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Can Roger Goodell Save Football?

24 minute read
Sean Gregory

On the morning of Dec. 1, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell received an unfathomable phone call from the league’s head of security. Jovan Belcher, a fourth-year linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, had killed his girlfriend in their home, then driven to the team’s practice complex. There, despite the pleadings of his coach and general manager, he shot himself in the parking lot, leaving his 3-month-old daughter an orphan.

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Goodell recalls his disbelief. “My first thoughts weren’t about football at all,” he told TIME. “This is not a football tragedy. It’s a human tragedy that impacts families, loved ones and an innocent child left behind.” He arranged for grief counselors in Kansas City. He spoke to Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt several times that day, encouraging him to consult the team’s captains: Should the players take the field against the Carolina Panthers at home the next day? Many fans expected and wanted the NFL to at least postpone the game. How could anyone–especially coach Romeo Crennel, scarred by what he saw–focus on football? Goodell spoke with players’-union boss DeMaurice Smith and others. “It was ultimately my decision,” says Goodell. “But it was important to get the views of the players and try to honor their wishes. Clark got back to me and said Romeo and the captains felt that playing the game–being together as a team and a community–was important. So that’s exactly what we did.” Kansas City delivered an emotional 27-21 victory.

For the fourth time in eight months, a current or former NFL player had taken his life. There’s no evidence indicating that football had anything to do with the Belcher tragedy. The Chiefs say Belcher had no “long concussion history.” He reportedly was drinking the night before the murder-suicide, and Belcher’s relationship with his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins had apparently had troubles.

But here’s the tabloid reality facing Goodell’s NFL: given all the news about retired NFL players suffering from mental illness or killing themselves while coping with brain damage associated with head trauma from playing football, it is natural to wonder, What if? The Belcher tragedy may be another warning sign: Are the pressures of pro football worth our cheers?

Some real science underscores this dark side of the game: on Dec. 3, a new study from Boston University detailed 33 cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)–15 of them previously unpublicized–in deceased ex–NFL players. (CTE, a debilitating brain disease associated with head trauma, can be diagnosed only postmortem.) Under the weight of such research, Goodell is trying to pull off, in his words, a “balancing act” that will define his legacy. Can he preserve the core of a game that is our national obsession–and a hugely profitable business–while responsibly addressing the mounting evidence that the sport can shatter lives?

Goodell has taken the ball. The commissioner is already rewriting the playbook of the game. After years of downplaying the dangers of concussions, the NFL has instituted policies and rules to reduce the risk of long-term injury. But things like sanctions for dangerous hits–especially the punishment handed down to the New Orleans Saints for allegedly running a bounty system that gave cash rewards for injuring opposing players–and stricter return-to-play guidelines after concussions are just the beginning of a safety-first orientation.

Kickoffs, for instance, could get the boot, even though the kicker placing the ball on the tee, the dash-and-crash downfield under the kick and the theatrical returns for touchdowns are a signal that Sunday is under way. From changing tackling techniques to altering the stance of offensive linemen so they don’t launch themselves headfirst into opponents, everything is up for discussion. And Goodell sits at the center of the table.

The Emperor of Pigskin

Wearing his navy blue NFL windbreaker collar up against a cool late-October morning–it’s the day before Hurricane Sandy blitzed the New York City area– Goodell mingles with New York Jets tailgaters in the MetLife Stadium parking lot. He signs every football, stops for every picture. “Hey, Commissioner, you want a kishke?” a fan asks Goodell, 53, holding up a beef intestine from behind a grill. Goodell–a fitness freak–politely declines the offal offer, saying he’d just eaten. The son of a U.S. Senator, he has the politician’s touch for working a crowd. He shakes hands, tussles hair, slaps backs and helmets and gives out more bro hugs than Joe College at his fifth reunion.

