Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  Still, it was a little endearing, too, that Kraft would take such an impish and even vulnerable approach to ingratiating himself. He also, on two of my visits, presented me with a half dozen organic eggs from chickens raised by a caretaker at his Brookline mansion. “I eat these eggs every day,” Kraft told me. “That’s the reason I still have hair.” It was probably too late for me, hairwise, but this was still a nice gesture by Mr. Kraft, like Charlemagne handing out opals and diamonds. The eggs were tremendous.

  In the middle of one of our interviews, Kraft took a call on his cell phone from one of his granddaughters, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. She was calling Kraft back after he had called her earlier for her birthday. “Hi sweetie pie, how ah ya?” Kraft said, with a big smile. He put her on speakerphone. “I’m actually sitting here with a reporter for the New York Times who went to Michigan, a graduate,” Kraft said. We exchanged pleasantries, me and the granddaughter (“What dorm do you live in?”). Kraft took her off speaker. He said he didn’t know what to get her for her birthday so was “just going to send you something” (guessing a check). “Oh, I love YOU,” Kraft said warmly. “Thanks, I love you. Thanks for calling sweetie pie, I love ya.” It was sweet.

  “Some of the gals I date make fun of me,” Kraft told me, after hanging up. I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I thought he might have been making a joke about how he’s old enough to be some of his girlfriends’ grandfather. “Is she older than any of them?” I joked, referring to Kraft’s granddaughter and the “gals” he mentioned. This was a little edgy on my part. I regretted the attempt at humor instantly. When Kraft didn’t react, I worried that I’d fallen on my tush. Luckily, his ADD kicked in, and Kraft started racking his brain over what we had been talking about before his granddaughter called.

  Kraft says he feels no rivalry at all with Jerry Jones. If there is a rivalry, it’s all on Jerry’s side, or in Jerry’s head. “I really bear envy towards no one,” Kraft told me. “Since I put dirt on my wife’s casket, I really realized what’s important. The things we worry about are paper clips.”

  Still, enshrinement in Canton would represent the ultimate paper clip for Mr. Kraft. He wants that megarecognition badly, preferably before he dies. Kraft has a compelling case. He has served on many of the league’s most important committees. He was instrumental in negotiating the league’s massive broadcast contracts and its last collective bargaining agreement. There is also the Patriots’ gaudy run of on-field success. He would never admit this publicly, but it does bother Kraft that he is not in the Hall of Fame—and also that Jones got there first.

  Would Kraft trade one of his Super Bowl rings for Jones’s Gold Jacket? “No way,” Kraft told me. Hall of Fame voting tends to be political. “A ring is earned,” he said. “It means you’ve outmanaged your competition and you’ve managed excellence at the highest level. To me, that’s more of a turn-on.”

  26.

  THIS MAN’S LIVER BELONGS IN CANTON

  March 2017

  Jerry Jones had been turned on pretty much since the night before the Super Bowl. News that he’d be inducted into the Hall of Fame further engorged Jerry’s already healthy ego like a perpetual Viagra drip. It represented a milestone, sanctifying Jones’s status as first among members. People in the league noticed an immediate change.

  I ran into Jones in March, at the league’s annual meeting at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. He was with his son Stephen, having a beer at the bar in the middle of the afternoon. I approached their table, congratulated Jerry on his honor, and asked Jones if he would now be the only “active owner” in the Hall of Fame. By “active,” I meant living, but Jerry took a more nuanced definition. This depended, he said, on whether I counted Dan Rooney as being “active.” Rooney, the Hall of Fame chairman of the Steelers, had been in failing health. He died a month later, at eighty-four, officially rendering himself “inactive,” and leaving Jones as the only Gold Jacket owner still strutting the earth.

  Across the bar and just off the lobby, Raiders owner Mark Davis was in the midst of a small commotion of angry Raiders fans. Davis had just won the right—per a 31–1 vote from his fellow owners—to move his team from Oakland to Las Vegas. That would make the Raiders the third NFL team to relocate in a fourteen-month period. Rabid Raider rooters from the Bay Area were the latest fan cohort to be aggrieved, and several of them traveled to Phoenix to tell the Captain Kangaroo–haired carpetbagger how they felt about his coming abandonment. In the spirit of confronting his victims head-on, Davis approached one of them, Godfather Griz Jones, the leader of a Raiders fan group called Forever Oakland. Davis extended his hand, but was rebuffed. Cold!

