Category Archives: nfl

The NFL bet

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Fifty years ago, the idea of putting the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, coupling the two primary examples of American excess, was as surreal as those two prodigious entities. Mostly because the National Football League—its Super Bowl showcase already out of control in 1974 and proclaimed by a commentator in that year’s host city of Houston to be “the championship of the solar system”—was adamant in its holier-than-thou stance against gambling.

“I would go anywhere,” then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle declared during Super Bowl Week of ‘74, “to testify against any proposals favoring legalized betting in pro sports. There is no doubt about the suspicions involved with betting, and we must be above suspicion.”

But here we are. The NFL now gleefully partners with multiple sportsbook operations—MGM, Caesars, FanDuel, DraftKings—has bookmaking establishments inside NFL stadiums that are open on game days, and debuted official NFL slot machines in Vegas days before this year’s big game. Where there is money to be made by the league…

It was right to the point, then, for the New York Times last week to note that the first Super Bowl played in Sin City “feels like a moment manufactured for” Hunter S. Thompson “as Las Vegas furthers the polishing of its image with the imprimatur of the NFL, which has made a seminal turn of its own with a public embrace of the gambling industry.” Thompson, creator of the subjective, first-person narrative he called “gonzo journalism,” attended that 1974 Super Bowl and produced a Rolling Stones magazine article headlined “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.”

That was a take-off on Thompson’s best-selling 1971 book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” And the idea of the Rolling Stones piece was to subject the NFL to Thompson’s critical eye; though he considered himself a football fan, he cast himself as apart from what he saw as the NFL’s self-serving model of integrity.

For Rolling Stone, Thompson wrote that the Super Bowl headquarters hotel in Houston was “jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion) and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the country who roamed through the drunken, randy crowd….”

That Super Bowl Week, I spent the better part of one day with Thompson, assigned by my Newsday editor to study the then-36-year-old, slightly bald, bespectacled, casually dressed celebrity author who smoked Benson & Hedges through a cigarette holder. (Not the only thing he smoked.) And the irony was that he appeared to be searching in vain for the Las Vegas cliché of rampant immorality.

During lunch in the lobby of the aforementioned hotel, he muttered about the absolute normality surrounding him. Where were the players and high rollers propositioning prostitutes? He drove me without warning to a dilapidated roadside bar—which appeared to be a topless joint, though not in use for that activity mid-day—but quickly left, with nothing to report.

We spent some time at a Super Bowl practice session for one of the teams—Miami eventually clobbered Minnesota in the dull title game to come—and Thompson decided that “the players almost all strike me as being the same person. I’ve never seen so many boring people.”

Then, as now, the hordes of reporters had no real news to unearth; everything about Super Bowl opponents already has been widely disseminated by the time they gather at the championship site. “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here,” Thompson said. “There really isn’t anything happening.”

He subsequently wrote for Rolling Stone, “For eight long and degrading days, I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs—which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast…”

It must be noted that “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was straightforward in Thompson’s depictions of his own drug-induced haze—pill-popping, pot-smoking, tequila-swilling, acid-dropping. And that, in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” he described his “crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon and the National Football League…”

The Super Bowl—I covered seven of the extravaganzas—never appeared to reach the level of disreputable behavior perceived by Thompson, though his radar likely was more sensitive to such grotesqueries. The event most definitely is over-the-top—a massive royal ball for the elite, scripted as a morality play of American values and competitiveness, sold as entertainment for the masses—thanks to the reach of television. In short, a voracious money magnet for the league and its partners.

Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, of suicide. But he appeared to sense, a half-century ago, this just-consummated no-guilt relationship, which nicely fits Sin City’s marketed dispensation that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” There already are hints that the Super Bowl could return there annually.

If so, they’re made for each other.

Also a football star

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Maybe the best summation of Jim Brown, on the occasion of his death this week at 87, came from Brown himself during a brief 2010 interview.

“I am a born activist,” he said then. “I have an opinion about most things.” He was sitting in a make-up chair that day, preparing to offer his judgements on a number of topics on the cable show CenterStage, which featured mostly reverential sessions with sports stars and other celebrities.

Of course Brown was a football wizard, still considered—now almost six decades after the end of his professional career with the Cleveland Browns—among the sport’s handful of greatest performers. He was a movie star, the first Black action hero on the silver screen. He was an outspoken advocate for civil rights, founder of programs to support Black businesses and ex-convicts attempting to restart their lives. But, too, he was arrested a half-dozen times for assault charges against women, including his second wife.

He was an intimidating presence, 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds during his playing days, and acknowledged having issues with anger management. Of the Martin Luther King Jr./Mahatma Gandi philosophy of non-violent resistance, he told Esquire magazine in 2008, “I don’t know what they’re talking about. Spit on me and I’ll knock you out. I ain’t going to sing and march, man. But I’m fair.”