Goodell may be the pope of our sporting religion, but here he’s just another knucklehead passing through the parking lot. “My girlfriend is a Steelers fan,” a man dressed in a Dolphins jersey–the Jets host Miami today–tells him. “And she’ll hate me if I don’t tell you. You hate James Harrison.” Harrison, the Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker, has racked up nearly $200,000 in fines for roughing up opposing players since the NFL started heavily penalizing more dangerous hits.

Harrison does not have any kind words for Goodell, nor for that matter do other NFL players. Harrison called Goodell a “crook” in Men’s Journal and said, “If that man was on fire and I had to piss to put him out, I wouldn’t do it.” Goodell keeps his cool. “I don’t hate him,” he tells the fan. “He’s just got to play by the same rules, that’s all.”

A huge guy wearing a Jets jersey says, “By the way, f— the Saints,” after someone snaps a photo of him and the commissioner. “Don’t let them screw you.” In March, Goodell suspended Saints coach Sean Payton for this season and team officials and players for significant chunks of time for participating in a bounty program. The penalties, some of which were later overturned by an appeals panel, burnished Goodell’s image as a power-mad martinet. The commissioner, a stickler for player discipline since he took office in 2006, says football can’t tolerate such a dangerous locker-room culture. Around New Orleans these days, “Go to Hell, Goodell” is a popular Cajun catchphrase.

Put another way: Why, Roger Goodell, are you messing with our game? Whether it’s because he has prompted rule tweaks, docked someone from your favorite team, locked out the players in a labor dispute last season or the referees this season, if you’re a football fan, Goodell has probably ticked you off. “Anything that gets in the way of football,” the commissioner acknowledges, “you get pushback.”

Football is brutal by definition; every play is a synchronized multivehicle crash. On a single Sunday in mid-November, for example, three quarterbacks–Michael Vick of the Philadelphia Eagles, Jay Cutler of the Chicago Bears and Alex Smith of the San Francisco 49ers–suffered concussions. “I just think we’re trying to take some things out of the game that are staples of football,” says Jets safety Yeremiah Bell. “Football is football. It’s contact. I mean, how much safety is there?”

Saints quarterback Drew Brees, one of the most popular and marketable players in the NFL, says he’s “disappointed” in Goodell. “Really a lack of accountability from the top down,” Brees says. “Also, I feel like, in large part, this bounty scandal, so to speak, is a big facade and a way to cover up the shortcomings of the league and the commissioner with regards to player health and safety over the last three years.” After all, can a commissioner who has proposed a longer regular season–which would mean more head banging–and put a violent game in the hands of underqualified scab referees really claim to care about keeping players safe?

The final verdict on the player-safety debate may be beyond Goodell’s control. The NFL is being sued by some 4,000 ex-players, plus nearly 1,500 of their spouses and children, who allege that the league “deliberately ignored and actively concealed” information about concussions for decades. In mid-November, ESPN and PBS reported that in the 1990s and 2000s, the NFL’s disability board for retired players concluded that repetitive head trauma was responsible for brain injuries to at least three ex-players and awarded them disability payments. Until 2009, though, the NFL publicly denied that concussions cause chronic brain damage. (The NFL says the decisions of the disability board, which consists of representatives from the NFL and the players’ union, are independent of the league.) The suit’s very existence has brought more scrutiny. “This case could lead to the downfall of the NFL as we know it today,” says Darren Heitner, a sports lawyer in South Florida.

The NFL is trying to get the suit tossed out of court and denies deliberately causing harm. But no one can deny that a spate of football players who either suffered from symptoms of depression and dementia later in their lives or killed themselves have been diagnosed with CTE. If football doesn’t become a safer game, more parents will likely prevent their kids–the NFL’s future players and fans–from playing. And why shouldn’t they, given studies like the one published in Neurology in September showing that ex–NFL players were four times as likely as nonplayers to die from Alzheimer’s or ALS? Fears are already trickling down to the youth level: according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the number of kids ages 6 to 12 participating in tackle football was down 35% from 2007 to 2011.

