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. 

If the NFL Fails, What's Left?

The USA has been in serious decline at least since the turn of the century, by some measures from two or three decades earlier. Much of what there was, the majority middle class, the Constitution, an improving environment, a rising standard of living, is gone. From being the model for postwar development throughout the world, the US has turned into the world’s number one rogue nation, often feared, sometimes hated, and increasingly pitied. US industry has largely withered away, leaving a nation of service industries, from fast food and chic food through financial services and entertainment. Within the expanding entertainment sector there are professional and semi-professional (i.e. college) sports.

America’s sports tradition has revolved around three seasonal sports, baseball in the spring and summer, football in the autumn, and basketball in the winter. Most high schools in the US field teams in all three sports, along with less popular sports such as track & field, soccer, and in affluent communities, even ice hockey, tennis and golf. Football and basketball are the ones that attract a paying audience in both high school and college. The seasons barely overlap so high school athletes can, and often do, play all three major sports on their school teams.  With the growth of professional sports and their ever present drive to maximize revenues through television, the seasons of all three sports have expanded to cover at least half the year. Pro sports keep taking in ever more money, largely through TV, and pro athletes have a faster path to great riches than all but the shrewdest and sleaziest of upstart banksters, but they have to work hard to get there, as well as being possessed of exceedingly rare physical traits.

Baseball, called the national pastime since the Great Depression, when out of work men could pass the long afternoons at the ballpark for less than the price of a movie, is now played mostly at night in front of well paid workers by outrageously overpaid players often recruited from countries where the game is still widely played, such as the Dominican Republic, the rest of Latin America, and even Japan. Just as gladiators working the Colosseum during the Roman Empire were mostly recruited from the distant outposts of the Empire, big league baseball players increasingly come from the further reaches of the American Empire.

Basketball is played from early childhood even to middle age by many people throughout the US but a minuscule percentage are good enough to even think about playing pro ball. There are only about fifteen players on each pro team so the competition for a position on any of those teams is statistically akin to being elected president, except that to be an NBA player you have to be really talented. It also helps to be a tough, agile, two meter tall kid who grew up spending most of his days shooting baskets in a focused, competitive atmosphere. White kids aren’t discriminated against as far as I know, but there just aren’t that many of them with those requisites so by now, basketball is an almost exclusively black sport, much as ice hockey and Nascar racing are white sports.

Despite claims made by others, football is still the most popular American sport. It started in colleges such as Harvard, Rutgers and Princeton over a century ago and college teams still have huge and loyal followings, often playing in larger stadiums than those used by the pros. The big college programs have become more and more professional except that the players don’t get paid. Successful coaches at the big state universities are often the highest paid employees of their state. Vast numbers of players go through those schools tuition free but only a tiny number hit the jackpot and make it to the NFL.

Once upon a time, preppy college boys were squeezed out of big time football by the sons of Polish steel workers and coal miners from western Pennsylvania.. Industries and demographics have changed. In 1961 James Meredith was the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, accompanied by federal marshals ordered in by President Kennedy to protect him from the redneck mobs trying to keep him out.  By 1985, Bo Jackson, one of the greatest athletes in American history, was winning the Heisman Trophy (for outstanding college football player of the year) at Auburn, a nearby rival of Ole Miss, in front of huge cheering crowds of the same sort of people who a generation earlier would stop at nothing to keep their universities white. Sports have their dark sides but football (and basketball) have had a role in the racial integration of the South. There is a delightful irony in seeing vast crowds of white people across Dixie, from the Carolinas to Texas, cheering on the black heroes of their alma maters on Saturdays in autumn. Those players now go on to make up the lion’s share of NFL rosters.

Players’ salaries in all pro sports continue to rise but there are warning signs on the horizon for football. The most discussed problem is the growing evidence of brain damage among retired players. Measures are being taken to reduce hits to the head but football is, by its nature, a spectacularly rough game. If the violence is reduced, will the spectacle maintain its popularity?