He never hesitated to speak his mind, regularly challenging expectations. At 29, at the peak of his football powers, having just led the NFL in rushing for an eighth time in his ninth season, Brown abruptly retired to go into movies full time. “People asked me, ‘Why would you want to quit?’ I said, ‘I make more money [as an actor], have Raquel Welch as a leading lady. I don’t get hit. They call me Mr. Brown.’”

He was born off the southern coast of Georgia on St. Simons Island, which at the time was an all-Black region with a slave-trade history but later was transformed into a resort community. He father abandoned the family six weeks after Brown’s birth and his mother relocated to the New York City suburbs to work as a domestic, leaving young Jim with a grandmother until he moved north to Manhasset, Long Island, at 8.

He excelled in football, track, basketball and especially lacrosse in high school and “pitched a couple of no-hitters,” he said, “but I wasn’t good at baseball.” Reports that the Yankees offered him $150,000 were “an exaggeration,” he said, “but I did get a letter from [Yankees manager] Casey Stengel.”

He always claimed that he experienced “no racism” during school and a Manhasset attorney named Ken Molloy organized fund-raisers in the local community to pay for Brown’s first year at Syracuse University, where he competed in basketball, track and lacrosse but was the only Black on the freshman football team and wasn’t offered an athletic scholarship until he demonstrated an ability to make the varsity.

That accomplished, he once scored 43 points in a single game (via touchdowns and placekicking) against Colgate.

“Sports,” Brown said during that 2010 chat, “always make people react a certain way. People are impressed by athletes. Overly so. I get a lot of things coming my way because I’m an athlete, and sometimes it isn’t fair.”

But it was his football ability that removed so many complications. He found less racism in football than in lacrosse, which he always said was his better sport. Paul Brown, his first coach with the Browns, “didn’t like my attitude of independence,” he said, “but he loved the way I played.”

A decade after Brown retired, in October 1975, when I was covering the New York Giants’ preparations to face the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo’s superstar running back O.J. Simpson, Giants coaches compared their challenge to what every NFL team had known about defending Jim Brown.

“When I was with Detroit,” then Giants assistant Floyd Peters said, “every time we’d play the Browns we’d try everything to stop Jimmy. He’d still get his 125 yards. Same thing when I went to Philadelphia.…Our linebacker would go stand right next to him; the old joke about going with the guy when he goes to the peanut stand.

“Once, we thought we’d figured him out,” Peters said. “Studied him on film and began to notice that on every play, he’d cut back after he went through the hole. So one of our dumb tackles made sure he was ready for the cutback, and sure enough, here came Jimmy. The tackle gets him down, and his eyes get great big and he yells—for everyone to hear, including Jimmy—‘Hey, he DOES cut back!’ On the next play Jimmy went right past the guy, all the way for a touchdown.”

Likewise, Brown lulled opponents into believing they were wearing him down by dragging himself weakly off the ground following each tackle, trudging slowly back to the huddle. Only to materialize—faster and stronger—on the next play.

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil,” celebrated sports columnist Red Smith once wrote, “there is no other like Mr. Brown.”

There now are 12 men who have surpassed Brown’s 1963 NFL single-season rushing record of 1,862 yards. But all of their careers bled into the league’s expansion from 14 to 16 games per season (Brown had four seasons with 12 games, five with 14). And none have matched Brown’s one-season mark of 6.4 yards per carry.

That’s one definition of activism.

Not the Detroit Lions

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(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Here comes another Super Bowl, our 21st-Century version of Christians vs. lions. And I am wondering, in spite of its enormous popularity—more than 50,000 spectators attending gladiatorial games at the Colosseum back when everyone used Roman numerals—did the whole Christians-lions thing end because they ran out of Christians?

What if the National Football League, the bread and circuses of our modern culture, were to run out of players? Is there any chance that increased awareness of participants’ brain damage, something we’ve been reading about for more than a decade, will multiply the number of liability suits, gradually scare off insurance companies, advertisers, schools and colleges—not to mention parents of potential kiddie footballers—in a domino effect that eventually would dry up the NFL’s feeder system? Putting football (like democracy?) on a slow-motion decline into oblivion.

Silly, no?

The Super Bowl, and football in general, remain our most popular form of escapist entertainment. Of the 100 most-watched telecasts in 2021, 75 were NFL games. The NFL’s annual revenue, which has topped $15 billion a year, is roughly four times what it was at the beginning of the century. The league’s new 11-year deal with media partners is valued at $110 billion. We clearly love the spectacle.

Yet the sport’s barbaric nature is progressively more obvious with the accumulating reports of CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head.

After the 2005 publication of forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu’s 2002 discovery of CTE in the brain of late Pittsburgh Steeler Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, there was a 37.8 percent drop in tackle football participation among all ages—from 8.4 million to 5.22 million—over the next 12 years.

