Tom Brady seems to know everyone, but he never knew the real Roger Goodell at all
COMMENTARY
The stack of GameDay programs beneath the desk in my home office doesn’t provide an accurate count of how many Patriots games I’ve covered during Tom Brady’s career. I’ve managed to hoard – quick count here — 21 programs, but I’d guess I’ve been privileged to cover probably 40-45 of the Patriots quarterback’s performances during his decorated run, including the last two Super Bowl appearances.
I was there for almost every home game from 2009 until last season, when the parameters of my gig changed. I picked up a Sunday media column last season, which meant I was planted on my couch waiting for Ray Lewis to say something nonsensical rather than commuting to Gillette. Rarely was it a long wait.
I was never a beat writer in those five seasons, but I was there on the Sundays and occasional late Mondays when football matters were settled to write an online column. Because access is so controlled and I didn’t have the established relationships with certain players that benefited the beat writers, my standard approach was to try to observe details that might be overlooked for whatever reason – familiarity, probably — by those who were there more often than I was.
I made a recurring mental note to look around, notice how the players acted and interacted when the microphones weren’t surrounding their faces, to try to get authentic color or a morsel of insight that someone else might not have.
I tried to notice the stuff I would have noticed as a fan.
Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I did not. But I did gain lasting impressions that I believe to be accurate.
Devin McCourty and Shane Vereen struck me as uncommonly intelligent, thoughtful men by society’s standards, let alone the standard of a locker room.
Aaron Hernandez – shirt usually off, earphones usually on – intimidated the hell out of me. I don’t know if that means I had sharp instincts or not sharp enough instincts given what he turned out to be.
Watching Rob Gronkowski not only happily goof with children but pretty much turn into one himself in their presence makes me happy that my own kids admire him.
And I always chuckled when Vince Wilfork would depart with stacks of Styrofoam containers full of food from the team’s postgame buffet. To Big Vince, the spread was his personal take-out window.
My lasting takeaway, however, from those attempts at watching when they don’t know you’re watching is one I’ve been reluctant to share. I recognize that the well-compensated professional cynics among us who wave their pitchforks and howl “fanboy!’’ any time you offer anything beyond generic praise for the Patriots could have a field day with this.
Don’t care about that. Because the deeper we get into Deflategate, and the more that is revealed by the paper trail NFL commissioner Roger Goodell never wanted you to see, the more I wonder whether a certain impressive impression is a harbinger of what I recognize right now:
Tom Brady might be the only decent and (mostly) honest human who is seriously involved in this whole shameful multi-million-dollar charade.
The absurd irony is that Brady’s reputation and character – actually, maybe the proper word is integrity, though the NFL has relentlessly appropriated it for its own misuse – has been assailed more than that of anyone else tangled up in this situation. Our collective perception of Brady, built during his 15 seasons here and confirmed by those who have studied him closely, goes something like this:
He’s a preternaturally good guy, raised right in a quintessential All-American family, respectful of everyone if hyper-competitive. It’s remarkable that his fame – and the multiplication of that fame that comes from being married to one of them most glamorous women in the world – hasn’t affected him to any noticeable degree. He has everything (except a white pool cover), and yet he seems to have retained his grounded sense of self.
That’s not to suggest he doesn’t have a healthy ego. I’m not sure it’s possible to succeed in professional sports – especially to the historic degree that he has – without one.
But I can say this, too, and it comes from all of those game days roaming the bowels of Gillette Stadium with my eyes wide open: I’ve never seen a star professional athlete who so consistently treats people around him with such a casual, friendly respect. Behind the scenes, Brady is chronically, unyieldingly nice. At his workplace, he does not reside within that 30 Rock bubble of fame. If he doesn’t know everyone’s name – the guy picking up towels, the dude checking media credentials, anyone – he certainly treats them like he does. And he does it every time. Maybe he knows everyone is always watching him. But he doesn’t deviate from that geniality, and it could not seem more genuine.
