP (shaking head and pointing back): “Dude?”
EISEN (nodding affirmatively): “Dude!”
Faulk and I tried to follow this battle of ideas back-and-forth, which probably looked like a pair of dogs watching a Ping-Pong match. It all seemed to be leading nowhere, except a logical place to call it a night.
17.
“START BLOW-DRYING TEDDY KOPPEL’S HAIR ’CAUSE THIS ONE’S DONE”
August 5, 2016
Friday dawned, and I made my first visit to the Hall of Fame proper, at least as a fan or nominal “sportswriter.” Technically I’d been here once before, but as a political reporter. Future vice president and lifelong Steeler fan Joe Biden had stopped in for a photo op a few weeks before the 2008 election. Our press pooler on that day was Perry Bacon, a burly African American reporter who was working for the Washington Post. “You look like you played some, man,” Biden said. Bacon told him that he in fact had never played football. Biden then jabbed Bacon in the chest, which he apparently judged too soft. “You need to work on your pecs,” the running mate said. Canton makes for such freakish associations, or maybe it’s just Biden who does.
The main Hall of Fame museum is a round stone structure with a cone-headed top. From the outside, it resembles a giant orange-juice squeezer. Inside, it is a smaller and more intimate affair, a short walk between the various exhibits, theaters, galleries of busts, and a large gift shop, which was my first stop. A TV near the checkout counter played ESPN, which at that moment featured Tom Brady speaking for the first time that summer after observing a media lockdown through training camp. These were his first public words since a panel of appeals judges reversed a lower-court decision and sided with the NFL in ruling that Brady must serve his four-game Deflategate suspension after all. Brady, who a few weeks earlier announced on his Facebook page that he would not appeal the decision any further, was his usual insipid self before the microphones. Actually, he might have been even worse than before, although it hardly stopped the Court of Foxborough from hanging on the quarterback’s every word like he was Socrates in Athens.
“I tried to come out here and just focus on what I need to do to get better and help our team,” Brady said. “I’ll be excited to be back when I’m back, and I’ll be cheering our team on, hoping they can go out and win every game.” Commenting from the ESPN studio, former Patriot teammate Damien Woody described Brady’s remarks as “emotional.” The only emotion it stirred in me was boredom.
Back to live action in the gift shop, I turned around and found myself face-to-belly with a mountainous former player. His face I could not recognize, only his Gold Jacket. “Who’s that?” I whispered to the guy next to the hulk—perhaps the most commonly uttered question of the weekend, especially around anonymous old linemen. It turned out to be Walter Jones, the mainstay offensive tackle of the Seahawks and Hall of Fame Class of 2014. He was shopping for a white shirt to wear to the Hall of Fame parade through Canton the next morning. I asked Jones if Gold Jackets had to pay for stuff in the gift shop (I always try to get smarter, no matter where I am). He replied that a Hall of Famer is given gift cards in exchange for signing autographs.
There was something affecting about being at the Hall of Fame when so many Gold Jackets were “home.” I watched a film about the previous Super Bowl, in all of the game’s high-definition action. It was one of those full-sensory theaters where you could experience the crunch and acrobatics of the field and hear the coaches’ amped-up pep talks and, for a few seconds, feel like you could run through a wall yourself. No one creates reality distortion like the NFL, and I admit to being a total sucker for this stuff.
And then I walked out of the darkened theater and was confronted—without breaking stride—with a couple of Hall of Famers walking slowly down a hallway. Steve Young, the once fleet and nimble 49ers quarterback, nearly veered into me. He wore a Gold Jacket and a blank expression. I don’t want to read too much into one split-second visage but my mind jumped to some of the more harrowing concussion sequences I’d ever witnessed on TV, both involving late-career Steve Young.
One came in 1997, courtesy of a sack from the aforementioned Warren Sapp (with follow-up knee-to-the-head by Sapp’s Buccaneers teammate Hardy Nickerson). Another came two years later, with Young getting pulverized on an unblocked safety blitz by future Hall of Famer Aeneas Williams, of Arizona, leaving Young motionless on his side, as if he were suddenly asleep. That sack—resulting in his second concussion in three weeks—would be the last play of Young’s career.
Young was one of the handful of Gold Jackets that the Hall of Fame offered up to speak to the media that afternoon. We were summoned to a room at McKinley High School, a short walk from the main museum, past an overhanging sign touting the Hall’s mission statement (again), another declaration of OUR VALUES (INTEGRITY listed twice), and a massive photo collage of the Class of 2016 (captioned with another CELEBRATE EXCELLENCE EVERYWHERE).
Unfortunately, Young was a no-show at the media meat market, the stated reason being that he was “not feeling well.” A dozen other Hall of Famers held court at stations across the room, including most of the new class. Demand upon them varied: Orlando Pace, the stud offensive tackle for the Rams, was pretty much left alone, consistent with the unsung position he played and the now-abandoned NFL city—St. Louis—he played in.
