Justice delayed, but not denied for Brady
In federal court and football there is one common rule: Never leave at halftime.
During the Deflategate appeal in New York, those of us with front-row seats knew it was over before NFL attorney Paul Clement stopped speaking. The National Football League couldn’t back its case, and its high-powered lawyer was defenseless in the face of bad facts and a federal appeals panel that seemed annoyed with the prospect of dealing with a strange labor law case.
When Clement took a seat, an attorney turned to me and flipped up his yellow legal pad.
“Tom Brady wins,” it said, underlined twice for effect.
New England’s golden boy would play, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would have to swallow a healthy serving of crushing precedent for years to come.
But with what must have felt like a 21-3 lead, Jeffrey Kessler, Brady’s attorney, quickly saw his commanding advantage disappear. The judges were focused on the quarterback’s cellphone, and two of the three jurists appeared ready to defer to Goodell and his decision in a bizarre arbitration dispute involving footballs that may or may not have been deflated.
The momentum was gone, and soon the decision handed down by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman — in which he chided Goodell for dispensing “his own brand of industrial justice” — would be nothing but an anecdote.
Reporters and lawyers rushed out of court to break the news that Brady would almost certainly sit. It all came falling down, and nothing would change the fact that Brady would miss four games for being generally aware of something that may have not even happened.
That was 11 months ago. Since then, Brady and the Patriots have taken the law into their own hands.
The union never took the Deflategate fiasco to the Supreme Court. Instead, head coach Bill Belichick and his team of peeved Patriots released their frustration on the field. In a coaching master class, the Pats went 3-1 without the best player in the history of the game.
Then he came back, and at 39 put together a nearly flawless season. His Patriots marched through the playoffs, and of course Goodell decided to go everywhere but Foxboro as Brady and the gang took care of business.
On Super Bowl Sunday there was nowhere else to hide. The commish surely thought he had dodged an awkward moment when the Falcons took a commanding lead heading into the half.
Then, much like that strange day in federal court, the script flipped. Goodell’s punishment meant nothing as he handed the Lombardi Trophy to Patriots owner Bob Kraft. Then he left the stage, deflated and blanketed in boos.
Industrial justice, indeed.