January 8, 2018
I went to see Goodell at NFL headquarters on a Monday in January, the morning after a sluggish docket of first-round playoff games. He had spent the weekend crisscrossing the country to catch two contests—Los Angeles on Saturday night to see the Falcons and Rams, Jacksonville on Sunday for the Bills and Jaguars.
The commissioner was sitting in his sixth-floor office, sipping water and battling a cold. Goodell, who was about to turn fifty-nine, wore a beige V-neck sweater and looked somewhat worn down but freshly worked-out; he had just come from a Pilates class. Regrettably, there had been no time for a Sunday workout: Goodell had to wake up at 3:30 a.m. in L.A. to fly to Jacksonville in time for Bills-Jags. He also told me he had gone through two canisters of Purell over the previous two days. He is a beast.
It had been a rough season—“challenging,” to use the language of the undaunted leader. There are never “problems” for this commissioner, only challenges. Goodell was now finishing his twelfth season as head of the league, thirty-sixth overall. He has been through strikes, lockouts, rival leagues, “existential” lawsuits, litigious owners, Al Davis, 9/11, Ray Rice, and, now, Donald Trump. It would be a bad look to complain, especially at his price. “We’ve always had our challenges,” he said. But even by Goodell’s embattled standards, this had been quite a year.
Goodell walked me to a small conference table in the far end of his office. I took a seat next to the shiny silver rendering of an NFL Shield. I mentioned to Goodell that I had met his wife, Jane, at a cocktail party during the league meetings, and that she had suggested—presumably joking—that her husband had a tattoo of the Shield. Roger Goodell laughed at my retelling of the exchange but also felt the need to set the following straight for the record:
“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.