NFL director of investigations John Raucci, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI, had asked McNally to make himself available for a follow-up interview the next day. At first, the locker room attendant said that he would not be available for such a conversation because he had another full-time job and would not return to Gillette Stadium until August 2015 for the Patriots’ first preseason game. Unbowed by this apparent evasion, Raucci stressed the importance of the follow-up interview, and McNally acquiesced. The two men scheduled to speak again on the evening of January 19.
Later, when asked to describe the purpose of their early-morning phone call, McNally and Jastremski both claimed that it was merely a congratulatory conversation about the team’s big win but conceded that some of the talk did focus on the subject of the inflation level of the footballs.
The anxiety increased for Bob Kravitz as he made his way to the airport on the morning of January 19. Although he trusted his NFL sources, he also feared that he was being used as a pawn. As far as he was concerned, his was the only name attached to the story thus far, and those who had served up the narrative would remain hidden in the background, unidentified and protected by the rules of journalism. “What if I’m wrong?” he muttered to himself. Kravitz checked in on the Twitter universe and noticed the Newsday piece and began to breathe a little easier. Hours later, after he had returned to Indianapolis, the columnist let out a loud war whoop when ESPN reporter Chris Mortensen, one of the most respected media members covering the National Football League, fired off a tweet of his own—NFL has reported that 11 of the Patriots footballs used in Sunday’s AFC title game were under-inflated by 2 lbs each, per league sources.
Chapter Three
Pressure
As the morning wore on, Brady continued his text conversation with Jastremski. The quarterback appeared to be gauging how well his “ball maker” was handling the pressure.
You good Jonny Boy? Brady asked.
Still nervous. So far so good though. I’ll be alright, Jastremski typed in response.
You didn’t do anything wrong bud, the quarterback insisted.
I know, I’ll be all good, the ball maker replied.
Jastremski told Brady that Dave Schoenfeld, the team’s head equipment manager, would be “picking his brain” about the situation later.
No worries bud. We are all good, Brady replied.
Jastremski handed over his cell phone to the Patriots security team later that day for forensic analysis.
Meanwhile, Tom Brady was attempting to smother the controversy in its cradle. To him, and most other quarterbacks, ball pressure came down to personal preference and was not something that could alter the course of a game, whether footballs were inflated or deflated on purpose or as the result of game-time weather conditions. Brady’s friend and 2014 season MVP Aaron Rodgers, quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, would later admit that he liked his footballs to be overinflated. “I like to push the limit to how much air we can put into the football, even go over what they allow you to do to see if the officials take air out of it,” Rodgers told Phil Simms, a former star NFL quarterback, Super Bowl winner for the New York Giants, and broadcaster for CBS Sports.6 Brad Johnson, who also got a championship ring when he quarterbacked the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl victory in 2003, said that he paid his equipment guys seventy-five hundred dollars to alter footballs before the AFC championship game against the Oakland Raiders. “I paid some guys to get the balls right,” Johnson later told Tampa Bay Times reporter Rick Stroud. “I went and got all 100 [Super Bowl game balls] and they [equipment personnel] took care of all of them.”7
Among the fraternity of NFL quarterbacks, ball manipulation was a commonplace, accepted bending of the rules.
But league officials did not see it that way, at least now, and the sharks were circling amid the hype machine over Super Bowl XLIX. On the afternoon of January 19, 2015, the head coaches of both the Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks were committed by the league to participate in a conference call with the media. Bill Belichick was historically notorious for his strategic refusal to offer reporters anything of substance during these exchanges. He could make the most exciting game seem as boring and painful as a visit to the dentist. Normally, only the most wonkish football fans paid close attention to the coach’s comments.
But reporters were not interested in discussing X’s and O’s with the Patriots coach. By midmorning, news that the league was now investigating the Patriots over allegations of deflated footballs had grown from a small brushfire into a full conflagration. Now, news outlets such as CBS Sports, National Public Radio, and even the Huffington Post had latched onto the story.
“What’s your response to the report on deflated footballs?” one reporter asked on the call.