Brett Favre, not surprisingly, was swarmed. I could barely get within fifteen feet of him, but close enough to hear the Gunslinger parry a series of admiring queries from the Pigskin Pravda. “What made you Brett Favre?” was one of the first questions, which turned out to be representative of the pointed grilling he would not be receiving from the Fourth Estate. “I was watching some old highlights of myself, and I was actually pretty good,” Favre said.
“What made you Brett Favre?” the reporter tried again.
“Arm strength?” Favre said, shrugging, as if he were taking a wild guess.
I always found Favre, whose playing career ended in 2010 after a few stutter-step retirements, to be a wildly compelling figure. He was a self-fashioned bumpkin prone to big rolls of the dice, big plays, and big mistakes at the worst possible late-game moments. You never knew what you were going to get with the audacious Favre, except for a high-wire act, for better or worse. He was the banged-up opposite of the hypersmooth control freak of a Brady.
Seeing Favre at close range, it occurred to me that I’d always had a bit of a fan-crush on the guy. He inhabited his dumb-jock charisma with a mischievous exuberance. If I stepped back I’d probably have to concede that Favre cut a far more winning and accessible personality than my master of mistake-free football and optimized living, Mr. TB12 himself. Favre was a mess, who put his teams—and their fans—through emotional hell rides. If I was being objective, I’d probably prefer Favre’s flawed hu
manity on most days to Brady’s cool strut on the edge of hubris. But I’m not being objective.
Favre, who wore a blue polo shirt and long khaki shorts, was asked how he would spend his first day as a Hall of Famer back home in his native Mississippi. “Probably cut grass on my front lawn with my gold jacket on, I don’t know,” he said. Favre added that he had heard Mississippi had more football Hall of Famers than any other state. They do, a reporter confirmed, “per capita.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds good to me,” said Favre.
After a few minutes of Favre, I made my way around the Gold Jacket spin room. At this point in the weekend, I was officially burned out on the feel-good parade and determined to at least drizzle on it. I made a point of asking the Gold Jackets about the state of their health. I figured it would make for a less comfortable line of questioning.
But most of the answers were thoughtful and even carried a whiff of relief, as if the Hall of Famers welcomed the chance to pierce the propaganda veil. “I have aches and pains all over the old body,” Dermontti Dawson, the longtime center for the Steelers, told me. He was standing off in a corner, and I had him pretty much to myself, which made it easier to converse on these more delicate issues. “As players, we all know we’re going to have residual effects,” Dawson said. He listed a few of his recent ones: he had his rotator cuff repaired the previous September, he was about to have his other shoulder replaced, he had bad carpal tunnel in both hands. “But it is normal,” Dawson said. “We played a high-impact game. You know there will be fallout. It may not be immediate, but there will be fallout.” Another reporter walked over, listened for a bit and chimed in: “Dermontti, tell me about your induction, your memories of that special day?”
Dawson dutifully shared his memories. But then he turned back to me, and I asked if he had he seen Concussion.
“Oh yeah, I cried through it,” said Dawson, who played with some of the players featured in the film, including its most tragic protagonist, Mike Webster, whom he would succeed as the Steelers’ center. “I just had tears coming out of my eyes. And I started worrying about myself, what’s going to happen to me down the road.” Another reporter tried to ask Dawson about “what it meant” for him to “come home” to Canton. But Dawson talked over him, something I appreciated. He kept looking at me. I asked Dawson if he had felt any neurological effects from his career.
“Yeah, I’ve had some short-term memory problems,” Dawson said. “And sometimes I think too much. I can’t shut my mind off. I can’t sleep too well, just general stuff like that.” He said he has tried to combat damage to his brain by “keeping my mind active,” doing puzzles and playing brain games that he has on his iPad. “I try to do that, read all the time,” Dawson said. “But you never know what’s going to happen to you down the road.”
An official-looking guy in a suit walked over, maybe sensing danger as if a trip wire had been activated (keyword: “Concussion”).
I moved on to another scrum, this one anchored by Dawson’s former teammate the defensive end Kevin Greene. Greene, a holy terror of a pass rusher, played fifteen years in the NFL and was part of the 2016 Hall of Fame class. Greene’s lawless blond mane that once flew out the back of his helmet was now cropped and neat. But with bulging forearms and a white goatee, he retained an aura of menace about him, like an aging professional wrestler. Even at fifty-four, Greene’s still-crazed eyes were not what you’d want staring at you across a neutral zone.
Another Gold Jacket walked by us and set up shop across the room. Jim Kelly! I loved Jim Kelly, the hard-bitten quarterback who led the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls in the early 1990s, all losses. Buffalo’s glory years coincided with some awful Patriots teams, so it was never enough of a fair fight to even bother resenting the Bills. I had only positive associations with Kelly, the brash orchestrator of the Bills’ unrelenting no-huddle offense. Their Super Bowl futility also lent them a lovable loser’s cachet.
