12

by Casey Sherman

  The bleeding didn’t stop there.

  The Patriots had to give up two draft picks, a first-round pick in 2016 and a fourth-round pick in 2017. And almost as an afterthought, two team employees were now out of jobs. The league suspended Jim McNally and John Jastremski “indefinitely.”

  In a show of solidarity, the Patriots swapped their Twitter avatar showing the team logo for an image of Brady’s jersey. The wife of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson also shared her feelings on social media. Suzanne Johnson tweeted out the news of Brady’s suspension along with a happy-face emoji.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kraft’s Counterattack

  Robert Kraft was outraged by the assault on his quarterback and his team at the hands of Roger Goodell, the man he had mentored, protected, defended, and even welcomed into his home. It may have been called the Wells Report, but Kraft believed the scathing indictment against the Patriots and subsequent suspension and penalties were orchestrated by the commissioner alone. Kraft had owned up to the Spygate scandal, calling his coach’s flagrant rule violations stupid. But with Deflategate, he was ready to mount a counterattack. He felt that the latest controversy was being fueled by the jealousy of his fellow owners and people working in the league office who had ties to the Jets, the Patriots’ hated AFC East rival. Mike Kensil, who had participated in the sting operation during the championship game, had previously worked in the Jets front office for twenty years and was there when Bill Belichick abruptly resigned as head coach to go to New England in 2000. Omitted in the Wells Report was any mention of Kensil’s heated rant directed toward Patriots equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld at halftime of the Colts game, when he allegedly warned him that he was in “big fucking trouble.” The report only alluded to a conversation between the two men about the testing of footballs.

  Wells had made no effort to interview D’Qwell Jackson, the Colts linebacker who intercepted Brady in the AFC championship game and was said to have given the ball to a member of the Colts’ equipment staff, despite the fact that Jackson’s name is mentioned several times in the Wells Report. “Throughout the NFL investigation, no one reached out to me. No one asked me about the football,” Jackson said in a 2018 radio interview. “Not a peep. Silence. I would have loved to catch them [the Patriots] in the act because we got our tails kicked…but no, I had no idea [about the ball being deflated].”84

  There was also the disturbing case of Jeff Pash, the NFL executive and labor lawyer who had helped negotiate the collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA in 2011. He worked side by side with Ted Wells on the so-called independent investigation. Kraft didn’t trust him. Pash had drawn the owner’s ire for refusing to correct misinformation that had been sprinkled across the media from league sources—most notably, ESPN NFL reporter Chris Mortensen’s claim from January, later proved not to be true, that the league had found that eleven of the New England Patriots’ twelve game balls were inflated “significantly below” the NFL’s requirements at two pounds under the psi minimum. The truth, according to the Wells Report, was that only one Patriots football had tested two psi below the league threshold.

  Allegations of the Patriots’ wrongdoing continued to pile up. Less than a month later, ESPN aired another false report claiming that Jim McNally had attempted to slip an unapproved ball to the referee in charge of overseeing footballs for special teams in the same game. The story carried a cloak-and-dagger, underhanded tone. It was just another example of the Patriots getting caught cheating. But the reality was quite different. The ball in question, referred to later as K-Ball #1 in the Wells Report, had been taken out of play by league employee Scott Miller after kickoff to auction off later. It was replaced with a new ball that was described by Patriots staff as “crappy” and insufficiently broken in. Patriots placekicker Stephen Gostkowski was outraged over the switch and demanded that the ball be returned for the remainder of the game. Schoenfeld, Jastremski, and McNally then went hunting for the ball. An NFL official said he saw the ball on a couch in the officials’ locker room, and the football was eventually recovered and given to McNally, who tried to get it back in the game but got denied because the ball didn’t carry referee Walt Anderson’s distinct markings. Anderson initialed each ball before the game. However, later investigators could not conclude whether the referee had even marked K-Ball #1 before the game. The NFL later fired Scott Miller for selling game-used footballs without the league’s permission.

