Tag Archives: “Big Game”

We Have Every Reason To Expect a Lot More from the NFL

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There’s at least one more level to the Jon Gruden disaster that NFL fans should consider about the league’s remarkable influence. Like many other enormous corporations the NFL, selling a slick, bristling mix of testosterone and patriotism, ducks away from anything with a whiff of political conflict.

I concede, as others who know him personally have, that I’m stunned that a guy like Gruden who has been a high-profile media/cultural presence for over 20 years, regularly giving live interviews, chewing up air time as a TV analyst and obliging all the other requests for personal contact that go with being a football celebritry … could conceal his essential meat-headedness so long and so well. I suspect he had help. His is another example of how well powerful systems, in this case, the almighty NFL, can throw a PR cocoon around people and project to the public only the parts of its culture that serve its business interests … until they don’t.

Las Vegas Raiders: Jon Gruden faked coronavirus to players, report

Two Gruden compadres, ex-Gophers star and former NFL coach Tony Dungy and his ESPN partner Mike Tirico, both black, are in a bad spot for defending Gruden about his “michellin [sic] tires” description of another black guy’s lips. That coming the day before the New York Times dropped the bomb(s) about Gruden calling the NFL commissioner a “faggot”, ripping the league’s concussion protocols, (in other words, Gruden’s pro-concussion) and trading nudie pictures of cheerleaders. All of which is, y’know, really classy stuff.

My suspicion is that while Dungy and Tirico and dozens if not hundreds of other NFL “leaders” may have been surprised by Gruden’s racist imagery, they aren’t as unfamiliar with his other boy’s club stupidity.

So that’s Gruden. A reckless high-profile meathead, now out the $60 million remaining on his contract.

But it’s the NFL itself that should be held to greater account and responsibility than it ever is. Given its footprint, we have good rights to expect a lot more from this monolith.

The Gruden e-mails were leaked from a (way too) long-running investigation of the toxic (i.e. meathead) culture inside the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins. A company where we already know from law suits the team’s executives treated its cheerleaders like Vegas escorts and, yup, traded nudie pictures of them changing outfits.

Redskins Cheerleaders In Town for Calendar Shoot • VRAC's Costa Rica Blog

The trouble is that the NFL is not coming clean on that investigation. It is making no promises that it will reveal everything it has found out about the Redskins and others who had contact with the team. (“Confidentiality”, you know.) It is in effect protecting the team’s owner, a guy regularly reviled by sportswriters, players and fans as a (very wealthy) toxic idiot.

To anyone interested in a deeper dive into NFL culture I strongly recommend, “Big Game” by New York Times Magazine writer Mark Leibovich for an inside-the-suites sense of who says what to who when it’s more or less just them — peer billionaires — talking. (To his enormous credit, Leibovich burned up all the access his name and the Times brand afforded him to tell a story the average sports writer only dares hint at.) The NFL owners club is a remarkable collection of avaricious gargoyles. One where guys like the Vikings’ Mark and Zygi Wilf and Arthur (Home Depot) Blank of the Atlanta Falcons come off as comparatively rational.

But the level where this Gruden idiocy touches the country’s perilous moment is where the NFL — arguably one of the most popular and therefore influential organizations/corporations in the country — could and should use Gruden’s buffoonish racism and sexism to make unambiguous statements to its fans, which is to say just about everyone in the country.

The NFL could and should be a leader among other giant corporations in taking stark stands against belligerent stupidity like racism (which it is sort of good at in a lipservice/signage kind of way, considering 70% of its players are black) and sexism (where it has a long ways to go, despite promoting Breast Cancer Awareness Month with pink shoes), but also right now … for … wait for it … COVID vaccinations.

The league has recently been running in-game PSAs pushing cancer and mental health awareness screenings, etc. Players and coaches appear giving quick testimonials. That’s great.

But what, I ask, would be the effect of a dozen or so top current and former stars, coaches and league executives stepping up to a camera and telling pro football’s millions (and millions) of fans to get vaccinated … for the sake of other people — like the season ticket holders sitting next to them — if not themselves? In order to put this grinding pandemic behind us once and for all?

I seriously doubt the league’s TV ratings or ad revenue would suffer an iota.

The problem for the big, powerful, macho NFL, as it is for every other giant public entity, is that racism and cancer are kind of the easy stuff. They have no serious public, political advocates. (And I’m not forgetting Colin Kaepernick’s protests against police violence, and how the league effectively blackballed him before paying him off to avoid a certain-to-be-nightmarish public trial.)

But COVID vaccination, as a consequence of being made “political” by belligerent partisans, many of whom love football more than life itself, is terrifying territory for the NFL. (Airlines resisting vaccination mandates for passengers are another prime example of failure of true “leadership”.) It’s appalling how heavily-to-tightly-managed entities, especially those controlled by a small cluster of well-heeled egos turn into shuddering eunuchs at the thought of riling just an ugly faction of its consumer base.

How best to put it? Shrinking from conflict over something as valid, real and life-protecting as a vaccine is not what I’d call, manly, brave, courageous or patriotic. It’s more like cowardly, and meatheaded.

A Few Mostly Kind Words About Pat Reusse

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I don’t usually bother writing anything about sports, or sports writing. That’s because as marketplaces for hot takes and punditry go sports is at least as glutted as politics … but without the saving grace of relevancy to something more important than mere entertainment and distraction.