“We’ll cooperate fully in whatever the league wants us to,” Belichick responded in his often imitated, grumbling monotone. “Whatever questions they ask us, whatever they want us to do.”
The coach told reporters that he had no idea there were any concerns over the footballs during the game and that he had only heard about the potential issue that morning. However, given his reputation for control and for paying attention to each minute detail of the goings-on at Gillette Stadium, it seems unlikely that Jim McNally’s interrogation by NFL security would have escaped Belichick’s attention when it happened.
The media continued to pressure the coach. “What do you think of the topic and if that could potentially be an advantage for a team?”
“You’re asking the questions, I’m just trying to answer them,” he replied.
“Were the Patriots using deflated footballs?” one reporter asked pointedly.
“I just said the first I heard about it was this morning,” Belichick fired back. “Whatever they need from the league, that’s what we’ll do.”8
It was the last thing Bill Belichick wanted to be dealing with at the moment. He and his assistants had a Herculean task in front of them in developing a game plan against the reigning Super Bowl champions, and any talk about the inflation or deflation of footballs would divert attention away from this challenge. The coach repeated the season’s rallying cry—Do your job— to the members of his staff and his players and attempted, at least initially, to block out the distraction and the tempest brewing outside Gillette Stadium. That day, David Gardi, senior vice president of football operations for the NFL, sent a letter via e-mail to Belichick, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, his son Jonathan Kraft, and league commissioner Roger Goodell, stating in part that an initial investigation had found that none of the Patriots’ game balls in the AFC championship were inflated to the league-required 12.5 psi (pounds per square inch). In the letter, Gardi stated that the footballs “may have been tampered with after the normal inspection procedures were followed prior to kickoff.”9
Fifty-five-year-old Roger Stokoe Goodell had been running the most popular and lucrative league in all of professional sports for more than a decade. The ginger-haired NFL commissioner was the son of a United States senator appointed by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller following the 1968 assassination of New York senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. It was the only time in his life that Charles Goodell had been handed something he had not earned, something he had not fought for. The elder Goodell came from modest beginnings in western New York. He was a star athlete at Jamestown High School and played both baseball and football at Williams College, in Massachusetts. Known as “Charlie” to his friends, Goodell always kept a dictionary by his side, reading it incessantly to increase his vocabulary. He joined the U.S. Navy in the mid-1940s, attended and graduated from Yale Law School and the university’s graduate school of government, and later enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a first lieutenant during the Korean War.
Charles Goodell got bitten by the political bug early. After a brief stint as a law professor at Quinnipiac College, just down the road from Yale, he went into practice briefly for himself before heading to Washington, D.C.,
for a job with the United States Justice Department. A few years later, Goodell made his first run for public office in a special election to fill a New York congressional seat vacated by the death of Daniel Reed, a long-serving Republican and former head football coach at Penn State and Cornell. Charles Goodell won the special election in 1959, when Roger, his third son, was just three months old. The elder Goodell took in nearly double the votes of his opponent. He was reelected three times and emerged as one of the party’s “young thinkers” at a time when House Democrats outnumbered Republicans two to one. He had voted against the “Great Society” bill, which outlined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty. Goodell submitted his own version but it went nowhere. As a Republican, he found himself in a perpetual minority, relegated to the sidelines of major policy issues along with his good friend and fellow Republican Donald Rumsfeld, a congressman from Illinois and future secretary of defense under President George W. Bush.
Charles Goodell’s political future drew fresh breaths when Bobby Kennedy succumbed to bullet wounds fired by assassin Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Governor Rockefeller needed to fill Kennedy’s seat with a fellow Republican who would not be seen as repugnant to RFK’s legion of supporters. As the nation mourned, the crafty New York congressman sent Rockefeller a secret letter that outlined the similarities he shared with the late Kennedy. Goodell was appointed to Kennedy’s seat three months after his death.
