Mike Freeman - Bloody Sundays: Inside the Rough and Tumble World of the NFL

INTRODUCTION
Condoleezzas Story

AFTERWORD
End Zone

A snapshot. Americas terror war rages on, which explains the agitation around the sunny West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bushs national security adviser. Aides scurry in and out of the room, creating a frenzied buzz. When her office finally empties, Rice welcomes me with a pleasant smile and firm handshake and expresses relief that, at least for a few minutes this afternoon, she will not be asked to discuss the latest world crisis or suicide bombing. No, Rice is going to talk football.

Rice is a former Stanford University provost and political scientist. She is one of the presidents most trusted advisers. If she were to leave government service tomorrow, she would easily command a seven-figure job at a top think tank. She could go to Wall Street. She could go into law. Hell, she would make a pretty good president herself.

Once the football chat begins, however, it is clear she has few such aspirations. Rice is asked about her future, and her answer would raise a few eyebrows. Her dream job is on Park Avenue in New York, as commissioner of the National Football League. She is totally serious. Thats absolutely right, she says, though not immediately, and not before Paul Tagliabue is ready to step down. I want to say that for the record. I think it would be a very interesting job because I actually think football, with all due respect to baseball, is a kind of national pastime that brings people together across social lines, across racial lines. And I think its an important American institution.

Rice is not the only person in the U.S. government who appreciates the importance of football and what it means to millions of people. Knowing that a World Trade Centerlike terrorist attack on an NFL stadium filled with 70,000 fans would be devastating, in terms of both the potential loss of human life and the damage it would cause to the American psyche, the military was ordered to take unprecedented security steps after the September 11, 2001 attack. Some of these maneuvers never became known to the public, but Lieutenant Colonel William E. Glover, head of the Air Warning Center at the Air Forces Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, says that the military put up combat air patrols over every NFL game during the 2001 season. Glover explains that F-15 and F-16 fighter jets would monitor the airspace around the stadium during the national anthem, stay for a short while, and then fly on to the next stadium. Since the aircraft can fly at two times the speed of sound, or around 1,500 mph, and cover large distances, groups of stadiumsfor example, Washington, Philadelphia, and New Yorkcould be covered by one swift patrol in a matter of minutes.

Now that is a prevent defense, one that may even have been ordered by the national security adviser herself.

Rice does not, of course, fit the stereotype of a pro football fan. She speaks four languages, plays piano so superbly that she once hung with Yo-Yo Ma to perform a Brahms duet, was a professional-caliber figure skater, and has written three books, including one on German unification. She is also a woman. While the NFL estimates that an increasing number of its fans, some 20 to 30 percent, are women, the sport remains mostly the territory of men, an arena for a sort of crude bonding, complete with tests of manhood and rituals that border on the grotesque. How many women attend a New York Jets game shirtless in 20-degree weather, beer guts flapping in the January wind, yelling that the Miami Dolphins suck, while simultaneously spitting beer on fans five rows down?

No, Rice does not fit neatly into any of the football-addict categories, yet her passion for the sport, her love of it, is as powerful as anyones, man or woman. When we meet at the White House, Rice is monitoring the latest series of violent outbursts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But as we continue to speak, it becomes clear that between security briefings she sneaks away to check television or Internet reports on the latest NFL gossip. Rice regularly watches the ESPN television networks NFL Countdown, a testosterone-suffused Sunday pregame football feast that is two hours longonly hard-core fans need apply. I have covered the sport for a living, and even I cant watch that much analysis. Rice eats it up. How much of a football-head is she? Rice will tape a game and, despite knowing the final score, watch the entire contest upon arriving home from meetings or overseas trips. I would have written several more books if it had not been for the NFL, she says, only half-joking.

Rices passion for football stems from her study of the history of warfare. She is attracted to two fundamental similarities between football and combat: the use of strategy and the goal of taking territory. I really consider myself a student of the game, she says. I find the strategy and tactics absolutely fascinating. I find the evolution of the game really interestingagain, as it relates to military history. Military history has swung back and forth between advantage to the offense and advantage to the defense. When the offense has the advantage, then a new technology will come along that will temporarily give the defense the advantage, and vice versa. Football has that kind of pattern too.

Though the pure, naked violence of the sport is what attracts most to football, the strategies coaches employ to thwart or trick the opposing team are a close second. It is why head coaches like Bill Walsh and Joe Gibbs, already in the Hall of Fame, and others like Bill Belichick, on his way there, or Super Bowl champion Jon Gruden almost become cult heroes, some as popular as movie stars. They are seen as geniuses by fans and the news media, as innovators in their football kingdom, devising schemes and tactics that outwit and outplay. Head coaches are raking in franchise cash because owners recognize their importance; their salaries are approaching the stratospheric levels, closing in on the $7 million or more a year salaries of star players.

The capitalistic sport of professional football has become a reflection of America in all its glory and foibles: its bloodthirsty and profit-driven, its egalitarian and discriminatory, its scandalous and heroic. But above all, the NFL is the countrys supreme entertainment. Daily sports pages cant tell the full story of the nations ultimate franchise, the NFL. This book slips inside the sport to reveal the NFLs underground societies, the ravaged health of players, the unheralded talent, the thug life, the true leaders, and the possible future. That Condoleezza Ricean educated, Republican, multitalented black womanthrives inside the widening circle of American football fans is a testament to how far the sport has evolved. But despite her knowledge of football and her intense passion for it, Rice says men often underestimate what she knows because she is a woman.

As the Stanford provost, Rice oversaw the universitys athletic budget and was ultimately responsible for hiring the football coach. Some of the candidates she interviewed were surprised by her football knowledge. Wed go through the interview process, she said, and inevitably I would ask some question of a coach, say, who came from an option team. Youre not going to be able to run the option at Stanford. We dont have enough bodies to give up to run the option. What do you plan to do? It always surprised people.