Roger dodger no fun
Goodell appearance pure gold
It’s playoff time, and the Patriots don’t need any delicious subplots to fire up their fans.
The games, all by themselves, do the trick just fine. They are an annual occurrence now, like Opening Day at Fenway, the Harvard-Yale game and the marathon, to the degree you can skip right past wild card weekend and save your pondering for whether it’ll be Saturday night or Sunday afternoon you’ll be trekking down to Foxboro in the divisional round.
Nonetheless, this year’s tourney does offer a delicious subplot for Pats fans: Is NFL commissioner Roger Goodell going to make an appearance at Gillette Stadium? Put another way, will he “show his face” in Foxboro?
Does he have the . . . hey, does anyone want to talk about deflated footballs?
Pats fans and Roger Goodell: No fan base from one franchise ever has had more contempt for a league commissioner.
I suppose Green Bay Packers fans got their noses out of joint when NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle suspended halfback Paul Hornung for the 1963 season because of gambling activities, and OK, Brooklyn Dodgers fans had to be boiling when baseball commissioner Happy Chandler whacked popular manager Leo Durocher for the 1947 because The Lip was “consorting with gamblers.”
But please. The NFL of 1963 wasn’t the all-powerful sports Death Star that it is now, and I’m guessing most Brooklyn fans forgot all about Durocher once Jackie Robinson appeared in the Opening Day lineup for the ’ 47 Dodgers. Plus, there was no social media in those days. No all-sports radio stations, no ESPN and, well, no Tom Brady.
That’s the big difference, right? Tom Brady.
You either believe Brady’s the greatest quarterback of all time, or you believe he’s the second-greatest quarterback of all time, or you’re a complete idiot. He’s won four Super Bowls, he’s played in two others, and he sets a new record every time he completes a pass. No other sport currently has such a longstanding marquee attraction as the NFL has with Brady.
And yet Goodell and the NFL’s poofy lords used Brady as a pawn in some kind of inside-the-boardroom turf war, thus adding Deflategate to our sports lexicon. By the time the last lawyer cashed in, Brady was forced to sit out the first four games of 2016.
And now Goodell gets to Foxboro during football season as often as Hillary Clinton got to Wisconsin during campaign season. Never. Goodell didn’t make the trip up from New York for the beginning of the 2015 season when the Patriots unfurled their Super Bowl XLIX banner, and if he’s been at Gillette at all this past season, he must have had tickets for the dreaded red seats and thus wasn’t watching the game.
Appearing on WFAN’s “Chalk Talk” radio program this past October, Goodell was asked by New York Daily News football columnist Gary Myers if he has any plans to attend a Pats game at Gillette Stadium. Replied Goodell, with the kind of dodge that would have made a politician beam with pride, “I’ll go wherever I need to go.”
(Goodell also said something along the lines of, “My job is to protect the integrity of the game,” according to a piece that appeared on NESN.com, but there’s no mention of whether there was a laugh track involved.)
Now if you try to think as the NFL thinks, it all makes sense. Every NFL game is a live reality TV program, and that means a Roger Goodell appearance Saturday night at Gillette Stadium for the Pats’ playoff showdown against the Houston Texans would, I guess, be a bad look for the league.
Again, I guess. But why not just have some fun with this? And never mind hiding Mr. Integrity of the Game in one of those fancy-schmancy suites. Just have Goodell walk out to the field before the game, accompanied by that dark, menacing music that always fills your movie house when Darth Vader is on the screen, and let everybody play their roles.
Patriots fans could boo. Fans everywhere else, watching the game on TV, could roll their eyes and point out the Pats are cheaters, Brady’s a pretty boy, etc. Goodell could later say something along the lines of, “I’m here because I work for you, the fans,” after which he could, oh, I don’t know, fire an intern.
WWE impresario Vince McMahon would kill to have one of his top villains do his thing in front of that many eyeballs. Just do it, Roger. The league’s integrity demands it.