  Davis pleaded for dialogue. He told Griz he wanted to talk about “the team’s future,” and how meaningful it would be if only they could all work together to support their beloved Raiders in their new home in the desert.

  “There is no future,” Griz said.

  Ouch. Davis looked wounded, but rebounded quickly—near-billion-dollar stadium subsidies (from Nevada in this case) take the edge off such snubs. In the friendlier confines of the Membership, Davis was being treated more like a conquering hero. Few maneuvers are more respected among NFL owners than finagling a sweet stadium deal from a sucker municipality. Even more impressive in this case was that it was the nutty Mark Davis who pulled it off, someone who “surprises people if he can roll out of bed and put on his pants,” as one owner put it to ESPN The Magazine.

  Davis then headed off to receive an audience of well-wishing insiders at a Biltmore restaurant. Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, who was dining nearby, asked Davis if he had thought that day about his late father, Al Davis.

  Having Al Davis as a dad must have been quite the fraught setup. My favorite story of Davis family pathology involved the great Raiders receiver Cliff Branch, who for a time had hired Mark Davis to be his agent—with hopes that Mark could get more money out of his dad. “I got kicked out of the house,” Davis said. But then Branch scored two touchdowns in the Super Bowl, Mark recalled, and all of a sudden he was back in the family’s good graces.

  “I think about him every day,” Mark Davis said of his late father, and then entertained the logical follow-up question: What would Al Davis think of the Raiders’ moving to Las Vegas?

  Mark paused and assumed a quizzical look. “I really don’t know what he would think,” Mark said.

  Back at the bar, I stopped again at the Joneses’ table. Jerry, who had moved on from beer to something amber colored in a tumbler, waved me over and said he had enjoyed my previous “visit” (everything constitutes a “visit” to southern men of a certain age, even a thirty-second drop-by at his table, such as my earlier “visit”). I seized this chance to remind Jerry that the two of us had had a fine visit in Dallas about a year earlier and I looked forward to visiting with him again in the future. He replied that he had enjoyed visiting before, and would very much look forward to that. I thanked him and headed off. Another good visit!

  Our next visit would take place in Dallas about a month later. Jerry Jones was sitting aboard the Cowboys’ bus, in the parking lot of a golf course not far from the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport. He was taking a break from the Cowboys Golf Classic, the tournament the team hosts every spring. As a general rule, the Dallas Cowboys’ bus is not a place for the faint of heart, or liver.

  At two p.m., Jones was sipping from a cup of tea. He had been battling a cough. But after about a half hour, the namesake King of Jerry’s World was done messing around. He was not just any Hall of Fame owner, but an active Hall of Fame owner, especially when his habitat is amply stocked with his favored libation, Johnnie Walker Blue. “I do like to have a drink,” Jones confirmed, something I’d heard from a few people over the years. “Do you want a shot of Scotch?” Jones asked me. Sure, I said, not realizing that by “shot,” Jones was talking about blue twenty-four-ounce plastic stadium cups bearing the
Cowboys’ logo, soon to be filled—and refilled—to the top.

  “This ought to take care of that cough,” Dr. Jones proclaimed, raising his big cup and welcoming me to Dallas. It is not easy keeping up with the Joneses. I learned this the hard way.

  One of the drivers in Jerry’s employ, an African American gentleman named Emory, opened a back cabinet stocked with $250 bottles of “Blue.” No doubt Jones could afford the smooth booze, but he also mentioned a qualifier. “It’s the stuff it makes you do after you’ve had it that you might not be able to afford,” he said. I relay this by way of transparency into Jones’s inhibitions, which after a few more supersized pours from Emory were weakening fast.

  After meandering around for a bit, I presented Jones with a flipped-around version of the question I had previously asked Kraft: Would Jones trade his Gold Jacket for one of Bob Kraft’s rings?

