Sure enough, the Falcons beat the Seahawks and would host the Packers in the NFC Championship the following Sunday—granting another last gasp for the Grand Ol’ Dome. The question then became, would Goodell finally do the honorable thing and show up in Foxborough for the AFC Championship Game? Surely, since he had just bid his farewell to the Georgia Dome the week before, he could not compound his cowardice further. I sent a sarcastic email to an NFL flack asking if Goodell would be returning for one last look at the Dome. Yes, the flack said, seemingly without return sarcasm, Goodell in fact would be returning to Atlanta. And the flack even tried to justify it by explaining that Goodell had not seen the Packers play in person yet that year, and had already seen the Steelers play twice, so fair’s fair.
Like Goodell, I, too, had been avoiding Foxborough, although in my case no one noticed or cared. Mostly I stayed away because getting there was a chore and I’d just as soon avoid the traffic and urine-soaked hell of postgame Route 1. If Lambeau was the NFL’s Louvre, Gillette two weeks later would be like going to Hooters for a nightcap.
But a friend came through with two excellent tickets on the 20-yard line, so I flew up Sunday to see if Tommy could complete the last step of his vindication tour en route to the Super Bowl. Naturally “Where’s Rahjah?” had provided hours of sports-radio mirth in New England. By the time I was heading south from Logan airport in my rental car, however, a new preoccupation had come up. In the predawn hours of that morning, some yahoo Masshole pulled the fire alarm in Pittsburgh’s hotel in Boston (as yahoo Massholes do), sending the groggy Steelers out into the cold. Nice. Someone on WEEI was comparing this with the old rat-fucking shenanigans that Red Auerbach used to pull to “gain an edge” on the competition. The late Boston Celtics patriarch was notorious for supposedly orchestrating stunts like these—turning off the hot water in the visitors’ shower room, for instance. There were similar tales of fire alarms going off in the wee hours at the Lakers’ hotel during the NBA finals. A certain mystique had grown up around these capers, in the vein of “doing what it takes” to mess with an opponent and “getting in their heads.” That’s the point the caller on the radio was trying to make. Personally I had a hard time thinking of these things as anything other than classic dick moves, but I figured the listeners of WEEI could do without my opinion on this.
Not surprisingly, the fire alarm mastermind was busted, arrested, and identified—as Dennis Harrison, twenty-five, of Boston. “I’m drunk, I’m stupid, I’m a Pats fan,” he told police. Harrison might have coined the perfect mantra for us.
I went to the Pats-Steelers game with my old pal Nem, an artist who now lives in nearby Watertown. Nem adopted the Pats later in life. Like me he was excited to be going to such a fateful game but also pining slightly for his warm living room, eating chili, drinking for free, and peeing without a long hike or line. Nem and I were both fifty-two years old and increasingly biased against hassle and unnecessary discomfort. Hunter S. Thompson put it well, if not succinctly, in a gonzo treatment he did in Rolling Stone about Super Bowl 8 in 1974. “I hope to Christ I never again succumb to whatever kind of weakness or madness it is that causes a person to endure the incoherent hell that comes with going out to a cold and rainy stadium for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and trying to get involved with whatever seems to be happening down there on that far-below field.”
But Nem and I were also closer to death than we used to be and figured that as we age, events like this become ways to measure your life, like weddings and funerals. We got to Foxborough early, watched the Falcons cruise to NFC primacy on a tailgater’s TV (so much for my Packers). We chatted with a few groups of Steelers fans in the parking lot, a few of them interspersed with Pats counterparts in SONS OF BELICHICK jerseys and happy to share their food and booze. Good-lucks were exchanged. We respect you guys, I said to my new Pittsburgh friends. Really, there was no reason to be assholes before we kicked Black and Gold ass.
It was a wet chill of a night, 35 degrees and drizzly. The cold was raw and clingy, more insidious than the straight-up freeze of Green Bay. As is true of many Pats fans, I had become complacent and took my comfort for granted. Shame on me for skimping on layers—not superior preparation!
