“If there’s one thing I can assure you,” Goodell said sternly, “I have zero tattoos.” Noted.
While Goodell’s position has made him an expert at managing billionaire megalomaniacs, this season had exposed him to an entirely different breed of them—namely, the one who now occupied the White House. Trump had injected more politics into the NFL than the league had suffered through in years. Traditionally, culture-war critiques of the NFL had been confined to the left. Liberals were more prone to suspicion of football for its violence, militaristic sensibility, and over-the-top displays of patriotism. But Trump had now struck a throbbing nerve on the right, making the NFL an improbable symbol of permissive leadership and political correctness. And double bonus points for how prominently the NFL has figured into the president’s ledger of personal grievance and unreturned affection.
Pete Rozelle’s dim view of Trump—whom he saw as a clown and con man—trickled down to his protégé Goodell. Goodell told me he has met Trump at least twice over the years, once at a Yankees game about fifteen years ago and then a few years later at a dinner gathering. Goodell found Trump to be pleasant and solicitous in those limited encounters—maybe because Trump was still, at the time, angling for a place in the Membership. After losing out on buying the Bills in 2014, Trump began insisting that the NFL, particularly Goodell, was intent on freezing him out, on account of his history with the USFL.
Goodell comes from a notable Republican lineage, albeit of the mostly extinct northeastern-moderate subspecies. But he is carefully diplomatic in his public politics, and especially as they relate to the current president. “It’s interesting times we live in” was as much as Goodell allowed himself to say. When I asked Goodell whether he or anyone on his staff had any communication with the White House, back-channel or otherwise, he smirked (I took this as a no). “Our focus is on what we do,” he said. “Our focus is on the game itself.” Nevertheless, owners and league officials close to Goodell said he was more supportive of the protesting players than they would have expected. He mostly received decent marks for his handling of the anthem protests, though often backhanded. (“Only Donald Trump is dumb enough to make Roger Goodell look smart,” the Eagles fan and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell said on Twitter.)
For as taxing—challenging—as this season had been, Goodell’s demeanor betrayed a mix of relief and fatigue, and also a strong whiff of his usual self-satisfaction. The latter would be burnished by Goodell’s muscular new contract, his ability to put down a rebellion by the NFL’s most powerful owner and withstand an attack on the league from the most powerful man in the world.
Still, I was slightly surprised at Goodell’s swagger given the vulnerability that had been laid bare in the league that season. When I suggested as much, Goodell assumed a seen-it-all-before jadedness. “Remember, I came into the league in 1982,” Goodell told me. “We were facing litigation about the Raiders’ move” (from Oakland to Los Angeles), he said. “We were on strike for nine weeks. There was a competing league. We had a lot of issues going on.”
By comparison, he said, 2017 had merely been a year of “transition.” Discussing the dealings between players and owners during the anthem turmoil, Goodell enthused about the “unprecedented dialogue” they had engaged in. “One of the players said, ‘We’re sitting here not in a locker room, not on a field,’” Goodell told me. “‘We were sitting in a boardroom and dealing with each other as partners.’ That understanding and listening was remarkable, and really a powerful thing for us as a league.” The NFL pledged that it would donate $89 million over seven years to social justice organizations after several discussions with “the Players Coalition,” a group of player-activists led by the Eagles’ Malcolm Jenkins.
It’s easy to be cynical about this, and dismiss the league’s financial commitment to community and social-justice initiatives as just a way to placate the agitators. A group of players, led by then–San Francisco’s Eric Reid, wound up quitting the coalition, believing the commitment was just that. Kaepernick is still unemployed and remains a flash point in the dispute. Reid, now a free agent, remains unsigned as of this writing, despite having been a starting safety for the 49ers for the last five years.
“How do we make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else?” said the Chargers’ Russell Okung, one of the players who wound up leaving the Players Coalition, referring to Kaepernick. “Reparations need to be made in some manner,” he said.
