Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  “I love what he did for the black players,” said lifelong Pittsburgher Camilla Ideley, an African American woman in a Steelers sweatshirt. She’d been rooting for the team her entire life but this was her first time at Heinz Stadium. She’d always had to work on Sunday during games and could never buy a ticket. But she left work early on this Monday to attend the viewing and pay her respects.

  Funeral services were held the next morning at Saint Paul Cathedral, near the University of Pittsburgh. The proceedings had an end-of-an-era, won’t-see-his-likes-again feel. It also had dignitaries—a former president (Obama), secretary of state (John Kerry), attorney general (Eric Holder), CEOs, dozens of Hall of Famers, two commissioners (Goodell and Tagliabue), representatives from the Nugget Industrial Complex, and Steeler royalty, past and present.

  Art Rooney II, Dan’s successor as Steelers chairman, paid tribute to his father on behalf of many admirers who wanted to. The Rooneys wished to avoid a fancy parade of eulogists, as anything too big-shotty would be unfit for Mr. Rooney. Art’s speech lasted all of four minutes.

  “Faith, family, and football” were his father’s “core values,” Art said, probably not in that order. He told brief stories: He was with his father once, attending daily Catholic mass during a visit to New York, when Dan’s cell phone rang. To Art’s surprise, his father picked up. How could he? In a cathedral? “I thought it might be the commissioner,” Dan explained. God would understand, just as Art’s mother, Patricia Rooney, understood when in 1968 Dan dropped her off at the hospital to give birth to their youngest daughter, Joan. “And then headed to the stadium to fire a coach,” Art said.

  I stood on the front steps of Saint Paul’s and took in the assembled puzzle pieces: I met a city bus driver wearing a ragged Steelers jacket; a homeless woman and her daughter. Obama looked past the other dignitaries and made a point to shake the massive hand of Mean Joe Greene. (Rooney, a longtime Republican, had fallen hard for Obama and endorsed him early; Obama later appointed Rooney ambassador to Ireland.) Several owners—maybe two dozen here—milled around on the cathedral steps, waiting on Town Cars. Would they get this number of owners at their own funerals? Would they get a president? (A cardinal? A Sal Pal?)

  “Legacy” becomes a big deal to men of a certain age and wealth. Would they be remembered in the right way? Games end and scoreboards reset, but the final score goes in the books.

  * * *

  —

  Goodell was unusually close to Dan Rooney. It was Rooney who knocked on his hotel door in 2006 to tell him he would be the next NFL commissioner, after a series of deadlocked votes. Goodell, who tried to check in with each of the thirty-two owners at least once a month, told me he spoke to Dan Rooney almost every day. “It’s hard to imagine this league without Dan Rooney,” Goodell said.

  Rooney died on the eve of what would become a tumultuous season for the NFL. For the second straight year, the league suffered a drop in television ratings.

  Fracturing would occur at all levels—among owners, players, and fans; and along political, cultural, and racial lines. There were national anthem protests, fan furors, and the unprecedented circumstance of a United States president actively working to undermine the country’s most popular and profitable sport. As in Donald Trump’s rookie season in the White House, “division” was the inescapable watchword running through the turmoil of this campaign.

  Players were divided among themselves, against the league and their owners; fans were furious with players, players mad at fans; fans with owners, owners with players, and owners with one another. “There’s no question, this season has been probably unlike anything that I’ve been around,” Art Rooney II told me at the end of 2017.

  Among his many NFL roles, Dan Rooney used to chair the NFL’s compensation committee, charged with determining the commissioner’s salary. Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who succeeded Rooney as chairman, told me the story of the first owners’ meeting he attended, in 2002, when Tagliabue was still commissioner. Rooney shuffled up to the microphone and announced he was going to issue a report on behalf of the committee. “He said, ‘We’ve extended the commissioner’s contract for five years, and if you have any questions, just call me,’” Blank recalled. That was it. Blank, the cofounder of Home Depot, was taken aback.

