Men's Journal

Sports columnist Matt Taibbi Photo credit: photo by Michael Pirrocco

In his inaugural column Matt Taibbi celebrates a new football season and makes the case that Pennsylvania pol Arlen Specter’s unsportsmanlike conduct — not Bill Belichick’s spy cams — spoiled the last one.

The preseason games have started, the 2008–2009 NFL season is a few short days away, and here is why my loved ones think that is awesome news: because they think my “problem” might finally be cured. If this off-season had gone on any longer, institutional remedies might have been pursued. They tell me it was a close call.

My problem has a name. He is a saggy-assed senator from Pennsylvania who bears a striking resemblance to ancient renditions of St. Pilosius, Christianity’s patron saint of hairy backs. I’ve been obsessed with Arlen Specter ever since his horrifying, bug-eyed face was splashed all over ESPN in the run-up to the Super Bowl — the Super Bowl that, for a Patriots fan like myself, was originally scripted to be the Ultimate Sports Orgasm, a million-megawatt maraschino cherry atop an unprecedented perfect modern-era season.

We know how things turned out in real life. Specter’s pregame demand for a reopening of the investigation into the Patriots’ videotaping practices proved to be a karmic deathblow preceding one of the great sports train wrecks of all time. The Patriots’ vaunted offensive line (which had given up only 21 sacks all year, over the course of about 49,000 pass attempts) decided not to show up for the game and was instead replaced by five Australian schoolgirls who were apparently in Phoenix that weekend to audition for a remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Bill Belichick eschewed his famed pulsating-brain-colored gray cutoff hoodie for an eerie bright-red job that made him look like a tranny cheerleader — and I was forced to watch this sexually ambiguous imposter blow off a makeable third-quarter field goal in order to try a doomed 4th-and-13 bomb to Jabar Gaffney, in the biggest moment of the biggest game of all time.

God didn’t need to keep up the Arlen Specter thing after that, but he did. For months after the Super Bowl, he rammed Specter’s insane Spygate threats down the public’s throat, even raising the possibility that the Senate would open investigative hearings into the functional equivalent of a baseball team stealing the signs of an opposing third base coach.

Spygate was always a crock, for the simple reason that the NFL is based upon the idea that teams will do whatever they can to win. Not only does every team engage in some form of the same behavior Belichick indulged in (famed ex-Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson has admitted that many coaches film defensive signals); we know teams do things that are much worse. For one thing, we know that normal human beings don’t maintain superheroid 330-pound physiques without enough illegal drugs to kill a field of racehorses. Every now and then one of these guys keels over in practice, and they open them up to find hearts the size of basketballs. The MEs get contact highs just by bending over the corpses.

Teams cheat. In domes they pump in phony crowd noise to fuck with visiting quarterbacks. QB-coach headsets suddenly crap out at key moments. Hell, Bill Belichick used to be celebrated for his cheating — for his famous instruction to the defensive players on the ’90 Giants to “accidentally” kick the football before the snaps in the Super Bowl, or sending players not even involved in the play to jump on the pile long after the whistle, all in order to slow down Jim Kelly’s explosive “K-Gun” Buffalo Bills.

Back in the days when Belichick was just a snarling, mute henchman on Bill Parcells’s leash, this was called smart coaching. When he got his own team, though, and turned into America’s leading Smug Trophy–Hoarding Asshole, the playground bully who wouldn’t share, he suddenly became a cheater who needed to be stopped. Belichick’s crime wasn’t that he cheated; it was that he was brazen and unapologetic about it — and he misjudged how much the other teams whose brains he’d been beating in would jump at the chance to stick it to him.

But Spygate was never a threat to the “integrity” of the game. No matter how much teams juice their players, or steal signals, or turn off the hot water in the opposing locker rooms, the games still come down to which team can block in the fourth quarter. What you see on the field is actually happening: honest competition. And you can’t say that about the action on C-SPAN. That’s why I flipped when Arlen Specter took over this past NFL off-season.

It’s bad enough that we let our elected officials fuck up the jobs they were actually elected to do, like steward the rapidly disappearing national treasure and protect what’s left of our civil rights. But when they start sticking their grubby hands into the sordid pastimes we choose to enjoy in private — for instance, the gorgeous fascist fantasyland called the NFL — well, nothing could be more un-American. That’s like telling us we can’t collect Nazi flatware. They Do Not Belong.

So I became a stalker. I’m not proud of it. But Arlen Specter left me no choice.

It started with phone calls. i would call Specter’s office in the guise of some liberal do-gooder representing this or that coalition of homeless amputees, or blind AIDS patients, or parents of autistic children, or some other more or less deserving group that theoretically could actually use the attention of a U.S. senator for a minute or two. I would ask for an audience with the senator to discuss policy ideas. Then I would wait patiently for the boilerplate brush-off, the loser senatorial rebuff (“Let me take your number and we’ll have someone get back to you”), hang up, and regroup.

A few hours later I would call up with a different pitch. I would pretend to be a disgruntled former employee of the New England Patriots, recently fired and offering juicy information. They’d take me a little more seriously then.

