The Reporter Who Won’t Let the NFL Go off the Record
Mark Leibovich spent years digging under the skin of Washington, D.C.’s power brokers. When he turned his attention to the world of pro football for a new book, he found an awfully familiar set of characters.The Reporter Who Won’t Let the NFL Go off the Record
Mark Leibovich spent years digging under the skin of Washington, D.C.’s power brokers. When he turned his attention to the world of pro football for a new book, he found an awfully familiar set of characters.
As a Washington, D.C., magazine writer, Mark Leibovich has devoted himself to the study of aging, needy white men. But four years ago, the New York Times Magazine correspondent pushed those subjects to the back burner. He began writing Big Game, a book about the NFL and its owners. For Leibovich, the change of venue came as a welcome relief. For here was a new group of aging, needy white men—and they seemed totally unfamiliar with the rules of magazine writing.
“There was far more ‘You’ll take care of me, right?’ in football than in politics,” Leibovich said recently. Case in point: In 2014, Patriots owner Bob Kraft told Leibovich that Boston was “a village compared to New York.” Sensing the comment would set off a tsunami warning at WEEI, a Patriots PR man asked for it to be considered “off the record.”
Leibovich includes Kraft’s quote in Big Game. Weaponizing an off-the-record request as he once did in a profile of Chris Matthews, Leibovich also prints the PR man’s plea for amnesty. In both politics and the NFL, the dark arts of information management must be kept at bay.
After years of rotten behavior, NFL owners finally have the muckrakers they deserve. When the owners get together to try to save the league, ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham tell us what really happened. All we’ve lacked—outside Van Natta’s profile of Jerry Jones—was a portrait of what these owners are like up close: their pettiness and intramural rivalries and eccentricities.
In Big Game, Leibovich asks Jones whether he’d trade his spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for another Super Bowl ring. Jones hems and haws—he’d been drinking—and then says he wouldn’t. A Cowboys PR man asks for a “mulligan”; both Jones’s comment and the mulligan request are in the book.
The Falcons’ Arthur Blank says he’s miffed that Kraft celebrated the Patriots overcoming a 28-3 deficit in the Super Bowl by putting 283 diamonds in his Super Bowl rings. (When Blank’s words were reported accurately, another PR meltdown ensued.) Jets owner Woody Johnson, Leibovich writes, looks “slightly daydreamy and disoriented … like an overgrown third-grader who collects toy trains and rotten quarterbacks.”
In April, Leibovich and his Times colleague Ken Belson unearthed an audio recording of a 2017 owners-players summit about the recent wave of protests. Bills owner Terry Pegula can be heard worrying about Donald Trump’s next tweet.
God, [Terry Pegula] comes off like a tool. Basically saying, ‘We can’t inflame Donald.’ The way that he was living in fear and just giving voice to short-term thinking … trying to outrun the next tweet when you’re running a multibillion-dollar business that can just print money. It’s stunning.Mark Leibovich
“God, he comes off like a tool,” Leibovich told me. “Basically saying, ‘We can’t inflame Donald.’ The way that he was living in fear and just giving voice to short-term thinking … trying to outrun the next tweet when you’re running a multibillion-dollar business that can just print money. It’s stunning.”
Leibovich rolled his eyes at the practice of calling NFL owners “Mr. So-and-So.” “Dan Snyder, he supposedly cares most about being ‘Mr.,’” Leibovich said. “I actually asked him in my brief time with him what I should call him. I wanted to be told ‘Call me Mr. Snyder’ because it would be a great thing to quote him on. But he dodged the bullet and said ‘Dan.’”
Snyder didn’t get away scot-free. In Big Game, Leibovich writes that “there are venereal diseases tougher to get rid of than” Snyder.
Leibovich argues that the NFL and Washington, D.C., have evolved in such a way that they’ve become parallel universes. They are run by the same kind of oligarchs and reported on by the same “insiders” and haunted by the same president. The NFL, he writes, is a “swamp.”
Leibovich’s previous book, 2013’s This Town, was a chronicle of Washington when its self-regard seemed to have reached the terminal stage. Similarly, Leibovich felt he’d arrived on the NFL beat in “the late stages of a really big party.” Pro football might not be “dying,” but the idea that it could be made the guys who run the league just vulnerable enough to talk—to reveal what makes them tick. As a study of the power class eating itself, Leibovich might have called his book This League.
From a certain angle, reporters who cover politics and sports are alike in that they’re both hopelessly lame. “Hell, political reporters,” a veteran hack says in The Boys on the Bus. “Shit, they’re like sportswriters. The job’s a lot the same. It’s fun to do. And the quality isn’t very high. Anybody can be a political reporter or a sportswriter.”
But a handful of journalists—David Remnick, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles P. Pierce, among them—have wrung quality material from both beats. In terms of genre-hopping, Leibovich’s direct predecessor is probably Red Smith, who, moonlighting as a political correspondent in 1956, called the conventions as “relentlessly alcoholic as the Kentucky Derby” and so staged that they “would give wrestling a bad name.” When Leibovich calls the NFL owners meetings “summer camp for superrich postmenopausal dudes,” he’s doing the same bit from the opposite end of the stage.