  Jones was nowhere near as definitive as Kraft was on the Gold Jacket versus ring question. “Oh boy,” Jones kept saying. “Boy. Boy! Boy! Boy! Boy.” His face filled in a kind of sloppy and happy grimace, befitting this high-class dilemma. He suggested an alternative riddle. How about if I asked whether Jones would pay a quarter billion dollars for another Super Bowl ring?

  “Why don’t you ask me that?” Jones proposed. “If you could assure me of that, you’d walk out of here with a check.”

  Nope, can’t do it, I said, and repeated my question: Would he trade his Hall of Fame jacket for another ring?

  “No,” Jones said finally. “No.”

  Sitting a few feet away, Rich Dalrymple, the Cowboys’ longtime head of public relations, shook his head. “You messed that one up,” he told his boss. Jerry tried to explain himself.

  “I’ve been involved in Super Bowls,” Jones said. He had three rings already, although none since 1996. He just loves his “babies,” as he calls them. He has been known to slip one ring on each hand to announce his presence in places where he might not rightly be identified. Jones will walk into joints far from Dallas. He will slap his weighted hands down on the bar—crack—to break the ice with strangers.

  “How ’bout them Cowboys?!”

  No question, Jerry loves his babies, as if they were actual babies. But he still puts the experience of winning a Super Bowl a tad behind getting into the Hall of Fame. “Uh, well, let me think of how to say this,” Jones said, trying to amend his answer to something more acceptable to Cowboys Nation. “I’m stumbling around here.”

  “He gets one mulligan, right?” Dalrymple tried to appeal to me. “Since we’re on the golf course?”

  Dalrymple wanted Jones to change his answer to the more politically correct “another Super Bowl.” Fans would hope and expect to hear that from their first-class owner. It would reassure them that it’s all about winning and rings. Otherwise it’s just a rich guy’s ego trip. But what a trip!

  I was noncommittal on the mulligan. Actually, I was closer to inoperative at that point, as Emory had just inflicted a third massive cup of “love potion,” as Jerry took to calling the Blue. My tape recorder, however, remained fully functional.

  “Of course Rich would want me to say it’s all about the Super Bowls,” Jones said.

  Dalrymple acknowledged that he was not at all surprised that Jones would value his Hall of Fame induction over another Super Bowl ring. The jacket is a more rarefied honor: a little more than three hundred NFL legends have received them, as opposed to the thousands who have gotten Super Bowl rings. “You’re talking about immortality,” Dalrymple said. “But I wouldn’t want you to say that publicly,” he added, looking back at Jones, who just did.

  Jones grinned and shrugged. “I answered truthfully,” he said. “I was trying to be truthful.” Jones then raised his empty cup and jiggled the ice cubes to get the attention of Emory, who administered more truth.

  It’s important to have fun, Jones said, becoming philosophical. He’s always managed to enjoy his various undertakings. As a young man, Jones said he did a stint as a shoe salesman, which he also loved. He then said something about “spending the afternoon masturbating over selling shoes.”

  Wait, WHAT?

  “I’ve sold shoes,” Jones said again, “and I’ve masturbated in my shoes.”

  Okay then. “We’ve all been there, sir,” I said, trying to be reassuring. (Author’s note: I have never masturbated into my shoes—or anyone’s shoes.)

  “We’re deteriorating,” Jones acknowledged. “But here is my point. I can tell you when I was selling them shoes, and I’ve sold a bunch of shoes, and I’ve sold insurance . . . I promise you the shoe itself won’t get it done. The policy itself won’t get it done, unless you’re having fun.”

  Here I jumped in and made a parenthetical observation.

  “I guarantee you that Robert Kraft is not sitting somewhere on a bus talking about masturbating in his shoes,” I said. This is as safe of a guarantee as I have ever made to anyone. Jerry collapsed onto his side in a belly laugh. “And that’s why he’s not in the Hall of Fame,” I added.

  Dalrymple chimes in something about Kraft having a beautiful young girlfriend.

