FEBRUARY 4, 2011
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This past summer, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell found himself facing a situation every authority figure dreads. His reputation hinged on how he handled a greasy-haired young man sitting in front of him, brandishing a smirk. The lug in question was Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, who had been accused of rape for the second time in a year, in this instance by a 20-year-old college student in Georgia. Arming himself for the conversation, Goodell had talked to two dozen other players, including other Steelers. “Not one, not a single player, went to his defense,” Goodell told Sports Illustrated. The vanity of the quarterback is that he is such a beloved leader that his teammates forgive even his transgressions. But, as Goodell made his way down the list of the Roethlisberger’s peers, he must have begun to see the quarterback as an icon of a different sort, as professional football’s Bigger Thomas.
Four months later, Roethlisberger is further down the commissioner’s list of things to worry about—the league’s collective bargaining agreement expires this spring and a lockout is looming; the owners are insisting that the physically brutal season be extended by two games; and evidence about the long-term consequences of brain injuries sustained on the playing field has been mounting, horribly—but it seems neatly appropriate that the season will end where it began: with the Steelers quarterback occupying center stage, this time in the Super Bowl. That’s because each of the problems facing Goodell betrays the NFL’s underlying conflict: Modernizing a brutal game means shedding the throwback elements that are often its biggest attraction. And, although Roethlisberger is far from the NFL’s most important problem, he is in some ways its most emblematic one.
Roethlisberger’s fundamental attribute, as a player, is that he is a quarterback who is built like a meat-processing plant. Modern passing offenses are intricately arranged entities: They require the quarterback to instantly assess the defense’s shifting scheme, imagine where vulnerabilities might appear, and to tick through a series of probabilities before throwing the ball. Its masters, not usually physical specimens, are quarterback-horologists with quick-twitch minds, dads teetering on the edge of middle age: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and the emerging Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers.
Roethlisberger is the opposite of all that. He has one of the slowest releases in the league, so pedantic that you can just about see the ox-cart wheels of his mind turning. And yet, his immensity permits him to stand still behind his line—defenders struggling to bring him down—waiting long enough to heave the ball over everyone’s head, to a streaking wide receiver. At his worst, Roethlisberger is capable of some astoundingly stupid throws. But he is also responsible for many of the crude thrills of the last few seasons, the elemental pleasure of a country-strong ball heaved so far and so true that not even the post-graduate complexities of contemporary defensive engineering can stop it.
One evening last March, this small-town icon was in a Milledgeville, Georgia, bar to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday. He walked up to a young woman with whom he’d been flirting (“all my bitches, take some shots!”) with his penis hanging out of his pants, according to the handwritten account she gave police later that night, and led her into a bar bathroom where he raped her. Her friends tried to get into the bathroom, but Roethlisberger’s private security team barred the door. When she finally left, she went outside with her friends, searched for the first police car she could find, and told the officer she’d been raped. Charges were eventually dropped, after the victim declined to pursue the case, but the moral contours of the situation, from the court documents, seem as stark as those that condemned Mike Tyson—and sent him to prison.
What is particularly striking is that Roethlisberger—who is from Ohio and has lived his whole life in the Midwest, whose current contract is worth $102 million, who could have been in Dubai or South Beach, cavorting with supermodels—chose to celebrate his birthday in small-town Georgia. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Brady, whose wife is the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen, appearing in Milledgeville except by contractual obligation. But these are the terms of Roethlisberger’s throwback celebrity. He went where he would be adored.
The NFL has worked hard to preserve the sport’s small town heritage, and to insulate its franchises against the market. Take this Sunday’s matchup. Given modern economics, it is astounding that Green Bay even has a team. The city is the two hundred and sixty eighth largest city in the country, far from any major metropolitan area, smaller than Gresham, Oregon, Richardson, Texas, and West Covina, California. Roethlisberger’s Steelers are football’s version of the Yankees, but only in a controlled market could they manage this position: In baseball’s less protected market, the Pittsburgh team has lost more games than it has won every year since 1992; the city is simply too small to sponsor a competitive team. This position has won the league acclaim and loyalty: The Packers and the Steelers have two of the league’s largest fan bases.
But other anachronisms from football’s past have proved more difficult to update. There is the nostalgia for violence, and the suggestion from commentators that to make the game safer is to choke its soul. And there is the boorish entitlement of throwback heroes like Brett Favre and Roethlisberger, who still imagine they have the run of the town.
Earlier this fall, I found that I could not get the theme song from an NFL Network commercial out of my head. I went to iTunes to download it, imagining the performers to be a brother-sister cohort from some obscure branch of the Carter-Cash family tree, ably marshaled by T-Bone Burnett. But the song turned out to be by an unimpeachably stoned bearded hipster and dectet from West Hollywood called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (possibly a nonet: I couldn’t spot the guy with the banjo in all their performances). No wonder I’d liked the song so much. Any authenticity was buried, Princess and the Pea-like, beneath piled-up layers of irony and remove. And, though Brady and Manning are stars, and their own brand of football has its adherents, the NFL knows very well what it is selling (a sentimental feeling about small-town life), and to whom (people like me). It is winking at itself, just subtly enough that its fans can enjoy the joke.