Last month, Leibovich and I met at a Washington, D.C., steakhouse a few blocks from the Times Washington bureau, which was seen in the recent documentary series The Fourth Estate. As if by reflex, Leibovich distanced himself from the surroundings. “The highlight of my week by far?” he said. “Not being invited to any of Sean Spicer’s book parties. It’s such a badge of honor.”
Leibovich has always carried himself as a heretic in Washington. After a tour at the San Jose Mercury News, he came to the Post in 1998 and wrote knowing, closely observed profiles for the Style section. When Style began to lose its monopoly on the franchise during the late stages of the Graham family’s ownership of the paper, Leibovich moved to The New York Times.
Leibovich is neither an inverted-pyramid newshound nor a conventional Washington feature writer. Working in the wicked tradition of Marjorie Williams and Michael Lewis, he stands out even in his own bureau. “There’s actually a breed of print reporter who overdoes the swagger,” he told me. “A lot of ’em come from Politico. ... They’re usually male, too. They can’t just have a phone conversation. They have to stand. They have to make sure you hear it. If there’s something combative going on, it’s great to have the big, loud conversation on the phone. Oh, I’m gonna screw you! Like they’re performing, right?
“It’s the opposite of act-like-you’ve-been-here-before, New York Times, repressed, also fake professionalism,” he continued. “Essentially, we’re all impostors and there are different factors of it.”
Leibovich turned to pro football in 2014 when Tom Brady said yes to his long-shot request for a profile. (Leibovich got an email with the subject line “Tom Brady here.”) He started writing a Brady book but discovered that the quarterback wasn’t sloughing off much material and that sales required a more global look at the league. He worked on Big Game for parts of four years, loaning himself to the Times sports department to gain access to the Super Bowl and returning to his old beat to cover the 2016 presidential campaign. “Then Trump happens,” he said, “and my worlds collide.”
Every NFL owner wants to talk about politics, because they think they know stuff.Leibovich
Sports and politics exist on opposite sides of the alpha-male bonding continuum. To politicians, Leibovich seemed eminently cooler for writing a football book. At the same time, NFL owners who’d seen Leibovich on Morning Joe were eager to pick his brain about Trump. “Every NFL owner wants to talk about politics, because they think they know stuff,” Leibovich said.
In Big Game, you can see Leibovich’s journalistic method at work. He is a great writer of scenes—scenes he observed, rather than the reconstructed, Woodwardian kind. Leibovich can take a throwaway remark and squeeze it for a half-dozen nut grafs. Witness how in a recent feature former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s line about “my current status” blossoms into a mini-treatise on the state of the capital in Trumpian times.
Leibovich has a divining rod for the small detail that reveals a subject’s vanity. When the 2016 NFL meetings were held at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, owners complained that it wasn’t held at the Breakers, a tonier resort up the coast. One owner, requesting anonymity to whine, tells Leibovich, “I don’t want to come off like a spoiled rich guy.”
Leibovich is good at hanging out with subjects and establishing situational broship. (Listen to how he questions Paul Ryan on this episode of The Daily.) He loves sorting people and ideas into archetypal categories: In Big Game, they include the Supreme Leader and the Membership and Existential Issue One. (I could have done with about 30 percent fewer of these.) Though Leibovich writes smiling, funny prose, his work also carries an undercurrent of disgust, as if Tad Friend and Hunter S. Thompson were sharing a byline.
The best Leibovich subjects are people who are verging close to self-parody but are nonetheless fiercely protective of their dignity. Take ESPN’s Adam Schefter. When they met, Leibovich attempted some small talk about their shared alma mater, the University of Michigan. Schefter said, “I don’t want to waste your time”—by which he meant his time. Leibovich describes Schefter as the über-connected king of Twitter “nuggets”; “league powwows,” he writes, “are like Adam’s bar mitzvah.” Leibovich told me he was ready to not like Schefter but was disarmed when the insider made no apologies about his corner of journalism. When Leibovich asked Schefter whether such a nuggetty output was satisfying, Schefter replied, “Everything’s fleeting.”
Roger Goodell—the Supreme Leader—was a more marshmallowy subject. Goodell granted Leibovich three separate interviews—NFL PR might have seen Leibovich as a redemption vehicle—but Goodell never said much, at least on the record. His press strategy mimicked his league-stewardship strategy: “Playing not to lose and then losing.”
Goodell evinced no sense of humor. When Jane Skinner Goodell told Leibovich that her husband had the NFL shield tattooed on his butt, Roger Goodell made sure the reporter knew she was joking. Goodell was eager to talk in detail about how he’d crushed a Pilates or SoulCycle workout. “It’s almost as if he’s making himself a Vince McMahon creation, right?” Leibovich said. “I’m the dick in the suit and I work out a lot. You can see it, because the suit is kinda tight.”
