It is impossible to overstate how big a loss Roger Goodell suffered Thursday, when Judge Richard Berman nullified the four-game suspension Goodell had deemed just for Tom Brady’s part in Deflategate and its cover-up.
The winners in this fracas — Brady, the Patriots, Robert Kraft, the NFL Players Association — come away with victories that are certainly satisfying but are relatively small in comparison to the epic, sweeping, historical setback Berman pinned on Goodell. And that will be the case even if the NFL’s appeal somehow reverses Thursday’s decision.
Ninety-five years after the notion of an all-powerful sports commissioner came into being, Goodell’s ill-fated pursuit of justice — “industrial justice,” in the verbiage of Berman, two words that will instantly implant themselves into the American sporting lexicon — that job is dead, once and for all.
And Goodell is the one who unhooked the respirator.
For all of those 95 years, it was Kenesaw Mountain Landis whose stony visage presented the face of what an American commissioner was supposed to look like. Hired by owners fearful that the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series would ruin them, he was granted an emperor’s authority and was delighted to use it.
And not always for good. It was Landis who kept the color barrier in place as long as it was. It was Landis who often ruled randomly and wantonly, forbidding players from earning extra money barnstorming based on because-I-said-so reasoning, always ruling in favor of owners, once actually ordering Ducky Medwick of the Cardinals off the field in Detroit in Game 7 of the 1934 World Series because unruly fans started throwing garbage and debris at him.
He was undefeated. More, he was unchallenged. And never, ever forget: The eight White Sox who were charged with throwing that World Series? On Aug. 3, 1921, they were each acquitted of the charge. It took a jury all of three hours to reach a verdict.
And one day later, Landis threw them all out of baseball. Forever. Such was Landis’ authority. Hell, such is Landis’ authority: This very week, the sitting commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, refused to allow Shoeless Joe Jackson’s name to be submitted for consideration for the Hall of Fame … only 96 years after his alleged part in the plot (and, again: HE WAS ACQUITTED).
That was then.
Now? Since Landis was appointed in 1920, there have been 10 baseball commissioners. There have been five NBA commissioners and six NHL commissioner/presidents. Goodell is the sixth NFL commissioner. It is a select group, 27 men who have presided over a combined four centuries of professional sports. It is rarely easy to unseat despots, after all, and commissioners, for the most part, have been nothing but despotic through the years.
Except now the position is increasingly ceremonial. And the commissioners themselves — and the owners who support them — are largely to blame. For decades, owners and commissioners in all sports conspired to limit both player movement and player salaries, a greedy dance that ultimately backfired, slowly and surely, once players developed the fortitude to risk their careers in courts of law.
Tom Brady is not Curt Flood, he faced neither the contemporary scorn nor the potential for calamitous consequence that Flood did when he challenged the Cardinals’ right to trade him to the Phillies in 1969 like so many boxes of baseballs. But give Brady this (even if, like me, you believe he acted above his rank-and-file brethren by refusing to fully cooperate with the league investigation): He had the defiance, and the profile, to challenge the corporate bully before a judge.
And the last strip of commissioner powers was undone.
There is some reactionary fear that this ruling could throw so much of the NFL’s system into chaos, but it won’t. There was similar fear that the dawn of free agency in American sports would completely destroy the notion of fair play and competitive balance. It didn’t. Players understand the need for structure; they benefit from it as much as the owners do.
What this will do is give the NFLPA the kind of leverage that free agency once gave Marvin Miller and the baseball union to enact real, substantive, lasting change. His critics always disagreed, but Miller never wanted anarchy in baseball, just fairness. The courts ultimately handed him that clout. And Berman, Thursday morning, probably handed DeMaurice Smith a similar cudgel.
There will still be men who possess the title of “commissioner” going forward. But it will be a lot less imposing designation. Over the course of 95 years, absolute power had already devolved to implied power. We are officially on the clock to where it settles at honorary power. Roger Goodell can take a bow for that. Hey, it’s something.