Jerry Jones Make America Great Again Hat
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The N.F.Fifty. Stiff-Armed Trump. Now He Is Heckling From the White House.
What is a team possessor to do under pressure level from the president of the United States?
Credit... Photo illustration past Ben Grandgenett. Source photograph by Jessica Tang for The New York Times.
This was not your usual Super Bowl mob scene. It might have looked like it at kickoff, on what the National Football League calls opening night, when it kicks off the holiest week of its year. The annual event has metastasized into a sprawling tumor of reporters yelling out questions — whether the Atlanta Falcons running back Devonta Freeman has a favorite fish (aye: tilapia), whether the New England Patriots center David Andrews has a favorite breakfast cereal (yes: Cap'n Crunch, Crunch Berries) and whether the Patriots motorbus Bill Belichick knows about "Bill Belichick Underwear," a pair of which ane Goggle box reporter from Alaska claimed to be wearing (no: "Approximate I missed that one," Coach mumbled).
[ Trump rekindles national anthem protest fight, N.F.50. sides with players .]
But opening night in January 2017, Super Bowl LI, likewise offered something else: an early indication that professional football, like so many other American cultural institutions previously safety from partisan politics, would be twisted and pounded and very much transformed by the baby presidency of Donald J. Trump. "I'm non talking politics at all," Tom Brady insisted, responding to the several questions concerning just that — namely, his old golfing pal who had moved into the White House a few days earlier. "I'm just a positive person," Brady went on to say in what became his formulaic response. "I just want the best for everybody."
The media throng at Infinitesimal Maid Park in Houston did non play along. This was non going to be an Obama-era Super Basin, much less one of those pre-high-def Super Bowls from back when coaches wore fedoras. The 45th president wasn't in omnipresence, simply he had an uncanny knack, or need, to soak up equally much attention as possible from the bizarre American moment he was leading the nation through. He was thrilled to inflict politics in every direction, even (or especially) onto the toy armies of pro sports. As with and so many of Trump'south fixations, this one came with a dorsum story of personal grievance: repeated rejection in his efforts beyond iv decades to buy an North.F.L. team. His most contempo endeavor was in 2014, when Trump tried to buy the Buffalo Bills. But an N.F.Fifty. owner's box is so exclusive as to make even the White Firm a consolation prize.
Instead, Trump became a heckler from the bully pulpit. His attacks on the league began during the campaign, especially after Colin Kaepernick and then other players knelt during the national canticle to protest police force violence confronting African-Americans. A week before the election, for case, at a campaign rally in Greeley, Colo., he jeered Kaepernick, citing the quarterback as a reason the N.F.L. was "style down in the ratings." Now, after his inauguration, he was basking in his victory. "Politics has become a much bigger subject than the Super Bowl," Trump boasted in the run-upwards to the big game. "This is usually Super Bowl territory, and now they're saying that the politics is more interesting to people," he said. "So that'due south good."
Not for the N.F.L., which, in its ham-handed, Kremlin-like manner, went so far as to scrub from the event's official transcripts most every mention of "Trump" or "president." Zip to run across here, just football. "We offer a respite," Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys' owner, once told me. "We are a respite that moves you lot abroad from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps."
Just the folly of creating a safe space from Trumpian discord became more and more inescapable as Super Bowl week ground toward game day. Trump'south relentless encompass of the Patriots, his touting of his friendships with Brady, Belichick and their team'south possessor, Robert Kraft, made information technology impossible for many citizens not to treat this game equally a proxy state of war for our national divisions. White nationalists embraced the team from deeply liberal New England as their own. Richard Spencer dubbed Brady an "Aryan Avatar" and said the Patriots' winning the Super Bowl would be "a victory for the #AltRight." On the other side, near 40 percent of the Falcons' season-ticket holders were African-American, and the team's slogan was #RiseUp. The game felt like Make America Great Again versus The Resistance.
When Atlanta scored first, the reaction on Twitter reinforced the impression. "America 7 Trump voters 0," the parody account @NotBillWalton tweeted. "The Falcons respect an independent judiciary," the author and critic Andy Greenwald added. During timeouts, partisans scrutinized the TV commercials, looking for signs that they were playing to the political moment. Did everyone see that Budweiser advertising depicting the journey of the visitor founder, Adolphus Busch, every bit he immigrated to America from Germany? #BoycottBudweiser was upwards and running before halftime. "These commercials have been a bonanza of leftist activism," a Breitbart News editor complained. "Ii immigration commercials, a feminist commercial, now an eco wacko commercial? Am I missing anything?"
Speaking equally a Pats fan (deplorable!), I was just missing my football game team. We were getting clobbered 28-3 well into the third quarter. Trump left his Super Basin viewing party early on. But he would exist heard from once more, and then would the Patriots, after they came back to win in overtime, 34-28. In the postgame commotion, someone swiped Brady's jersey (a heist Kraft would liken to "taking a great Chagall or Picasso"). The F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies eventually located it — in Mexico. Actually, how on-message could Trump's team be?