Goodell insists his motives for the safety measures are pure. “I don’t do things for public relations,” he says. “I do things because they’re the right thing to do, because I love the game.” And if that means he’s not beloved? “If you want to do the popular thing, be a cheerleader.”

The commissioner has leeway for unpopular moves because the league is more lucrative than ever. Even his staunchest foes acknowledge his executive chops. “His stewardship of the business of football and the game,” says DeMaurice Smith, head of the NFL Players Association, which has sparred with Goodell over the Bountygate incident, “has been extraordinary.” In 2006, the year Goodell took over from Paul Tagliabue, the average broadcast viewership of NFL games was 66% higher than the network prime-time average; now it’s 151% higher. Having negotiated labor peace with its players (whose average salary is now $2.1 million) until 2020, the NFL signed TV deals with CBS, Fox and NBC that will last until 2022. The networks will pay the NFL some $3 billion a year, a 60% increase over the previous deal.

Growing Up Goodell

From his earliest days, Goodell was obsessed with football. He still remembers getting his first official NFL football–“the Duke”–from a family friend when he was 6 years old. “Just that smell, the whole thing, I will never forget it,” he says, watching the Jets and the Dolphins from a private box in MetLife Stadium. He even slept with it for a few months, something his brothers–he is the middle of five boys born within a seven-year span–took pleasure in teasing him about.

Goodell started playing tackle football in fourth grade and was an aggressive kid, fond of fighting. He put those traits to use defending his younger brother Michael, who was his opposite and a target of bullies. “Absolutely, he would beat the crap out of people,” says Michael. “Roger was not Atticus Finch.” (Michael came out after college and has been with TV writer Jack Kenny, now his husband, for 30 years.) When they were older, Michael once visited Roger in college and went to the bar where he worked. “There were these two twins, they were body-builder twins, they were freaks,” says Michael. The meatheads picked Michael up and were about to punch him, until Roger started cursing them from behind the bar. They put Michael down. “So yeah, it was a lifelong thing,” says Michael of the intervention.

When Michael sees gay kids committing suicide because of bullying, he reflects on how he could have been one of them. “I was the type who would have been beat up a lot,” Michael says. “It would have been humiliating. What would that have meant if I did survive it? Would I have done drugs? There are all sorts of things you can turn to just because of self-hatred and loathing. But none of that was even a possibility, because I had this support around me. So, yeah, Roger is very much a hero figure for me.” When I relay Michael’s words to big brother Roger, he tears up. “Ha,” he says, sniffling, unable to say much else. “That’s the first time I heard that. I didn’t know it had that much impact on him.”

Goodell’s hero is his father Charles, a New York Republican Congressman who was appointed to the Senate after RFK’s assassination. He introduced the first congressional bill to end the war in Vietnam, even though he knew his party would desert him in the 1970 election. Behind his office desk, Goodell keeps the campaign trinkets people still send him–YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE GOODELL, says one button–and a copy of his father’s Vietnam Disengagement Act hangs on the wall. “And you think I get a lot of crap?” Goodell says while showing it to me.

Backing the unpopular war was a Republican rallying point, but the elder Goodell wouldn’t fall in line. “The Nixon Administration made him almost Public Enemy No. 1,” says George Mitrovich, Charles Goodell’s former press secretary. The kids felt it. “There was a lot of hateful invective directed at our family from time to time,” says Bill Goodell, one of Roger’s older brothers. As early as age 11, Roger was very aware of his father’s sacrifice: he’d go with his conscience, even if it cost him his seat. “He loved being a United States Senator,” says Goodell. “My personal view is, he never got over that. And that’s sad to me on a lot of levels. But he did what was right. He knew the consequences. He knew it was going to end his career. You can’t buy a lesson like that.”