In 2015, when a medical study revealed increased risk of memory problems for kids who played tackle football prior to age 12, the NFL took evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5—cracking heads in youth leagues. To keep the supply of gridders coming.

But news of middle- and high-school teams being suspended has spread across the nation—sometimes due directly to heath concerns, often because there no longer were enough children willing to play.

The NFL, which initially dismissed Omalu’s findings, at last established a concussion protocol and instituted penalties for intentional head-to-head blows it calls “targeting.” But Omalu continued to argue that brain damage isn’t strictly from clinically diagnosed concussions and that safety measures such as improved helmets “don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull. We have to take the head out of the game.”

According to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, the disease now has been found in the brains of more than 315 former NFL players—including 24 who died in their 20s and 30s, several of whom committed suicide. The most recent was 32-year-old Phillip Adams, who last April shot and killed six people in a violent rampage in South Carolina before killing himself.

That’s a lot more unsettling than watching Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, earlier this season, emerging from a tackle rubber-legged, with little imaginary birds twirling around his helmet. Or Arizona defender Budda Baker being carted off the field on a stretcher after a violent collision during a recent playoff game.

Though CTE is detectable only in posthumous examinations, researchers are concerned about the cognitive fog and erratic and impulsive behavior in the disease’s potential victims. So when Tampa Bay receiver Antonio Brown bizarrely stripped off his equipment and walked off the field, mid-game, against the Jets last month, BU’s CTE Center co-founder Dr. Chris Nowinski acknowledged in an online post, “Like you, I wonder if Antonio Brown’s behavior is caused by CTE.”

We will only know if his brain is examined after he is dead. When it is too late.

 

 

More than bad P.R.

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There is a guy out there who calls himself the Reputation Doctor and I can think of at least two prominent veterans of the football coaching trade who could use his services right now. A sort of surgeon specializing in character repair, his name is Mike Paul, who has been praised by BusinessWeek as “The Master of Disaster;” by Sports Illustrated as “Mr. Fixit;” by various political leaders as “The Crisis King.”

And if there ever were public figures in need of esteem convalescence, we could start with Jon Gruden and Urban Meyer, a couple of fellows who appear to consider themselves apart from polite society. Judging by recently revealed emails and videotapes, Gruden and Meyer seemed to assume the job bestowed unlimited access to power and privilege, a free pass to belittle and badger whomever they pleased.

I once spoke to the Reputation Doctor while reporting on an embarrassing transgression by some accomplished sports star or other. Of course he spoke only in general terms, since he was not working with that athlete, but a central tidbit he did offer was that “if they were my clients, I’d say, ‘You don’t want people to doubt your word.’”

Which gets right to the problem with Gruden and Meyer. Gruden, after detailed revelations of racist, sexist and homophobic emails he had authored over several years, insisted he had “not a blade of racism in me” and claimed he “never meant to hurt anyone.” He resigned as Las Vegas Raiders coach under pressure—amid the high probability that not a soul believed his weak mea culpa.

Meyer called evidence of him canoodling with a young woman in a suburban Columbus, Ohio bar, after he had skipped his Jacksonville team’s flight home from its loss in Cincinnati, proof only of “a bad decision…stupid.” Jacksonville owner Shad Kahn called Meyer’s behavior “inexcusable” but kept him around for the Jaguars’ fifth consecutive loss the next weekend. Meyer’s questionable conduct aside, losing five straight games in his first NFL job is not a good career look.

Meanwhile, character witnesses have not exactly rushed to either man’s defense and subsequent reporting not only reinforced unsavory qualities in both coaches, but raised the question of whether they represented a decidedly low standard among their peers.

Writing for Slate, Alex Kirshner called Gruden “a spitting image of the worst stereotype you had in your head of a meathead, authoritarian football coach” and concluded that Gruden’s attitude toward Blacks, women and gays “wasn’t an affront to the NFL as much as an embodiment of it.”

New York Magazine’s Will Leitch contended that it is “becoming increasingly clear” that the Gruden’s emails were “about the entire culture of the NFL….You want to know what the NFL is really like? The Gruden emails—again, sent by one of the most powerful figures in the league, without the slightest worry of reproach, to top-ranking NFL officials at their corporate email addresses—are the opening pages of the entire story…”

William Rhoden of The Undefeated argued that the “reality is that the NFL, for all its attempts to move forward, has been revealed as a regressive organization populated by white men who hold views about race and power that are antithetical to progress and enlightenment. Trust me, Gruden is not the only person who holds these beliefs. He’s the only one stupid enough, or emboldened enough, to express them via email.” At The Atlantic, Jemele Hill declared that “the NFL is full of Jon Grudens.”