That brings me to my lingering curiosity regarding Brady’s levels of honesty during what increasingly looks like a shameful, clumsily orchestrated charade to restore some of Roger Goodell’s enforcer credibility. Oh, sure, I wonder why Brady discarded his phone (setting himself up for some headline-seizing hyperbole if nothing else), and why ballboy Jim McNally took those footballs into the bathroom that fateful night, and the various little unsolved mysteries in this whole debacle that mostly act as a smokescreen for how the NFL has handled this whole situation.
More than anything, though, I’m surprised Brady didn’t know McNally by name.
I guess he did not know everyone after all.
Nor did he obviously know everything, which is also made clear by the transcript despite the league’s stumbling attempts at obfuscation.
Goodell slammed his gavel on Brady and upheld the four-game suspension upon appeal because, as he explained in his 20-page ruling, he did not believe “any suggestion [from Brady] that the communications [with John Jastremski] addressed only preparation of footballs for the Super Bowl rather than the tampering allegations?’’
Except, you know, the transcript of the appeal hearing reveals that Brady onmultiple occasions acknowledged talking to Jastremski regarding the tampering allegations.
“One [topic of discussion] was the allegations which we were facing and the second was getting ready for the Super Bowl,’’ he says in the transcript. “…. I think I was trying to figure out what happened [with the footballs], you know what could be — possibly could have happened to those balls.’’
Of course he discussed the leaked report with Jastremski. Who in his position wouldn’t? The Patriots were in the crosshairs because of something – the alleged deflation of 11 of 12 footballs in the first half of the AFC Championship Game by 2 pounds per square inch or more — that didn’t happen other than in the fiction section of Chris Mortensen’s twitter feed. It made no sense to Brady because it was patently wrong, and he wanted to know if someone had done something of which he was unaware.
No wonder the NFL wanted the testimony sealed. It made Goodell look like an arbiter who was generally aware – at best — of his surroundings (“Peyton?’’) and who was damn sure intent on working backward to shoehorn his ruling into his own predetermined conclusion.
In other words – deep breath here – Goodell deliberately mischaracterized conversations held behind closed doors to uphold his own over-the-top suspension based on a vague conclusion drawn by a league-compensated and hardly independent investigator that “it was more probable than not’’ that Brady was “generally aware’’ that a fineable misdemeanor that had no impact on anything might have occurred.
Or maybe it was just science. Damned if we know. Four games, son. Didn’t want to do it. Felt I owed it to you.
It’s all so absurd. Goodell was the judge, jury, arbiter and executioner, and had Judge Richard M. Berman not provided the whole thing for our reading pleasure and exasperation, he’d have gotten away with it. There’s no way Goodell could have wanted or expected Brady’s testimony to see the light of day. No. Way.
I suppose I should note that while I haven’t observed Goodell in his natural habitat as much as I have Brady, I have seen him in live, technicolor action twice, excluding the time last February when he handed the Lombardi Trophy to Robert Kraft and wisely got the hell out of the way.
The first was during his annual commissioner’s address – I believe “State of Protecting the Shield’s Integrity’’ is the formal term — a couple of days before Super Bowl XLIX. Let me tell you, his haughtiness in person is something to behold. You could practically reach out and touch his hubris when he patronized Rachel Nichols for daring to question his intentions. He was especially charming when he blathered about his 65-minute daily workout after the Play 60 kid was planted as a questioner among the media.
The second time was the day after the Super Bowl, when he presented Brady with the Super Bowl MVP award and the keys to Malcolm Butler’s new truck at the media center.
The cloud of Deflategate lingered, but nothing was about to affect Brady’s sunny mood the morning after winning his fourth championship. Still, given all that had happened, it was a bit of surprise when Goodell embraced Brady like they were reuniting frat brothers.
At the time, I thought Brady was doing Goodell a solid there, or at least taking the high road on a particularly fulfilling morning even by the standards of his charmed life.
Now I wonder where Goodell was hiding the shiv — and whether there is anyone among the thousands of people Brady has met along the way who revealed less about their true intentions than the commissioner did that day.
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