Roger Goodell is an idiot.
Agreed? OK, let’s move on to Tom Brady.
This is what we, the public, know about Tom Brady, connoisseur of deflated balls.
We know he’s had some hair experiments. We know he runs almost as fast as some people who write about him and slower than a good number that watch him. He lacks a discernible bum but makes up for it with an epic chin ditch. He’s got a super pretty wife who — based on Super Bowl press conference performances — is very protective of her man. He wears UGGs for money and is surprisingly capable of standing up in front of the whole world and telling a determined lie.
I’m not sure which is worse, the UGGs or the lie, but based on his popularity I guess more people aren’t that bent about him imitating the bad footwear choice he shares with a high proportion of teenage girls.
So the lie has got to be what inspired NFL commissioner Goodell to get back on his law-and-order horse and start shooting everything that moved again.
Because can we really call this a “crime”? There are the letters of the rules and there is the spirit of the rules and there are rules that are made to be broken because who really cares?
The NFL didn’t, or at least it never did before. The last time two teams were busted for ball tampering the NFL issued, respectively, a warning (for using a sideline heater to warm game balls on a cold day — a no-no) and a $20,000 fine (for wiping game balls with stuff that made them more grippy).
That the New England Patriots quarterback likes his footballs with a little squeeze to them and was able to beg or bribe Patriots locker-room attendants John Jastremski and Jim McNally to carry out his bidding is not a crime.
It doesn’t make him a fraud or make his fourth Super Bowl win any less impressive. This is not Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds. Brady and the Pats were going to win anyway.
Letting some air out of the footballs is part of football and part of sports the way trying to get away with holding is or trying to jump the snap or trying to doctor a baseball or use goalie pads that don’t pass the NHL calliper test. It’s the kind of cheating that’s part of the game.
You do it at your own peril but it’s not that perilous so people keep doing it. And in the NFL, where there is a lot of really perilous things going on all the time — from brain injuries to performance enhancing drug use to indiscriminate administration of addictive pain killers — it doesn’t seem that important.
It’s like getting a ticket for going 125 km/h on the Trans-Canada. Nothing all that reckless, nothing that other people aren’t doing. Would you lie to get out of a ticket? Stretch the truth a bit? As long as you didn’t think you’d get caught doing what most people would, no harm done. If you knew you’d lose your licence for fudging the truth while trying to get out of the ticket, you simply own up and pay it.
But that was the fuzzy world Tom Brady was in during the off week before Super Bowl when “Deflategate” came to light.
He had no idea what would happen if he told the truth because how could anyone guess what Goodell, the hanging judge, would do?
In retrospect, Brady should have known he was facing a potentially harsh penalty given that no one got hurt in the deflating of the football. No loved ones were struck. In all those circumstances Brady might have been on safer ground, as Goodell has historically let that stuff slide.
But this was Goodell on his high horse. This was Goodell dealing with the integrity of the game, as opposed to something meaningful. This was Goodell looking for an opportunity to launch an investigation that could find the truth, not an elevator video from a casino — that’s for TMZ.
Doubtless Brady should have aw-shucks-ed it. For a rich, handsome, famous and successful guy he’s very good at that. Had he just acknowledged he likes his footballs puffy, allowed that maybe things went too far, chances are he pays a fine and we’re done.
But in his moment of truth, albeit while facing a system of justice applied like finger paint, Brady fudged: “I would never do anything outside of the rules of play,” he said at the press conference after “Deflategate” blew up (pun, yes). “I would never have someone do something that I thought was outside the rules.”
A review of Brady’s comments on the subject leading up to the Super Bowl now reads like the half-truths of a man who knows he’s likely going to get busted. He leaves himself a lot of wiggle room just in case. There are a lot of off-ramps to “not that I know of.”
For his very public not-truth telling, Brady probably deserves to take some heat. Politicians can lie to their public, but for whatever reason when athletes do, it seems so much more demeaning. We’d like to think that they’re better than that. Sure they take drugs and do bad things off the field and whatnot, but as long as they fess up, we’re usually OK with it. No one likes the lies.
Even in Patriot-land, where murderous tight ends get contract extensions and they have surveillance capabilities like something out of Homeland, Brady usually flew under the radar. He didn’t seem a cyborg deployed to neutralize Peyton Manning, at least not from a distance.
But this time he flew a little to close to the heat and got burned.
And everyone might be making a big deal about Brady’s bald-faced untruths if the commissioner hadn’t got all heavy-handed and suspended him four games and dinged his team for $1 million and two precious draft picks and generally come off like someone excited to have one of his investigations find something for once.
But that’s what Roger Goodell did, and we already know what he is.
Impossibly, he’s made Tom Brady a victim of more than fashion.