Mark Leibovich - Big Game - The NFL in Dangerous Times

“What is this, summer camp?” said Steve Tisch, the film producer and chairman of the New York Giants. If you own a football team, yes, in a sense it ­is—­summer camp for superrich postmenopausal dudes. The National Football League offers them ­round-­the-­calendar recreation, delicious food, and a dedicated counselor/commissioner to hold their hands and buckle their ­big-­boy pants. Tisch is known among certain campers as “the Tush.” He is a model bunkmate: well liked, good company, and always helpful about hooking his NFL partners up with party invitations and tickets to the big Hollywood award shows when they come through L.A. He introduced Bob Kraft to his kid girlfriend, the ­model-­actress Ricki Noel Lander, at a party at Chez Tush. Tisch owns the distinction of having won both a Super Bowl and an Oscar (as a producer of Forrest Gump). He displays both trophies in the den of his home in Beverly Hills.

“Look at these,” Tisch told me as he admired the twin booty when I visited him at his hillside mansion. “They were great to show off when I was dating.” That was before Tisch met his newest trophy, the gorgeous Katia Francesconi, whom he celebrates with a photo display in his front entryway. She speaks five languages, Katia does, and for their first “serious” date, Tisch flew her to the Toronto film festival, then to Pittsburgh for a ­Giants-­Steelers game, then to Spain. He proposed in Portuguese.

Tisch has a certain dumbfounded charm about him. You could even call it ­Gump-­like in how he projects both a lurking detachment and an utter sense of belonging to the privileged jungles he occupies. He is easily amused. When I first met him, at a Super Bowl party, Tisch told me to call him on his cell phone. He would be more than happy to share with me his impressions of America’s most successful sports league and the sanctified club he belonged to as an NFL owner (“Junior high school for billionaires,” as he described this confederacy). I asked Tisch for his phone number. “Sure,” he replied. “Just dial 310 Take-A-Hike.” And the happy camper laughed a little harder than I might have expected him to. It’s good to be the Tush. He told me to call anytime. Once, I asked Tisch if he was in fact the only person on the planet with both an Oscar and a Super Bowl trophy. “I have two Super Bowl trophies, asshole,” the Tush corrected me, and further amused himself.

But he is no fan of this Boca Raton Resort and Club. Neither are his fellow owners. It will not do, and the head counselor will hear about this. There are too many ­kids—­real ­kids—­making noise amid this great gathering of sportsmen. What use would any titan of great means and legacy have for the Flow Rider Wave Simulator out by the cabanas? It strikes a discordant note with the important business the No Fun League is trying to conduct here.

Ideally, the NFL’s winter huddle would take place about an hour to the north. The Breakers in Palm Beach would be everyone’s first choice. Boca is okay, and the Resort and Club, a Waldorf property, has its appeal (an ice cream store off the lobby, and who doesn’t love ice cream?). But it’s not close enough to the water, the layout is strange, and besides, it’s hard to be satisfied with anything when you’ve known the best. As a football potentate, you’re in this for the brass ring, and the ­Breakers—­apex of taste, luxury, and ­convenience—­represented the brass ring. About one-quarter of NFL owners have homes within an hour of the premium resort. Built in the 1890s, the Breakers is a playground for this particular kind of tycoon. “After fires in both 1903 and 1925, the hotel reemerged more opulent each time,” the Breakers’ website reads. The football emperors would hope to say the same someday about their sport; would that their current set of conflagrations end up as only brushfires.

The Breakers is respectable and resilient, just as the league and its patrons believe themselves to be. At any given time, the Breakers’ guest register “read[s] like a who’s who of early ­20th-­century America: Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, vacationing alongside US presidents and European nobility.” Or so says the Breakers’ website.

In any event, that is more in line with how NFL owners view themselves. They are not just hobbyists, but more like ministers, or actual figures of history; certainly they’ve earned the right to be called philanthropists, right? With all they’ve contributed?

They talk a lot about all the “quiet giving” they do, or have their PR people do it (while mentioning, of course, how “Mr. So-and-So does not like to call attention to himself”). They are rich enough to care about their legacies. At the very least the owners fashion themselves as pillars of their communities, although many of them are in fact despised in their hometowns and remain stubbornly out of view. It’s hard to dislodge a pillar.

“There is the Breakers and then there’s everything else,” one of the owners told me as he surveyed the riffraff in the crowded lobby in Boca. He asked that I not reveal his name “because I don’t want to come off like a spoiled rich guy.”

Not to overstate the gravity of this Boca Raton failure. A subpar resort for the NFL’s annual meetings will make no one’s roster of “existential” matters that supposedly threaten the league; nothing like the drop in ­youth-­football participation, nor lawsuits, regulatory roadblocks, and disruptions to the broadcast model that the league’s modern business has been built on. Nor would it rank among the battery of blows that Commissioner Goodell manages to suffer, or ­self-­inflict, or aggravate, every few months. But it’s also of a piece with something being ­off-­kilter with America’s beloved blood sport. You hear about “statements” being made in the NFL; as how the Dolphins can “make a statement” to the league by beating the Patriots on a Monday night, or how Adam “Pacman” Jones, the Bengals cornerback with long dreadlocks and a rap sheet to match, can “make a statement” by concussing the Steelers’ Antonio Brown with a big hit on a crossing pattern.

NFL meetings also make a statement. They should assert an elegant show of force from a superpower league. The syndicate operates as a drug kingpin of sports and entertainment in a nation packed coast to coast with junkies. Who can’t leverage a setup like this? “Hey, even the worst bartender at spring break does pretty well,” 7­pooh-­poohed Eric Winston, a journeyman offensive lineman, last with the Bengals, belittling ­Goodell’s performance.

Had Peak Football been achieved? As with any empire, there is a sense that for all its riches and popularity, the NFL is never far from some catastrophic ­demise—­or at least might be flying close to the top of the dome.

It was thus vital that this annual meeting convey every confidence at a moment of great prosperity and unease. The owners should feel reassured. Pro football might be played by bulked-up exhibits before tens of millions of viewers, but it’s these puffed-up billionaires who own the store. These are the freaks, the club that Trump couldn’t crack. They are known in their collective as “the Membership.” “The ­Thirty-­two” is an alternative shorthand, or ­thirty-­one if you don’t count the ­shareholder-­owned Green Bay Packers (on the other hand, it still totals ­thirty-­two since the Giants are co-owned by two families, the Tisches and Maras). These members envision themselves as noble stewards of their communities and wield their status with an assumption of ­permanence—­a safe assumption since there are venereal diseases easier to get rid of than, say, the Washington Redskins’ owner, Daniel Snyder. Plus, the Membership gets to keep most of the NFL money and none of the brain damage.