After Charles Goodell lost the 1970 election to James Buckley, who ran on the Conservative Party line–Goodell split the moderate-to-liberal vote with his Democratic opponent–the family settled in Bronxville, N.Y., a wealthy enclave just north of New York City. Roger captained the football, basketball and baseball teams his senior year of high school and was president of the Varsity Club.

He was on no one’s short list for future NFL commissioner, and his brothers needled him about his poor grades. “He was a big dumb jock,” says Michael. “He played that up. He was walking around in his letter jacket, with his girlfriend on his arm and stuff. He was big man on campus.” Michael laughs. “And one of the things we always used to tease him about, he just used to grunt. You know, ‘Hey, Rog, how are you today?’ ‘Grrrrr.'” Goodell says he doesn’t remember the grunting, though a couple of NFL staff members say it sounds familiar. “He just wears a different jacket now,” quips one. Goodell does vouch, however, for his academic ambivalence.

Even in high school, Goodell enforced a personal-conduct policy. Bronxville High School required athletes to sign a pledge: No drinking or troublemaking, or they’d be booted off the team. The other players knew Goodell would rat them out for misbehaving. “They didn’t like to see me come to a party,” says Goodell. “I took that pledge seriously.” Michael remembers his brother’s showing up at one gathering where football players were drinking. “All of a sudden it was like an alarm went off,” Michael says. “They were running out the back door as he was coming in the front door. It was like Prohibition.”

Goodell attended Washington & Jefferson College, outside Pittsburgh, and wised up. “I had my time,” Goodell says, when asked why he got more serious about school. A bad knee had already ended his football days. “I did my thing in high school. I knew I had to prove that it wasn’t anything more than I didn’t focus.” His freshman year, Goodell buried himself in the library. “Talk about a bore,” he says. “Holy s—. I must tell you, it was miserable, it was difficult, because I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed.” Goodell got A’s that first semester and graduated with honors.

Going the Distance

When Goodell started mapping out his career, he sent a letter to every NFL team. No one bit. The league office, however, hired him as an administrative intern in 1982. “When he first started, you could put him in any situation and feel confident you could trust him,” says Joe Browne, the NFL’s longtime communications guru. Carmen Policy, the former president of the San Francisco 49ers, remembers first meeting Goodell at the 1985 Super Bowl, at Stanford Stadium. “He was energetic and effective in a non-pushy way,” says Policy. “You felt comfortable with him.”

At the following year’s Super Bowl, in New Orleans, Goodell volunteered to serve as legendary commissioner Pete Rozelle’s driver. By then, he was already more established; this task seemed more fit for a college intern. “I’d do anything,” says Goodell. “I wanted any opportunity that would keep me around.” Circulating in Rozelle’s orbit proved valuable. “I practically lived with him,” says Goodell. “And he could see how I managed people, managed situations. I wouldn’t give that back for a moment.”

As he rose through the NFL ranks, Goodell got a handle on all sides of the NFL business, including stadium development, expansion, television negotiations and licensing. He also learned how to carry out change in a league that is essentially a monopoly run by wealthy, headstrong team owners. The NFL had prospered by sharing TV and national merchandising and sponsorship revenues equally, but in the 1990s, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was at war with the league. He thought teams, rather than the NFL, should have rights to market their brands locally and pocket that revenue. This, Jones thought, would prod individual clubs to aggressively promote their brand–and in aggregate allow the NFL to attract more-lucrative national deals. Goodell helped convince the other owners that Jones was right. “From this office,” Goodell says, “we can’t promote 32 teams the way they can in their markets.” Jones’ model won out and has contributed to the league’s success.

That business sense helped Goodell develop a strong rapport with the owners, who are in charge of hiring commissioners. But it by no means blunted his hard edge. “I told the other owners when he was made commissioner that I’ve seen him bite,” says Jones. “He’s easy in his demeanor. But I’ve been bitten.” A few weeks into his tenure, Goodell handed down his first fine: $25,000 to Steelers chairman Dan Rooney for criticizing the refs. Rooney, a gracious man who is now ambassador to Ireland, had earlier delighted in telling Goodell the news of his appointment as commissioner. “The tender moment didn’t last long,” Goodell quips.

