Big Game Read online

  Also by Mark Leibovich

  Citizens of the Green Room

  This Town

  The New Imperialists

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark Leibovich

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Brief portions of this work, some in slightly different form, first appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.

  ISBN 9780399185427 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780399185434 (ebook)

  NFL and the NFL shield design are registered trademarks of the National Football League.

  Version_1

  In loving memory of great friends:

  my father, Miguel Leibovich,

  and brother, Phil Leibovich

  Contents

  ALSO BY MARK LEIBOVICH

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  Introduction FOOTBALL, IN SPITE OF ITSELF

  Prologue RESPITE

  Chapter 1 THE SUPER BOWL WITHOUT JOCK STRAPS

  Chapter 2 THE MONKEY’S ASS

  Chapter 3 NUGGETS

  Chapter 4 “TOM BRADY HERE”

  Chapter 5 “BEWARE THE PISSED OFF PRETTY BOY”

  Chapter 6 GARISH FIST ORNAMENTS

  Chapter 7 BALLGHAZI

  Chapter 8 CHEATER

  Chapter 9 NO ONE BUYS TICKETS TO WATCH A MORALITY PLAY

  Chapter 10 DINGS?

  Chapter 11 WHUPPINGS

  Chapter 12 “WE PAY HIM DAMN WELL TO BE NEUTRAL”

  Chapter 13 NO BROKE DICKS

  Chapter 14 ROGER AND ME

  Chapter 15 THE BIG SPLAT

  Chapter 16 IMMORTALITY GETS OLD

  Chapter 17 “START BLOW-DRYING TEDDY KOPPEL’S HAIR ’CAUSE THIS ONE’S DONE”

  Chapter 18 AMERICAN CARNAGE

  Chapter 19 PATRIOTISM

  Chapter 20 CHEESEHEAD ELEGY

  Chapter 21 “WE DON’T WANT YOU IN LOS ANGELES”

  Chapter 22 “I’M DRUNK, I’M STUPID, I’M A PATS FAN,” THE MAN TOLD POLICE

  Chapter 23 THE TV REPORTER IN THE BELICHICK UNDERWEAR

  Chapter 24 CLOCKS AND SITCOMS

  Chapter 25 TURN-ONS

  Chapter 26 THIS MAN’S LIVER BELONGS IN CANTON

  Chapter 27 “FAITH, FAMILY, AND FOOTBALL . . . PROBABLY NOT IN THAT ORDER”

  Chapter 28 “WE NEED A BLACK CHARLTON HESTON”

  Chapter 29 JUST COMPARTMENTALIZE, BABY

  Chapter 30 THE LAST VISIT

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  FOOTBALL, IN SPITE OF ITSELF

  February 4, 2018

  It fell to the Brazilian First Lady to settle the punch-drunk scene. She strutted in with the self-assurance of someone who knew her aura preceded her, even in defeat. “Great game,” she said, not aware of the player’s name (he was out of his jersey, a lineman by the size of him). He knew hers. Gisele Bündchen was working the big game after chaos in a back hallway of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, seeking out Philadelphia Eagles to stun with her classy attaboys. I watched them flinch—“Uh, thanks, thanks very much.” Super Bowl 52 had just ended in a hail of confetti and an unanswered Hail Mary from her husband, New England quarterback Tom Brady.

  He was already being criticized across the Hot Take Village for not sticking around the field long enough to congratulate his Philly counterpart, Nick Foles. So his supermodel wife, in Brady’s stead, was taking on his celebrity grace duties. She moved from Eagle to sweaty Eagle, representing Brady both as a sportsmanship ambassador and—in a sly way—as a killer consolation trophy to brandish over the new champs. She was the last power play in his playbook. And the Eagles had no answer for Gisele. She caught another one leaving the locker room. “Good game,” she said, startling him. “Uh, your guy’s amazing,” the Eagle muttered back.

  Brady himself was behind a curtain dealing with the media. “Losing sucks,” he confirmed. “But you show up and you try to win, and sometimes you lose and that’s the way it goes.” The game had finished only fifteen minutes earlier, he reminded everyone.

  Brady is an empire, like the league he plays in. Empires fall eventually, but one of their best moves is to sell the illusion of timelessness. Normal limits don’t apply. How many more big games did Brady have left? He kept getting asked this question, in so many words. “I expect to be back but we’ll see,” he said.

  Four years earlier, in the Almighty’s den, Brady and I had discussed the “How much longer” question too: issues of age, mortality, and the actuarial tables that he knew were running against him in the NFL, or “Not for Long” as players call a league where the average career lasts 3.3 years. Barely anyone still plays in these big games—much less excels—past forty, Brady’s present age.

  I wondered why he kept doing this, and whether he worried about confronting a void after he finished. “When I don’t have the purpose of football, I know that’s going to be a really hard thing for me,” Brady told me then. There was melancholy to him when he said this, one I’ve sensed in Brady sometimes, even in his pinnacle moments—of which this batshit shootout in Minnesota was not one. He headed off his temporary stage and met up with his football goddess in a hallway. They shared a group hug with the kids, Instagrammed for proof.

