Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  If I was an aging NFL quarterback intent on “sustained peak performance,” maybe I would care more about “the method” and “the lifestyle.” However: I am not. I am a middle-aged print hack and retired high school athlete bent on “decent performance.” I felt little need to delve deeper into the Tao of TB12 beyond the tutorial Brady (and Guerrero) provided me a few years back.

  If “Gods do not answer letters,” as John Updike once wrote about Ted Williams, they do reply to emails—or at least Brady does. He was always responsive and would typically write back within a day. He was thoughtful, polite, and, as far as agreeing to meet again, graciously noncommittal. He was always busy, he would say, believably. He was tied up with commitments in addition to his work and his family. He never closed the door all the way. It might have just been his way of being nice, but at least Brady’s stiff-arms were more of the “not now” variety rather than a simple definitive “no.”

  I was in touch with enough people in Brady’s circle to get updates on his nonfootball life. His mother, Galynn, had been diagnosed with two forms of cancer in the space of a year, first smoldering myeloma and then breast cancer. She underwent a regimen of surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy treatments, and her prognosis was uncertain for much of 2015 and 2016. Before she was diagnosed, when she first began feeling sick, Galynn had anguished hard over Deflategate, following every development. “She was as whacked out as a towel would be when it was wrung dry by Tommy’s situation,” Tom Senior told me. Her illness would make it impossible for the Bradys to travel to any Patriots games in 2016.

  In the midst of Brady’s suspension, I sent Tom an email. “Hope all’s well with you and family,” I wrote, “and that you’re keeping the Moneymaker pliable.” I asked if TB had any interest in letting me visit with him during his suspension. Because I’m such a good friend, and I figured he might require my support.

  Brady replied promptly, thanked and affirmed me. “As you know by now, Pliability is the way!!!” Brady said (the GOAT likes his exclamation points!!!). “There is no other way,” he emphasized. Brady, as I expected, then let me down gently. “I’m gonna lay low the rest of the year outside of my existing obligations as there are A LOT of those,” he wrote. “Look forward to seeing you around. Best of luck to you always!”

  And “btw” Brady added, he had seen me on TV the previous morning while he was warming up on the treadmill. I was doing some talking head routine on CBS during the presidential campaign—and apparently I had achieved peak pundit performance in the eyes of the Prince of Pliability. “Nice job,” Brady said. (Shit, I felt like writing back, I see YOU on TV, too, Tommy, but that felt too giddy.)

  Like so many people, Brady, who had previously expressed great uninterest in politics, could not avoid the Trump-Clinton brawl of 2016. Maybe more to the point, the campaign could not avoid Brady. It began in September 2015 when Trump friend Bob Kraft stuck a Make America Great Again hat in Brady’s locker between a canister of Listerine and a tube of deodorant. A reporter spotted the hat and questions ensued. Brady deemed it “amazing” what Trump had accomplished on the campaign to that point. “He obviously appeals to a lot of people,” Brady said in an interview on WEEI. “And he’s a hell of a lot of fun to play golf with.”

  Brady’s “total focus” on football has always bought him license to be oblivious to the outside world, at least in the “stick to football” contexts where he was called upon to speak (locker-room interviews, his weekly sports radio interviews). But Brady’s ability to aw-shucks his way through Trump had limits in light of the intensely divisive feelings Trump was stirring up. Brady seemed to realize this soon enough as the Trump questions kept coming and took on an edgier urgency—to a point where Brady would reflexively take a knee every time someone mentioned Trump’s name to him. “Can I just stay out of this debate?” an exasperated Brady said later in the fall after a WEEI host asked him another Trump-related question.

  But Trump kept right on dropping Brady’s name at every opportunity. He would always tout their “great friendship” and the “great love” he had received in New England due to Brady’s “great support.” He attributed his victory in the Massachusetts Republican primary to a “Tom Brady effect” (this “effect” did not extend to the general election as Clinton won all six New England states except for a single electoral vote in northern Maine). Bizarrely, Trump’s Brady bro boasts were not just restricted to Patriots Country, either. “We love Tom Brady, right?” Trump yelled out at a rally on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in a room full of Ravens fans who booed loudly.