Because I am genuinely a fan, because I understand that the clockwork of modern football is most gorgeous as counterpoint to the caveman attributes of players like Ray Lewis (the violent, brilliant Ravens linebacker, headed for the Hall of Fame, who once beat a murder charge) or Roethlisberger, I don’t envy Goodell his position. But the looming problem of player concussions means the league can no longer be content with its half-way modernization—its four-game suspensions for accused rape, its insistence that players play two more games a year even as the devastating health risks of each incremental collision are looming into view. Goodell will soon have to choose, whether his league is for the cavemen or against them. And so, if the Steelers win on Sunday, and Goodell has to hand Roethlisberger his third Super Bowl trophy, I will be watching the commissioner’s face, to see whether he greets his champion with a wink or with a wince.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a Schwartz fellow at The New America Foundation.
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7 comments
Add this to the "collapse of civilization" checklist under the gladiator games category
- skahn
February 4, 2011 at 9:09am
I fail to see the point of this article. Is it to moan about the lack of accountability for boorish off-field behavior? To promote athleticism over strength and size? To say that the current NFL practice of revenue sharing is wrong? What? Or, just a random bitch session with no point? I'm a Steeler fan. That said, I would have liked to see Big Ben's suspension run the full 6 games, just to pound that point into not just his brain, but everyone else who should think twice about what they're doing off-field. Player punishments need to be faster, stronger, and WITHOUT any appeal or later reduction. All that said, the Pittsburgh organization is probably better than any other org as far as dealing with miscreant behavior - wacking it quickly, fast, and hard, and dumping players who don't get the message. I doubt Ben's got another chance in Pittsburgh; any futher screwup, and he's gone the way of Holmes and others. Honestly, other teams need to emulate the Pittsburgh organization more here. That said, the NFL's on-field problem isn't Ben's style of play - football is (and should remain) a very physical game, where smarts are paired with brawn to get a tough job done. If I wanted to watch smart dancing (i.e. bump-and-go) play, I'd watch soccer (which I do, regularly). No, the "brute" player is just as much a part of the game as the ballerina receiver, and the scrambling QB. What the NFL needs to tone down is not the *idea* that tough isn't required, it's the *magnitude* of what is being encouraged. Let's face it, the whole concussion debacle is just the tip of the iceberg. What the NFL has to do is simple physics, none of which alters the character of the game or its appeal to fans. It needs to lower the SIZE of players, instituting a BMI cap. Let's face it, 350+ lb 6-foot linemen aren't good for anyone. Reducing the average weight of an NFL team by 20% would help absolutely everyone. And it needs to re-introduce (and harshly enforce) that idea the NFL is a Tackle game, not a Spearing game. Tackles are done with the hands on the body. Any use of the helmet is an immediate game expulsion, and repeat offenses quickly lead to season-ending suspensions. Avoidable contact with the opponent's helmet is an immediate personal foul. These restrictions are easy to implement, but the NFL has to keep up the enforcement in the face of temporary criticism. It's for the good of the entire game (down through kid's football).
- trims
February 4, 2011 at 10:29am
Rothlisberger is a criminal and a jerk, but does the author have to be this snarky, professions of NFL love notwithstanding? What the hell does Ben going to rural Georgia have to do whether he is a rapist or not? Is there anything that documents that he went there because that's where he'd be liked? And the article reeks of insinuations that just because Rothlisberger is big, he's also slow and stupid. This is the kind of shit that gives liberals a bad name (I don't know whether the author is liberal or not, but by virtue of writing in TNR, he will be painted that way).
- NR409654
February 4, 2011 at 11:31am
Hel'll greet him, should the Steelers win, with a congratulatory smile. The NFL isn't ptiched just to small town America either, no matter where R. chose to celebrate his birthday and who cares where. You can't turn that detail into anything large, or, less, mid- sized or smaller. Your challenge was to make your case: that R. personifies the crises afflicting the NFL. This, in this wobbly, discursive piece, you have not done at all, including establishing your premise. Other guy, I wouldn't wait in breathless anticipation for the NFL to cap player size. You'll asphyxiate yourself. It'll never happen.
- basman
February 4, 2011 at 8:16pm
Actually, Ben is kind of slow and stupid, and a moral reprobate to boot. You don't have to be liberal to know that (last I looked, conservatives didn't support rape). This was a good piece. One small point. Yes, Green Bay is the 268th metro in America, but Milwaukee, is 39th (about, moving up based on 2010 census), Madison is 88th, and the Packers are Wisconsin's team. So, no, Green Bay is not some tiny city in the middle of nowhere, despite TNR authors' geography handicaps.