League Under Fire

As commissioner, Goodell reverted to high-school-enforcer mode. He introduced a new player-conduct code in 2007 and wasn’t shy about punishing those giving his league a bad name. Goodell benched Adam “Pacman” Jones, for example, for all of the 2007 season and part of the 2008 season after multiple arrests. He sat the Steelers’ star quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for six games in 2010 over behavior tied to an alleged sexual assault in a bar–even though no charges were filed.

While Goodell attacked player misconduct from the outset, he was slower to respond to the growing evidence that concussions were more than a minor occupational hazard. In October 2009, Congress dressed him down for it. California Democratic Congresswoman Linda Snchez compared the NFL’s soft-pedaling concussion risks to tobacco companies’ denying that smoking could damage your health. The NFL’s oddly named Committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI), led by a rheumatologist, produced research on concussions that was widely panned. Dr. Mitchel Berger, who sits on the since renamed Head, Neck and Spine Medical Committee, told the New York Times that there was “no science” in one of the group’s studies.

Critics fault Goodell for not shuttering the MTBI committee sooner. “You have to realize when you’re not getting the right advice,” says Eleanor Perfetto, whose husband Ralph Wenzel was an offensive lineman for the Steelers and San Diego Chargers in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and died from complications from dementia at age 69 in June. Perfetto, who has a Ph.D. in public health, is a plaintiff in the concussion class action against the NFL. “That’s part of leadership,” she says.

Goodell concedes that “you can always look back and say it could have been done faster.” But he argues that the NFL’s reaction to concussions has been “very responsible.” He points out that if the league had put into effect stricter return-to-play rules earlier, players might not have reported their symptoms since the dangers of concussions are clearer now than they used to be. While Goodell won’t take sides on the medical debate about concussions, he now acknowledges that football may do damage. “It doesn’t take a lot to jump to the conclusion that constant banging in the head is not going to be in your best interest,” he says.

Rule changes reflect that reality. The collective-bargaining agreement signed after the 2011 lockout reduces the number of off-season practice sessions and limits the number of full-contact practices in the regular season, cutting exposure to potential injury. The return-to-play guidelines are tougher: once a player is diagnosed with a concussion, he’s out for the rest of the game. Kickoffs were moved up five yards, to the 35-yard line, which leads to more touchbacks and fewer collisions. The NFL says concussions on kickoffs were down more than 40% last season.

Some of the NFL’s most fearsome players, including Baltimore legend Ray Lewis, have been fined for vicious hits as Goodell tries to deter dangerous play. “The reality is, since 2010, no professional league or amateur association has made more of a change to help player safety than the NFL,” says one of the league’s former critics, concussion expert Robert Cantu, who co-directs Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

The rule changes won’t do much for damaged former players (or dead ones and their widows). To them, Goodell’s reforms are a painful reminder that the NFL could have taken such precautions years ago and maybe saved them from the memory loss, depression and other ailments they suffer today. “Some of it is defensive,” says Mary Ann Easterling, widow of former Atlanta Falcons safety Ray Easterling, who committed suicide in April and was diagnosed with CTE in a postmortem. “They have to put on a show for that. The pressure is on, so then we have all these different ways to not just treat players like commodities.”

Goodell argues that the NFL is doing right by these injured players. The last collective-bargaining agreement, for instance, includes $1 billion set aside for retired players. “How many industries do that?” he asks. “Go back to people that are no longer involved in the business? I salute the owners and salute the players for doing that–$620 million of that was in pension benefits alone. So those are very, very significant improvements. We’ll try to do more. Can I solve the problems for everybody? I don’t think that’s possible.”