  “I was like ‘What the fuck?’” Blank said. “What kind of report was that?” The story underscores the uncluttered style of Dan Rooney and the relative simplicity of a process that, fifteen years later, would swirl into a mess.

  Rooney was always stressing basic principles. Simplicity and modesty were foremost. David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, told me that whenever he went to lunch with Dan Rooney, “it always involved a tray,” and usually took place at the Steelers’ cafeteria. Shribman took me to dinner the night before Mr. Rooney’s funeral (Thai food, no tray) and regaled me with stories of Rooney, usually landing on the theme of his everyman bona fides. “When pro football owners became highfliers, he remained grounded,” Shribman wrote of Rooney following his death. “Dan Rooney was an ordinary guy in a field where there were no ordinary guys on the field.”

  Shribman told me about a lunch he had arranged with Rooney and Mary Leonard, a journalist who had moved to Pittsburgh from Washington to join the Post-Gazette. After the lunch, Shribman recalled, Leonard marveled about Rooney, how his kindness and lack of pretension stood in such contrast to the NFL owner she had left behind in her previous hometown. “He bears no resemblance at all to Dan Snyder,” Leonard said of Rooney.

  Rooney was never comfortable with the big business and audacious commercialism that had overtaken the modern NFL. He was rooted in a close-knit league of family businesses. There is a passage in Michael MacCambridge’s bible of NFL history, America’s Game, in which one owner speaks dismissively of Goodell’s tendency to spew jargony business school terms such as “monetize” and “commoditize.” The book also includes an account of Rooney sending Goodell an NFL jersey loaded up with advertising patches reminiscent of a NASCAR jacket. “This is what we’re trying to avoid,” Rooney wrote to Goodell.

  Rooney also emphasized the importance of the Membership sticking together and putting the league before their self-interest. He urged his partners to solve problems “in house” and not let them spill into the press; and to avoid unnecessary drama. Dan Rooney would have hated the season to come.

  28.

  “WE NEED A BLACK CHARLTON HESTON”

  August–December 2017

  They could have been any two billionaire schmucks taking an evening stroll through Manhattan. Robert Kraft and Arthur Blank had met up at the Plaza Hotel, where Kraft keeps an apartment. It was a warm night in August, and they decided to forgo the usual limo and head to dinner on foot.

  Passersby who recognized them on the street expressed mild surprise that Kraft and Blank, the rival owners from the last Super Bowl, would be seen together. Kraft and Blank shared a few laughs over this. They are in fact close friends of similar age (mid-seventies), background (observant Jews from the Northeast, Blank from Queens and Kraft from Brookline, Mass.), means (multiple billions), and tastes (bespoke suits, younger women). Blank, however, needed to unburden himself of a minor beef with Kraft. It involved the aforementioned Super Bowl 51 rings that Kraft insisted be embedded with those 283 diamonds to commemorate the 28–3 deficit the Patriots overcame against the Atlanta Falcons. Blank, who bought the Falcons in 2002, mostly took the loss and the attendant trolling in stride. But the ring stunt bothered him. He found it unnecessary and tacky. “I said to Robert, ‘You didn’t have to do the 28–3 in the ring,’” Blank told me. “It kind of pissed me off.”

  In recounting the exchange, Blank mimicked Kraft’s whiny, faux-sheepish response. “Well, you know how it is,” Kraft replied to him. In fact, Blank does not know because his Falcons have never won a Super Bowl (and in case anyone forgot, the Pats had now won five). Kraft did n
ot apologize. On the contrary, he told Blank that he should not be mad at him, but at the Falcons coaches. The exchange, which lasted all of about thirty seconds, ended there.

  But Blank and Kraft had more important matters to discuss. They had come to New York in their capacities as members of the six-person compensation committee to iron out details of a contract extension for Commissioner Goodell. The dinner confab—held in the private room of the Midtown restaurant Aretsky’s Patroon—felt like a formality.