This was Nem’s first time at Gillette. He took note of the directives from the scoreboard for us to “make noise, make noise.” “It’s so easy to be a fan,” Nem remarked, “they tell you what to do at every second.” After sufficient noise was made, the scoreboard declared “Fan Power” and we all felt, sure enough, empowered. Nem ran off to the concession stand before kickoff and came back with a big plastic cup of red wine. He came to Foxborough for the Pats and stayed for the Merlot.
The game was never close. Pittsburgh seemed to be playing half asleep, especially after their brilliant running back Le’Veon Bell went out with a groin injury. Brady threw for 384 yards and three touchdowns; receiver Chris Hogan caught nine balls for 180 yards and two touchdowns. It was 34–9 after three, leaving only the “Where’s Rahjah” chants to build and the final score to be registered (36–17). Nem and I stuck around for the trophy presentation. Nothing about this result was surprising, but I tried to make myself feel grateful, if not exhilarated by the once-hapless Pats’ earning their seventh trip to the Super Bowl in sixteen years. I saw a woman in a Steelers #7 jersey sobbing in the concourse. “You’ll be back next year,” I said, trying to be reassuring, but a big part of me felt nothing. Maybe it was a self-protection. Last time Pats fans tried to enjoy a blowout win in the AFC Championship Game, after all, we got promptly deflated. But this felt like something else, maybe how rich people become overindulged when they lose the ability to savor and great fortune becomes mundane.
Bob Kraft did another one of his self-satisfied trophy hoistings on national TV. “For a number of reasons, all of you in this stadium understand how big this win was,” Kraft cried, sounding a bit befuddled (or “drunk” to use the word teasing some of the YouTube clips). “But we have to go to Houston and win one . . .” And with that, Kraft stopped abruptly, raised the trophy again, and ended his remarks in mid-sentence—which was strange, but really fine.
As Nem and I made our way out of the stadium, a shot of elation appeared on the sideline in front of us. Martellus Bennett, the Patriots tight end, had grabbed a pair of red, white, and blue pom-poms from a cheerleader and began dancing and singing along to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Somebody book this man on Behind the Pom-Poms!
Bennett, a journeyman eccentric who wore out his welcome with three NFL teams and never won with any of them, had served as a blocking and pass-catching mainstay for the Pats after Gronk went down in November. Known as “Marty”—Mahty in New England—Bennett had become a fan favorite and bracing alternative to the drab personalities that Belichick preferred in his locker room. Bennett wrote a children’s book (Hey A.J., It’s Saturday), produced an animated film (Zoovie: A Warm and Fuzzy Tale), and released a mixtape on his Twitter account (Year of the Orange Dinosaur). He visited Boston Children’s Hospital dressed as Pikachu. He was also a quote machine, who once compared the Patriots’ dreadlocked bowling ball of a running back, LeGarrette Blount, with Bambi. On another occasion he claimed that his previous team, the Bears, never won because “we just had a bunch of bitches on the roster.”
Now here was Bennett galloping off to his first Super Bowl. New England’s assholes had made easy work of Tomlin’s bitches. And here was my blast of joy, the visceral thing you remember. I would think of this scene whenever I heard the candied “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” playing somewhere. It always awakens the souvenir image: Mahty jumping around with cheerleaders, dancing in the rain on Route 1.
23.
THE TV REPORTER IN THE BELICHICK UNDERWEAR
January 30, 2017
Donald Trump was not elected for subtlety. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he announced in what would become the billboard line
of his inaugural address. “American carnage” needn’t be unpleasant. It could even be riveting, like pro wrestling and pro football (both Trump obsessions). It could draw huge crowds, as Trump America’s grand opening drew “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period,” in the words of incoming White House mouthpiece Sean Spicer. The claim was as plausible as pro wrestling, but Spicer was just using “alternative facts,” as the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway defended her beleaguered-from-day-1 colleague. They worked in the service of the new president’s mission: to be the biggest spectacle in the world at all times, and to create a Maximum America in his own image.
