The Ritual Elimination of Jon Gruden

On Friday October 8, 2021 word leaked that emails had been found where Jon Gruden expressed

unacceptably racist and homophobic sentiments. By Monday the New York Times expanded the

coverage and Gruden was gone, faster even than Al Franken or Garrison Keillor. Whereas Franken and Keillor were alleged to have engaged in inappropriate touching and gestures, there were no known complaints against Gruden. For anyone who is not familiar with American football and may not even have heard of Jon Gruden, I might first explain who Jon Gruden is. Until he resigned on October 11th, Gruden was the head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders football team in the National Football League.  He had coached them earlier in his career when they were in Oakland and had then moved on to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers where he had won a Super Bowl at the end of the 2002 season. After dropping out of coaching in 2008 he went on to being a TV analyst for ESPN and other sports TV outlets until the Raiders lured him out of retirement with a ten-year $100 million contract in 2018.

I confess to a smidgen of cynicism that led me to wonder if there was a plot hatched to get the Raiders out of this ill-conceived contract. Hearing the Raiders’ owner, Mark Davis react with displeasure that he had been neither consulted nor informed by the NFL before they launched the attack on his coach tends to neutralize the conspiracy theory, which leads us to the more plausible theory that the NFL was taking advantage of the atmosphere spearheaded by the Me Too Movement to eliminate a perceived enemy/liability.

Salaries in sports have reached absurd levels but this was surprising even in this inflated atmosphere, not so much for the amount as for the duration of the contract. Losing coaches are often sacked after only one or two seasons. Gruden had been out of coaching for a decade and while his knowledge of the game is impressive and his earlier coaching record was good, $100 million was a large bet on his belated return to coaching. His first three years into the contract did not produce a winning season but in 2021 the Raiders started off well and appeared headed for success. Indeed they did manage to get into the playoffs and were then eliminated in a close game.

The NFL was conducting its own investigation of what had been the Washington Redskins football organization until the name “Redskins” was deemed politically incorrect and the league forced the owner of the club to drop the name. Concurrently the league was facing lawsuits brought by female employees of the Washington Football Club alleging a hostile workplace and sexist discrimination. It was during these investigations that the league found emails to the Redskins’ General Manager at the time, Bruce Allen, an old friend of Gruden. The investigation reviewed 650,000 emails in all, an effort worthy of its DC neighbors, the FBI and the CIA. That it chose to reveal and publicize the old emails of Gruden, who was not under investigation himself, may have had something to do with the fact that Gruden had often criticized Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the NFL, whose salary is even more generous than that of Gruden.

A man making $10 million a year probably should be smart enough to avoid calling the man who runs the organization in which he operates “a faggot” and a “clueless anti-football pussy”, even in an email to a friend. Most of us learn early in life that insulting people on whom our continued employment depends is not in our self-interest. Then again, $100 million apparently generates a degree of hubris.

The release of a coach’s old personal emails was not one of the league’s shining hours. Gruden was critical of Goodell’s management and his criticisms extended to bashing the hiring of female referees, tolerance of player protests during the playing of the national anthem, pressuring teams to draft gay players, and the league’s drawing too much attention to its injury protocols. I’m unaware of Gruden ever making his criticisms public but I assume that some of them are shared by many people in and out of the league. Beyond his league concerns, Gruden’s emailed criticisms of Presidents Obama and Biden to friends using vulgar epithets similar to those he applied to the NFL Commissioner.

In his place I might have made some comments critical of the league myself, although very different than his, and unlike Gruden, I realize that if I had a job in the NFL, I would probably be forced out for my views. First of all, I find the incestuous relationship between the NFL and the US military highly repugnant. The military flyovers at many games seem more appropriate to the Germany of the 1930’s than to a country that likes to think itself as a model of democracy.

Football and the military may appear to have some affinities. Strategies, discipline, training and

violence are present in both and they relish the high levels of testosterone in the more physical of those activities. From my limited involvement with football and the Army in the distant past, I recall that insults to ones virility were routinely used to inspire greater dedication to unpleasant tasks, from running laps around the field to digging latrines. Despite such affinities, there are differences. Football is a game, a rough game which inspires the natural competitive spirit of boys and young men. As a lifelong fan, I would argue that it is one of the greatest games ever devised, right up there with chess in its deployment of complex offensive and defensive strategies, as well as having specialized players on the field with different roles. The military is about waging war, which is not a game, except in the minds of some of our politicians and generals. It’s about killing people. In theory, it is about defending ourselves from foreign aggression, although to my knowledge the US Department of Defense has engaged exclusively in offensive activities since its name was changed from “War Department” in an early gesture of political correctness.

As for the misogyny which Gruden has been accused of by the NYT, I’ve never quite been able to forget that two current NFL quarterbacks were accused of rape early in their careers. Those charges were either dropped after an out-of-court settlement, or reclassified as sexual assault, that magical term which can be used to mask a violent crime or to conflate an unwanted gesture into a career-ending accusation. Good thing for them. Rape is usually a fairly clearly defined crime, although there are some exceptions, such as when the alleged rapist has been declared a wanted enemy of the state. Those players were suspended briefly, which given their salaries, would appear to most of us as severe monetary penalties. In 2007, the year after Roger Goodell had been named Commissioner of the NFL, another star QB, Michael Vick, who at the time was considered by many to be the best athlete in the league, was found to be involved in a dog fighting ring. He was charged with killing dogs who were not vicious enough, convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, as well as being suspended by the NFL. He served his time, interrupting a good career in his prime. I am often out of synch with a great number of my fellow Americans across a wide spectrum of subjects, issues and causes, but am I really alone among my countrymen, or even among football fans, in believing that raping women is a more serious offense than killing dogs?