  I couldn’t help myself, and emailed news of that episode to Brady. “How to read a room there, Donald,” I wrote.

  “Funny,” Brady replied. “That made my day!”

  In addition to Brady, Trump was also not shy about advertising his “great friendship” with Kraft, or for that matter Belichick. When I wrote about Trump in October 2015, he kept insisting to me that he was a huge fan—meaning that Belichick was a huge fan of his, that the coach “really loves me.” Everyone just assumes that Belichick is “a really rough guy,” Trump said. And maybe he is a really rough guy, he allowed, but there’s just something about the Donald that melts the hoodie’s heart.

  “So I go to the Patriots game last year,” Trump told me. “I’m on the sidelines with Kraft. He’s got Les Moonves right here. He’s got a lot of different people. And Belichick comes over in his Patriots sweatshirt and the hoodie and the whole thing. He hugs me, and he kisses me, and he said: ‘I love you. You’re the greatest.’”

  Yes, that sounds exactly like Belichick.

  I worried for a second that I might not have hidden my skepticism when Trump told me this. But he did not appear to notice. He sat at his desk in Trump Tower and seemed almost dreamy at this memory, as if the reception he received from Belichick that day had moved him a great deal. “He just feels warmly toward me, Belichick does,” Trump said. “Isn’t that the craziest thing?”

  Well, yes. And I remained dubious. Besides the fact that Belichick strikes no one as a “hugs me, kisses me” type, on or off the sidelines, he had been reputed over the years to be a progressive, at least culturally. He supposedly loved the Grateful Dead, did attend Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and has worked quietly on liberal causes, such as visiting prisons with Hall of Fame running back (and ex-felon) Jim Brown. Brown has praised Belichick’s contributions to an organization he established that supports inmates, gang members, and underprivileged children. “He has been face to face with my gangsters in L.A. and in Cleveland,” Brown said of Belichick, adding that Belichick’s commitment to humanitarian causes placed him on a par with Boston Celtic great Bill Russell as a social activist. Brown described the Patriots coach as “a free-thinker.”

  As it turned out, Belichick’s freethinking did indeed lead him to great affection for Donald Trump. The day before the election, Trump was campaigning in New Hampshire, at a rally in Manchester. When he came to the requisite “I love the New England Patriots and they love me back” part of his speech, Trump added a special enhancement. He had received a “beautiful letter” of support for his campaign—from Coach Belichick.

  Again, I was dubious. Did Belichick write “beautiful letters” to celebrity politicians? My suspicion was that either Trump made this up, or, if Belichick did write the letter, the last thing he would have expected—or wanted—was to have Trump read it out loud. It would have dropped Belichick right into the middle of the most bitterly contested presidential campaign in decades, and right in the middle of the season.

  I was wrong, twice. Not only did Belichick write Trump the letter, Trump apparently called to ask Belichick if he had his permission to share its contents at a rally; and Belichick apparently told Trump that if he planned to do that, he would go back and write Trump a second letter, an even more effusive one, that he could then read at the rally—which he did.

  This became an immediate iss
ue in Foxborough. Belichick was asked about the letter repeatedly in his weekly press conference. “My comments are not politically motivated,” Belichick said. “I have a friendship and loyalty to Donald.” At the very least, this confirmed that Belichick had in fact written these words to Trump: “Congratulations on a tremendous campaign,” he wrote, according to Trump, reading from the letter. Belichick praised Trump for “coming out beautifully” despite having had to deal with “an unbelievable slanted and negative media.” Trump had proven himself to be “the ultimate competitive fighter,” Belichick wrote. “Your leadership is amazing.” The love note went on for a while longer, concluding with the coach expressing his hope that the next day’s election results would “give the opportunity to make America great again.”