Goodell and the NFL survived 2017, but the commissioner and his league seem to be at the mercy of uncertain and uncontrollable events. The conflicts of 1982 that Goodell evoked might have been more dramatic and certainly “distracting”—that year’s regular season was shrunk to nine games after a players’ strike. But they were also more easily resolved. The dilemmas of today are more profound: There is no obvious common ground between Jerry Jones’s vision of the football field as a respite and Kaepernick’s vision of it as a platform. The players weren’t kneeling to gain leverage or extract donations, or anything else Goodell could give them. They were trying to make themselves heard. “I talked to a lot of players who were saying, ‘Man, I don’t need to be quieter, I need to be louder,’” the Bengals’ Eric Winston, the NFLPA union president, told me. “That to me was the key takeaway from this season.”
And what happens if an owner like Jones decides to take matters into his own hands and “fire” players if their protests continue? “Our focus is on what we do,” Goodell said, punting.
NFL owners don’t pay Goodell so much to be interesting or revealing in interviews. In this regard, he is very good at being commissioner.
He added that everything was now fine between him and Jerry Jones. A nation exhales. The Cowboys’ owner had congratulated Goodell on his new contract. They had just been discussing a bunch of other unrelated league business. It underscores a core fact of life among the billionaires’ cartel and the soldiers of the Shield who serve them: Just compartmentalize, baby.
I pushed further: What happens, I asked Goodell, if players keep kneeling in future seasons? What if Trump tries to rekindle the issue, as you figure he’d love to do, just in time for the 2018 midterm elections or his reelection campaign in 2020—or, for that matter, fires off a tweet calling on viewers to turn off the Super Bowl if any players kneel, prompting the players to do exactly that?
“You’re dealing with hypotheticals,” Goodell said. “You can come up with five scenarios of what could happen.”
Football is always generating new scenarios. That’s part of what makes it so great and so fascinating. But not all scenarios stay between the sidelines—or stay hypothetical.
30.
THE LAST VISIT
It had been a long and jangled night.
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON, “FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE SUPER BOWL,” ROLLING STONE, FEBRUARY 28, 1974
“It’s been such a long season,” Giants co-owner John Mara was saying. He had only three wins for his troubles. He’d fired his coach, Ben McAdoo, after two years, had just found his replacement (Vikings offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur), and now just wanted to get out of town to somewhere warm. There would be no Super Bowl in Minnesota for John Mara.
Main Event LII had more mogul no-shows than usual. Usually there’s a decent showing, if only as a gesture of respect for the commissioner. Goodell tends to notice who comes to things like his State of the League press conference (Wednesday) and his annual Super Bowl party (Friday).
But Goodell’s presser had more empty seats than it had media haircuts. For those who did come, the production reeked of tribal obligation. Goodell’s canned podium spiel had a phoned-in quality. Even the planted-kid question was humdrum (something about Roger being someone whom a lot of kids look up to—questionable premise).
The one nugget discharged at the event was the NFL’s news that it would be holding another regular-season game in Mexico City in 2018, between the Rams and Chie
fs. Three questions were granted to Mexican journalists, including one reporter who was still muy enojado over something Coach Belichick had said in November after the Patriots played the Raiders there. El Hoodie was no fan of South-of-the-Border football. “Personally, I wouldn’t be in any big rush to do it again,” Belichick said on WEEI after the game. “We’re fortunate,” he added, “there was no volcano eruptions or earthquakes, or anything else.” Trump could have named him secretary of state for that.
Kraft, meanwhile, sampled guacamole back at the hotel with a reporter for ESPN Deportes, who insisted that “Roberto” take a shot of tequila with him. I have no idea if the video of this has gone viral, but it should, if only to expose fans to the dulcet tones of Kraft saying “Gracias, Juan” in a perfect Brookline-Jew accent.
Stylish Stan Kroenke wore a scarf over his blazer to Roger’s Friday night shindig. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, was working the room (he is apparently a regular at Super Bowl and Emmy parties: both potential donor goldmines). Demi Lovato performed, or someone like her.