“You ask a lot of owners,” Leibovich continued, “and they go, Yeah, it’s a big fucking problem that people hate the face of the league.” To explain how Goodell keeps his job, Leibovich fastened on a fascinating Oedipal strand. Goodell idolized his father, the late U.S. senator Charles Goodell, once writing to him, “If there is one thing I want to accomplish in life besides becoming commissioner of the NFL, it is to make you proud of me.”
Leibovich found Goodell using the same language with the owners. “I will work tirelessly to make you proud of me,” he wrote in a 2011 letter to Blank. Goodell has referred to at least four owners as his mentor. The commissioner, Leibovich said, has “a real, real talent for lubricating insecure, very rich, largely aging white men.” For the owners, firing Goodell wouldn’t just be like firing the league’s CEO. It would be like firing their son.
Leibovich found NFL owners roughly analogous to U.S. senators. “I don’t think it’s the best slice of humanity you could ever hope for,” he said. But unlike senators, owners can’t lose their jobs unless they go the full Jerry Richardson. They cut the figure of senators but have the job security of Supreme Court justices.
In person, Bob Kraft could be personable and solicitous. (Twice, he gave Leibovich organic eggs that had been laid on the grounds of his mansion.) Yet his efforts at human interaction had a mechanical aspect. A touching line about missing his late wife, Myra, became less touching when he used it on Leibovich on three separate visits. Once, Leibovich asked Kraft whether Goodell was really the best guy to run the NFL. “Can we go off the record?” asked Kraft.
Because Jerry Jones had been given the once-over by Van Natta and others, Leibovich was at first hesitant about bellying up to the same bar. “I decided to just jump on the cliché and ride it to utter liver poisoning,” he said. Leibovich and Jones guzzled so much Johnnie Walker Blue that Leibovich passed out on the Cowboys team bus. Afterward, Leibovich realized that some owners resist writerly reevaluation. Jones, happily, is the cliché.
Big Game is a reminder that when sportswriters aren’t worried about burning bridges, they write like they talk in a bar. Agent Leigh Steinberg is “a tireless name-dropper and self-promoter but not without insights.” Giants co-owner Steve Tisch—known around the NFL as “the Tush”—“has a certain dumbfounded charm … project[ing] both a lurking detachment and an utter sense of belonging to the privileged jungles he occupies.”
“Woody Johnson,” Leibovich told me, “what a …” He paused. “I just edited myself,” he said. “Put that in. Be meta.” That is what Leibovich would do.
Last summer, Leibovich was on book leave while Trump was marauding through Washington, detonating the status hierarchies that Leibovich wrote about in This Town. I asked whether he had pangs about missing what seemed like the ultimate Leibovich story.
“Every single fucking day—are you kidding?” he said. “It was like going to work in the circus every day and not being able to perform.” In the Times Washington bureau, Leibovich sits near the White House reporters like Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis. Early in the administration, reporters would turn up the volume on the TV every time Trump spoke. Leibovich would put on headphones and listen to white noise.
Leibovich made a temporary return to the beat when the Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, wrote him an email comically asking what his grandkids would think if he told them he was writing about football during the Trump era. What did you do during the Stormy Daniels affair, Grandpa?
“I had all kinds of pangs,” Leibovich said. “It was a really inopportune time to be stepping away. Although it was also nice. Like lot of people, I don’t find this story [Trump] titillating. I don’t find it, ‘Oh you must be having the time of your life!’ Because it’s not a circus. It’s really very dispiriting and scary in many ways, especially for journalists.”
One of the interesting things about Trump that I’ve found is that it’s reminded professional cynics that maybe we do care. Maybe I’m cynical and maybe that’s what all reporters are. But I do care. Pretty much all of my colleagues care. Pretty much everyone I know cares. And that’s sort of good. It’s sort of awakened something.Leibovich
“One of the interesting things about Trump that I’ve found,” he continued, “is that it’s reminded professional cynics that maybe we do care. Maybe this is my cliché. Oh, yeah, I was the guy who was going to write the book that blows the lid off all the bullshit. Maybe I’m cynical and maybe that’s what all reporters are. But I do care. Pretty much all of my colleagues care. Pretty much everyone I know cares. And that’s sort of good. It’s sort of awakened something.”
Leibovich couldn’t keep Trump out of Big Game if he wanted to. During a 2015 political interview with Leibovich, Trump said that Kraft had “choked” during Deflategate like Mitt Romney choked during the 2012 campaign. (“Did he really compare me to Romney?” Kraft asked.) Speaking of Trump, I told Leibovich I found it almost unbelievable that Richardson was the only NFL owner who has thus far been snared by the #MeToo movement.
“It’s not for lack of people in the league trying to dime other owners in the league out for various #MeToo rumors,” Leibovich said. “You should check out so-and-so. Or: Call the so-and-so police.”
Leibovich found it painfully reminiscent of Washington. “There were a lot of similarities in the ‘You didn’t hear it from me, but …’ maneuvers,” he said. Perhaps this is the way the NFL and Washington are most similar. Both are so awash in money and vanity that human relationships are like midround draft picks. An owner salutes “my good friend” before stabbing him between the ribs—after asking to go “off the record,” of course. It makes for a perfect Leibovich set piece: heaven for the journalist and hell for the rest of humanity.
