On Friday night, the N.F.L.’s social-media accounts posted a video of the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, sitting in the basement of his home, in Bronxville, New York, and reading from a script. Reading from scripts is part of Goodell’s job. He is the representative of the league’s thirty-two owners, and he serves as their mouthpiece. The owners do not seem to mind that Goodell’s delivery is wooden, or that the league has stumbled from controversy to controversy during his tenure, or that he is unpopular enough with the public that he is routinely booed during the N.F.L. draft. They don’t mind, clearly, because Goodell has been good for business: in 2018 the league generated around sixteen billion dollars in total revenue. And they don’t mind because, whatever his private thoughts and feelings, the commissioner seems to understand clearly who his bosses are.
Goodell read from their script in 2016, when the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to protest police brutality and pervasive racism by first sitting and then kneeling during the national anthem—and subsequently lost his job for it. Goodell did it again in 2017, when Donald Trump distorted Kaepernick’s message, in a gleeful attempt to rile up his base; the league pushed back against Trump, albeit somewhat gently, calling his remarks “dismissive” but ultimately allowing his misrepresentation of the players’ protests to persist. Several of the league’s owners are major Trump donors, and the league’s fan base skews much whiter and more conservative than its players, around seventy per cent of whom are black. After Trump’s anti-protesting rant, the N.F.L. committed eighty-nine million dollars toward racial-justice causes, and also passed a rule that players on the field would be required to stand for the national anthem. No one was particularly satisfied by this, but the issue fell out of the headlines, and ratings rose again.
After the murder of George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis, sparked nationwide protests, Goodell went, at first, to a familiar-sounding script. On May 30th, he issued a statement about the sadness of “tragic events” and the “urgent need for action” on “systemic issues.” He did not identify which issues were “systemic,” nor what actions were needed. Simply acknowledging such protests might have seemed like a positive step for a league that has arguably played a role in suppressing them, but the bromides were so vague as to be meaningless; Goodell did not mention racism or the police, let alone Kaepernick or Black Lives Matter.
At any other moment in the N.F.L.’s history, that’s where things might have ended, with the owners hoping that the demands and the energy generated by the protests would burn out before the season began. But not this time. Players were angry at the league’s response. Some league employees were, too. As the week went on, individual teams and owners put out their own statements. Some pledged money; others were more blunt than Goodell had been. (“To be honest, I’m surprised that the resulting violence hasn’t been much worse,” the Las Vegas Raiders’ owner, Mark Davis, said.) Players openly protested, and some criticized their own teams and the league. Something was shifting, and there were no games to distract anyone from the business of doing the right thing. On Thursday, a group of N.F.L. players, including some of the league’s biggest stars, posted a video in which they told Goodell what the N.F.L.’s response should have been—they wrote a new script for him. (As the Athletic has reported, the players received help from an employee of the league’s own social-media team.) The next day, Goodell hosted an “emotional” town-hall meeting with employees, the Wall Street Journal reported. Then he released the video, using the players’ script.
“We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people,” Goodell said. “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to N.F.L. players earlier, and encourage all players to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe that black lives matter.”
“That was more his personal decision than it was an ownership decision,” a league executive told the Journal. Goodell knows who his bosses are, but he also cares about his legacy, and he could see what was going on. The league needed to reconcile with players who are now speaking out. Among those who appeared in the video were two of the league’s most exciting and marketable young quarterbacks, Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson, both of whom are black. “Without black players, there would be no National Football League, and the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality, and oppression of black players, coaches, fans, and staff,” he said in the video.
Goodell did make one change to the players’ demands: instead of admitting to “silencing” the players’ peaceful protests, he admitted to “not listening” to them. There may be legal reasons for this; Kaepernick and Eric Reid, the first player to protest alongside him, sued the league for collusion, and settled last year. But the change seemed telling regardless. “Now we’re all getting ready to take a knee together going into this season, without a doubt,” the Washington Redskins running back Adrian Peterson told the Houston Chronicle, after seeing Goodell’s video. It’s one thing to listen, which can be done privately. But is the N.F.L. really going to start encouraging public speech?
“We’re a league of meritocracy,” the Denver Broncos head coach, Vic Fangio, told reporters early last week. “You earn what you get; you get what you earn. I don’t see racism at all in the N.F.L.,” he continued. “I don’t see discrimination in the N.F.L.” After an immediate and overwhelming backlash, Fangio walked back his words. But he was giving voice to one of the game’s most cherished myths: that, in football, people of different backgrounds unite as brothers, and fight for a common cause.
There’s truth in it, but it leaves out many complicating and competing truths. A football player’s career is violent and short. His contract is not guaranteed. Nearly every player in the N.F.L. is considered more or less expendable, with the exception, traditionally, of a few white quarterbacks. Locker rooms are stratified not only by position but by race. Despite the league being around seventy per cent black, just three of its thirty-two head coaches are. There has never been a black team president. All but two of the league’s owners are white. (The exceptions are Shahid Khan, a Pakistani-American billionaire, who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, a Korean-American businesswoman, who owns the Buffalo Bills with her husband.) There is a team in the league called the Washington Redskins. I could go on.
These things were just as true on May 1st as they are now, but they have become harder to ignore. When one of the league’s few untouchable players, the future Hall of Famer Drew Brees, was asked in an interview with Yahoo Finance, on Wednesday, what he would think if players knelt during the national anthem during the upcoming season, in order to continue protesting racism and police brutality, he answered as he did in 2016: he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America.” This time, even his own teammates expressed their disappointment and anger. Brees apologized, and after Trump tried to stoke the controversy, by praising Brees’s first statement, Brees repudiated it again, and also repudiated the President’s statement of support. The facts hadn’t changed, but what had been a comfortable position in football had become publicly intolerable. And, in streets around the world, people were taking a knee, some of them wearing Kaepernick jerseys.
“I vividly remember the Colin Kaepernick conversations,” the Dolphins’ Brian Flores, one of the N.F.L.’s few black head coaches, said in a statement, on May 30th. “ ‘Don’t ever disrespect the flag’ was the phrase that I heard over and over again. This idea that players were kneeling in support of social justice was something some people couldn’t wrap their head around.” It was one of the most direct criticisms from within the league of the N.F.L.’s handling of Kaepernick—and, even then, it was a fairly generous way of putting things, suggesting that the problem was one of comprehension. Fangio and members of the Broncos have since led a Black Lives Matter protest, but that counts as careful public relations at this point, however heartfelt the action may be. The N.F.L. risks relatively little by aligning itself with its players right now. Even Mitt Romney is marching.
But empowering players to speak their minds—players who are required to talk to the press but have effectively been policed in what they say—is an actual step forward. Changing the name of the team in Washington would be another quite obvious one. Owners could also vastly expand the pipeline for minority candidates for coaching and front-office positions—throughout the ranks. They could take player health and safety more seriously, instead of treating black bodies as an inexhaustible resource. They could forgo public financing and tax subsidies for stadiums, which sap city budgets, leaving less money for social services.
Most of these reforms are extremely unlikely—but many unlikely things seem to be happening now. And, even if not a single owner is willing to pay Kaepernick to play, Goodell and the league could contribute real money to his foundation. If the goal is actually to address the “centuries of silence, inequality, and oppression of black players, coaches, fans, and staff,” then helping people to know their rights would be a start.
A previous version of this post misstated the numbers of black general managers and nonwhite head coaches in the N.F.L.
No comments:
Post a Comment