Deflategate (January, 2015)
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The strangest press conference in modern American sports history? It has to be this:
It is a moment straight out of the Adam McKay playbook, a moment that, with the benefit of hindsight, feels almost too satirical to be real. Even the chyron appears fabricated, as if yanked straight from the opening credits of Succession. If Adam McKay did make movie about this, critics would declare it as overly broad and overtly ridiculous (as they seem to do with the movies he actually makes, anyhow). The wardrobe—that hat, bro!—is deliciously absurd. But it was not a dream, and it was not a satire. It was all real: In 2015, Tom Brady was accused of deflating footballs before a playoff game. The Wikipedia entry for this thing is as long as that for some American presidents. The jokes, fraught with leaden double entendres, wrote themselves: Touching balls. Rubbing balls. CNN carried this press conference live. Let me repeat that: CNN carried this press conference live.
This was the biggest story in American life for a short period of time. The media framed it as if Santa Claus had been spotted inhaling powdered horse tranquilizers in a nightclub while consorting with a woman who did not resemble Mrs. Claus. The sanctity of America’s most muscular and most popular sport had been violated by a blatant manipulation of PSI, whatever the fuck that was. Rubbing balls. Touching balls. Look at this press conference: Reporters are literally shouting questions, like something straight out of the movies. The Dunkin Donuts coffee cups in the background? I mean, you can almost hear Sully from Dorchester screaming obscenities with dropped r’s at the screen. There were very serious and very long official reports in its wake. There was a suspension. People evoked Deflategate as an example of the dissolution of American integrity. Massholes acted as if Brady were Mahatma Gandhi.
Tom Brady retired this week at the age of 44, and there are many ways to view his career. He is the most iconic and successful quarterback in American history. But I cannot get past this press conference. I cannot get past Deflategate. Because it foreshadowed an era when ridiculous moments that toed the line between reality and satire would define our everyday existence. The cheating and the lies just became a hell of lot more momentous. The notion of accountability became a lot more real.
I just read my friend Chuck Klosterman’s panoramic book about the 1990s, and so I’ve been thinking about how eras begin and end in an age when there is no overarching monoculture, and when decades increasingly seem to fuse together into one long and exhausting timeline. In the fragmented twenty-first century, calcifying decades into moods and ideas feels increasingly hard to do; but there are still galvanizing moments that feel like the culmination of an era, and I’ve begun to think that Deflategate is one of those moments. It was an all-encompassing and completely unserious thing that we took far too seriously, and in its wake we wound up in a completely serious moment that felt, in the day to day, entirely unserious. And oddly enough, Tom Brady was the bridge. As I wrote last year:
The closest Brady’s public image came to unraveling happened in 2015, when reporters spotted a Donald Trump campaign hat in his locker. Way back in the days when Brady was evolving from a sixth-round draft pick into a major celebrity, he judged one of Trump’s beauty pageants; according to author Charles P. Pierce’s book Moving the Chains, Trump became “a new very close friend.” It is easy to imagine that Trump, given his myopic self-regard, viewed Tom Brady as a kindred spirit, a serial winner who presented a flawless image of opulence and success to the country. And for Brady, I imagine Trump was nothing more than a dude he could chase girls and play golf with back when he was young. It was almost as if Brady was entirely out of touch with what the consequences of that friendship could even be once Trump chose to run for president on a platform of bigotry and anger—which is exactly what we’d come to expect from the older Tom Brady, who was too busy modeling cardigans and studying film to pay much attention to the consequences of his actions outside of football.
After a while, those ridiculous moments didn’t seem so funny anymore. They just felt like the end of something. And perhaps it’s an overstatement to say that Deflategate foreshadowed the end of American democracy as we know it, but I’m not saying it didn’t foreshadow the of America as we know it, either. Five years later, we found ourselves here, at an equally ridiculous press conference that wasn’t nearly as frivolous:
The balls were deflated. Someone did it. And I’m not sure if we’ll ever figure out what the hell happened to all of us after that.
Anyway, here’s the full piece about Tom Brady that I wrote last year. He was more of a periodically intriguing cultural cipher than he was an actual human being. For that reason, I will miss his presence, and yet I won’t miss him at all.
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