Did this contrast in consequences of different disapproved activities reflect the values of the NFL or the USA in general? It was after all, a US prison where Michael Vick served his time. Then again, it may just be that it’s easier to negotiate an out-of-court settlement with a cocktail waitress than with a dead dog.

In fairness to Roger Goodell and the NFL, the league has expanded the business on his watch, making a lot of young men of humble origins into millionaires while making all their wealthy team owners into billionaires. To his credit, I’ve never heard Goodell use vile or offensive language but then, I have never read his e-mails or listened to his phone calls.  

If October 11th was a bad day for the NFL, it was worse for the New York Times. The Times, often referred to as America’s paper of record, covers many aspects of the news rather well, especially the obits, and its intelligent columnists outnumber its Neo-Lib propagandists and its presumed if undeclared foreign agents. It also documents and promotes the trendy values of its wealthy and influential NYC readers and the vast legions who would share those values and consumer preferences but just don’t have the wealth yet. Unfortunately, it does have a tradition of cowardly backing of the Establishment at its worst, such as its cheer-leading for the invasion of Iraq and its massive effort to derail the campaign of the most notably democratic candidate for the presidency. While the attack on Gruden may appear to be a small thing, its implications are greater than people seem to realize.

The exposè of Gruden was written by Ken Bolten and Katherine Rosman, who should have known better. You can see it here. Among the long list of all the terrible things that Gruden said to friends in his emails, the article had this gem:

“ Taken together, the emails provide an unvarnished look into the clubby culture of one N.F.L.

circle of peers, where white male decision makers felt comfortable sharing pornographic

images, deriding the league policies, and jocularly sharing homophobic language .”

While we were allowed to read many of the comments in Gruden’s emails, we were not furnished the images, described elsewhere in the article as pictures of women wearing only bikini bottoms, including one photo of two Washington cheerleaders. Did the authors see the photos? We did not. Jon Gruden was born in 1963, well after Hugh Hefner had made his fortune by founding Playboy Magazine, which featured women wearing not even bikini bottoms. Playboy’s decline came as a result of its sweet girl-next-door-photographed-nude features being nudged aside by publications such as Hustler, more open to pubic hair and a grittier sort of eroticism. Since then the USA has grown a huge pornography industry, which proves that the US can still make products for export. Most of the participants don’t get to wear bikini bottoms. When were Bolten and Rosman born and where have they been living?

Elsewhere in the New York Times, in the same week as the e-lynching of the Raider's coach, there was a glowing tribute to the artist Mickalene Thomas, with her loving appreciation of images of topless women.  Thomas's views were sincere enough but could there have been just a bit too much hypocrisy in the policies of the NYT, which spent so much effort decrying hypocrisy in the NFL?

Gruden was also accused of using offensive homophobic language. His language was certainly

vulgar, but these days does anyone not use vulgar language? After the story of the emails was

published, Carl Nassib, the only currently active player in the NFL who has come out as gay, and who happens to play for Gruden’s team, the Raiders, unsurprisingly declared that Gruden’s comments were unacceptable, but there was no report of his having had any previous objection to Gruden’s speech or comportment as coach.

The article drew more than two thousand comments and was republished at the end of December as one of the most widely read articles of the year. While there were a sprinkling of comments saying that the whole thing was a bit overwrought and out of place, the comments more typically seethed with heterophobic hatred, and a good many exuded racial hatred as well.  Of the thousands of comments, only a handful suggested that the whole episode involved a serious invasion of privacy. None seemed to grasp that their own comportment and attitude resembled that of the lynch mobs of a century ago. Yes, I am aware of the radical difference in outcomes. Losing your job, no matter how well paid, is not the same as being tortured and hanged. Still, the angry mob wanted Gruden to lose his job, and many suggested that others should follow. Were the NYT writers guilty of a hate crime in instigating such a reaction?

Gruden has been hounded out of a lucrative job because he used foul language and made comments in his private emails which were considered by some as racist, misogynous and homophobic. While all people should understand that old emails never die; they just go into a deep reversible coma, he might have been better off if he’d simply vented his spleen on Twitter. After all, the ex-President publicly sent out messages on Twitter far more crude, offensive and vulgar than anything Gruden said to his friends, and he sent them virtually every day of the four years he was in office. The two institutional attempts to remove him from office both failed since the majority of our elected Senators apparently do not regard his behavior as unacceptable to the degree that the majority of NYT commenters regard Gruden’s.

Hate is the major driver of ratings on all the radio and TV networks, and apparently for the major print media as well. Foul language has grown ever more foul. The N-word may have been successfully suppressed, except among black comics, but the F-word is now the most common adjective/adverb in American English. While I would be happy myself to see the use of the F-word banished from more than one instance per published or broadcast sentence, the establishment of a thought police or a speech police to bring about vigilante justice, whether it be brought about by hot-headed legislators or the New York Times readership, is something we should all stand up and fight.

We congratulate the Raiders for making the play-offs despite all the turmoil brought down on them by the Commissioner and the NYT in mid-season.. We don’t agree with Jon Gruden about much of anything outside of his field of football knowledge but we do wish him well with his lawsuits.