Urban Meyer has not been similarly cast as reflecting league-wide boorishness—not yet, anyway. But shortly after he took the Jacksonville job, there was a published reminder that one of his first hires was strength coach Chris Doyle, who had been forced out at the University of Iowa over allegations he had made racist statements and had bullied players. (Doyle resigned months ago but denied any wrongdoing.)

Sounds like the NFL needs more than a public relations medic.

New (NFL) math

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Though hardly a watershed moment in NFL history, the recent revision of rules related to uniform numbers nevertheless has stirred discussions of athletes’ traditional (almost spiritual) attachment to their numbers as well as the league’s long-perceived stodginess.

Nothing new there. In the 1970s, during my days covering the New York Giants, there was a wide receiver named Danny Buggs, drafted out of West Virginia, who requested jersey No. 8 when he showed up at rookie camp. Sorry, he was told; wrong number. Requirements at the time—just now changed—were that Buggs, as a wide receiver, had to pick something from 80 to 89.

Buggs was given 86 and later 88, but remained uncomfortable with both. “8 means a lot to me,” he said. “I wore it in college….It’s psychological or something. I don’t know. I feel lighter in 8.”

Bobby Hammond, a running back who was briefly Buggs’ teammate, also requested 8, which he had worn at Morgan State. He too was informed of that impossibility because, starting in 1972, NFL running backs had been restricted to digits from 20 to 49. Hammond was assigned 46, though he stubbornly wore 8 in practice.

A half-century later, we have a recount. For the upcoming 2021 season, NFL wide receivers and running backs will be allowed any number from 1 to 49 and 80 to 89.

With this new numbers racket, articles naturally have surfaced taking the league to task for its past sin of being too buttoned-up—The No Fun League—over all these years. Why, before this, couldn’t players wear any number they wanted?

The answer was that codifying numbers by position benefited officiating crews to instantly differentiate, for instance, interior linemen from eligible receivers (which the new system essentially continues). The NFL also believed it was “simpler for fans” to be able to associate numbers with players’ roles. So in 1972, the league decreed: 1-19 for quarterbacks and kickers; 20-49 for running backs and defensive backs; 50-59 for centers and linebackers; 60-79 for defensive linemen and interior offensive linemen (except centers); 80-89 for wide receivers and tight ends; 90-99 for exhibition game use only (when teams’ rosters are larger).

No exceptions! Except…The Giants had signed a celebrated linebacker out of Michigan State for the 1973 season named Brad Van Pelt, and Van Pelt had included a stipulation in his contract—shortly before the numbers rule passed—that he wear No. 10.

Which he did for 11 seasons. Until he was traded to the Raiders—who then were based in Los Angeles—and took advantage of a 1984 tweak in the numbers’ rule (allowing 90s for linebackers) by wearing No. 91.

Football observers even older than myself know that long, long ago, on a planet far, far away, no number was out of bounds on the gridiron. Red Grange, a superstar halfback of the 1920s and 30s (before that position was known as “running back”), wore 77. The University of Michigan back Tom Harmon, who twice led the nation in scoring in the 1940s and played briefly for the Rams, was widely referred to as “Old 98,” his unique uniform number.

These days, smaller numbers—and, specifically, single digits—are all the fashion, as a glance at any college roster demonstrates. What hasn’t changed is that players get attached to their numbers, often as early as high school, and acknowledge that they “feel like an 85” or “feel like a 7….” and prefer to take the number with them as long as they are playing.

Now, basically, they can, though there is a financial catch. Any NFL veteran wanting to switch numbers for the 2021 season will have to buy out the existing allotment of his personalized jerseys that are on the market featuring his old number. Still, this is a matter of identity, and the NFL Network analyst Andrew Hawkins, who had worn 2 as a college wide receiver and 0 in the Canadian League, expects, for instance, to see single-digit wide receiver numbers proliferate. Because, he said, “You look good, you feel good, you play good.”

And maybe, as Danny Buggs said long ago, you feel lighter.

Anybody have a problem with that?

“Good luck trying to block the right people now!” lamented old pro Tom Brady in a tweet. What if his linemen won’t know who to knock down if their opponents are wearing smaller jersey numbers? “DUMB,” Brady railed. “Why not let the Linemen wear whatever they want, too? Why have numbers? Just have colored jerseys…Why not wear the same number?…DUMB.”

It has been reported that Brady’s former coach, New England’s Bill Belichick, likewise is against the new number allowances. That guy across the line dressed in No. 3 might be either a cornerback or a linebacker—maybe a kicker—and then what?

In the end, the sum of all this doesn’t seem to amount to much.

Go figure.

Re-name that team

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For a new name, I suggest “Washington Pigskins.” That would check all the boxes: 1) History, by retaining a reference to the ‘Skins moniker that has been part of the NFL team’s identity since 1933. 2) The sport in question, since footballs, though never made from a pig’s skin, nevertheless have been stuck with the description for more than a century. 3) Washington fans’ particular fondness for members of the massive offensive line, known as the Hogs, that produced three Super Bowl titles in the 1980s and ‘90s. 4) and most important, it’s a handle that wouldn’t insult anyone.