  Kraft had had enough. He ordered Stacey James, the team’s head of media relations, to write his counterpart Greg Aiello, the NFL’s communications chief, to demand action.

  “Once again, we have another LEAK (this one citing four sources close to the investigation),” James wrote. “What is unconscionable to me is that the league holds data that could very well exonerate us from any wrongdoing and completely dismiss the rampant reports and allegations of nefarious actions.”85

  Patriots attorney Robyn Glaser then forwarded James’s letter to Jeff Pash. “We hereby DEMAND that the misinformation…be formally and publicly corrected by the league IMMEDIATELY.”

  Glaser had worked for the team for the past decade following a stint as a music industry attorney in Los Angeles. She was a born fighter and wore black fingernail polish that she covered only with boxing gloves during her strenuous daily workouts. Admittedly, Glaser, a Colby College graduate, had never watched an NFL game in its entirety before joining the Patriots, opting instead for reality shows like Project Runway.86

  Glaser now found herself front and center in the biggest reality show in sports, one brimming with bold allegations of cheating and corruption, heavy drama, and deceit.

  Pash responded to Glaser’s demands by e-mail, telling her that he had no reason to believe the leaks came from the league office but that he’d pass on the concerns to Ted Wells. This weak response lit a fire under Glaser, who called it “disingenuous.”

  “Jeff, you need to step up,” Glaser demanded. “It’s been made resoundingly clear to us that your words are just a front.”

  The attorney’s vitriol had no effect on Pash, who chided Glaser for sending such a “personal and accusatory note.” The NFL executive insisted that his responses to her concerns were both candid and respectful.

  “I work for the Patriots, as well as 31 other clubs and the Commissioner,” he replied. “Sometimes that creates tension, as it apparently has here.”

  The tension was, in fact, palpable, and each camp was dug in. Through it all, Robert Kraft thought about the toll it was taking on his quarterback. Kraft’s respect for Brady was greater than his admiration for any other player. He felt that any mother would be lucky to have a son like Tom, a guy who competed and worked hard for everything he had ever accomplished. The owner slammed the Wells Report in a lengthy statement upon its release, calling its findings “incomprehensible,” and then put his own legal team to work on a rebuttal.

  Within a week, the Patriots released their own Deflategate document titled The Wells Report in Context online. In it, the team questioned the NFL’s decision not to notify the Patriots about concerns raised by the Ravens and the Colts prior to the Indianapolis game or take any preventative measures to ensure that the teams were using footballs with equal pressurization. Did the NFL willfully put the Colts at a disadvantage just so it could catch the Patriots in the act?

  The document also stressed that the deflation of the Patriots’ balls was due to the impact of the temperature and fully consistent with the Ideal Gas Law and pointed out that, according to the Wells Report, three of the four Colts balls tested at halftime were below league regulation. The report hammered the Wells Report line by line. The document called into question the league’s financial dealings with Ted Wells and pointed out the fact that NFL executive David Gardi had jumped to conclusions when he fired off a letter to the team on January 19 that accused the Patriots of tampering with footballs without even considering any scientific explanation about ball deflation. The Wells Report in Context even
analyzed the minute and forty seconds that McNally had spent in the bathroom with the bags of balls, arguing that it was the proper amount of time for a man to urinate and wash and then dry his hands.

  The Wells Report in Context made a lot of sense to Patriots fans and even those reporters eager to tear down the mighty franchise. But the architects behind the document “jumped the shark” when they attempted to explain Jim McNally’s use of the word deflator. The Patriots continued to add information to their website over time and, in June 2015, offered their own explanation for the juvenile banter between McNally and the friend he called “dorito dink,” John Jastremski. According to the team, the word deflator referred to weight loss and not footballs.