But even with fair warning, Nelson Rockefeller could not imagine the sea change that would come through Goodell’s political metamorphosis. Charles Goodell became a progressive. James Buckley, brother of noted conservative William F. Buckley and a staunch critic and rival of Goodell’s, called him a “Republican whose level of liberalism approached the indecent” and said that he was making a career for himself by embarrassing the administration.10 Goodell marched with Coretta Scott King, wife of slain civil rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was endorsed by the likes of liberal political activist Noam Chomsky, and even took on the leader of his own party—President Richard Nixon—voting against two of Nixon’s nominations to the United States Supreme Court.
Then, in September 1969, Senator Goodell introduced a bill that would require all American troops out of Vietnam by December 1, 1970. He gave Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, a heads-up about his plan during a phone call that was secretly recorded. Goodell then placed a similar call to Nixon’s secretary of defense Melvin Laird. Despite being an early advocate for the war in Vietnam, Goodell now felt that the United States should not be engaged in a land war 10,000 miles away. Overall support for the war had dropped precipitously after the Tet Offensive in 1968, when news crews captured the intensity of battle between American soldiers and the Viet Cong. In reality, the fight resulted in an overwhelming victory by U.S. forces, but the tenacity shown by North Vietnamese troops caused influential Americans, most notably CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, to question whether a successful resolution to the war was achievable. Those doubts soon echoed across college campuses, and Senator Goodell listened to the cries of outrage with both ears. The war had changed him, and he would soon be labeled a traitor for taking a conscious stand against his party and against his president. Therefore, he had to be brought to heel or destroyed. As Charles Goodell fought hard to become a hero to young Americans, he was being vilified by the Nixon White House. GOP operatives called him “Changeable Charlie” and “Instant Liberal.” One fellow lawmaker compared Goodell’s political conversion from conservative to progressive to Saint Paul’s journey on the road to Damascus.11 President Nixon quietly offered Goodell a job in his administration if he would tone down the rhetoric. But Senator Goodell only spoke louder. He entertained antiwar activists like Jane Fonda and met with defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg to discuss strategy for leaking the explosive Pentagon Papers.
Like an NFL coach whose goal is to isolate and take away the best player on the opposing team, Nixon and his aides focused their attention on Charles Goodell’s demise. Vice President Spiro Agnew became Nixon’s hired gun and verbal assassin. He told fellow Republicans that “Senator Goodell has left the party.” He compared Goodell to Christine Jorgensen, the first recipient of a sex-change operation. Those smears stuck. Charles Goodell lost his bid to win a full term, and his political career was over at the age of forty-four.
His eleven-year-old son, Roger, cried on election night.
The younger Goodell idolized his father. Yet Charles Goodell, despite his earnest connection with young people and those opposed to the war, remained aloof to the responsibilities of parenthood and distanced himself from Roger and his siblings. Charles Goodell moved his family to New York City, where he practiced law while his son Roger was given all the advantages and opportunities that his father had earned himself through hard work as a youth.
Nevertheless, there was resentment from the father toward the son. Roger fought for Charles’s attention and love by excelling in the classroom and on the ball fields. He was a three-sport star athlete at Bronxville High School, where he captained the Broncos football team during his senior year in 1977. When his coach demanded that Goodell notify him if any teammates were drinking alcohol or experimenting with drugs, the 170-pound tight end did just that. Roger Goodell was willing to name names for the welfare of the team and also to endear himself to his coach. Injuries, including a concussion suffered during his senior year playing baseball, kept him from playing football in college, so after high school graduation, Roger attended Washington & Jefferson College, a small liberal arts institution spread across a leafy campus in Washington, Pennsylvania, some thirty miles south of Pittsburgh. The institution boasted its fair share of influential alumni, including a United States senator, treasury secretary, and attorney general. Washington & Jefferson provided students with the proper track toward a career in politics, but Goodell had no interest in following in his father’s footsteps to Capitol Hill. In 1981, after graduating magna cum laude with a degree in economics, Roger composed a letter to his father offering thanks for putting him through college. “The only thing I want to do in life, other than to be the commissioner of the NFL, is to make you proud,” he wrote.12 The letter wasn’t so much a pledge as a plea by a son for his father’s blessings.