This pitted Trump from the get-go against the incumbent megaspectacle on the American carnage calendar: the Super Bowl. It was scheduled for two weeks later in Houston (an event also not invented for subtlety). A collision course between Trump and the NFL was probably inevitable: there was only so much room in the American headspace.
Lamar Hunt, founder of the AFL and Kansas City Chiefs, originally coined the term “Super Bowl.” It was a play on the bouncy “Super Ball” toy, originally intended as a placeholder until the game’s grand masters could come up with a better, more dignified name. But “Super Bowl” stuck as the permanent solution as this grand pageant of excess as we know it today took hold. The AFL-NFL Championship Game (or “World Championship Game,” as the first two contests were called) grew into a culture-stopping extravaganza.
A few days after Trump’s inauguration, I headed for the alternative chaos of Houston. It was good to escape Washington, if not the politics of it, which remained hard to escape after Trump took his hand off the Bible. His swearing-in begot nationwide protests. His first actions included a ban on refugees and restrictions on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. It set off bedlam at airports, court challenges, and more protests. Super Bowl 51 would not be your average stick-to-sports extravaganza.
“I’m not talking politics at all,” Tom Brady said in response to the first of several questions that concerned just that—specifically, his golfing buddy, now in the White House. Brady was getting a lot of Trump questions, beginning with Super Bowl week’s Opening Night at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Brady tried to shut them down, always easier when operating in his managed bubble. But this was not Foxborough. Brady’s podium was being overrun with distraction questions. “I’m just a positive person” became his go-to blow-off. “I’m focused on positive things in my life,” Brady said. This presumably did not include refugees.
Shortly before Opening Night began, Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she advised the Justice Department that Trump’s executive order keeping out citizens from Muslim-majority countries was not constitutional. Several Falcons and Patriots players were invited to weigh in but mostly demurred. The Falcons receiver Mohamed Sanu, a practicing Muslim, was asked to discuss Trump’s executive order. “A very tough situation,” he called it, and “hard for me to talk about right now.” I asked two of the more thoughtful Patriots, defensive linemen Alan Branch and Chris Long, if they had thoughts on Trump. Both said they did, and would speak at some point, but did not wish to “distract” during Super Bowl week. League and team officials did their best to fumigate the event of any political contamination. They went as far as scrubbing the official transcripts of the interviews of nearly every mention of “Trump” or “president,” despite the words’ coming up through the evening.
Typically, Super Bowl Opening Night (“fueled by Gatorade,” because everything must now be fueled or powered by some big-paying sponsor) makes up its own goofy mob scene. Players and coaches are required to make themselves available in a mosh pit of quasi-media. They are eager to learn, the quasi-media are, things like whether Falcons running back Devonta Freeman had a favorite type of fish to eat (yes, tilapia) or if Patriots center David Andrews had a favorite breakfast cereal (yes, Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, the Crunch Berries providing “an important source of fruit,” he confided to me).
A female TV reporter from Alaska told Belichick that she always wears “Bill Belichick underwear on game days.” Coach, who had just announced that his “focus was on football,” managed a pained look of amusement (or was it an amused look of pain?). “Did you even know there was Bill Belichick underwear?” she pressed. “I guess I missed that one,” he muttered back. Belichick also mentioned that he’d never been to Alaska.
Super Bowl week is like a national political convention in that little of consequence actually happens until the final night, and even that is often an anticlimax. Still, every majordomo in politics—or in this case football—tends to show up so the rubber-necking factor is high. Entourages pass through the lobbies of the hotels inside the secured Super Bowl “village”: sights of Dan Fouts signing a football, Mean Joe Greene at a reception desk at the Hilton, Odell Beckham’s entourage nearly trampling a slow-moving pack of Gold Jackets emerging from a luncheon. “They make us wear ’em here,” Hall of Fame defensive back Mel Renfro told me, referring to the Gold Jackets on parade this week.