  Amazing, Belichick even spoke in the Trumpian message lexicon. After a few too many follow-up queries for Belichick’s liking (i.e., one), he returned to his own message: increasingly gruff variations on “We’re focused on Seattle.”

  Passions around the 2016 election were stratospherically high, in New England as everywhere. Say what you will about Donald Trump, but there is no question he has been a transformative figure. His campaign, presidency, and shattering of norms have been an unsettling force in America, for better or worse. I know many people who count themselves in the “worse” camp. I am related to many of them, live in a city (D.C.) full of them, and work in a profession that Trump has essentially declared war on (the “unbelievable slanted and negative media,” in Belichick’s grandiloquence). Also, a whole lot of these people live in New England and root for the Pats and were thrown into a conniption of cognitive dissonance over Trump’s full-on (and mutual) embrace of their team.

  Trump was always wrapping himself in the Pats flag in some fashion. No football team was more closely associated with a future president, or perhaps any president, at least since Richard Nixon adopted the Washington Redskins as his own and even called occasional plays for coach George Allen. Similar to Trump, the Patriots were a divisive juggernaut that inspired strong feelings. The team represented a sporting ideal of Trump’s promise to make “America win so much, you’ll be bored of winning.” New England had indeed won so much that a lot of America had become, yes, bored of its winning. And no small number of them also believed that the Patriots, like Trump, had achieved their victories through questionable means.

  If the Patriots weren’t polarizing enough, they now represented a culture war grenade. It worked both ways. People outside of New England who had no reason to hate the team, but who hated Trump, now had a fully formed Evil Empire to root against whose helmets might as well have been emblazoned with MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. And people who had no reason to support the Patriots, but who loved Trump, could now identify with Brady, Belichick, and Kraft as Patriotic soldiers for their cause.

  The dynamic reminded me of the 1980s, during the epic NBA rivalry days of Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics. I was, naturally, a Bird-Boston guy, and in college at the time in Ann Arbor. Being a Celtics fan not only won me the ire of the many fans on campus who rooted for the emerging Detroit Pistons, the Celtics’ chief rival in the Eastern Conference; it also made me have to answer for Boston’s bitter history of racism, the perception that nothing had changed about the city since the worst days of the busing crisis of the 1970s, and the notion that the Celtics, with their white stars and predominately white roster (ten players on their 1986 championship team), were the unofficial team of White America.

  No matter what I said—talking points included the Celts’ being the first team with a black player and a black coach—it wouldn’t register. My African American friends, especially, hated the Celtics. This even extended to many blacks who lived in Boston. Of the relatively few blacks in my suburban schools in the late seventies and early eighties, a large number rooted for the Dr. J–era Philadelphia 76ers. In ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary about the Celtics–Lakers rivalry, “Best of Enemies,” Magic Johnson told of African Americans sidling up to him whenever he played in Boston and declaring themselves to be Laker fans, despite where they’d lived their entire lives.

  Similarly, I knew many white people in college, from rural areas of Michigan not close to Detroit, who took Bird’s greatness as a validator of white achievement. I remember visiting a friend’s cottage on Lake Michigan and watching Game 7 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals between the Celtics and Pistons. We were at a small-town bar, about three or four hours from Detroit, no blacks in sight for miles. Everyone in the bar who was paying attention was rooting for the Celtics. When I asked one guy why he wasn’t rooting for the home-state Pistons, he discharged a stunning flurry of invective against the city of Detroit and African Americans in general. The Celtics, he believed, had the best chance to defeat the “Tinseltown Niggers” in the finals.