  Brady’s Patriot teammate Rob Gronkowski walked by en route to another makeshift podium. Gronk appeared dazed, more so than his usual stupor. He also had processing to do. Only twenty-eight, the tight end had filled up an impressive share of stat sheets and medical charts over his eight seasons. How much more? He got that question, too. “I am definitely going to look at my future, for sure,” Gronkowski said, maybe more candidly than he expected. “I am going to sit down the next couple of weeks and see where I’m at.”

  No one could blame him if he quit. His working life had been a pained procession of broken bones, concussions, surgeries, and rehabs. Even when health allowed, he performed under a doleful tyrant of a coach for a below-market contract in what sure looked to be a cheerless work environment. He had plenty of money, two Super Bowl rings, and Hall of Fame credentials. He could move into any number of Gronk-suitable existences—WWE, action movies, or some reality show.

  But Gronkowski was also born to play this game, as much as any mortal body can be. He was Peak Football, both in size (six foot six inches, 260) and temperament (beast). He could still dominate if he wanted to or—more to the point—he should still dominate because I really wanted him to still dominate. Yes, I want Gronk to keep playing because he helps my team win. That’s my selfish disclaimer: the Patriots are a disease I contracted early, growing up in Massachusetts. I still root for them, and am still trying to grow up (no longer in Massachusetts). The team has been great and interesting and despised for a long time. They make me feel like a winner, superior to my friends who root for other teams, and that’s important, God knows.

  Allegiance to the Pats can be tricky. We lead the league in crosses to bear. Our owner can
be a whiny star-fucker and sniveling in victory. Everyone who follows pro football outside of New England is sick of us (excluding Donald Trump, Jon Bon Jovi, and maybe a few others). Big portions of the Patriots’ fan base have become entitled assholes. And yes, I might be one of them. Yet I am loyal to the Pats pretty much unconditionally, give or take the odd cheating rap or occasional Aaron Hernandez.

  If anything, my infatuation with pro football has only deepened, even as I’ve supposedly become instilled with more mature priorities and a fuller knowledge of how the game operates and the kinds of people who operate it. It started in second grade, when my best friend, Josh, and I wrote a letter to our favorite player, Jim Plunkett, and invited the young Patriots quarterback to Josh’s house for dinner (he never responded). This attachment has endured through the years and withstood a steady helmet-slapping of cognitive dissonance over whether I should know better than to keep following this sport as closely as I do. Scary research on posthumous football brains has been as impossible to miss as the testimonials from still-living retirees about the sad state of their bodies. (To wit: “My life sucks,” Jim Plunkett, then sixty-nine, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2017. “Everything hurts.”)

  If you love football, you get good at blind spots and blind sides. NFL Network and NFL Films captivate with round-the-clock fairy tales: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun!” A football life can be irresistibly Hollywood and parable-ready—like the up-from-dirt saga of lineman Michael Oher, the protagonist in Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. But it’s easier to ignore how his story ends, if anyone even noticed: Oher missed most of the 2016 season with the Carolina Panthers after a series of concussions. He posted a photo of ten pill bottles on Instagram and captioned it “All for the brain smh.” Oher eventually deleted the post from Instagram, and the Panthers eventually deleted Oher from their roster.

  The Lords of the League can appear overmatched by the moral and cultural moment that confronts them. Roger Goodell, the game’s embattled commissioner, who in late 2017 received a contract extension that could pay him up to $200 million, always seems to be presiding over some self-inflicted mess. Under his watch, the NFL has gone from being one of the most unifying institutions in America to the country’s most polarizing sports brand. Goodell himself seems not inclined to accept much blame for this trajectory. “I think it’s a little more reflective of how somewhat divided our society is at this stage,” he told me in his New York office a few weeks before the Super Bowl.

  Still, my four-year incursion into the NFL has also led me to another impression: that for whatever reckoning might be in store for the sport—and whether that reckoning comes now or later—the game’s appeal is powerful and durable, and its redemptions are never far away. The sport has a way of grabbing you back. It happened here in Minnesota three weeks earlier, when the Vikings quarterback Case Keenum threw a 61-yard touchdown pass as time expired to shock the Saints in the NFC Divisional Playoffs. The play sent Twin Cities fans into merry conniptions, lasting right up until the moment their team got spanked a week later by the Eagles. It would be relived and rehashed around the country for several days, no doubt by people who a few months earlier were declaring themselves “done” with football over some kneeling player, lousy ref’s call, or other such outrage.

  What to make of this beautiful shit-show of a league? I get asked existential versions of the “How much longer?” question myself. Which camp was I in? The true believer camp (“If we lose football,” said David Baker, the president of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “I don’t know if America can survive”) or the cataclysm camp (“In twenty-five years, no one in America will play football,” said Malcolm Gladwell)?

  Are we witnessing the NFL’s last gasp as the great spectacle of American life? I’d probably put the game’s long-term survival as a slight favorite over the doom scenarios. Pro football has prevailed too many times to bet against, in spite of itself.

  Beyond that, I’m punting, or turning the question back on ourselves—the hundreds of millions of us who have made the National Football League the superpower it is. Why does this game still mean so much, and why are we still here?