Goodell then wrote letters to all twenty-eight NFL teams, begging for an opportunity to prove his worth.
He also penned a letter to league commissioner Pete Rozelle on July 2, 1981, that read,
Dear Mr. Rozelle,
I am writing you in reference to any job openings you may have at your offices. Having just finished my undergraduate education at Washington and Jefferson College this past May, I am presently looking for a position in the management of professional sports. Being an avid football fan, I have always desired a career in the NFL. Consequently, as a great admirer of you, it would be both an honor and a pleasure to work for you in any position that may be available.
He signed the letter “Respectfully, Roger S. Goodell.”13
Later he received a noncommittal reply from Rozelle’s office: “Stop by if you’re ever in the area,” the note read. Young Roger wasted no time. He immediately phoned the league office and said that he was close by and could drop in the next day. This was a lie. Goodell was seven hours away in Pittsburgh at the time. Still, he got in his car and drove to NFL headquarters the following day for an informational interview. Roger made a positive impression and was awarded an internship as an administrative assistant a few months later.
Goodell, however, needed a mentor as much as he needed a job. Indeed, young Roger was searching for a father figure, and as luck would have it, the NFL was then being run by (Alvin) Pete Rozelle, a fifty-five-year-old former sports publicist and marketing genius who had grown the league from twelve teams to twenty-eight through a merger with the rival American Football League. Rozelle had also created the Super Bowl, professional sports’ biggest spectacle, and birthed the long-r
unning Monday Night Football television franchise with Roone Arledge, head of ABC.
Young Roger would learn a great deal from Rozelle, a true visionary. As commissioner, Rozelle introduced revenue sharing to the league, which allowed small-market teams like the vaunted Green Bay Packers to share equally in television revenues with big-market teams like the New York Jets and Giants, the Chicago Bears, and the Los Angeles Rams, thus creating a more level playing field than that of Major League Baseball, the NFL’s chief rival. Rozelle had also honed his managerial and leadership skills through his work as general manager for the Rams and as a marketing executive for the 1956 summer Olympics. The man could also be tough.
Early in Rozelle’s tenure, in 1963, league investigators discovered that two of the sport’s biggest stars, Green Bay Packers running back Paul Hornung and Detroit Lions All-Pro tackle Alex Karras, had placed bets on NFL games. Investigators conducted fifty-two interviews with players on eight teams and determined the two football stars had either bet on their own teams to win or had placed bets on other NFL games. Neither Hornung nor Karras was guilty of taking bribes, point shaving, or game fixing, but the reputation of the emerging phenomenon called the National Football League took a major hit. Without seeking counsel from the team owners who had elected him and paid his handsome salary, Rozelle dropped the hammer on both players for gambling and associating with “known hoodlums.” He banned them indefinitely, sending shock waves around the league.
Hornung was the NFL’s biggest attraction at the time. The “Golden Boy” had set an NFL scoring record with 176 points in 1960 and was awarded the NFL’s most valuable player trophy in 1961. Karras was the anchor of the Lions’ defense and an all-league selection three years running. Five other Lions players were fined for betting on the 1962 NFL championship game between the Packers and New York Giants. The Lions organization was also fined four thousand dollars for failure to adequately supervise its players. At the time, Rozelle called the decision the hardest of his life. What outraged the commissioner was Hornung’s and Karras’s flagrant disregard for league rules. Each player had been informed time and again of the league rule on gambling, and yet according to Rozelle, they had continued to gamble with no signs of slowing down. The commissioner considered banning each man for life. This would be the most severe penalty paid by a professional athlete since “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and seven Chicago White Sox teammates were handed lifetime bans from Major League Baseball for fixing the World Series in 1919. The Black Sox Scandal was one of the reasons Rozelle had his job as NFL commissioner. Major League Baseball had never had a commissioner before 1919, but the position was created in the wake of the scandal to police and control the players. Pete Rozelle decided that he would exact from Hornung and Karras “the most severe penalty short of banishment for life.”14 Both players were reinstated a year later.
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