Steve Tisch was present along with the stunning Katia, his future (third) wife. Katia is more than beautiful—she speaks five languages, Tisch will always remind people—though she is certainly beautiful, too. Fellow owners are quick to pay tribute (“Nice job there, Tush”). Other than Super Bowl rings or hot young stadiums or perhaps yachts (Jacksonville’s Shad Khan leads the league with his five-decked, $200 million Kismet), there is no greater object of envy for an NFL owner than having a drop-dead gorgeous “friend.” Jerry Jones is a huge Katia fan. Whenever he sees her, he makes a point of telling Katia that “Steve is such a nice boy,” but that he, Jerry, is a Man. Katia told me this and thought it was funny. She planted a kiss on the Tush’s mouth in a show of devotion. (Alas, while doing some last-minute fact-checking in May, I was saddened to learn from Tisch that the marriage was off and his fairy tale with Katia was no more—so, so much for all that.)
We were all waiting to pay respects to Gold Jacket Jerry. Jones was receiving supplicants at the Cowboys’ table, close-talking at that moment with Al Michaels. If Jones was chastened by the slam-dunking he’d received at the hands of his partners a few weeks earlier, or by the Cowboys’ disappointing season (9–7, no playoffs), he wasn’t showing it. Jones seemed to be living large as ever, as large as the tumbler he hoisted upon seeing Katia and Steve waiting off in the wings—and again, Steve is such a nice boy.
When it was my turn, I approached Jerry’s throne gingerly. This was the first time I’d spoken to Jones since our blurred-out horror show aboard the Cowboys’ bus the previous May. I wondered if he would remember me. Of course he would remember me! “That was such a great visit,” Jones said, nostalgically. “I remember that visit very fondly.” Nice to know. Jones said that he was rooting for the Eagles in the Super Bowl. “Because I’m so jealous,” he explained, presumably of the Patriots, or maybe just of Bob Kraft.
Anyway, it was good to see me, Mr. Jones said. Good visit. We agreed to visit again, one day, Jerry and I, or maybe this would be our natural endpoint.
* * *
—
The night before the Big Game, Tom Brady Sr. invited me to a “small family gathering” at a bowling alley in Edina, Minnesota, about twenty minutes from downtown Juneau, or wherever we were.
Galynn Brady, Tom’s mom, grew up two hours north of here in Browerville. This fluke of maternal origin lent her son a claim to local roots throughout the week. As we heard several times, Tommy and his sisters used to spend their childhood summers in Browerville, enabling the GOAT, years later, to regale media hordes with tales of milking cows.
The Brady family reunion overtook a second-floor stretch of the bowling alley. There was no sign of Tom or Gisele but about 150 Bradys or Brady satellites were here—Bradys by birth, proxy, or marriage, and also Kevin Youkilis, the former Red Sox infielder now married to Tommy’s sister Julie. “Yoouuk,” I said, upon seeing him, as the Fenway crowds used to howl when he came to bat—Youk still gets this a lot, I’m guessing.
Brady Partiers wore their #12 and Pats gear. They pronounced Tahhmmy with Minnesota accents. One of them—a cousin, I think—got everyone’s attention and yelled out news that “Tahhhmmy won the MVP, it was just announced.” Everyone cheered for the quasi-native son, and then went back to their bowling.
Tom and Galynn looked eager for game day to arrive and the deep freeze to end so they could get on with being proper Californians. If Tom Senior had his way, he told me, he’d like the NFL portion of his son’s party to end altogether. “Absolutely,” he said when I asked whether he wanted his son to retire. But then, TB Senior doesn’t get a vote on this. “Of course not,” he said. “Did your dad get a vote when you were forty?” (No, but in fairness I was out of the league at that point.)
Gisele does get a vote, and it’s clear she’s with her father-in-law on this. She has ceded the final call to her husband, but for how much longer? The question touches everything in the Not for Long: it comes for eternal quarterbacks, wives, parents, Hall of Fame coaches, and really, the whole cavalcade. Clock management is a lie.
In Brady’s case, there’s little doubt his wife would prefer having a husband around who better approximates what a normal one might be like; someone who doesn’t spend his autumns in “scheduled car crashes” with three-hundred-pound unicorns in helmets. “If you want to compete with me, you have to give up your life,” I’ve heard Brady say a few times, underscoring his commitment to sustained peak performance. “Because that’s what I’m doing.”
