FLEXING ITS MUSCLES
Stinson, B7 Taking on the NFL lands ESPN writer a three-week suspension.
Bill Simmons is not at all an ideal martyr. The ESPN sportswriter and commentator is like that medium’s Michael Bay, Chuck Lorre or Dan Brown: he hit on a formula that was appealing to a wide audience a long time ago, and he turned it into an empire that is both hugely popular and not without its critics.
Simmons pioneered voice-of-the-fan sportswriting, where everything relates back to gambling, the Rocky movies, or Beverly Hills 90210 — and every athlete and team must be assigned a historical rank. When the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died, Simmons opened his podcast by trying to determine how many other actors were better than him, as though the best way to remember someone who had just passed away tragically was to figure out if he was a starter on the All-Actor Team.
So, no, Simmons is not one of journalism’s great seekers of truth. And yet, the news that he was disciplined by ESPN — a three-week suspension — for daring to call Roger Goodell a liar has suddenly rendered him a sympathetic character, just another speck of mud on the National Football League’s boot.
More than anything, though, the fact that ESPN has picked a fight with one of its biggest personalities, a notoriously sensitive one at that, suggests that the NFL brought serious pressure to bear, and that it has no intention of casting Goodell overboard, even as scandals related to his discipline of players continue to roil.
This is a remarkable point to have reached. It was only a week ago that Goodell appeared to have reached the end of his plank. There was the amazingly tone-deaf press conference in New York, where the commissioner admitted mistakes, but would only vow to develop policies over the next few months that would demonstrate that the NFL is, to use his words, serious about “punishing behaviour that is totally unacceptable.” A bold stance. It was here that Goodell refused to acknowledge that he, personally, deserved a lot of the blame for the Ray Rice scandal, since he had quite obviously failed to investigate the February incident that ended with Rice rendering his now-wife, Janay, unconscious, before handing the running back a feather-light two-game suspension.
Two weeks after TMZ had published the elevator tape that showed Rice punching Janay in the face, Goodell, finally addressing the matter, was still acting like it was a wacky series of unfortunate events that caused him to tread so lightly around the Rice case, as opposed to a conscious decision on his part. What did Rice tell him about what happened that February night? Can’t say, under appeal. Why was the NFL’s crack security team unable to get the video that TMZ got with a phone call, and a copy of which was with Rice’s lawyers all along? These are the things we are trying to determine, Goodell said. His answers to every pointed question were the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
Not long after that press conference, ESPN published on its web site a long, deeply reported account of the Rice investigation, anonymously sourced but obviously coming from Team Rice, in which it was made clear that Rice felt he gave an honest account of what happened in the elevator — and that both the league and the Ravens seemed to have many opportunities to acquire the tape that would have ended any uncertainty about it.
It was this article that caused Simmons, on the Monday edition of his podcast The B.S. Report, to freak out a little. He called Goodell a liar, said it was f---ing bulls--- to suggest otherwise, and basically dared his bosses to come after him for the “liar” comments. And, lo, challenge accepted.
While hardly anyone who has followed the Rice situation in recent weeks would dispute the substance of Simmons’ comments, it’s true that he lacked the evidence to phrase it quite so bluntly. Goodell is hanging his integrity on a very specific interpretation of what happened: Rice gave him an account of the incident that was “inconsistent” with what the TMZ tape eventually showed. Thus, he and the Ravens brought down the hammer within moments of one another.
But, even accepting Goodell at his word, that inconsistency he clings to amounts to Rice having told him (and the Ravens) that he hit Janay, possibly with an open hand, hard enough to knock her over, where she hit her head on a railing and lost consciousness. Again: this is the charitable version of what Goodell knew when he decided that two games was a suitable suspension for it. The sources in that ESPN article suggest he was told everything, including the nature of the closed-fist punch.
Either way, what the commissioner refuses to acknowledge is that, even if he was submarined by a player who wasn’t fully truthful with him, he’s just as guilty for having not done enough to assess what went on between Rice and his wife before he meted out a paltry suspension.
Roger Goodell could have admitted three weeks ago that his investigation of Ray Rice wasn’t up to the NFL’s usual strict standards, that domestic violence cases need special consideration that he wasn’t prepared for, and that he took responsibility for the mistakes and was pledging to fix them.
Instead, he effectively blamed Rice for his own lack of diligence, conveniently casting the wife abuser as a liar, too. Gosh, the commissioner said, I can’t believe I was misled, and we’ll get it right next time. Goodell made Rice the sacrificial lamb, so it wouldn’t be him.
It seems insane that the NFL’s owners are fine with this. Yes, Goodell’s NFL makes them millions, but so would an NFL with anyone else in charge. Literally anyone. Condi Rice. A random fan. Doug Ford. (Probably not Doug Ford.)
But, a high-profile commentator at an NFL broadcast partner shoots his mouth off, and the response is to protect the commissioner’s honour? Seriously: what honour?
Bill Simmons isn’t the martyr we need, but he’s the martyr we have.