Sports nicknames range from the geographically (Colorado Rockies) or historically (Philadelphia 76ers) appropriate to simple alliteration (Baylor Bears) and wieldiness (Minnesota Wild). They aren’t of great import and occasionally are downright wacky. A minor-league hockey team in Georgia was the Macon Whoopies. There was a high school in Illinois called the Polo Marcos. The UC Santa Cruz teams are known as the Banana Slugs.

But there is this obtuse old habit of pro, college and high school teams calling themselves Indians, Braves, Chiefs and so on—and employing wild-eyed, bloodthirsty-looking caricatures, feather-wearing fans and “war” chants as part of their act. At least since the early 1970s, indigenous peoples have been raising public objections. Please stop, Native American leaders said: “We’re people, not mascots.”

Some teams did stop, decades ago. Dartmouth College ditched “Indians” for “Big Green.” Stanford University replaced “Indians” with “Cardinal.” St. John’s University transitioned from “Redmen” to “Red Storm.” Just to cite a few. Yet the highest-profile of the offenders, the professional football team in the nation’s capital, has persistently used—and repeatedly defended—a racial slur as its brand for 87 years. The Washington Redskins.

Retired Washington Post reporter Leonard Shapiro this week recalled confronting then-team owner Jack Kent Cook in 1992 with Webster’s unabridged dictionary’s derogatory definition of the nickname. That was when activists attempted (but failed) to remove trademark rights to the name.

“I don’t care what Webster’s says,” Shapiro quoted Cook. “I use the Oxford Dictionary, and my dear boy, it says no such thing.”

In the same lordly fashion of Cook and George Preston Marshall—the avowed racist who founded the team, burdened it with the “Redskins” name and was the last NFL owner to integrate his roster—current owner Daniel Snyder has continued to belligerently resist demands to show a little respect.

In 2013, during yet another round of protests by Native American groups and an increasingly mainstream awareness of the disparaging term, Snyder swore “never” to change it. At the time, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray refused to utter the nickname, referring only to “our Washington team.” Sports Illustrated football maven Peter King and my former Newsday colleague Tom Rock did the same. A D.C. high school announced that it was barring all Washington team paraphernalia on its campus.

(On that occasion, the satirical “news” site, The Onion, acknowledged Snyder’s willfully tone-deaf stubbornness by recommending he change the name to “the D.C. Redskins.” Another snarky source proposed that, if he was so intent of keeping “Redskins,” Snyder could at least show a touch of sensitivity by tweaking the logo to a redskin potato.)

True to form, Snyder—backed by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at the time—cited polls claiming that Native Americans weren’t put off by the name, and took refuge in the weak excuse that he was preserving the team’s sacred tradition and heritage.

That struck Duke University cultural anthropologist Orin Starn, who was teaching a Native American studies program, as a “spurious argument. You don’t want to keep the tradition of separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites or the tradition of keeping black players out of professional sports [as Marshall had].”

Except, of course: “Rich men don’t like to be told what to do,” Starn said.

So here’s what appears to be different now amid the nationwide demonstrations over minority human rights and social justice following George Floyd’s murder by a Minnesota policeman. The corporate giants FedEx and Nike, speaking Snyder’s language—big money—have sensed a different answer blowing in the wind and have let Snyder know it.

Snyder suddenly is saying the team is open to a “thorough review” of the nickname, and already alternatives are being offered on social media: The Washington Redtails—a nod to the nickname for the crimson-tailed planes flown by World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first Black military aviators in World War II. The Washington Americans. Generals. Presidents. Lincolns. Memorials. Veterans. Jeffersons. Roosevelts. Monuments.

Snyder could take his pick. Or, he could keep his willfully degrading team name. And retain his personal appellation: the Washington Pigheaded.

 

 

Play now, heal (and pay) later.

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In many ways, Nick Buoniconti was a parable of the football culture. He punched above his weight—a low draft choice, theoretically too small to be a pro linebacker, but whose doggedness and toughness landed him in the Hall of Fame. He played hurt, a point of highest praise in his sport, and won two Super Bowl rings. Yet he spent the last four years of his life, before his death at 78 this week, “paying the price,” in his own words—suffering from dementia he believed resulted from more than 500,000 hits to the head during his 14-year professional career.

Yet, to the end, and even having endured the trauma of his son’s paralysis, the result of a college football injury in 1985, Buoniconti insisted that he “always loved” football. “I still do.”

During my six years of covering the NFL, the longest conversation I ever had with Buoniconti was during Super Bowl Week in 1974, when he made clear his realization—and acceptance—of the “athlete’s dilemma,” what author John Weston Parry described in his 2017 book as “sacrificing health for wealth and fame.”