- lfriedla
February 5, 2011 at 10:38am
I'm glad Goodell didn't have to go through the charade. The last thing I wanted to see was a Steeler's victory and the inevitable follow up stories about Ben's "redemption". Yeah, right. But what I think this article about was less the impossible contradictions inherent in pro football (where both lightning quick thinking and impossible brutality are both required - having played at a low level, its tough to think straight after either giving or receiving a brutal, full-speed hit), than about the difficulty a lot of somewhat refined, intelligent people have reconciling their brutal side with their thinking side. I, perhaps wrongly, consider myself all of the above, but I too am still a fan. Every year I start watching the concussions and blown out knees start piling up and I swear I'm gonna stop watching the game because it gets more brutal every year. And, without fail, by the time the playoffs roll around, I'm engrossed. Just like all the rest of the reasonably intelligent heathens out there. At its heart, life is brutal and deadly and civilization is a conceit I'm amazed we've been able to pull of this well for this long. It takes both intelligence and a level of moral brutality and a huge amount of luck (being born at the right time in the right place has the savior for most reading this fine publication). The seemingly opposite sides of football never CAN be reconciled because they're polar opposites. But they also can't be separated. They opposite sides of the same damn coin. Articles like this are just another look in the mirror for the writer and the readers...
- rambooride
February 7, 2011 at 10:41am
In this odd little piece, W-W exhibits an almost total lack of understanding of the social function and role that football and other sports occupy. He refers repeatedly to its supposed “small town heritage.” American football originated largely on Ivy League campuses. From there, it spread to other universities and then to the industrial cities--mostly large and some small--of the Northeast and Midwest in the form of the NFL. Then professional football simply followed the Sun Belt migration. The NFL is not “selling a sentimental feeling about small-town life.” Where does W-W get this idea from? What the NFL sells is the primal adrenaline surge of the tribe going to war against its neighbors, of “the thin red line” holding off “the enemy”, “the others”. In the process, it is a rallying point for community and sometimes individual identity in an atomized and, for many, dispiriting modern world. It’s popularity echoes the Washington public’s sortie to Manassas, Virginia in the summer of 1861 to watch the First Battle of Bull Run (until things got ugly for boys in blue). It is vicarious participation in war, right next to the warriors themselves--or at least in the nearest seat. The appeal of football is not precisely “nostalgia for violence.” It’s nostalgia for a world--part real, part imagined--where the individual is grounded in his tribe or nation. The violence against the rival “tribes” provides context and heightened drama. It’s part Iliad, and part Circus Maximus. W-W asserts that “[The NFL Commissioner] will soon have to choose, whether his league is for the cavemen or against them.” What nonsense. There may be some impending change at the margins in NFL rules or equipment--as there have been a number of times before--but there will be no single decision for or against what is a basic component of the game and of its appeal. I doubt very much in any case that W-W has any clear idea of what changes, specifically, he wants the Commissioner to enact. He pretentiously claims that, “...I understand that the clockwork of modern football is most gorgeous as counterpoint to the caveman attributes of players like Ray Lewis...” Clockwork? I bet drone strikes in Af-Pak look like clockwork to the author too--a “gorgeous counterpoint” to the battles of caveman infantry. Then again, when a wide receiver takes a hard hit, the passing game doesn’t look much like clockwork either. The reality here is that this article isn’t about Ben Roethlisberger or the NFL’s problems. It’s about the psychology of Benjamin Wallace-Wells who claims that: “Modern passing offenses are intricately arranged entities: They require the quarterback to instantly assess the defense’s shifting scheme, imagine where vulnerabilities might appear, and to tick through a series of probabilities before throwing the ball. Its masters, not usually physical specimens, are quarterback-horologists with quick-twitch minds, dads teetering on the edge of middle age: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and the emerging Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers.” In others words, the “modern” QB isn’t actually an athlete, much less a warrior. He’s just like us--or, more particularly, just like W-W. It’s all brain over brawn--just the way W-W would do it--he fantasizes--if he were on the field. Never mind the fact that Roethlisberger, who warrants only the irrelevant observation that he is “built like a meat-processing plant,” has actually won two superbowls (his performance against the Seahawks in Superbowl XL being admittedly a weak one) and played in a third in the last six years--better than all but one of the of the “quick-twitch” quarterbacks W-W lists by way of supposed contrast. If W-W so disdains the repellent violence of modern football, why does he feel the need to pay for access to the NFL Network? The answer, of course, is that he shares the psychological needs of the crowd, but, at the same time, as “a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a Schwartz fellow at The New America Foundation,” he also resents the glorification of the “caveman”. He loathes Roethlisberger, simultaneously envies the alpha male quarterback, and finally settles for diminishing him by creating an alternative (and imaginary) version of the troglodyte quarterback, i.e. a quarterback version of himself--small, unathletic, brainy and, of course, somehow better than the arrogant, hulking jock. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few high school memories wrapped up in this little piece. In short, this article is useless as sports or social commentary, but it is invaluably revelatory of the psyche of a right-thinking and insecure intellectual/professional c. 2011.
- ccarrick@vzavenue.net-old
February 7, 2011 at 2:17pm