Calling time on football league’s controversial grow-the-pie guy

When Roger Goodell was growing up here, he had the best possible example of moral leadership. His father, a moderate New York Republican appointed by governor Nelson Rockefeller to Bobby Kennedy's Senate seat after the assassination, risked his career to come out against the Vietnam War.

"We should not be engaged in a land war 10,000 miles away," he wrote to Rockefeller. Egged on by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon never blanched at putting his political viability ahead of the lives of kids on the battlefield, but Charles Goodell would not do that. In September 1969, the senator tried to force the president to withdraw all the troops faster by introducing a Bill, S-3000, withholding money. He could have waited until after his election the following year, thus garnering Nixon's support, but he was that rare creature that seems to have vanished from the Washington landscape: a profile in courage.

Moral stance

His moral stance brought down the immoral Furies: Nixon, Agnew and Kissinger, who suggested Goodell was treasonous. As his five sons, including Roger (11), watched in dismay, the vengeful Nixon White House schemed against Goodell’s re-election, and, at 44, his political career was kaput.

The two legacies from his dad, Bryan Curtis wrote in Grantland last year, could well be “a measure of his dad’s idealism, his contrarianism, his stubbornness. And I bet we’d also find a kind of defense mechanism that develops when you see your dad destroyed on a public stage. An instinct that makes you think, I won’t let that happen to me.”

Now the NFL commissioner, he told The Times' George Vecsey in 2010 that it "was a valuable lesson to me". But what was the lesson? Goodell is acting more like Nixon, the man who covered up crimes, than his father, who sacrificed his career to save lives. As ESPN's Keith Olbermann summed it up, "Mr Goodell is an enabler of men who beat women," and he must resign.

Goodell likes to present himself as a law-and-order sheriff bent on integrity, whose motto is: “Protect the shield.” But that doesn’t seem to include protecting the victims of violence or American Indians who see the Washington team’s name as a slur. As with concussions, the league covered up until the public forced its hand.

The commissioner, who has been a sanctimonious judge for eight years, suddenly got lenient. His claim that it was "ambiguous about what actually happened" in the Atlantic City casino elevator between Ray Rice and his then- fiancee, Janay Palmer, during the Valentine's Day massacre was risible to start with. What did he think happened? The man was dragging out an unconscious woman like a sack of mulch.

Goodell’s credibility took another hit on Thursday, when Don Van Natta Jr wrote on ESPN.com that four sources close to Rice had said the player had admitted to the commissioner during a disciplinary meeting on June 16th that he had hit his girlfriend in the face and knocked her out. Rice probably assumed the commissioner had seen the video. Yet Goodell only suspended him for two games, two less than if he’d been caught taking Adderall.

It has been suggested that the NFL will give players purple gear next month in honour of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. But they may as well just wear green. The Wall Street Journal reported that the greed league even asked entertainers to pay for the privilege of playing the Super Bowl halftime show.

Goodell was hired by the owners to be a grow-the-pie guy, which means shielding the throw-the-punch guy. Since he became commissioner in 2006, the league’s 32 gridiron fiefdoms have increased in value by $10.9 billion, according to Forbes. Goodell himself is on more than $44 million.

Fewer sales

Owners shrug off moral turpitude because when they pay a lot of money for a player, they don’t want him sitting out games, even if he’s been accused of a crime, because every game they lose means less merchandise and fewer ticket sales. So, as the NFL continues its perp walk – on Friday, one of its best running backs, the Minnesota Vikings star Adrian Peterson, was indicted on charges of abusing his four-year-old son in Texas - Goodell looks the other way.

They think they can get away with anything now, even with women being almost 50 per cent of their fan base. Maybe they can. Twenty million people tuned in to watch the Ravens play Thursday night – even without the irony of prerecorded Rihanna show kicking things off – and the papers were filled with sickening pictures of women proudly wearing Rice’s No 27 jersey.

The last sports commissioner who didn’t kowtow to owners may have been Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who banned Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox players from baseball for life even though they were acquitted in 1921 and went out with the jury to eat to celebrate. “Regardless of the verdict of juries,” Landis said, “baseball is competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside and outside the game.” If only. – New York Times service