“Wait, what did you say your name was?” asked Joe Lambert, a member of Specter’s judiciary committee staff.

“Dzhugashvili,” I said. “Josef Dzhugashvili.”

“D-z —”

“Dee-zee-h-u-g-a-shvili. It’s Georgian,” I said.

I rambled on with some story about working in the Patriots’ IT department and witnessing some suspicious “competitive practices.” I professed to be deeply torn about calling and hinted that I was physically frightened of what Bill Belichick & Co. might do in the way of vengeance. “These guys would make a Denver omelet out of me if they knew I was calling,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Lambert said.

“They’re like the Medellín cartel, only in cleats.”

Lambert bought the story and suggested we set up another call to Daniel Fisher, a more senior Specter aide. “Let me give you my private extension,” he said. Not the kind of answer you get when you call up and ask for help for the gay, blind, and dying. Anyway, I then hung up and wondered how long it would take Lambert to run the name Dzhugashvili through Google and realize that he had just given his personal phone number to Josef Stalin.

I kept up this kind of pointless needling for weeks. I became obsessed with the goal of finding a piece of smoking-gun evidence that I could use to get Specter hauled before the Ethics Committee for a conflict-of-interest violation. After all, by repeatedly sticking his foot up the ass of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell with his Spygate rants, Specter was obviously carrying water for the cable company Comcast, his second-largest campaign contributor (the largest is the law firm that represents Comcast), which just happens to be in the middle of a protracted and expensive dispute with the NFL over broadcast rights. Here is how insanely serious a football fan I am: I went all the way to Washington, sat in the Senate records office, and spent hours poring over Arlen Specter’s financial disclosure forms, looking for some piece of information that I could use to get the government’s filthy hands off my Sunday afternoons.

I thought I was really smart when I found notations indicating that Specter had held at least $30,000 in Comcast stock for years. And I thought it was interesting that the Senate judiciary chairman — who has enormous influence over all legislation pertaining to antitrust issues — also held large bundles of stock in telecom companies like Lucent and AT&T, both of which, like Comcast, have a real stake in telecom, broadband, and broadcast antitrust legislation.

But the joke was on me. In the U.S. Senate it is not against the law, or even against the Senate rules, for a lawmaker to own stock in companies whose share price is directly affected by his legislative behavior. It’s not even considered bad form. Unlike the NFL, where you can’t come within a hundred miles of rigging the game’s outcome without breaking a rule, the United States government is a landscape of complete and total moral chaos.

I mean, it’s actually legal to buy a U.S. senator, unashamedly and right out in the open — but in the NFL you can’t film a defensive coordinator who’s making his signals in front of 65,000 people. They don’t allow players to pump pure nandrolone into their necks on the sideline during games. But in Congress, it’s okay.

The NFL off-season in particular ought to be one of the few remaining pure joys of the male experience. It is a time when men lock themselves in their dens, go on the internet, and spend months at a time researching the three-cone shuttle times of 300-pound teenage sex criminals from places like Alabama–Birmingham and Central Michigan. It’s a time for watching the “Briefs” section of your local newspaper every morning for reports of your team’s star cornerback driving his Escalade into an old-folks home at four in the morning while on vacation in Miami (it’s always Atlanta or Miami), then walking away from the scene exuding what police inevitably describe as the “strong, unmistakable odor of marijuana.”

It’s a time for cheering your team’s director of public relations when he stands up on live television and says, days later, of said star cornerback: “We believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and we’re not going to comment until the justice system runs its course.”
Until the justice system runs its course. In NFL-speak, until after the season. When the bastard’s contract runs out anyway.

This is what the NFL off-season is for. It’s for obsessing over the draft, obsessing over free agency, succumbing to wild rationalizations that explain away this or that roster-threatening arrest (“That wasn’t even his sawed-off shotgun! It belonged to his cousin!”). It’s for watching grainy internet videos of the first minicamp practices and concluding, based upon a few seconds of footage of guys running around in shorts, that the undrafted free-agent running back your guys picked up off the SEC scrap heap is the next Emmitt Smith. It’s for eight thousand mentions of the word upside.

We lost all that this past year, under a cloud of scandal. But it wasn’t all bad, when you think about it.

The reason Spygate so completely captivated the public imagination is that it threatened to undermine our implicit belief that the games on Sunday were fair fights. That our society reacted so swiftly and voluminously to even the faintest whiff of real cheating is a testament to how far we’re willing to go to protect the so-called integrity of the game. Sports is the one place where Americans always care enough to demand at least some semblance of justice and fairness, and to stamp out true corruption.

That we don’t care nearly that much about Congress, or the presidency, or our tax dollars, or healthcare for war veterans, or the future condition of the planet we’ll be leaving to our children — well, that’s kind of embarrassing, I guess, and it sucks. But what the hell? None of that shit is as fun as football. And another season, thank God, is finally getting underway. Here’s to jumping in it with both feet, and to once again having reason to remember: At least we still care about something.

This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.

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