  * * *

  —

  The worst thing about pro football is that a lot of it has nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on TV—and then you supersize all of it, stretch it over a week, and here we have the Super Bowl.

  Our hosts did not disappoint. Neither did the weather. It was a frigid week in the “Bold North,” as Minnesota is apparently now calling itself, courtesy of its Super Bowl 52 host committee. I hadn’t heard “Bold North” before, just like I had no idea why Philly fans had taken to wearing German shepherd masks as their trademark identifiers instead of something, say, more majestic and birdlike (apparently the canine masks were meant to evoke the Eagles’ underdog status—got it). This 2018 gridiron carnival played out in a dream sequence that featured the various parading werewolves of the NFL: “I saw Bud Grant walking with the queen. I saw Odell Beckham Jr. walking with the queen. I saw (Boomer) Esiason drinking a Starbucks at the Loews Hotel. And his hair was perfect.”

  Both the Eagles and Patriots, and most of the international media, were based out at the Mall of America in Bloomington, next to the airport. By Friday, the warring Taliban factions from Massholia and Phillystan had descended on this retail colossus—big enough, by the way, to fit 7 Yankee Stadiums, 32 Boeing 747s, or 258 Statues of Liberty. The MOA also has its own in-house counterterrorism unit for our safety. Fans pestered players at the food court, a Chinese TV crew broadcast from the Splat-O-Sphere (at the Mall amusement park), and armed SWAT teams prowled among the Buffalo Wild Wings, Kiehl’s, and Benihana. Philadelphians were warned, as a security precaution, not to don their German shepherd masks inside the complex or to break into their menacing renditions of “Fly, Eagles, Fly.” They appeared undeterred by the counterterrorism unit.

  As happens whenever large bunches of media people assemble in one place, there was no shortage of bitching about something or another. This week’s über-complaint, obviously, involved why on God’s frozen earth we were here. As in, why would the league plunk down its marquee event in this NFC North Siberia? The consensus is that pro football has been overtaken by a “biblical plague of dickheads,” to paraphrase the late writer Richard Ben Cramer (granted, he was talking about journalism).

  Like many things with the NFL, the real answer included dollar signs. This was all bribery fodder, essentially, or a Bold North variant on the civic blackmail and corporate welfare model that’s gotten many grand NFL edifices built and paid for. Football had awarded its grandest pageant to the Twin Cities in order to sweeten an already sweetheart deal in which state officials had agreed to subsidize a new billion-dollar stadium for the billionaire owners of the Vikings. And taxpayers would foot about half the bill for a football Versailles whose primary beneficiaries—a pair of New Jersey real estate barons—cared little about the cash-strapped predicament of Minnesota schools, roads, and “essential” services that were less essential than football.

  And then came the extra point: local fans/taxpayers were also forced to play host to the marauding followers of the team that two weeks earlier had defeated the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia—and, for good measure, had pelted their kindly midwestern visitors with a Philly Special of profanity, hurled objects, and beer showers as they attempted to flee their beating.

  All that said: the “Minnesota Nice” thing is legit. People are unfailingly friendly, even to outsiders who don’t deserve it. “I will always live in Minneapolis,” Prince once told Oprah. “It’s so cold it keeps the bad people out.” Prince, however, did not live to see this invasion of Eagles and Pats fans at the Mall of America.

  Yet just when you’re ready to
pronounce the NFL dead beneath an avalanche of its own greed and bullshit—hell, even declare the Super Bowl to be a trope for the decline of America—you hit the payoff. The game starts, and with it the best part of pro football: football.

  * * *

  —

  There is an honesty about football that my day job—politics—could never match. No one tries to dress up or excuse a loss, which was refreshing after being lobotomized by so much political spin. No one tries to argue against numbers on a scoreboard, or convince a coach they deserve to start because they went to Harvard (or Alabama). “Football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection,” Frederick Exley wrote in A Fan’s Notes. “It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge.”

  Super Bowl 52 was a glorious jailbreak. Both offenses ran circles around the opposing defenses. There was just one punt, few penalties, lots of big plays, and a few sandlot calls back and forth. The Pats tried a double-reverse pass intended for Brady, who had run wide open down the right sideline—only to drop the damn pass. This felt fateful, if not ominous.

  Eagles coaches might have sensed the same because they called a similar play later in the half that Foles caught in the end zone. Philly fans were now beside themselves. They had dominated the stadium all night, outnumbering and outcheering smug Pats rooters by a ratio of about three to two. (We got totally owned, as the bros say.) Foles threw three touchdown passes, each requiring replays to confirm the balls were “possessed,” the passes were “controlled,” and the receiver “survived the ground.” But it was Foles’s touchdown catch that kicked the hysteria in the giant room up to decibels rarely heard from a Super Bowl audience in a neutral city.

  At the start of halftime, I saw an older Eagles fan in a throwback Wilbert Montgomery jersey wheezing outside a men’s room. He was resisting an oxygen mask from a paramedic and wanted no part of an ambulance. He had suffered too many years with the Eagles to miss this reward. Air is overrated.