  Three decades later, rooting for the Patriots had also become a racially and socially fraught identity. Trump’s willingness to inflame so many minority groups and women, his ability to inspire his “silent majority” (the Nixonian term he adopted for his mostly white supporters), and his insistence on shouting out to the Patriots whenever possible made him an unshakable piece of baggage for the team. White nationalists embraced the Patriots as their own. Neo-Klansman Richard Spencer dubbed Brady an “Aryan Avatar” and said the Patriots’ winning the Super Bowl would be “a victory for the #AltRight.” Spencer also tweeted his approval that the team employed “three white wide receivers” and was “consistently NFL’s whitest team.”

  The latter was not true—the Patriots’ makeup of white and African American players has been in line with the league average. Whatever, this was not fun. And as someone who has been an eager apologist for the Patriots over many years—through cheating scandals, a murder trial, and all manner of arrogant behavior—the Trump connection was a bigger drag on the team’s image than anything that came before, at least in the (admittedly politicized) circles I traveled in. It was a much hotter button of an issue than Deflategate ever was, back in those days of innocence.

  My common response to any anti-Trump fervor that accrued against the Patriots was that fame trumps politics in many cases. “Friendship” becomes different when you’re living at a certain sea level of public life. You become part of a select club made up of people who play golf together and attend one another’s weddings and funerals. They call to congratulate one another on presidential elections and Super Bowl wins and those types of everyday things. The rest of us could never begin to understand. We should keep our heroes in their lanes and never expect crossover perfection.

  But damn if the 2016 campaign did not exhaust and deflate. No one was safe. Football was not safe. The election came and went but never seemed to end.

  I spent Election Night in New York performing my talking head duty at CBS and being stunned with all the rest of the media geniuses. I left CBS Studios on Fifty-seventh Street at around 2:30 a.m. and headed back to my hotel on Seventh Avenue. Whom should I spot walking in the other direction but Jets owner Woody Johnson. He was wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat and heading home from Trump’s Election Night party. Last time I saw Johnson, we were in Boca Raton, at a party at the league meetings in March 2016. He had been a big Jeb Bush supporter and was then working up the stomach to embrace Trump, which he soon did. He told me in Boca that he had made a great deal of money in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president—which I took as Johnson’s way of indicating he would be just fine if Hillary was elected, too. I was relieved to hear that.

  “Woody!” I called out to the Johnson & Johnson heir on the sidewalk. I was somewhat fog-headed from the late hour and did not, thus, address “Mr. Johnson” in the proper fashion. The Wood Man did not seem to mind. He said he was thrilled with Trump’s victory and predicted it would bring “hope” to all the “blue-collar guys” he knew in Staten Island. Feeling free to be a wiseass, I asked Woody whether Trump “could even bring hope to the New York Jets?”


  Johnson peered over his glasses and played along. “Do you really think he could help the Jets?” he said. It turned out maybe Trump could: by sending Woody out of the country. He wound up appointing him ambassador to the United Kingdom.

  Five days later, I watched the Patriots host the Seahawks on Sunday Night Football. This had all the makings of a great game—two elite teams, Super Bowl rematch from two years earlier, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll (he of the fateful decision to pass at the goal line in 2015) returning to Foxborough to play the team that fired him in 1999, paving the way for the Belichick Century. It really did turn out to be a great game, eight lead changes, terrific performances by Rob Gronkowski and Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson. The Pats had four chances to tie the game from inside the 3-yard line in the final minute; a last-ditch pass to Gronk on fourth down was broken up in the end zone.

  But what was remarkable about this game was how numb everything seemed in the stadium. Sometimes it’s hard to judge a crowd from TV; this was not one of those times. Everything felt sleepy and muted. I could have been projecting my own exhaustion with football and the fractured days we were all living through. But I was not alone in noticing the pall.

  “Man, have you ever heard seventy thousand people quieter than this?” Al Michaels mused at one point in the NBC broadcast. Foxborough has for years been a reliably nonraucous environment compared with other NFL venues. Yet something was different about this. It felt as if everyone watching were still nursing a hangover from our nasty bender of an election, as if the country were playing hurt.