It was five days before the Big Game in Houston, during a post-workout media opportunity on the Dolphins’ practice field as Buoniconti’s Miami Dolphins were preparing to face the Minnesota Vikings. Almost off-handedly, Buoniconti described the pain from three floating chips in his right elbow and how his coach, Don Shula, had just nixed surgery to fix the problem.

“It’s my elbow,” Buoniconti said. “But what can I say? Shula decided that if I had the operation before the Super Bowl, there may have been complications and I wouldn’t be ready to play this week. I’ve learned that it’s a player’s obligation to play.”

His wasn’t the only example that day of football’s split-screen image, a requirement of yeoman strength in juxtaposition to physical disarray. Among Buoniconti’s teammates, safety Jake Scott had five metal screws holding together a broken hand (but joked that the team’s biggest fear was “a lightning storm.”) Guard Bob Kuechenberg had a pin in his right shoulder, cornerback Tim Foley had a pin in his left shoulder and tight end Jim Mandich had a pin in his left hand.

None of them missed the game (won by the Dolphins for a second consecutive Super Bowl title).

Buoniconti had injured his elbow three weeks earlier and aggravated it in the conference title game the following weekend. Because he was having “trouble moving my fingers and there was radiating pain down my arm,” he said, Dolphins’ physician Herbert Virgin agreed to operate immediately.

Except: “Well, after the [conference championship] game that night,” Buoniconti said, “I dropped into King Arthur’s Place [a Miami bar/restaurant] and saw Shula there and he offered to buy me a beer. I said I couldn’t, that I had to be going. Shula asked, ‘Where?’ I said, ‘I’m going over to the hospital to get the bone chips taken out of my elbow.’ Shula said, ‘What?!’”

Shula summoned Virgin, two other physicians and Buoniconti for a consultation that, according to Buoniconti, went like this: “There were five people there and one man, Shula, decided I shouldn’t have the operation. You know, we decided. But we really didn’t. Shula will probably give me hell for saying this stuff.”

Likely, Buoniconti—a two-time all-pro—was protected from discipline over that loose-lips moment for the same reason Shula blocked his medical care: Shula needed Buoniconti in the Super Bowl.

My phone call to Virgin later that day brought the doctor’s refusal to discuss the situation. “I am under strictest orders from the coach not to discuss this unless [Shula] gives permission,” he said. Shula denied any interference. “Did Virgin say he couldn’t discuss this?” Shula said. “Well, anything that’s of a confidential nature within our team, we prefer to keep it that way.”

Virgin later called back to say he in fact had permission to explain that “it’s no big deal. Nick can’t injure himself further. If it bothers him during the game, we’ll just give him some Darvon, and that’s only glorified aspirin.” (Darvon was banned by the FDA in 2010 because of heart risks.)

There are endless examples similar to Shula’s stiff-arm response to prioritizing health over football, and Buoniconti acknowledged as much that day.

“We all know this stuff about having arthritis 20 years from now,” he said then. “But, heck, I understand that football players don’t live past 50, anyway, because of their injuries and because they tend to be overweight as soon as they finish competing. But I’m not thinking of 20 years from now. I’m thinking of Sunday.”

He was 33 at the time and he lived past 50. By 28 years. But there was a football price.

 

Giants, meet the new boss

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Midstream, the New York Giants are changing horses. This defies proverbial wisdom, though it certainly doesn’t go against sporting custom. When a team loses 10 of its first 12 games, as the Giants have, the coach is susceptible to the heave-ho, an incomplete season notwithstanding. But with no guarantee that things will get better before they get worse.

I have seen this movie more than once in my nearly half-century as a sports journalist. Most similar to this week’s developments, there was 1976. Then-Giants owner Wellington Mara declared that “changing coaches in midseason always has been repugnant to me, because I’ve always felt that is a cop-out by management to pin the shortcomings on one man.”

Even as he spoke, Mara nevertheless had given coach Bill Arnsparger his pink slip a week before Halloween. The team was 0-7.

The best rationale for the move, Mara admitted, was that the players might respond to “another personality.” Certainly Arnsparger’s replacement, the personable John McVey, was a breath of fresh air compared to the intense, insecure Arnsparger.

The Giants lost their next two games, anyway, finished the year with four losses in seven games under McVey and won only 11 of 30 over the next two seasons before he, too, was let go. Proving two things: 1) That the Giants needed better players as much as they needed a different coach, and 2) Years of scholarly research and psychological interpretation correctly have predicted that the time-honored mid-season coaching shakeup is a 50-50 bet, at best.

Now we have Steve Spagnuolo, who has just replaced Ben McAdoo to lead a team fairly decimated by injury and deteriorating confidence. And good luck to Spagnuolo.