Kelly has suffered through a brutal run of hardship after his retirement in 1997. His son Hunter was born with Krabbe disease, a rare neurological disorder that resulted in his death at the age of eight. “It’s been said that the trademark of my career was toughness,” Kelly said in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 2002, when Hunter was five. “The toughest person I ever met in my life was my hero, my soldier, my son, Hunter. I love you buddy.” Kelly, who has dedicated much of his post-playing life to a Krabbe disease advocacy group he and his wife established in Hunter’s honor, was diagnosed with cancer of the upper jaw in 2013. Kelly endured surgeries, chemo, radiation, and all manner of indignity, only to have the cancer return in 2014. Two months after Kelly was declared cancer-free for a second time, he was additionally diagnosed with MRSA (staph infection). (In March 2018, Kelly announced his cancer had returned, and he was being treated once again.)
It felt almost silly to ask Kelly about something as relatively pedestrian to an ex–football player as brain health. He spoke of “getting dinged” with a kind of neutral remove. The new rule changes and concussion protocols were “just kind of how the game has evolved,” he said, not taking a position on them either way. Kelly was part of a generation of mobile quarterbacks, along with Favre, Young, Warren Moon, and Troy Aikman, who enjoyed peak seasons during the 1990s. They were all bold and mobile enough to have each suffered and played through multiple concussions. To varying degrees, each had spoken with concern if not regret about the impact the game had had on their cognitive health. Aikman and Favre have both said they would hesitate to let their hypothetical sons play football. Not Kelly. “If my son was still alive today, I would not hold him back from playing,” he said. He spoke of his own dings with an element of comic nostalgia, like he was reliving a wild old time.
“I remember playing the New Orleans Saints one time, and I’m laying on the turf, and the whole dome is spinning.” Kelly laughs and a few of the reporters giggled along with him. He says that he could not get his eyes to focus and had to come out of the game for a while but eventually came back in.
“And I remember the Super Bowl against the Washington Redskins,” Kelly kept going. “I think I played the whole last quarter with a concussion.” He even threw a couple of postconcussive touchdown passes. “So maybe they should have hit me a little earlier, I’d have done better,” Kelly said to more laughter.
One of the reporters asked Kelly to give his definition of a ding. “Is what happened in New Orleans a ‘ding’?” he said.
“Yeah, that was minor,” Kelly said, smiling. He seemed to notice that the group of media around him had grown, and that not everyone was smiling back at him. “Well, of course I played back when that was considered minor,” he said. “These days, I might have not gone back in that football game.” He said he agreed “as a parent” with the new vigilance about head safety. Another reporter asked when Kelly learned he had suffered a concussion in the Super Bowl against Washington. “After the game, when I had no clue where I was at,” Kelly said, laughing again.
I heard Kelly’s tone as more happy-go-lucky than cavalier. He had been through worse and should be free to enjoy his memories of less burdened times—a retroactive respite. By now, though, the only laughter coming back at Kelly was of the nervous variety, especially after he recalled being disoriented after the Redskins Super Bowl, not knowing where his family was or why he had gone back to the team hotel. “To make a long story short, it’s no fun,” Kelly said, “but you know what?”
Before he could conclude his summation, a reporter asked whether Kelly had any memory today of that fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. “No,” he said. “I mean I know we lost.” At this point, a referee inserted himself, a league or Hall of Fame official. “Last question,” the man announced. This was the PR equivalent of placing a too-talkative former player into the concussion protocol.
The media fair broke up and the Gold Jackets scattered. I followed Brett Favre out a back exit
and through a darkened auditorium. Favre moved with something between a swagger and a limp. He had an induction speech to prepare and needed to rest up. “I’m tired,” he said.
Appendix: The Hall of Fame Game
The Hall of Fame Game is an appendage tacked on to an already-gratuitous body of preseason games. Think of a benign growth upon the appendix—something extraneous upon the extraneous. This year’s cysts were the Packers and Colts.
The only Hall of Fame Game that I have any memory of involved the Patriots, in 2000, against the 49ers. It was the first game that Belichick coached for New England, and the first pro game ever played by the rookie quarterback from Michigan, Tom Brady.
Also debuting that night in the ABC booth was Dennis Miller, the verbose comedian whose brief stint as a Monday Night Football commentator was, in my lonely view, a guilty pleasure. Miller approached the Hall of Fame contest with perfectly appropriate sarcasm. “If there’s anybody in this stadium more pumped up than me they wouldn’t pass the league’s standardized drug test,” Miller told his highly amused broadcast partner, Al Michaels.
As that first Brady-Belichick game wound down, with the Pats beating the 49ers 20–0, Miller tried to adopt his own version of Dandy Don Meredith’s “Turn out the lights, the party’s over” tagline to signal that the result was sealed. “Start blow-drying Teddy Koppel’s hair,” Miller said to conclude his maiden broadcast, “’cause this one’s done.”
I admit, I giggled at this, which partly explains why I’m not in the business of making decisions about TV careers. Miller was let go after two seasons on MNF. But it’s something, at least, that I still remember these lines—and who even remembers anything about a Hall of Fame Game, much less seventeen years later?
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