It was debatable how large a share of the blame Goodell personally deserved for this trajectory — and Goodell, in any case, was not inclined to accept much of it. "I think it's a little more reflective of how somewhat divided our society is at this stage," he told me in early January. But division was the inescapable theme that came up in the two-dozen interviews I conducted with players, owners and league officials about a season in which sponsorships were jeopardized, boycotts were threatened, blacklists against players were suspected, tickets and jerseys were burned and ratings and attendance were down. "There's no question, this season has been probably unlike anything that I've been around," said Art Rooney II, president of the Pittsburgh Steelers, whose grandfather founded the team in 1933.
The N.F.L. loves to emphasize how football brings friends, families and communities together, and to present the game as an oasis clear of the rest of life's messiness — or "distractions," as coaches like to call such extraneous passions as politics. "We offer fans a respite from the trials and missteps of everyday life," Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, says. That promise would evaporate abruptly in 2017, when the most potent oligarchy in American sports would have its power structure shaken, and arrive at the end of the season wondering: Was 2017 an anomaly or the future?
I went to see Roger Goodell at the N.F.L.'s headquarters at 345 Park Avenue, the morning after a sluggish docket of first-round playoff games in early January. The commissioner was sitting in his sixth-floor office, sipping water and battling a cold. Goodell, who is 58, wore a beige V-neck sweater and looked somewhat worn down but freshly worked-out; he had just come from a Pilates class at a studio not far from the office. It had been a "challenging" season, Goodell allowed — there are never "problems," only "challenges" for this commissioner — but every season has its issues. "Never has there been a period in our history where everything's been great," he said. "We've always had our challenges."
Goodell, the son of the former Republican senator from New York Charles Goodell, is a gifted political animal. He can come off as stiff and cautious in speeches and on TV — and can in fact be stiff and cautious in person too — but he was also clearly bred for public life, and adept at turning it on as necessary. He is a prodigious slapper of backs, squeezer of shoulders and knower of names. He laughs easily — maybe for real, or maybe not. He has also mastered the paramount political skill of prioritizing constituencies, none more so than the 32 N.F.L. team owners who employ him, the "membership," as they are known to one another. "You have to be able to deal with and get along with 32 different personalities," John Mara, the president and an owner of the New York Giants, told me. "We range from people like me who were born in a family business, and people who are self-made billionaires who think they know everything about everything."
Then there was that other billionaire — the one in the White House. From early in his presidential campaign, Donald Trump held up the N.F.L. as a symbol of the sissified and hypersensitive culture he was running against: "You used to see these tackles, and it was incredible to watch, right?" Trump said at a campaign rally in Nevada in early 2016. "But football has become soft like our country has become soft."
Culture-war critiques of the N.F.L. were previously mostly confined to the left. Liberals were far more prone to suspicion of football for its violence, militaristic sensibility and over-the-top displays of patriotism. But Trump struck a throbbing nerve on the right, making the N.F.L. an improbable symbol of permissive leadership and political correctness.
Seven months after Trump's Nevada rally, and just in time for the general election, Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, took to kneeling during the national anthem before preseason games: a protest, he explained, against police brutality endured by African-Americans and other minorities. It was only a matter of time before Trump served up the vegan Kaepernick as red meat to his base. "The N.F.L. is way down in their ratings," Trump taunted the league at a campaign rally in Greeley, Colo., a week before the election. He said that politics was "a much rougher game than football" and also more exciting. "We've taken a lot of people away from the N.F.L.," Trump boasted. "And the other reason is Kaepernick — Kaepernick!"
Well before Kaepernick was even born, the N.F.L. had figured prominently in the future president's personal ledger of grievance and unreturned affection. Trump had wanted into the membership for years, even though his earlier foray into football — as the owner of the short-lived United States Football League's New Jersey Generals in the 1980s — ended disastrously, with the league's collapse. In 1984, he finagled himself a meeting with the N.F.L. commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, at the Pierre Hotel in New York, in which he told Rozelle he would do whatever it took to get himself into the league, according to an account of the meeting in "Football for a Buck," the sportswriter Jeff Pearlman's coming book on the U.S.F.L. Rozelle was not impressed.