  “Mr. Jastremski would sometimes work out and bulk up,” the annotation read. “He is a slender guy and his goal was to get to 200 pounds. Mr. McNally is a big fellow and had the opposite goal: to lose weight. ‘Deflate’ was a term they used to refer to losing weight.”87

  Even the most ardent Tom Brady supporters had a difficult time believing this explanation, while Patriots haters pounced on it. On Twitter, one critic called it a “my dog ate my homework” defense. Skepticism was widespread and deflected from the fact that, for the most part, the Patriots’ rebuttal to the charges in the Wells Report was spot-on. During the off-season, the debate continued to play out in the court of public opinion and on just about every sports talk radio program in America. The divide was as easy to identify as that between Democratic blue and Republican red states. If you hated the Patriots, you were more inclined to believe every word of the Wells Report. If you were a Patriots fan, you put your trust and faith in the team and its quarterback.

  Four bloggers from the popular Boston-based website Barstool Sports protested at NFL headquarters in New York. Website founder David Portnoy and three colleagues, all wearing Brady jerseys, first picketed outside, chanting “Free Brady, fire Goodell,” and then handcuffed themselves together in the lobby. They were then handcuffed again, this time by New York City police officers, and escorted out of the building and into a squad car.

  “This is the best day of my life, getting arrested for Tom Brady,” one protester said, smiling.88

  It was a theater of the absurd, but the protesters’ sentiments were shared by fellow fans and former Patriots players.

  Brady’s longtime friend Matt Chatham voiced his outrage as well. Chatham by this time was long retired from the league after a stint with the New York Jets but had moved back to Boston and kept a high profile in New England as a television analyst. The former NFL linebacker had also made headlines in 2013 when he carried Boston Marathon bombing victim Heather Abbott to safety, away from the smoke and fire caused by the two pressure-cooker bombs that exploded near the finish line. Abbott lost her leg as a result of the terrorist attack, but she praised Chatham and his wife, Erin, for staying by her side during those chaotic hours that transformed the city. Chatham had earned the public’s trust and now used the platform to defend his old teammate and friend.

  “If manipulating fan indifference were the only thing at play here, Roger Goodell’s NFL wouldn’t be nearly as nefarious as it is,” Chatham wrote in an article for his website footballbyfootball.com. “The real problem is illustrated in the clear disrespect Roger Goodell’s league has for the intelligence of the American fan, seen this time in a statement released by the league outlining their rationale for punishing the Patriots.”

  The ex-player simply could not get past the very idea of the accusation.

  “The football has to typically pass through multiple officials’ hands every single play before it’s set for snap,” Chatham says. “There’s no way around that. A scheme to significantly deflate footballs would be a lot of effort for something with a high likelihood to get caught right away. Basically it would just be dumb. People say a lot of things about Tom Brady and the Patriots. But stupid isn’t one of them. Unfortunately, wanting scandal to be true—even the nonsensical ones—is a powerful public drug.”

  Even the commander in chief weighed in on the controversy. When the Super Bowl champions visited the White House in late April, President Barack Obama said, “That whole story got a little blown out of proportion. Even in the midst of a huge distraction during the biggest media circus of the sports year, they stayed focused…there’s Belichick and Brady, the most successful coach and quarterback tandem perhaps in NFL history and there’s the Patriot Way, a group that values teamwork and hard work above all else.”89

  Number 12 had attended the team’s White House celebrations in the past but was markedly absent this time. Brady stayed away from Washington, but his other team was hard at work in the nation’s capital.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tom Brady vs. the NFL

  DeMaurice Smith was ready to defend his union’s highest-profile member. The NFLPA leader had begun work with the AFL-CIO on an amicus brief that they filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. What began as a story about palace intrigue inside the NFL offices and Gillette Stadium had now evolved into a John Grisham–style legal thriller. In the fifteen-page document, the labor union argued that Brady’s suspension should be vacated because Roger Goodell had “failed to follow basic procedural fairness and acted arbitrarily as an employer seeking to justify his own disciplinary decision rather than as a neutral arbitrator.”90 It was a fancy way of saying that Goodell had presided over a kangaroo court in which he served as judge, jury, and executioner.

