May–September 2015
The thought of returning to politics made my head hurt. I had gotten a peek behind the Shield and I wanted to keep looking. There was an inevitability about this. For years I’d resisted sports as anything but a walled-off object of my mental energy—toys to play with on the side of all the serious. I used to get mad at myself for investing so much emotion in these figurines on the other side of the screen. Why grant them power to disturb my moods?
After a while, you learn to accept the addiction. The players and teams you root for become part of a shared birthright, seasonal pieces of our thought sceneries. In my case, even though I haven’t lived there for a while, I will always belong to the Boston/New England chapter of fans. We are one of but several wings in a big loud mental ward.
People have asked me over the years why I did not just become a sportswriter. My answer, more flip than anything else, was that I did not want to pollute the joys of being a fan with professional stress. As soon as sports became a job, part of my love for it would die.
Between the sidelines, NFL football is for the most part a clean meritocracy, with some exceptions (one being an otherwise employable quarterback who kneels in protest during the national anthem). This is why any suggestion of cheating—of skirting rules or fixing games or using banned substances—can be such fighting words. That is why the word “integrity” might be the single most important tool in the league’s propaganda kit. “Integrity” is etched onto the NFL’s most hallowed walls, embedded into its mission statements and everywhere in the commissioner’s declarations. Goodell invokes the “integrity of the game” with the same righteousness as a Fox News anchor asserts that the network is “Fair and Balanced.” Say it enough and it becomes part of the Shield.
Everyone is expected, at the very least, to be on the level. Now Tom Brady was a cheater. Again. Deflategate had subsided in the months after the Super Bowl but made a sudden comeback May 6. The league released its report on the matter from its special Deflategate detective, attorney Ted Wells. Clinically titled “Investigative Report Concerning Footballs Used During the AFC Championship Game on January 18, 2015,” the report landed as I was downing a Chinese lunch near my D.C. office. I emerged from the restaurant to find a distended inbox of emails and texts on my phone.
The subject lines were filled with headings such as “Cheater” and “Brady” and “Wow.”
The Wells Report had been hanging out there for months. Why was it taking so long? Personally I had interpreted the absence of news as a sign that Wells had found nothing; that Deflategate was fizzling into the goofy afterthought it should have been from the start. Bad read.
The Wells Report dropped like a ton of cement on the village. It turned out to be a flawed but plenty damning document for Tom Brady, the Patriots, and leapers-of-faith like me. That was my takeaway from an initial read of the 243 pages of lawyer porn that was the Wells Report. The overriding impression was that the Patriots were, to say the least, difficult to deal with. No upset there.
It sounded like the Patriots dealt with league investigators with the same arrogance and hyperregulation that they have with much of the outside world during the Belichick years. While most parties on the other side of this treatment—say, the media—have little choice but to swallow it, the league does not. This was per the authority vested in the commissioner by the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement and Goodell’s own zest for being the Man in Charge. The commissioner enjoys full disciplinary authority over his thirty-two bosses and their teams. What’s unusual about this arrangement is that he also serves at the pleasure of the thirty-two owners and carries out their wishes—except when he is fining them and taking away their draft picks and damaging their reputations.
Brady was fingered as the main perpetrator in the report even though Wells’s evidence was circumstantial and his conclusion heavily caveated: “It is more probable than not” that Jim McNally and John Jastremski participated in a deliberate effort to release air from the Patriots game balls after the balls were examined by the referee, the report said, referring to the locker-room lackey-accomplices. It also concluded (kind of, sort of, maybe, perhaps) that it was “more probable than not that Tom Brady . . . was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski.”
At worst, whatever more-likely-than-not offense this was would seem classifiable as an “equipment violation.” Using an illegal Stickum-like substance on a towel or uniform might also be listed as such, which the Chargers were caught doing in 2012. The league fined them $20,000 for not cooperating with the game official who noticed the infraction (this was later overturned on appeal). You could dwell on some version of the “everyone-does-it” explanation and find examples of NFL quarterbacks (Aaron Rodgers, Peyton Manning, among others) voicing preferences for having their essential professional tool—a football—prepared in a certain way. I guess you could compare this to Yo-Yo Ma liking his cello tuned in a certain way, albeit without a pack of three-hundred-pound rival cellists trying to behead him while he performed. (Fun fact: Yo-Yo is a Pats fan, I think I heard that somewhere.)
At the very least, this smacked of selective enforcement, involving the NFL’s most successful and resented team and star. This was also not the first time the Patriots had been called to the principal’s office. In 2007, the newly named Commissioner Goodell docked the Patriots a first-round draft pick after the aforementioned team official was caught videotaping Jets coaches sending in plays via hand signals—“Spygate.” That revelation also triggered talk of asterisks and poisoned achievements and freighted legacies.
I admit the “cheater” rap bothered me. It messed with my irrational but powerful fan’s belief that I was on the side of the righteous winners, if not the angels. That was my stab at a higher cause.
The inflated scandals also disturbed the creed of the Patriot Way, whose mythos I liked to believe incorporated an adherence to fair play. Were the Patriots’ victories a sham? Were the Super Bowls tainted? Was I tainted? Maybe the Patriots’ success was always too good to be true. Maybe they were all impostors, like me. Sports can trigger all kinds of psychological demons.
It has never been clear to me how big of a deal Spygate was. No one ever gave a good answer about why it would be so wrong for a team official to videotape opposing coaches from the field but okay for anyone—even that same team official—to buy a ticket and videotape the same coaches from the stands. Belichick made this point during his post-Deflategate/Mona Lisa Vito tutorial in January in response to a reporter’s question that referenced the then-seven-year-old videotaping matter. “The guy’s giving signals in front of eighty thousand people, okay?” Belichick said. “So we filmed him making signals out in front of eighty thousand people like there were a lot of other teams doing at the time, too.”