Past those early days of the Trump presidency, I had embarked on writing a volume about the North.F.50., the state'southward almost popular and prosperous sports league. In every empire, there comes a time when, despite all its riches and power and credible invincibility, a catastrophic downfall seems to loom. I wanted to know: Had Summit Football been achieved? In a matter of years, the N.F.L. had for a multifariousness of reasons (many of them self-inflicted) gone from existence one of the most unifying institutions in America to the land's near polarizing sports make. This was true before Donald Trump ever ran for anything. Still, I held out some naïve hope that this book project would offer me a respite from the perennial silly season of my day job, which is writing about politics. Possibly next book.
"Y'all think Donald can really do this?"
Woody Johnson, the owner of the Jets, put that question to me at the first North.F.Fifty. owners meeting I attended, in March 2016, at the Boca Raton Resort and Club. We were chatting at a reception that featured mountains of lobster and crab meat and more paella than I'd ever seen in my life. Johnson wore a white Jets baseball cap, a knapsack over both shoulders and a daydreamy expression that fabricated him look similar an overgrown third grader who collects toy trains and terrible quarterbacks. Trump at that time was stampeding his fashion through the Republican primaries. Johnson had served as the national finance chairman of Jeb Bush'southward ill-fated campaign until it was officially euthanized a few weeks earlier. Trump fabricated a signal of taunting Johnson via a tweet, saying, "If Woody would've been with me, he would've been in the playoffs, at least!" Johnson told me he was slowly warming up to Trump and hopeful that the candidate would act in a more restrained fashion going frontwards.
I next encountered Johnson eight months later, on election night. It was effectually ii:30 a.m., and I passed him walking on 57th Street. He was coming from Trump's ballot-night party and wearing a Make America Great Again hat. The Johnson & Johnson heir, who had raised tens of millions of dollars for Trump, predicted to me that Trump's neat victory would bring "hope" to all the "blue-collar guys" he knew in Staten Island. Yes, I said, only could Trump bring promise to the New York Jets? Every bit it turned out, maybe he could — past sending Johnson out of the country. (Trump wound upwardly appointing him ambassador to the United Kingdom.)
The caste to which Trump had get a preoccupation of N.F.Fifty. owners cannot be overstated. A few days earlier Super Bowl LI, I published an article in which I quoted Trump from an older interview criticizing the Patriots owner Robert Kraft for not suing the league over Deflategate, the airheaded "scandal" nigh underinflated footballs. Kraft did non perform well nether pressure, Trump told me in belatedly 2015. "He choked, just like Romney choked." In Houston, Kraft pulled me aside at a pre-Super Basin tailgate party. "Did Trump really say that I high-strung?" he wanted to know.
When I confirmed it, Kraft shook his head and appeared wounded, even with his team preparing to play in its seventh Super Basin in 15 years. People kept coming over to requite hugs and whisper into his ear, paying respects.
Jerry Jones, sharing a table with Kraft, was riding high, also, having just learned the night before that he would be inducted into the Hall of Fame with the class of 2017. Everyone knew that Jones had long craved the telephone call to County — and all the deference paid to the gilt jacket that comes with it.
Kraft, of form, felt the same, merely his phone call had all the same to come. As I watched the rival septuagenarians seated at the same table a few anxiety from each other, I wondered whether Jones would merchandise his gilded jacket for some other Super Bowl ring — or whether Kraft would trade 1 of his rings for a gold jacket.
I eventually put the question to Kraft in his office at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., a few months after he won his fifth championship. "No manner," he declared. Hall of Fame voting tends to be political. "A ring is earned," he said. "It ways you lot've out-managed your contest and y'all've managed excellence at the highest level. To me, that's more of a plough-on."
When I asked the aforementioned of Jones, his response was somewhat less articulate. "Oh, boy," he kept saying. "Boy. Male child! Male child! Boy! Male child." Nosotros were sitting aboard the Dallas Cowboys' omnibus in the parking lot of a golf game class non far from the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. As a general rule, the Dallas Cowboys' double-decker is not a identify for the faint of heart or liver.
"I do similar to have a drinkable," Jones confirmed, something I'd heard from a few people. "Do y'all want a shot of Scotch?" he asked me. Sure, I said, not realizing that by "shot," Jones was talking almost big blue plastic souvenir cups bearing the Cowboys' logo, before long to exist filled (and refilled) with Johnnie Walker Blueish Label, Jones'due south favored libation.
I relay this by way of transparency into Jones's inhibitions, which were relaxing rapidly. When I asked him again whether he would trade his golden jacket for another ring, Jerry's face up causeless a kind of happy grimace at this loftier-class dilemma. Finally, he answered. "No," he said.
Sitting a few feet away, Rich Dalrymple, the Cowboys' longtime head of public relations, shook his head. "You messed that one up," he told his boss. Dalrymple wanted Jones to improve his answer to "another Super Basin ring." That would reassure fans that nil was more important to their possessor than winning another championship more than than 20 years subsequently the last one. Otherwise, information technology's just a rich guy's ego trip (which it is, of form, simply you're supposed to hide information technology better).