Good for him, but you can see how that might be a drag to be married to after a while. “Sustained peak performance isn’t about changing one or two habits in your life, it is your life,” Brady wrote in The TB12 Method, a coffee table book published in 2017 that lays out his rules of the road. They include, among other things, lots of “pliability” work, hydration, and no coffee, thus freeing coffee tables to showcase this glossy cinderblock. Tom was nice enough to send me a copy of his book in November—and he even inscribed it (yes I checked, and immediately). The author said he wished the best for me always!
* * *
—
A few weeks after Philadelphia’s Super Bowl win over New England, Eagles offensive lineman Lane Johnson called the Patriots “a fear-based organization.” He claimed that players do not enjoy playing for the team, no matter how much they win. “When they go to do interviews, they act like fucking robots,” Johnson said of Patriot players on Barstool’s Pardon My Take podcast. “You only get to do this job one time, so let’s have fun while we’re doing it.”
Johnson has never played for the Patriots, but his perception of a smothering mirth-free environment certainly rings true. It was also hard to dismiss that Johnson had given voice to a common belief around the league about Foxborough—including from within the fortification itself.
As notable as Johnson’s words were, more so was that almost no Patriots players, past or present, were compelled to defend the Patriot Way (one exception being ESPN’s Tedy Bruschi, a three-ring Super Bowl champ with the Pats). Rob Gronkowski, who as of early spring 2018 had not said whether he wanted to keep playing football, has told numerous people how sick he was of going to work in such a dreary monolith. After veteran receiver Danny Amendola signed with Miami in March, Gronk paid tribute via Instagram and implored his teammate to “Be FREE, Be HAPPY.”
“The Patriots don’t play with joy,” Tom Brady’s father agreed after I read him the quote from Lane Johnson. “But I don’t know of any sustaining organizations that play with joy.” He went on to compare his son with the “lead dog” in Belichick’s pack. By allowing himself to be beaten, the Alpha had demonstrated by example that lesser canines should also fall into line.
Mr. Brady was not the first to apply the battered-canine metaphor to a taskmaster coach. The late Hall of Fame defensive tackle for the Packers, Henry Jordan, famously quipp
ed that Vince Lombardi “treats us all the same—like dogs.” It was a funny line, and leavened with affection for Lombardi in the retelling. But the dynamic inevitably gets old, and usually well before eighteen years (Lombardi lasted only eight in Green Bay). “After a while, you’re going to bite your owner,” Mr. Brady said.
No question, his son had become fed up himself with the Belichick culture. Brady was now biting back, in his own way. He has spoken—to friends, teammates, and relatives—about how playing in Foxborough had indeed become a dismal grind. He felt he had earned more deference and gratitude from a coach who probably owes his Hall of Fame career more to him than to anyone else. “He tells me, ‘I love it so much,’” Bündchen said about her husband and playing football in Tom vs Time, a behind-the-scenes documentary released in early 2018. “‘I just want to go to work and feel appreciated and have fun.’” The conspicuous implication here was that Brady presently was not having fun. “These last two years have been very challenging for him in so many ways,” Bündchen said.
Brady knows that his legend status in the NFL is every bit as potent as his coach’s. He had grown impatient with Belichick’s self-aggrandizing propaganda: the “how we did it” testimonials, via NFL Films, that Belichick would participate in following Super Bowl wins. In these productions, the likes of Brady and his teammates are portrayed as interchangeable cyborgs privileged to toil inside Bill’s genius lab. “Do Your Job.” “No Days Off.”
Brady was becoming more aggressive in telling his story, and on his own terms. The six-part Tom vs Time was released into the digital wilderness on something called Facebook Watch. Brady granted his filmmaker friend Gotham Chopra an up-close view of his “method” as he conducted his subversion campaign against the expectations of NFL longevity. Tom vs Time also represented Brady’s subversion campaign against the colorless code of the Belichick Method. It is not clear whether Brady even told his coach about the project, which dropped right on the eve of the playoffs.
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