It'not Munich or Berlin in the 30's

A second and less discussed cloud on the horizon is the cultural divide between team owners and players. While the majority of players are non-white and from humble circumstances, the owners of the thirty-two teams are all billionaires, tending to the far right politically. It is often hard to determine if NFL games are simply lavish popular entertainments or recruiting rallies for the Orwellian-named Department of Defense, which does in fact pay the NFL to promote recruitment. Most games feature military flyovers, military bands, giant American flags and large units of uniformed veterans of recent military campaigns honored in the stands, or sometimes on the field, as our heroes who have sacrificed to defend our freedoms. The solemnity of the religious/militaristic rite is marred less by the protests of a few civic-minded players than by the grotesque mauling of the national anthem by pop stars trying to be original.

Military girls

Perhaps it’s only fair that the anthem is routinely trashed since its third stanza, rarely sung in public, is an ode to the coming defeat of the British and their efforts to free American slaves in the War of 1812. Statues of Confederate heroes have been disappearing from public view recently due to public outcry but the Star Spangled Banner is more of an affront to the descendants of those slaves than any of those post-Reconstruction statues.

              

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,

That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion

A home and a Country should leave us no more?

Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Kaepernick and fellow protesters

NFL players are in a very complex position. Coming from underprivileged backgrounds in stark contrast to those of the owners, they are subjected to hyper-competition for their jobs. Surviving that competition can make them extremely wealthy young men but they are also in on-going, cut-throat negotiations with their employers, who can dump them at will. Such tensions came to light with Colin Kaepernick, an incredibly gifted athlete and far better than average quarterback. During the 2016 season, he refused to stand for the playing of the National Anthem prior to games to protest the all too frequent fatal police shootings of young black men and women in cities throughout the USA. An increasing number of players joined his protest. Despite a severe shortage of good quarterbacks, the key position in football, Kaepernick has been without a job for more than a year and is now suing the owners, alleging a conspiracy to keep him off the field., a charge which is as difficult to prove as it is obvious to see. He should be playing but, as a starting quarterback for a few years, he has already made more money than most Americans will earn in their lifetimes. Other younger players face bigger risks to their earnings. Many will no doubt keep their heads down and their comments to themselves. They walk a fine line between a return to poverty or a path to unimagined wealth. Still, it’s not hard to foresee this incendiary environment blowing up at some point.

Recently the NFL announced new rules for the 2018 season. Players will be required to respectfully stand during the playing of the national anthem, with an option of remaining in the dressing room until it’s over. Liberal media and journalists have come down hard on the NFL for suppressing the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech of the players, proving nothing so much as how the concern of today’s American “left” for constitutional rights is directly proportional to the wealth of the citizens whose rights are at issue. Do any of you who work in contact with the public, at a bank or a Walmart or an advertising agency, think that you could show up at work wearing a badge of support for a cause not supported by your employer? Journalists should know better, since few of them can write what they want when it contradicts the views of their employers.

The USA is a big, influential country with a long list of achievements in politics, science, art and culture. While our political heritage has fallen from the gutter into the sewer, a few of our better inventions have survived. Highest on my list of remaining American things of value are jazz and football.

Jazz is America’s music. Fortunately, it has spread to the rest of the world and is often appreciated more elsewhere than it is at home. It may be America’s greatest gift to the world and by now, excellent jazz musicians are emerging from the most unlikely and remote places on all continents.

American football may have evolved from English origins, along with soccer and rugby, but it is a distinctly American game. Unlike jazz, it has not effectively spread to the rest of the world, despite the efforts of the NFL to promote it with a few games in London and Mexico City. Overprotective parents increasingly discourage or forbid their children from playing it but nevertheless, football is one of the world’s great sports, both challenging to play and exciting to watch. Many sports feature remarkable athletic performances but football brings the fascination of a chess match played on a 100 yard long board with giant moving chess pieces of diverse capabilities. More than most, it is a coach’s game, but unlike baseball, that other coach’s game, where strategy often squeezes out most of the action, football never lacks for action, except during the TV commercials, which provide welcome breaks for getting another beer or disposing of the last one.

Hope is in short supply in America right now. The progression from James Meredith to Bo Jackson lets me hope that the country, despite appearances, is not beyond redemption. So, for this celebration of the nation’s independence on the two hundred and forty-second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I propose a toast to Colin Kaepernick. May more of his colleagues find their voices.

Despite all its problems, football must succeed! We have no queen to pledge our fealty to and no World Cup presence to cheer for. With democracy banished over the past several electoral cycles and American industry moribund, what else is left for Americans to rally round?