Rozelle was Goodell's mentor and idol, almost from the day Goodell set foot at the league in 1982. Rozelle's dim view of Trump — whom he saw as a clown and a con man — trickled down to his protégé, though Goodell is careful never to share his views on Trump publicly. He has met Trump at least twice over the years, once at a Yankees game about 15 years ago and then a few years later at a small dinner gathering. Goodell found Trump to be pleasant, engaging and solicitous in those limited encounters — maybe because Trump was still, at the time, angling for a place in the membership. In 2014, he tried to buy the Buffalo Bills, only to have his bid passed over. After losing out on Buffalo, Trump lashed out at his owner friends — particularly New England's Robert Kraft — for not doing more to grease his entry into the league. He also told friends that the N.F.L., particularly Goodell, was intent on freezing him out, on account of his history with the U.S.F.L.
When I interviewed Trump — now a presidential candidate — for an article a year later, he was still nursing a grudge, and on a particular hobbyhorse about how unfairly the league had treated his "great friend" Tom Brady. The New England Patriots quarterback had recently been suspended by the league for four games over his supposed role in the football air-pressure scandal known as Deflategate. Trump knew I had recently written about the N.F.L. and Brady, and he proceeded to deride Goodell to me as a "weak guy," "a dope" and "a stupid guy," among other things.
Goodell comes from a notable Republican lineage — albeit of the mostly extinct Northeastern-moderate subspecies — and has donated to Republican candidates. But he is carefully diplomatic in his public politics: "It's interesting times we live in," was as much as he allowed himself to say in our interview. The politics of his league were another matter. When you look at the various constituencies that make up the N.F.L. "family," it's a wonder the center has held as long as it has. More than 83 percent of N.F.L. fans are white, according to a Reuters report citing a 2007 study, and fans are 20 percent more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. Nearly 70 percent of the players, meanwhile, are black, according to data from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. N.F.L. owners, with a few exceptions, lean Republican; several of them donated to Trump's campaign, and some donated $1 million apiece to his inauguration committee. But unlike Trump, the N.F.L. cannot afford to play only to its base. It needs far more than just the predominately white, heavily male voters that compose Trump's hard-core coalition. It wants everybody in the football family.
Goodell was in Colorado on the Friday night in September when Trump, at a rally in Alabama, called on N.F.L. owners to fire players who knelt during the national anthem. "Get that son of a [expletive] off the field right now," Trump said. Joe Lockhart, the N.F.L.'s chief spokesman and former White House press secretary under President Clinton, called Goodell at 5:30 a.m. the following morning to discuss how to proceed.
Goodell's initial reaction was a mix of anger and resignation. The league's top executives — Goodell; Jeff Pash, the general counsel; and Tod Leiweke, the chief operating officer — divided up owners to call. The watchword was "unity": They should present a single front insofar as that would be possible. Owners and teams were encouraged to issue statements, emphasizing their support for their players. Nearly every team did, though very few called out Trump or even mentioned the president. Shahid Khan, the Jacksonville Jaguars' owner — a Pakistan-born Muslim and the only nonwhite owner in the N.F.L., as well as one of the donors to Trump's inauguration — joined his team on the field before the game and locked arms in a show of solidarity. Several other owners followed his lead.
Kaepernick's initial protests in 2016 had inspired roughly a dozen or so players to do the same or similar. But for all the media attention they received, the demonstrations had never reached a critical mass of players or prompted any great fan response. Trump's provocation in Alabama changed that. "The week before the president made his statement, four people kneeled," Arthur Blank told me. "The president then said his thing, and then 400 people kneeled." And even that response, Blank went on, showed signs of dying down within a few days — only to flare up again when Vice President Mike Pence waged (or staged) his own counterprotest, leaving an Oct. 8 Indianapolis Colts game he was attending at taxpayer expense after a group of visiting San
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