That said, I do like sports. And follow them. Always have. Baseball in particular. (The play-off series between the Red Sox and Astros should be the best of all of them this year.) And, I like pro football, something I say somewhat ashamedly, given everything we all know about the NFL. On the other hand, I know next to nothing about hockey and only kick into basketball gear in March when the Kansas Jayhawks, recipients of thousands of dollars of Lambert tuition cash, make a run at a title.

All that said, for many years I have been a regular reader and fan of Star Tribune sports writer Pat Reusse. Especially the cranky, pissed-off, had-it-up-to-here Reusse we can read this morning as he rakes Timberwolves superstar Jimmy Butler and coach Tom Thibodeau over the coals for Butler’s pre-meditated, maximum media exploitation tantrum at a recent practice session. (Bottom line to that little drama: Butler doesn’t want to play for the Wolves anymore.) What I (and many others) like is that Reusse both has and regularly deploys a license few other columnists on any beat enjoy in this town.

For the record, Reusse and I have crossed paths over the years, but that’s it.

He came to mind often as I inhaled the latest book by New York Times writer, Mark Leibovich. Normally encamped in DC reporting and commenting (acidly) on the vanities, delusions and perfidy of our ruling class (both government and media), Leibovich cadged a book deal to check out the NFL at the highest levels. The result, “Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times” is a unique, delicious and frequently hilarious vivisection of a class of bizarre-to-dysfunctional characters, namely NFL owners and NFL management, constantly obsessed over and “reported” on by literally thousands of professional writers. (There are a lot of good reasons why “Big Game” has not been mentioned on any NFL telecast.)

Journalism has long been divided into two camps. 1: Beat writers who rely on regular access to sources in order to feed news (or “nuggets” as Leibovich likes to call breathless sports minutiae) to their editors and readers. And 2: Columnists who are charged with applying something like accountability to pretty much the same stories, usually by writing cranky, dyspeptic things about failing coaches and athletes. The twain does not often meet, and truth be told, most mainstream publications, print or on-line, are still highly reluctant to print everything a writer knows for damn certain about the characters they cover. It’s a game of mutual benefit, you see.

Truth be told, most sports and just about all business writing can be filed under the heading of “Service Journalism”, where the intended effect is to sustained a comfortable, symbiotic relationship between source and publication.

Reusse’s decades of service to the local sports scene and his deep entrenchment in the culture, from obscure utility infielders to high-profile owners gives him unusual sway over nervous editors. He can say things no one else can. That relative lack of managerial fetters is essential to his standing with intensely skeptical readers who know — from first-hand experience how watered down, neutered and homogenized most “coverage” — in sports, business and media — really is.

As my old pal David Carr used to say when I asked him about the new world of access that opened for him when he signed on with The New York Times, “Shit, everyone returns your call when your last name is ‘New York Times’.”

So it was with Leibovich, who not only has his calls/e-mails to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, superstar quarterback Tom Brady and dozens of owners returned, but goes on to spend significant time with them. On the sidelines, in (one of) their multi-million dollar mansions and occasionally even while they’re in the company of their latest 14 year-old girlfriend, they talk to Leibovich. (“Fourteen” is not an accurate number when describing Patriots owner and major Trump supporter Robert Kraft, but you get the idea.)

The great, satisfying beauty of Leibovich’s writing is how he fully exploits the rare access he’s been allowed and doesn’t hesitate to drop the accountability hammer. Hell, he relishes it. (Garden variety writers and editors accept the neutered, half-a-story-is-better-than-none access protocol, because they’d be shut out of executive suites and clubhouses — and all those revealing post-game interviews — if they actually told the public what an asshole, fool or drunk so-and-so really is.) But then Leibovich doesn’t have to worry about coming back to cover jock world probably ever again.

Not that Reusse has had unimpeded free reign, mind you. His most fully-formed perspective of Zygi Wilf and the NFL’s shakedown of Minnesota politicians during the run-up to building our billion-dollar sports temple (U.S. Bank Stadium) didn’t appear in the Star Tribune, which, notoriously, was constantly boosting the project/taxpayer giveaway through every channel available to it. Reusse’s most, uh, “acute” commentary was quarantined over on his KSTP radio blog.

To let Reusse, arguably the paper’s most influential columnist in terms of shaping public opinion, rail on, Leibovich-like, right there in the Star Tribune’s own pages was unthinkable. Fully informing the public and lacerating the NFL for its ham-fisted extortion threats, local politicians for their comical, beyond parody, star-struck jowl-rubbing with Goodell when he made a rajah’s visit to Minnesota would have seriously undercut the paper’s Prime Directive. Namely, to build a stadium at whatever the cost and thereby guarantee the presence of a team — the Vikings — that drives the sale of millions of copies of the Star Tribune each and every year. (Reusse may have concurred with the quarantine, I don’t know.)

We can all live with the standard, fawning, half-the-story access reporting when the issue at hand is just some ego-crazed ballplayer ranting at teammates. But it sets (really) serious when that kind of coverage assists in sucking millions of taxpayer dollars away from other far, far more relevant services to build a stadium for, as Leibovich says, a sports league as rich and unchecked as any international cartel.