  Yes, Goodell had issues, and not small ones: the self-made imbroglios, the loathing that so many fans and players reserved for him, and the low-grade grumbling about the commissioner of the “can’t we do better?” variety from several owners. Ultimately, though, the NFL is a conservative outfit whose stakeholders have a strong bias for the familiar. Goodell, for all his flaws, has been at the league thirty-six years and was part of the NFL furniture. More important, he performed splendidly in his primary role of making obscene amounts of money for his obscenely wealthy bosses.

  Everything appeared to be on track for Goodell to receive a five-year contract extension with minimal friction—and maximum money, which could reach $200 million by 2024 if the league hit its financial targets (his current deal was set to expire after the 2019 season). Along with Blank, the committee chairman, and Kraft, the panel included four other influential owners chosen by Blank—Art Rooney, John Mara of the Giants, Bob McNair of the Texans, and Clark Hunt of the Chiefs. Jerry Jones had been sore that Blank had not chosen him to be on the committee. Jones had been agitating for a greater role in NFL governance and complaining for years that the league office had become bloated and that its executives were overpaid. This included the commissioner, whom he had otherwise given high marks, grading Goodell an “A-plus-plus” and “10 out of 10” as recently as 2016.

  His fellow tycoons knew Jones had strong feelings about how the NFL was being run, and how important it was for him to be heard. In fact, Blank had told partners that he had grown tired of Jones’s always being in his ear about the commissioner’s deal. He decided to keep Jones involved in a semiofficial capacity by making him a nonvoting “adjunct” member of the committee.

  As it was, Jones managed to gate-crash himself into the middle of the most divisive issues roiling the league in 2017. Dan Rooney’s old committee would be the battleground on which the season’s biggest points of contention would be waged—the commissioner’s salary, Goodell’s knack for turning player discipline matters into litigious fiascos, and the anthem protests that would unleash the president of the United States on his rival reality show, the NFL.

  Goodell was in Colorado on the Friday night in September when Trump, at a rally in Alabama, called on NFL owners to fire players who knelt during the national anthem. “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” Trump said. Joe Lockhart, the NFL’s chief spokesman, called Goodell at 5:30 a.m. the following morning to discuss how to proceed.

  Colin Kaepernick’s initial protests in 2016 had inspired a dozen or so players to do the same or similar. But for all the media attention they received, the demonstrations had never reached a critical mass of players or prompted any significant fan resistance. Trump’s provocation in Alabama changed that. “The week before the president made his statement, four people kneeled,” Arthur Blank told me. “The president then said his thing, and then four hundred people kneeled.” And even that response, Blank went on, showed signs of dying down within a few days, only to flare up again when Vice President Mike Pence waged (or staged) his own counterprotest, leaving an October 8 Indianapolis Colts game he was attending at taxpayer expense after a group of visiting 49ers knelt during the anthem.

  Trump and Pence appealed to a vocal subset of NFL fans. They booed kneeling players and called for boycotts; teams argued politics among themselves, and some former players criticized current ones. (“It’s the first time I’ve ever been ashamed to be a Patriot,” the longtime New England lineman Matt Light said after a dozen current Patriots took a knee.) “No one was expecting this to happen, and it was hard to see coming,” the Steelers’ Art Rooney told me. “I think there was no question it hurt the league.”

  Certainly the situation went well beyond “distraction,” which itself became a term of offense among protesting players. Russell Okung, an offensive tackle for the Los Angeles Chargers, said that the sequence of events—begun by Kaepernick, propelled by Trump—had turned the notion of “distraction” into something that could become a new period of activism in sports. “Never has our generation been presented with these historic choices,” Okung told me. There could be ramifications within what has been an iron-fisted hierarchy inside the NFL. That’s the nature of movements: they don’t necessarily respect boundaries.