So much football eminence operating in close quarters enhances potential for something noteworthy occurring, if not “news” per se (e.g., Johnny Manziel signing autographs for $99, or $50 for selfies). Earl Campbell, the bulldozer running back of the Houston Oilers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, made headlines early in the week when he complained that the modern NFL had grown soft compared with when he played. Campbell suggested that players were now too quick to succumb to injuries, including head injuries. “I can’t play because I didn’t get a pedicure this week,” Campbell told USA Today, mocking the current generation. “I don’t play because my head hurt. That wouldn’t have got the job done back in my day.”
Campbell, the son of rose growers in Tyler, Texas, played with a demolishing abandon that made plenty of his contemporaries soft, too. “Every time you hit him you lower your own IQ,” Redskins linebacker Pete Wysocki said of Campbell. In Campbell’s prime, health was the only thing some people thought could stop him. Never much for evading tacklers, the Tyler Rose preferred a more punitive approach. No one who saw Earl Campbell play forgot him—and it was satisfying in that football at its most basic is a straight-ahead contest of attempted domination. How sustainable was another matter. Campbell played only eight years in the league, retired in 1985, and was enshrined in Canton as perhaps the most merciless running back ever to play in the NFL. “Punishment” was the operative theme when discussing Earl Campbell. “The hardest-hitting running back I ever played against,” Cowboys safety Cliff Harris said after Campbell retired. “When you finished a game against Earl, you had to sit in a tub with Epsom salts.”
As Houston football royalty, Campbell was a ubiquitous artifact at this Super Bowl week. Now sixty-one, he was also another example of how punishment in football can be a two-way game, and that his “back in my day” nostalgia comes with a price. Campbell has had both knees replaced, endured five back surgeries, severe arthritis, foot drop caused by nerve damage, spinal stenosis, and a rehab program for addiction to OxyContin, among other things that Epsom salts couldn’t help. He had an unruly white beard and moved with the aid of a walker.
I watched Campbell inch through the room at the annual Super Bowl party put on by Leigh Steinberg, his former agent. Like Campbell, Steinberg had seen better days since his peak as the game’s premier superagent representing top players of the eighties and nineties. Several wound up firing or suing him, and Steinberg wound up filing for bankruptcy and being treated for addiction, among other fall-from-grace standbys. I’d spoken to him a few times, and read a memoir he wrote about his life as an agent in the NFL. He is a tireless name-dropper and self-promoter but not without insights.
In his heyday, Steinberg hosted the week’s essential Super Bowl party. He had made a bit of a comeback in recent years, recruiting first-round-drafted quarterbacks Paxton Lynch and Patrick Mahomes as clients. He was also trying to keep alive his Super Bowl party,
which he described to me as “legendary.” This would be the thirtieth he would host. Not knowing better, I figured this would be a primo destination, baby. But like Steinberg (and me), the party was solidly B-list. Long lines of fans filed into the Hughes Manor, a multitented event space a few miles from Super Bowl “village.” There were plates of sweaty cheese, silent auctions, and junior hustlers getting all excited about their networking opportunities.
Campbell was one of the few stars I recognized. Others also recognized Campbell, and mobbed him. His hobbled condition made it difficult for him to evade the pursuit, though Campbell did not mind. He smiled through a procession of photo requests, many of them younger fans who seemed not to know who Campbell was. But his older groupies did. They were less interested in photos and autographs, more interested in regaling Campbell with their memories of his memories. “You were an absolute beast,” one supplicant told Campbell. He wore a new cowboy hat and spoke with a New England accent (what’s more pathetic than a Masshole in a cowboy hat?). The man said he wore #34 in Pop Warner in honor of Campbell. “There was no one like you, Earl,” he said, shaking Campbell’s arthritic hand. He spoke to his hero in the past tense, like he was a ghost.
Commissioner Goodell managed to tear himself away from the Georgia Dome and get himself to Houston. Goodell was scheduled to host his annual State-of-the-NFL press conference on Wednesday. This is a Super Bowl week tradition in which we watch Roger Dodger stand on his Shielded soapbox next to the Lombardi Trophy and ride out a rush of media questions—and perhaps this year, skip the part about how people take risks by “sitting on the couch.”
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