Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  “There was a time when they kicked their last field goal to go ahead and it was like a round of applause for a nice effort,” Carroll observed after the game, speaking about the mood at Gillette Stadium. “Not a great place” is how he summed up the environment. Carroll attributed the crowd’s impassivity to being spoiled by the Patriots’ success. Perhaps they were, or to use the Trumpian construct, the crowd was just “tired of winning,” or maybe tired of something else.

  There was a time, not even a year before, when I could watch a down-to-the-wire Pats game like this and get worked into a palpitating dander. Win or lose, it would be useless for me to even try to sleep for at least two hours after it ended. My shirt would be drenched, my brain would be racing, and I’d have to absorb every word of “rapid reaction” on the Internet.

  It goes with our commitment to leaving it all out on the vicarious field we inhabit as fans. But not tonight, my heart was not in this. The stakes felt really low for a Big Game. The Pats were headed for the postseason either way. I would try to be ready for the playoffs.

  20.

  CHEESEHEAD ELEGY

  Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain.

  —VINCE LOMBARDI

  Dress as if you’re going ice fishing.

  —MAN IN HA HA CLINTON-DIX #21 JERSEY IN LOBBY OF THE HAMPTON INN, GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN

  January 8, 2017

  As a general rule, Jews don’t go ice fishing. But the message was not complicated. Packer fans set winning examples before approaching God’s tundra. They were spread out all over the lobby with shock-and-awe piles of wool, fleece, and Canada goose. They stood before their offerings like they represented some essential totems of manhood. They were exhibiting superior preparation.

  My pile is bigger! I packed more layers!

  Falling back in love can require forethought. You need to “put yourself in a position to win,” as Coach Belichick would say. For consumers of football, politics, and life in America, this had been a brutal season. Efforts at reconciliation were in order.

  Bill Parcells used to call this part of the year “the Tournament,” as in playoffs. The Pats would be there, as usual, their fourteenth time since 2001 and the seventh season in a row they had earned a first-round bye. I am indeed spoiled. But I needed a karmic infusion and knew where to find it. It was not Foxborough, and certainly not Washington, D.C.

  Since Trump’s election, my adult hometown felt like a fortressed village bracing for a guerrilla invasion. There was none of the postelection cooling of tensions we would normally enjoy with a new president. Instead, a shell-shocked aura hung over large sectors of the city. The Redskins had once again underachieved and missed the playoffs—which did please me, but didn’t help the prevailing mood. I vowed to get away as often as possible before the inauguration.

  I had never been to Lambeau Field, this most hallowed of ground in this the Middlest of Football Americas. The Packers were hosting the Giants in the NFC Wild Card Game. It was 10 degrees at game time and I stood on the hearty shoulders of giants who froze before me. Their Rules for Living have been conveyed through Lambeau’s generations, reaching down to tourists like me.

  The first rule was, no complaining about the cold. Visitors learn this immediately. “The weather is like Fight Club,” Giants coach Ben McAdoo said. “We don’t talk about Fight Club.”

  Everything climate related in Green Bay is relative—to the Ice Bowl. On the day of the Championship Game in 1967 wind chills were supposedly pushing below minus-50. Today’s bright sun and temps in the double digits (okay, so it was 10) were a Green Bay data point for global warming. And if you don’t possess the mental toughness (“rather difficult to explain”), someone else does. Lambeau has sold out every game since 1960 and there’s a deep bench of fans on a decades-long waiting list for tickets.

  More wisdom: I was instructed by multiple parties to eat and drink at Hinterland Brewery or Titletown Brewing Co. My pal Belson kept pushing me toward a bar called the Sardine Can, whose owner, Chris Hansen (he once went on Letterman and drank a beer through his nose), plugged his place as “a dump.” On game day, it is also important to check for last-minute logistical information—road closures, injury reports—in the Green Bay Press Gazette, the local daily whose sports editor a century ago, George W. Calhoun, cofounded the Packers along with a former Notre Dame football star, Curly Lambeau.