Some of Jones's fellow owners have described him as the Due north.F.L.'south Donald Trump, a blustering billionaire showman easily dismissed equally a carnival barker. When I asked Jones how he felt most this, he was thrilled. Trump's rise, he said, "is one of the neat stories in America. And let me tell you this," he went on, "the president ain't no joke. He's got as good a chance to be correct as any of them."
Several Northward.F.L. owners had known Trump for years, with Kraft being his highest-profile friend among them. (Kraft has given him a Super Bowl band.) But Kraft, too, is a politico, of sorts, who seems to practice his best to please as many audiences equally he can; in part through having mastered the art of saying quite unlike things for public and individual consumption. His friendship with Trump provides a case in indicate. Kraft loves being a presidential buddy but is also enlightened that many of his plutocrat friends don't corroborate. So Kraft is quick to mention to his friends — privately — that he disagrees with Trump on many issues and with many of the incendiary things the president has done and said. Simply he would rather have the presidential ear and try to be a positive influence. Arthur Blank, the Falcons possessor, told me that Kraft tried to sell him on this line, just he wasn't buying. "I said, 'You [expletive], yous've given him a lot of money,' " Bare told his friend Kraft (who disputes parts of Blank'due south account of their conversation). Blank's own line on Trump, which he says he also told Kraft, is that "in that location are things he's proverb and doing that are not neat for this state."
The Due north.F.50. has long possessed the charmed ability, or luck, to fold even its about embarrassing fiascos into its blockbuster reality show. I remember thinking as much when Tom Brady'southward Deflategate news conference was being carried live all over cable and leading all the news shows. What started out as a scandal rapidly became an engrossing story line and a pleasing snack food post-obit a season dominated by the heavy indigestion of Ray Rice and domestic violence.
The roiling politicization of the game, though, seems a different sort of problem — one unlikely to allay as long as Trump remains in function. Equally a Trump hobbyhorse, the anthem protests pack all the fundamental elements: They provide a grand spectacle, undercut an institution that Trump feels personal spite toward and highlight an consequence that he believes he can exploit for political proceeds. "This is a very winning, stiff issue for me," Trump told Jerry Jones, according to a Wall Street Journal account of a deposition Jones gave in connection with the lawsuit that Colin Kaepernick has filed against the league. "You can't win this one," Trump said. "This one lifts me." Last September, at a rally in Alabama, he received cheers when he said about whatever player who knelt, "Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he's fired!"
Since that start Super Bowl, Trump has neglected his bullying campaign confronting the N.F.L. for stretches, but his presence always hovers. Super Bowl LII was much less well-nigh the president than the year before — until he uninvited the champion Philadelphia Eagles to the White Business firm the day before the team'south scheduled visit in June. The reason, Trump said, was that the Eagles disagreed "with their president" and his insistence that they "proudly stand up for the National Anthem." (In fact, all of the Eagles did represent the anthem final flavor; reportedly only a small number of players had planned to visit the White House anyway.)
A collision between Trump and pro football game was probably inevitable: There was only so much room in the national head space for these dueling soap operas of American carnage. Now Trump gets to terrorize the club that would non accept him equally a member. Information technology must give him immense satisfaction to know that the N.F.Fifty. — on the eve of a new flavor — has no clue how to handle him or what to do about the national-canticle protests that a few players are nonetheless engaging in. Trump might not be allowed into the select membership of N.F.L. owners, but at to the lowest degree he still occupies prime number real estate in their thoughts.
The league is "under assault," the Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula said in a private meeting between a group of players and owners and league executives at the top of the national-canticle crisis last fall — a recording of which was given to The New York Times this Apr. It was Pegula who, along with his wife, Kim, paid $i.iv billion for the Bills in 2014, chirapsia out Trump for the squad. Trump assured fans via Twitter that he had dodged cataclysm. "Wow, @N.F.L. ratings are down big league," he wrote shortly afterward the Pegulas bought the team. "Glad I didn't get the Bills."
It's an interesting thought experiment: What if Trump had got a team afterwards all? Would he still have felt the need to run for president?
Just we're left with the reality nosotros accept, and a president who keeps returning to football game as a wedge event — even a security blanket. "I'm calling on y'all to join me in denouncing this SPINELESS give up to the politically right liberal mob," Trump said in a fund-raising email sent out in late August after ESPN announced it would not be televising the national canticle before "Monday Nighttime Football game" games this flavour. Information technology didn't seem like a coincidence that the email went out simply 1 24-hour interval afterward Trump'south one-time lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to taxation evasion and campaign-finance violations and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of eight tax and depository financial institution-fraud charges. On one of the worst days of his presidency, it seemed, Trump, too, was turning to football for a respite.
This article is adapted from "Large Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times," published by Penguin Press.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/magazine/nfl-owners-trump-football.html
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