As just one example, a year-old study in the Economist, with graphs and charts and a numbing collection of numbers, analyzed performance effects of in-season managerial changes over 15 years in soccer’s English Premier League. “We find,” authors of the study wrote, “that some managerial changes are successful, while others are counterproductive. On average, performance does not improve….”

When the New York Islanders switched coaches early in the 2010-11 hockey season, I called sports psychologist John Murray—who has worked with coaches and athletes in all professional sports—for his take on this retooling process and got the same response. “I do believe there are benefits to novelty [of a new boss’ voice],” Murray said. “But you can’t substitute [player] quality.”

As far back as 1963, a fellow named Oscar Grusky, for a Journal of Sport Behavior paper, examined managerial changes in baseball and found a “negative correlation” between replacing the team’s skipper and its won-lost record. Grusky’s interpretation was that the manager/coach replacement process for a struggling team “is also disruptive to the organization. The uncertainty associated with a new leader with a different agenda and new ideas may result in even poorer sport team performance.”

There’s another factor at play. That is, “You can control performance,” Murray said, “but you don’t control the outcome in sports.” Statistics and maximum performance by a team’s players do not necessarily translate into winning.

Neither does a coach’s past success predict the best results in a different situation. Arnsparger had come to the Giants with the reputation of being a “defensive genius” and two Super Bowl rings, but seemed completely lost as a head coach. McAdoo had gotten the Giants’ job last year based on his top-notch work as an offensive coordinator.

A couple of years ago I asked John Mara, Wellington’s son and now half-owner of the team, about the science—or is it art?—of finding a great boss. “Sports is different,” he said, “because the person has to be strong enough for being constantly in the spotlight, having every one of his decisions criticized and talked about on sports talk radio.

“You don’t have to have Albert Einstein, but it’s good to have someone with some intelligence. And not someone who thinks he knows it all.” John Mara quoted the late George Young, five times the league’s executive of the year who had turned the team around in the 1980s after John’s father signed him as general manager.

“You hire somebody with a high energy level. And something to prove.”

And hope the new horse can swim.

(John Mara)

 

Tim Tebow: Fake news?

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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those immune to Tebow Fatigue. And the rest of us weary souls.

It is now going on five years that Tim Tebow, his glory days as a Heisman Trophy winner and a brief flash of pro football success well behind him, has been vainly chasing a second act of athletic prominence. Rejected by four NFL teams, Tebow has turned to baseball, laboring on the sport’s lowest-rung, at 29, amid aspirants a decade younger than he is.

And, while his Sisyphean toil may not be fake news, it long ago began to feel like a transposed version of crying-wolf headlines. Over and over, there have been urgent prophecies, never fulfilled, of Tebow as savior or—at least—change agent.

Just months after his NFL apotheosis in a 2011 playoff victory, Tebow was traded by the Denver Broncos to the New York Jets, who spent all of the next season threatening to match the public relations hullaballoo by unleashing him in place of struggling quarterback Mark Sanchez, or as a runner-passer in the Wildcat formation, or as a receiver, or possibly as a running back.

Nothing ever came of any of that. Tebow, the erstwhile miracle man, mostly sat on the bench, was released after the season, spent one training camp with Philadelphia and another with New England but never played another NFL game. Always with much fanfare. Now, in what must be considered his athletic second language, Tebow is attempting to learn professional baseball with the Mets’ Class A farm team, the delightfully named Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies.

Jay Busbee of Yahoo! Sports wrote this week that Tebow “is playing baseball and nobody knows why.” His .143 batting average through April 19, against bush-league pitching, hardly forecasts big-time potential. So there are only his credentials as a celebrity—these days, mostly famous for being famous—that keep him in the public eye and make him the biggest attraction at the Columbia ballpark.

Come see the old Florida Gator star quarterback tackle another sport! (And don’t forget to stop in the gift shop on the way out for your Tebow Fireflies’ replica jersey.)

Surely, part of the narrative is Tebow’s recognition factor beyond sports, through his conspicuous displays of Christian faith. And even if his prayerful kneeling after football touchdowns—“Tebowing,” which he trademarked in 2012—wasn’t necessarily embraced for religious implications, it provided a fad to be widely mimicked.

The pose also was compared sarcastically to Rodin’s famous sculpture, “The Thinker.” So, segueing from that, let us ponder the puzzlement of the ongoing publicity glut.

Really: Why? Tebow hardly is the first jock to attempt a football-baseball transition. Apart from Deion Sanders—who is the only man to play in both the World Series and Super Bowl—Bo Jackson, D.J. Dozier, Drew Henson, Chad Hutchinson, Brian Jordan and Matt Kinzer are just some recent names on a long list of men who reached the top level in both sports. Plenty others—including two former Heisman winners, Chris Weinke and Ricky Williams—worked both the NFL and baseball’s minors.