  * * *

  —

  Donald Trump is not one for boundaries himself. As with so many things Trump, his cannonball into a relatively contained pool of player protest set off waves in all directions. In the absence of any great backlash to the initial Kaepernick-led demonstrations, the NFL could at least tacitly endorse the players’ right to use their platform. But then suddenly not only the president of the United States but also a significant share of Americans were saying “Stand up and stick to sports.” It moved the argument onto much more historically explosive—and, in a league where the owner-player divide is also largely a white-black divide, racially charged—grounds. During a tense owners’ meeting at the height of the anthem protests in October, Texans owner Bob McNair said: “We can’t have the inmates running the prison,” according to an ESPN report. Most people construed the remark as an insult with racial overtones against protesting players, nearly all of whom were African American. (McNair later apologized and claimed that the “inmates” he was referring to were not the players but executives at the league office.)

  In another less publicized meeting that took place a few days after Trump’s “sons of bitches” rally, Goodell convened a group of about thirty players, owners, and league officials at 345 Park Ave to essentially talk past one another for three hours, albeit in feel-good tones. The owners and players sat in alternating seats around the table to demonstrate unity. Given the scrutiny they were under, Goodell emphasized the importance of maintaining secrecy.

  “Let’s make sure that we keep this confidential,” the commissioner said to begin the session—an audiotape of which someone was nice enough to share with Belson and me.

  The commissioner and owners spoke in elevated terms about their endeavors. They quoted Thomas Paine (Blank), invoked Dr. Martin Luther King’s march on Selma (Miami’s Stephen Ross), and expressed great hope for what they all could accomplish together (“This can go for a long, long time,” San Francisco’s Jed York gushed).

  After a while, the players seemed to grow tired of the happy talk. They wanted to discuss why Kaepernick was still without a job and effectively being blackballed. “The elephant in the room,” in the words of Kaepernick’s former teammate and fellow kneeler Eric Reid.

  “If Colin was on a roster right now,” added Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Chris Long, “I feel like all this negativeness and divisiveness could be turned into a positive.”

  Long said that he did not wish to “lecture any team” on personnel matters, but “we all agree in this room as players that he should be on a roster.” Other than a few nods from owners, the response was noncommittal. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said that fighting for social justice is not “about one person.”

  Robert Kraft pointed to another “elephant in the room”: “this kneeling,” he called it. “The problem is, we have a president who will use that as fodder to do his mission that I don’t feel is in the best interests of America,” Kraft said. “It’s divisive and it’s horrible.” (A related elephant in the room that went unremarked upon: Kraft’s ostentatiously close friendship with Trump.)

  Lurie, who derided Trump’s presidency in the meeting as “fucking disastrous
,” cautioned everyone “not to be baited by Trump or whatever else. A black kid is going to get killed in some urban environment unnecessarily. We have to find a way to not get baited.”

  Bills owner Terry Pegula anguished over the uncertainty of when their Tormentor in Chief would next strike. “All Donald needs to do is to start to do this again,” Pegula said. “We need some kind of immediate plan. All of us now, we need to put a Band-Aid on what’s going on now.”

  Pegula complained that the league was “under assault.” He then unloaded a dizzying flurry of nautical metaphors to describe their predicament. “This is like a glacier moving into the ocean,” Pegula said. “We’re getting hit with a tsunami.” He expressed his genuine wish that the league no longer be “a glacier crawling in the ocean.”

  McNair played to his caricature as the good ol’ boy, brave enough to tell people what’s what. The players, McNair said, needed to knock off the damn kneeling. “You fellas need to ask your compadres, fellas, stop that other business.”

  The “fellas” across the table made no assurances about halting their “other business.”

  This inspired Miami owner Stephen Ross to suggest a “march on Washington,” featuring both owners and players. Ross, a New York real estate developer worth $7.6 billion (per Forbes), thought this would be a great idea. He had a dream!

  But Eric Reid had enough. “Everyone in here is talking about how much they support us,” the 49ers defensive back said. He wanted to talk more about Kaepernick. The room fell quiet. “Nobody stepped up and said we support Colin’s right to do this,” said Reid, who wore a Kaepernick shirt over his dress shirt and tie. “We all let him become Public Enemy Number One in this country, and he still doesn’t have a job.”