Goodell’s unflinching decisions, particularly with regard to fines and the bounty suspensions, have upset a fair number of current players. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, one of the league’s more outspoken, honest and thoughtful players, says of the bounty situation, “That was definitely an abuse of power.” Critics like Kluwe and union chief Smith argue that Goodell arbitrarily handed down penalties to the Saints players. Goodell has now recused himself from the appeals of the Bountygate players; Tagliabue, the former commissioner, took his place and has heard their arguments. Goodell, as is his nature, stands firm. “I hear from players all the time. They don’t want to be targeted,” he says. “No one wants to play a game where that exists. On any level. So I don’t make any apologies for taking a strong position on this.”

The Future of Football

Whether or not fans or players like it, Goodell is talking about making more big changes, all the way down to the youth level. “I pledge that the NFL will do everything in its power to minimize the risks and maximize the rewards of this great and increasingly global game,” Goodell said in a sweeping November speech at Harvard’s School of Public Health about the future of football.

Goodell is bothered that in September, five kids in Massachusetts suffered concussions in one game. One of Goodell’s most trusted safety gurus, Hall of Fame coach and analyst John Madden, supports a proposal to protect young brains that Cantu made in his new book, Concussions and Our Kids: ban tackle football before the age of 14. Goodell isn’t onboard with this proposal, since it would deny kids the kind of thrill he experienced.

On the pro level, Goodell is still exploring changes to the game. Kickoffs seem especially vulnerable, which won’t please many fans, since they have the potential to deliver excitement. In a recent meeting with Atlanta Falcons president and CEO Rich McKay, head of the NFL’s competition committee, Goodell brought up an idea promoted by Tampa Bay head coach Greg Schiano: After a touchdown or field goal, instead of kicking off, a team would get the ball on its own 30-yard line, where it’s fourth and 15. The options are either to go for it and try to retain possession or punt. If you go for it and fall short, of course, the opposing team would take over with good field position.

In essence, a punt replaces the kickoffs. “The fact is,” Goodell said during the meeting, “it’s a much different end of the play.” Punts have lower injury rates because the players bunch at the line of scrimmage and run down the field together toward the player making the return. They don’t charge at each other as they do on kickoffs, which reduces opportunities for violent smashes. “It’s an off-the-wall idea,” says Goodell. “It’s different and makes you think differently. It did me.”

Not so off the wall is a rule that takes effect next year requiring all players to wear thigh pads and knee pads. Some football experts believe that a lot of knee-to-head injuries occur because players are prone to making tackles with their head because the head, unlike other areas of the body, is fully protected. “That’s a theory we’ve talked a lot about,” says Goodell. “If you feel safest with your head, you’re more likely to use it.” Many players feel they are faster without pads weighing them down. Goodell wants to standardize the equipment. “We know what’s going to happen,” Goodell tells McKay. “They’re taking it to the tailor, and it’s going to be modified.” James Harrison–who else?–ridiculed this measure. “I don’t know how many people’s career has been ended on a thigh or knee bruise,” Harrison said in October.

Even if punts replace kickoffs, if violent tackling is further toned down, if players wear more padding, the game will still feel and look like football. The game’s beauty and drama–and hard-hitting appeal–are still there. And that’s exactly what Goodell is going for. “We’re a far, far cry from touch football,” he says.

Some fans, however, are still convinced he’s running in that direction. As he walked off the MetLife Stadium field before that Jets-Dolphins game after schmoozing with Dolphins majority owner Stephen Ross and limited partner Fergie, lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas, a Jets fan gave him an earful. “Leave the Saints alone! Leave the Saints alone!” the man shouted from the first row. “They are playing football.” The fan was practically pleading, Yo, Roger, stay out of the game. Goodell smiled, gave the guy a wave and kept walking. He’s not stopping anytime soon. “A lot of times, you know the right thing to do,” Goodell says later. “But you have to have the courage to do it. And I think that’s harder than it seems.”

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Write to Sean Gregory at sean.gregory@time.com