  “Yep, Bob’s got us all beat,” Jerry announced.

  “Let’s put him in the Hall of Fame,” Dalrymple suggested.

  “Let’s do put him in the Hall of Fame,” Jones agreed. “He gets a Gold Jacket for that.”

  It was after five p.m., and we had officially blown past the three-hour mark of the interview. “The Johnnie Walker Blue sort of distorted our time,” Jones said. That’s not all it distorted. I was placing myself in the Cowboys’ bus equivalent of injured reserve—not eligible to return.

  Before leaving the vehicle, Jones invited me to lie down on one of its several couches. This was an excellent idea. No way was I in any condition to drive out of the parking lot, much less to my hotel. “I’m gonna tell Emory you’re gonna take a nap,” Jones said, as he struggled to open the door of the bus. “The only question is how do I get out of this motherfucker?”

  Emory managed to liberate Jones, who headed off across the parking lot. Dalrymple would compare this encounter with a fifteen-round heavyweight bout in which “the guy from the New York Times” got buried in the thirteenth. He was being generous, since I am a middleweight, at best, and Jerry looked ready for another fifteen rounds. The Hall of Famer made a beeline for the clubhouse bar, where he ordered up some beers. “Hey, let’s get some SEE-gars!” Jones was heard saying. This man’s liver belongs in Canton.

  Back in the recovery bus, I looked up from the couch to find the driver smirking down upon me. “I should have warned you about that, sir,” Emory said. “We always warn people, you avoid the bus, or you’re gonna pay. Everybody in the NFL knows that. It’s KNOWN.”

  I closed my eyes, opened them again, and suddenly it was pitch dark and ten p.m. Knockout. How ’bout them Cowboys?

  27.

  “FAITH, FAMILY, AND FOOTBALL . . . PROBABLY NOT IN THAT ORDER”

  April 18, 2017

  Dan Rooney was a modest and humble gentleman, a throwback to a more modest and humble league. The longtime Steelers chairman was slight and stooped but a giant in the family business. His death, at eighty-four, was a Big Game, and his funeral was a mandatory rite for the lords of the league. If you love football, you have to respect Pittsburgh. The Steel City has a legit claim to being America’s unrivaled mecca of the sport. A few other places might rate, maybe Green Bay, but I’d take Pittsburgh, factoring in: 1) the sustained excellence of the Steelers, whose six Super Bowl wins still lead the league; 2) western Pennsylvania’s status as the country’s most illustrious breeding ground of NFL legends, especially quarterbacks (Namath, Kelly, Marino, Montana, Unitas); and 3) football’s roots as a factory game, which suit Pittsburgh’s blue-collar identity like a windbreaker.

  Football in Pittsburgh is for better or worse and till death do us part. And it is interchangeable with th
e Rooney family, whose patriarch, Art Rooney (Dan’s father, known as “the Chief”), founded the Steelers in 1933. Natives discuss their Stillers in way-of-life terms, as their forebears used to speak of steel or coal mining. Life’s a mixed bag, and so is love and so is football; sometimes you win, sometimes not; sometimes the factory closes and you get hurt on the field and nothing’s supposed to come easy. Mr. Rooney’s body was interned at Christ Our Redeemer Catholic Cemetery, not far from where Steeler Hall of Fame center Mike Webster’s broken postfootball life, brain, and CTE discovery would be immortalized in the movie Concussion. For better, for worse.

  I waited to pay respects at a public viewing held at Heinz Field the day before the patriarch’s funeral. It was a warm spring day, late afternoon in solemn Pittsburgh. Irish bagpipes played “Danny Boy” echoing through the empty stadium. About half the people in line were dressed in suits and the other half were dressed for a Steelers game in November.

  Most of the people I spoke to said they did not know Mr. Rooney well but appreciated what he did for Pittsburgh. African American mourners spoke with gratitude for Mr. Rooney’s willingness to sign and draft black players and also for making them, as fans, feel welcome in a tribal, segregated, and majority-white city where they sometimes did not. (The NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” ensuring that minority candidates be interviewed for coach and executive jobs, was named for the Steelers’ owner.)