The NFL must reckon with its creation, Jon Gruden
Jon Gruden’s character was entirely formed, or malformed, in football. It’s hard to find someone who was more incubated in it. There is a sense that Gruden was not just speaking for Gruden in those emails, but that he’s a representative NFL man in his blithe bigotry, that he is very much the football establishment in his talk of “queers” and fat-lipped Black men. And it’s going to be a challenge for everyone in and around the league who would like to separate themselves.
What makes his casually superior, straight and center-parted chauvinism so creepy is the traditionalness of his upbringing in the game. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, home of Knute Rockne. Son of a scout and coach. Went to high school in South Bend, Ind., in the shadow of Notre Dame, where his father served as an assistant to the legendary Dan Devine. As a young man, he worked for the most iconic and influential coaching-tree franchises: the San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay Packers. He spent years employed by ESPN and Monday Night Football. They all knew who he was and how he talked. Same with that unctuous scion Bruce Allen and the pervy trading of lewd pictures of topless women. It was learned inside the game.
As the NFL veteran quarterback-turned-observer Sage Rosenfels tweeted, “If you thought that these emails would have been reported to officials by those who were receiving them, well the problem is that these are the same people.”
Gruden is not some bygone relic. He is the current NFL, and as the Las Vegas Raiders head coach, he was at the very top of its pay hierarchy. He wrote those things between the ages of 48 and 58, some of them as recently as 2017, and it matters not at all that they are private expressions. In fact, that only makes them worse — there’s an unnerving divergence from his chatty charm-boy act for cameras that won him such rich contracts. He has spent his life culling rewards in a public-facing business, in which 70 percent of player-colleagues are Black and nearly half the audience is women, in which he had every opportunity to grow a respectful heart. His facile, favored-son abuse of position strikes at the very heart of the league’s public meaning. He made a farce of it.
The NFL professes to be at least partly about the cultivation of excellence regardless of background, and it fights a constant battle against cliché in that respect. If the league has any real import, if it’s something more than mere forum entertainment, it’s in the message that people should be able to become better, that we’re
Sally Jenkins writes for the Washington Post.
Gruden is not some bygone relic. He is the current NFL, and as the Las Vegas Raiders head coach, he was at the very top of its pay hierarchy.