I asked Kraft about Spygate, which he has pinned on Belichick over the years while insisting that he knew nothing about the team’s taping practices. He shrugged, assumed a reflexively pained look, and proceeded to tell me a story. After the Pats were busted in 2007, Kraft asked Belichick how much competitive benefit the taping had gained him on a scale of one to one hundred—especially in light of the penalties and embarrassment the team suffered after getting caught. About a 1 percent benefit, Belichick replied to his boss (no doubt looking him in the eye). “Then you’re a schmuck,” Kraft told Belichick.
Kraft relayed this conversation to me in a quiet and oddly conspiratorial way, as if he were taking me into his confidence by sharing it. In fact he has recounted this “schmuck” exchange many times over the years. It is a go-to sound bite from Kraft’s Spygate repertoire. And I’ve always been puzzled over why Kraft is so fond of this explanation, other than his seizing the opportunity to use a naughty Yiddish word (“schmuck”), which I can respect. The explanation raised more questions than answers. Kraft seemed to be saying, in essence, that the minuscule payoff the Patriots might have gained had not been worth the trouble.
But what if Belichick’s answer had come back higher, say 10 or 15 percent? Would that make the cheating kosher?
Kraft had no comparable “you’re a schmuck” story for Deflategate other than saying Brady had assured him he had had nothing to do with removing any air from footballs. Brady was suspended four games for his more-probable-than-not/at-least-generally-aware link to the alleged caper.
I could relitigate Deflategate up and down, which I am not proud of and won’t bore anyone further with. It was, in retrospect, a dark period in my annals of time management. Several times a day I would refresh the various sports websites for fresh nuggets and to see if justice was any closer to prevailing. It was like watching a playoff game in progress with the stadium lights off. I read the Wells Report three times (729 pages in total), and then (at least twice) the Patriots’ rebuttal to the Wells Report titled “The Wells Report in Context” (another catchy title), which still resides online. I could give tutorials on the Ideal Gas Law and how the league scorched Brady’s reputation over nothing.
I listened a lot to Boston’s sports radio stations online. It always makes me feel so smart and well informed, to a point where I can now probably teach a college course on the PSI saga, except that a law professor at the University of New Hampshire, Michael McCann, beat me to it (INCO 460: “Deflategate: The intersection of sports, law and journalism”). The Boston sports media was almost comically in synch with its outraged customers.
One exception was Michael Felger, a former Boston Herald football writer who grew up in Wisconsin and went on to become a contrarian fixture on “The Sports Hub,” one of the city’s two radio sports outlets. I was driving around Boston one day while visiting my mother and happened to catch a heated back-and-forth between Felger and a cohost. The cohost kept imploring “Felgie” to, for just one second, “try to put yourself in the position of the average Patriots fan.” To which Felger calmly replied: “But that would require a frontal lobotomy.” I considered that to be a valid point.
Boston fans were fluent in the nuances of this rolling injustice. What was especially galling was how the original narrative was set in motion. Someone, almost certainly employed at league headquarters, had given the bad air pressure numbers to Chris Mortensen a few days after the AFC Championship Game. ESPN (a valued NFL broadcast partner) went months without correcting the record even after it learned the information was wrong. In other words, the NFL was complicit in creating the outrage, stoking it, and then declining to kill it, even after the league knew it was wrong. It’s hard to think this was not part of some NFL-driven PR campaign, if not to persecute the Patriots per se, to propel the story in a direction the league wanted. Damn, I feel myself getting worked up again, about fucking air pressure. In footballs.
Whatever.
“I have never been involved in a national story that transcended all common sense like this,” said Bob Kravitz, the Indianapolis sports commentator whose tweet a few hours after the AFC title game started the whole thing—making him the Johnny Appleseed of the Deflategate media forest. “Not only do you have an eighteen-month clusterfuck that ends up in federal court, I’ve had an entire city threatening my well-being.”
ESPN’s Mortensen received a similar pelting even after he was diagnosed with throat cancer and off the air for a stretch. “People for the most part feel free to say anything they want to on social media,” he told me. That included in Mortensen’s case a series of death threats. “Listen, I’m a big boy, I really am,” Mortensen said. His concern was for his wife, who he said was shaken by the barrage and whom he urged to avoid New England—not easy since her husband has to spend a lot of time in Connecticut, where ESPN is based.
Certainly Mortensen screwed up, but I’ve always respected him for not burning his source, no matter how badly the source burned him. He told me Robert and Jonathan Kraft had been nothing but gracious to him in the aftermath. What was more relevant to me was that the league seemed very much to be driving an agenda here.
The main target of New England ire was Goodell, serving as the heat shield for the Shield—or, more to the point, heat shield for the thirty-one non-Kraft owners. “A lot of the reason Roger is paid a lot of money is that Roger takes a lot of fucking arrows for a lot of owners,” Falcons owner Arthur Blank told me.
Or bullets, figuratively speaking—so one would hope. A Boston sports radio host called for Goodell to be murdered (he claimed to be kidding) while effigies of the commissioner were being burned across New England and another faux-Roger was being tied up to be burned at the stake as part of some clever fan’s Halloween display—so puritanical! Special police protection was provided to Goodell’s summer home in Maine. Sports fans are not known for benevolent impulses. But then, they were fighting for a cause bigger than themselves: their football team.