  Saturday’s Press Gazette featured a lineup of gluttony options around town—a seven-pound burrito (at Sangria’s Mexican Grille), a forty-ounce steak (at Prime Quarter Steak Club), and (at the stadium proper) a special “Lam Bowl,” created for the playoffs, filled with three pounds of sausage, cheese curds, bacon, and tater tots, topped with Bavarian Dunkel Beer Cheese and Red Cherry Peppers (sold in a souvenir Lam-Bowl). Let the healing begin.

  My flight was late getting into Milwaukee Friday night, which along with the two-hour drive north to Green Bay made for slim pickings food-wise—as in, Brett Favre’s Steakhouse. Brett’s was the only place that was still serving dinner. If only someone had intercepted me, in the best Favre tradition. Brett, I hate to say it, your steakhouse was suboptimal: I ate an overcooked leather of a filet and mashed potatoes that tasted like chunky sour cream.

  But my waitress, Carol, wore a Packers bow tie and was tremendous. Her husband and son were off ice-fishing for the weekend, and she was moonlighting from her job as a prison administrator at the Columbia Correctional Institution, once the home of Jeffrey Dahmer. Carol told me the same basic rule applied at both of her jobs: just treat everyone the same. She asked where I was from. Washington, D.C., I said. Did I know Trump? Not really, I said.

  Talk of politics was minimal otherwise. People here are unfailingly nice—“Wisconsin Nice”—but the election had gotten intense. Green Bay, with a population of about 100,000 (Lambeau’s capacity is 81,441), is the seat of Brown County, which Trump won by just a sliver over Hillary Clinton, 48 percent to 47 percent. November felt forever ago and yesterday. But now we were on to something else in this, the smallest city in America to have a major sports team. Green Bay is not a red or blue state, but green and yellow America.

  Just treat everyone the same. Mind your layers. Go Packers.

  Green Bay and the Packers have been held up as the embodiment of something the league had gotten right. It is a crown jewel of small-town pride, a community invested literally in a team that is the only one in sports owned entirely by shareholders. Every one of these 360,000 owners is Membership. I much prefer them to the billionaires.

  “I think a lot of people around the league look at us and they wonder, ‘How does it work there?’” said Mark Murphy, a former defensive back for the Redskins who now serves as the Packers’ CEO, representing the team’s shareholders. On league matters, including official votes, Murphy effectively serves as the Packers’ owner. “My wife calls me a faux-ner,” Murphy told me. “That means I’m an owner but without the money.”

  Candidates for national office have tried over the years to reap reflective glory from this Pigskin Paradise, at times clumsily (John Kerry’s fumbled reference to “Lambert Field” during a 2004 campaign stop in Wisconsin is something he should never live down). Green Bay’s go-to God is of course Coach Lombardi, the philosopher-bully whose legend as a paragon of American leadership made him a rare consensus icon during an even more divided era. Both Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey considered Lombardi as their running mates during the 1968 election, according to David Maraniss, author of the definitive Lombardi biography from 1999, When Pride Still Mattered. Lombardi, a Kennedy Democrat, had no interest in the job.

  “If Brett Favre was the team’s Christ-like redeemer,” wrote Austin Smith in the January 2017 Harper’s (“The Lords of Lambeau”), “Lombardi was its Old Testament God.” His scripture is invoked all over Green Bay and around football, including by even the worst of actors. Greg Hardy, the former All-Pro de
fensive end for the Panthers and Cowboys, and repeated batterer of women, applied Lombardi to his own comeback attempt in the league. “It’s not whether you get knocked out, it’s whether you get back up,” Hardy said, quoting Lombardi, rather unfortunately.

  I took a ride around Green Bay late on the night before the game, enjoying the idea that these were the same streets Lombardi used to drive while obsessing over his game plans. Many of the roads had different names then, including one now named for the sideline sage himself (Lombardi Avenue). Subsequent coaches earned street designations after they won Super Bowls with the Packers—although Mike Holmgren and Mike McCarthy only rated “ways.”

  Peter King, the longtime pro football writer for Sports Illustrated and connoisseur of NFL road food, shared the best Lambeau advice I received. Show up about five hours before kickoff. Wander through the parking lot and strike up conversations with tailgaters. Be there and be friendly and the beer, brats, and brotherhood will flow. He was correct. A few people even offered me their stray tickets but I had already dropped $250 on StubHub for a single on the 30-yard line, Section 328. I wore seven layers. It was not enough.