One of those was John Elway. In 1982, the summer before the Stanford quarterback was made the NFL’s No. 1 draft choice, Elway dabbled in the minors with the Yankees’ Class A team in Oneonta, N.Y., while Yankee boss George Steinbrenner was convinced Elway would be his Major League right fielder within three years. Yet there wasn’t nearly the fuss made over him that the more limited Tebow is experiencing.

Elway, furthermore, was a can’t-miss NFL star, who followed his 16-year Hall of Fame career with the Denver Broncos by becoming the team’s general manager–and is the man, skeptical of the quarterback skills of one Tim Tebow, who sent Tebow packing in that 2012 trade to the Jets.

Here’s another argument—flimsy, I admit—why the Tebow story feels overdone. If one will accept a spelling quirk, there already has been a Tebow—Tebeau—in the Major Leagues. Three, in fact, in the late 1800s. George Tebeau (.269 average over six years), his brother Patsy (.279 in 13 years) and Pussy—so called, apparently, because his initials were C.A.T.; Charles Alston Tebeau—who was no relation to the other two. Pussy played only two games and hit .500, for the old Cleveland Spiders of the National League.

Anyway, now we have Tim Tebow, a Firefly. Yes, he’s generating plenty of light. But hardly delivering a shock. There is a big difference between a lightning bug and lightning. End of story.

Another Raiders’ road trip

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Time to trot out the old Gertrude Stein quote that in Oakland, “there’s no there there.” With news that the NFL Raiders will be running off to Las Vegas comes the sense of a lost place. And, just to further disorient football fans and civic leaders, the team crassly intends to squat at the Oakland Coliseum for at least two more seasons while its palatial new playground is being built in Sin City.

“Home” games are looking like there might be no “here” there. Plenty of Raiders’ fans, often described as among the league’s most passionate and loyal, essentially are reacting to the Raiders’ good-bye by offering to make them sandwiches. You know: Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?

That includes Scott McKibben, the man who heads the authority that controls the Oakland Coliseum. McKibben told USA Today that it is “actually financially to our benefit” if the Raiders don’t exercise their option to honor their lease through 2018—a clear suggestion that the Raiders pack up and leave immediately. The Coliseum generates $7 million a year from the team but spends $8 million.

There doesn’t appear to be a real danger that the Raiders will wind up like the imaginary Port Ruppert Mundys in Philip Roth’s “Great American Novel”—a baseball team in the World War II era forced to play its entire schedule on the road because its stadium was used as a soldier’s embarkation point.

But this promises to be a mighty awkward divorce. And not so different from the last time the Raiders said “See you, suckers” to Oakland citizens. That was in 1982, when the Raiders’ founder and original owner, Al Davis—father to current majority owner Mark, who inherited Al’s tendency toward itchy feet—went looking for greener grass in Los Angeles.

The weird logistics that year included having the Raiders continue to live and train in Oakland—practicing all week within view of the Oakland Coliseum—then flying the 365 miles to L.A. for Sunday “home” games. It was a bit like having the New York Jets play home games in Pittsburgh, or the New England Patriots play home games in Buffalo.

Players reported sometimes crossing paths with Oakland residents who marveled, “I didn’t know y’all were still around here.” The local newspaper, which had recorded the Raiders’ every move for the previous 22 seasons, quit covering the team. The Raiders’ fan club disbanded, though some members went on insisting, according to that season’s Raiders’ running back Kenny King, “You’re not the L.A. Raiders. You’re the Oakland Raiders.”

King’s response: “If they want to call us that, fine. I’m a Raider. A Whatever Raider.”

So, here we are again. The Whatever Raiders, expecting to play at least one more season 500 miles from their future digs, are somehow expecting Oakland folks to go on supporting them. Mark Davis, having lived up to his father’s allegiance to the team’s pirate logo by attempting to plunder taxpayers for a better stadium deal, nevertheless went on local radio and claimed, “I still have a feeling for the fans in the Bay Area. And I’ve met with a number of them. And anything I say to them isn’t going to soothe them, and it makes this whole thing bittersweet.”

Not that such emotions stopped him from merrily abandoning those fans, the same way the original Raiders left Oakland for Los Angeles in 1982, then walked out 13 years later on the spectator following they had built in L.A. to return to Oakland.

And now Davis has insisted that the Raiders will carry the “Oakland” name until settling in Vegas in 2019 or 2020.

But why should Bay Area citizens still contribute to Davis’ bank account with the Oakland Coliseum again becoming the Park of the Lost Raiders? With speculation that the team might seek a temporary home at the San Francisco 49ers’ stadium in Santa Clara—or even in San Antonio, Tex.—before its Vegas stadium is available, why should any fans buy into a one-way, short-term relationship?

Davis insisted that he really wanted to stay in Oakland, but had no choice.

Whatever, Raiders.