  Smith also worked the phones, connecting with several influential team owners including John Mara of the New York Giants.

  “What are we doing?” Smith asked Mara. “If you wanna fine him [Brady], fine him. But now we’re talking suspensions?”

  Smith didn’t believe Brady was guilty of any wrongdoing, but even if that was the case, it was a minor infraction at best and now it was being treated as a capital offense by Goodell and his minions.

  He walked Mara through the case. “There are allegations that there were minute differences in a limited number of balls in the first half of a playoff game where in the second half, the opposing team got beat like a drum with balls that were properly inflated. Again, what are we doing?”

  Mara and the other owners, except for Kraft, continued to back Goodell’s decision.

  “They were circling the wagons, which is easy to do because there’s just one wagon, the NFL shield,” Smith recalls. “When the NFL is conducting an investigation of any kind, they are incapable of giving an honest answer.”

  Smith then began ripping Roger Goodell in public.

  “I think the Wells Report delivered exactly what the client [Goodell] wanted,” he told ESPN. “This was no independent investigation. You can’t really have credibility just because you slap the word independent on a piece of paper.”91

  Jeff Pash’s involvement in the probe was a clear example of the skewed prism with which the investigation was conducted.

  Smith also accused Goodell of looking the other way when it came to the transgressions and crimes of his bosses—the NFL owners.

  “You have the case of Colts owner Jim Irsay, where someone [his onetime mistress] overdosed and died in his house,” Smith argued. “You have the case of Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, where the business he was connected with was found to be in violation of federal law. You have the case of the Minnesota Vikings owners, where a state court judge ruled that they had engaged in fraud. Somewhere in the middle of that is a huge yawning gap.”

  When asked if he trusted Roger Goodell, Smith said pointedly, “It’s not my job to trust him. It’s my job to represent our players.”

  Smith had been down this road before, not only in the Ray Rice case but during the Bountygate case in 2012, when four New Orleans Saints defensive players were suspended along with head coach Sean Payton and two assistant coaches for allegedly offering cash bonuses for injuring opposing players, including Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. According to NFL investigators, Saints pl
ayers earned one thousand dollars for causing an opposing player to be carted off the field and an additional five hundred if a player was knocked out of a game.

  Still, the suspended players testified under oath that no such practice existed and the NFL could not prove that it did. Twenty hours of testimony and 50,000 documents revealed very little evidence tying the players to the bounty program. The suspensions were later overturned by Roger Goodell’s former boss Paul Tagliabue, who handled the appeal.

  “Goodell said they had videotaped evidence incriminating the players in Bountygate, but this proved to be untrue,” said Smith. “They’re not concerned with truth. The NFL lied and twisted facts to get the conclusion they wanted, and now they were doing it again to Tom.”

  Meanwhile, the case was adding a mountain of stress to Tom Brady’s personal life. He was being flayed by the national media and torn apart by Goodell, the NFL’s most powerful man. An asterisk had been placed next to his career accomplishments, and he was lumped into the group of superstar cheaters that included Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire.

  His mansion in Brookline, Massachusetts, became his bunker. Brady was rarely seen in public, and questions swirled in the tabloids about whether the unfolding drama had taken an irreparable toll on his marriage. The celebrity magazine OK reported that Gisele walked out on Tom after a bad fight. The former celebrity darlings were now rarely photographed or seen in public together.

  And Brady’s marriage wasn’t the only relationship now called into question. Fans began to wonder if there was fission between the quarterback and Robert Kraft. The owner had been one of Brady’s most vocal supporters throughout the Deflategate saga, so fans were surprised when Kraft made the announcement in San Francisco on May 19 that he would accept Goodell’s discipline and would not appeal.