  Again, though, it’s relative: The sun was out. Lots of tailgaters went topless except for their chest paint. I had always assumed that the bare-chested bozos on TV in frigid stadiums are just showing off for cameras, or too drunk to feel anything. But I spotted maybe two dozen of them in the tailgate lot, and no cameras were anywhere. Maybe some were in the too-drunk-to-feel-anything camp, but there was honor in these men. It was less a fashion statement than a declaration of pride and place.

  Also impressive was that two tailgaters I spoke to possessed the situational awareness to apply sunscreen to their goose-pimpled torsos. “You can get a nasty burn on a day like this if you’re not careful,” a tailgater named Nick warned me. He had driven six hours from Minnesota. Cold air can lull you into thinking the sun can’t burn, he said; and it can indeed, which Nick learned the hard way coming to Packer games for thirty years. Veteran move. He offered me sunscreen and a bratwurst. I took the bratwurst.

  Other new friends included four bare-chested teammates from the Miami University of Ohio football team, who drove in from Cincinnati, each of their shivering pecs and bellies painted in yellow-green letters, spelling out:

  P (O-lineman Tommy Doyle), A (wide receiver Jack Sorenson), C (tight end Andrew Homer), and K (D-lineman Ben Kimpler).

  A post-Christmas Santa Claus with green-and-yellow beard hugged me. I took a selfie with a guy in yellow-striped Packer overalls unstrapped to expose a Packer tattoo over his bare nipple—which I then tweeted, a tourist move, but I needed to share.

  At the suggestion of one of the tailgaters, I stopped by the All Things Jerky truck and perused a menu that included reindeer jerky, boar BBQ jerky, kangaroo jerky, and alligator jerky—the latter two presumably imported from somewhere Not Wisconsin. According to my tailgate friend, jerky “keeps your blood warm in the cold,” so it’s good to stock up. This struck me as bullshit jerky, but what did I know? (I wasn’t even wearing sunscreen.)

  To warm up before entering the stadium, I stepped into the heated tent area called the “tailgate zone.” The AFC Wild Card Game between Miami at Pittsburgh was on a big TV. I watched Dolphins quarterback Matt Moore rolling out to his right and getting blasted by Steeler linebacker Bud Dupree as he released his pass. Moore was left writhing on the ground and bleeding from the mouth. A Packer fan watching next to me grunted in something between thrill and horror. He stood under a poster-size photo hanging from the ceiling of Packer mauler Ray Nitschke standing over an opponent—#66 in a classic kill shot.

  “You gotta see this,” the fan said, calling his friend over to watch the replays. And there were replays, five in the two minutes it took for Moore to get off the turf and the referees to assess the offsetting personal foul penalties (one for roughing the passer, the other for the retaliating Dolphins who attacked Dupree). “He gets hit right in the jaw!” CBS’s Phil Simms marveled during the final replay.

  “And made a terrific throw, too.”

  Football!

  Moore came out for only one play and then returned to the game. I headed into the stadium.

  My seat was near the top of the bowl. Next to me was a guy named Jake, a bar manager from Oshkosh, who spent much of the first quarter trying to start chants about Giants quarterback Eli Manning (“Eli eats boogers, Eli eats boogers”). None caught on. Other than that, Jake was definitely Wisconsin Nice, or Wisconsin Drunk. He kept trying to initiate high fives on every Packer offensive play that gained more than ten yards. This became tiresome after a while, at least to me (Masshole Nice isn’t really a thing). He also took delight in Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. dropping two passes in the first quarter. Beckham and some Giants teammates had faced a tabloid/talk radio/Twitter shit-storm during the week when they were photographed on a boat in Miami after jetting south on their off day. They should have been gearing up for frigid Green Bay instead, per hot take sources. This was not a good look for a team preparing for its first playoff game since 2011—a distraction at the very least. Beckham, as if playing exclusively to the peanut gallery, missed two more catchable balls early in the second quarter that Twitter immediately blamed on the Miami boat ride.

  But the Giants’ defense started warm in Green Bay and dominated much of the first half. They led 6–0 until just before the two-minute warning, when Aaron Rodgers defrosted and that was that. On second and goal from the Giants’ 5, the quarterback stutter-stepped around the pocket, avoided three rushers, ran to his left and, at the last second, threw a bullet to Davante Adams in the end zone to give the Packers a 7–6 lead. Adams then ran to a corner and observed the Green Bay tradition of the scoring Packer launching himself over the padded wall and into the first rows of exulting supplicants—the Lambeau Leap. Fans converge like frozen love piranhas, enveloping the Packer in a frenzy of hugs and head-slaps. This is most definitely a Top-10 best tradition in American sports, if not American life in general, or maybe even the entire history of human achievement.

  The Giants regained the ball for just forty-two seconds before punting it back to Rodgers. He drove the Packers 80 yards in 1:38, more than half of which came on a 42-yard Hail Mary to Randall Cobb on the last play of the half. Rodgers in his career had now hit on three desperation heaves of more than 40 yards at the end of halves or regulation time. I had seen them all on video but it was something to witness live. On TV, you can’t appreciate the full loft Rodgers had to put on the ball to allow his receivers to get downfield—four or five seconds, it seemed, longer than many punts. The crowd reupped their delirium, Cobb sprang up off the frozen ground and Lambeau Leaped into the hands of joy.

  I shared a high five with Jake and also a bag of my jerky at halftime—the kangaroo, I think it was (I warned him it might be a little tough this time of year). Green Bay went into the locker room up 14–6 but the game felt effectively over. The Giants looked beat on their slow walks to the locker room. It was as if Rodgers had lulled them into false hope before breaking New York with a flurry of gut-punches to end the round. The game was not close after that, with the Packers winning, 38–13. If the game had gone another half, Green Bay might have won 100–13 and I could have lost four toes.

  House of Pain’s “Jump Around” broke out in the stadium at the end of the third quarter. The early-nineties hip-hop anthem had become a Lambeau tradition following one that had begun twenty years ago at the University of Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium. This was not your Lombardi’s Lambeau, but it still worked. I adopted Green Bay as my NFC team this postseason while I jumped around on numb feet.

  21.

  “WE DON’T WANT YOU IN LOS ANGELES”

  God will never forsake you—unlike the Chargers.

  —SIGN OUTSIDE THE COMMUNITY BAPTIST CHURCH, FALLBROOK, CALIFORNIA, NEAR SAN DIEGO

  January 18, 2017

  Football’
s grand future sprawls over a big field of dirt just east of LAX. It covers 298 acres on the site of the Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood. Here is the dusty canvas where “Stan’s vision” would be realized, someday, at least that’s the plan (says Stan). “Stan” is Stan Kroenke, the serial entrepreneur, Walmart heir by marriage, and owner of the new L.A. Rams, among other pro sports teams.

  Whatever plutocrat’s wet dream gets constructed here will become the new home of the Rams and Chargers beginning in about 2020 (the projected finish was originally 2019 but building started slowly due to heavy rains). I heard from a lot of people at the league that I needed to check out this Manhattan Project of stadia in L.A. So I headed west after Green Bay, to warm up, watch the four divisional round playoff games on TV, and get a peek at Stan’s Vision. It wasn’t much to see yet, this vision, unless you get off on inspecting big, early-stage construction grounds, which I do barely at all—maybe a fifteen-minute capacity, tops. The meter was running.

  I met up first in a construction trailer with Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ chief operating officer, and the chief cheerleader for Stan’s Vision. “You have a good reputation,” I told Demoff, upon meeting him—which he does, at least around the league. “You haven’t been to St. Louis lately,” cautioned Demoff, who is forty-one years old and almost entirely gray (largely because of St. Louis). To wit: KTVI Channel 2 in St. Louis had recently identified Demoff in a graphic as “Rams Chief Operating Officer/Professional Liar.”

  Anyway, the agenda for the visit was for Demoff to sell me on all the wondrous things about the in-progress stadium. But really I was more interested in talking about the elephant in the room, that being the Chargers’ deciding to come here, too, even though nobody wanted them. I wasn’t subtle about this, either. “You want the Chargers to fail, right?” I asked Demoff. He smiled, but couldn’t play along. “I want us to succeed,” he said. At which point I was sent out to view the big pile of dirt.