Brady, Tom

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      in Football

      Tom Brady Jokes About Election Results as Buccaneers Visit White House

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      President Biden’s administration has revived a tradition of championship invitations that had grown sporadic under former President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — Until a few hours before kickoff, Tom Brady was questionable for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ celebration of their Super Bowl title at the White House. He was the most prolific winner of titles and decliner of presidential invitations in league history.But when the band struck up and President Biden strode onto the South Lawn to meet the championship team, Mr. Brady, the quarterback and seven-time N.F.L. champion, was there, smiling in a dark suit and sunglasses, leading a small procession including his coach, his team’s owner and the commander in chief himself.A few minutes later he was back in the spotlight, tossing off political jokes like slant routes, mostly targeting Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, a longtime friend of Mr. Brady’s.Mr. Brady first needled Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, which many Trump supporters still believe. The quarterback said many people did not believe the Buccaneers could win the championship last year.“I think about 40 percent of the people still don’t think we won,” Mr. Brady said.“I understand that,” Mr. Biden said.Mr. Brady turned to Mr. Biden. “You understand that, Mr. President?” he said.Mr. Biden smiled. “I understand that,” he said again.“Yeah,” Mr. Brady continued. “And personally, you know, it’s nice for me to be back here. We had a game in Chicago where I forgot what down it was. I lost track of one down in 21 years of playing, and they started calling me ‘Sleepy Tom.’ Why would they do that to me?”Mr. Biden — whom Mr. Trump frequently called “Sleepy Joe” during the campaign — played along. “I don’t know,” he said.Mr. Brady, 43, is the most accomplished signal caller in N.F.L. history. After leading the New England Patriots to six championships in his first two decades in the league, he quarterbacked Tampa Bay to a 31-9 Super Bowl victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in February, shortly after Mr. Biden was inaugurated. It earned him and his teammates a request to visit the president at the White House.But as of Monday, White House officials could not say for sure if he planned to attend.Mr. Brady missed several presidential team visits under Mr. Trump and President Barack Obama after winning previous Super Bowls. He last trekked to a White House title ceremony in 2005, when George W. Bush was in office. His attendance this time around was rumored on Monday, then confirmed by photos posted to social media on Tuesday morning.Mr. Biden has in recent weeks also hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, as his administration revives a tradition of championship invites that had grown sporadic under Mr. Trump after many players boycotted the festivities. An N.F.L. champion last visited the White House in 2017.On Tuesday, while Mr. Brady’s teammates stood on risers and baked in the heat of the White House lawn, the president praised the Bucs for their persistence in reeling off an unbeaten run to the championship after starting the season with seven wins and five losses.“This is a team that didn’t fold, got up, dug deep,” the president said. “It’s an incredible run.”He singled out Tampa Bay receiver Chris Godwin, who was born and raised in the same states as Mr. Biden. “Born in Pennsylvania, raised in Delaware,” the president said. “Where I come from, that’s a heck of a combination, man.”The president could not resist sprinkling in a few stories of his own, less accomplished football career. And he could not resist ribbing Mr. Brady — and himself — about their ages.“A lot has been made about the fact that we have the oldest coach ever to win a Super Bowl and the oldest quarterback to win the Super Bowl,” said Mr. Biden, who at 78 was the oldest person ever sworn in as president. “Well, I’ll tell you right now: You won’t hear any jokes about that from me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with being the oldest guy to make it to the mountaintop.”Eventually, Mr. Biden gave way to the team owner, Bryan Glazer, and coach, Bruce Arians, and then to Mr. Brady and his comedy routine.When the laughter from the relatively small crowd on the lawn died down, Mr. Brady and the Buccaneers prepared to give the president a customary personalized jersey, with “Biden” across the back and the number 46, for Mr. Biden’s presidency. The band prepared to play Queen’s “We Are the Champions” while players, including the quarterback, posed for photos with onlookers including several Florida politicians.But first Mr. Brady had one more joke, about how he planned to make the most of the remainder of his time at the White House.“We’re going to challenge — 11 of us — 11 White House interns to game of football here on the lawn,” Mr. Brady said.“And we intend to run it up on you guys, so get ready to go.” More

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      in Tennis

      Naomi Osaka Is Talking to the Media Again, but on Her Own Terms

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      The tennis superstar is guest-editing Racquet magazine and has written a cover essay for Time. What’s left for traditional sports journalism?In early May, a couple of weeks before she tweeted that she wouldn’t appear at a required news conference at the French Open, Naomi Osaka was on a Zoom call with a writer for Racquet magazine who was trying to gain insight into the athlete’s inner life.Ms. Osaka said she’d gone to the protests in Minneapolis last year and had been moved by what she saw.“It was a bit of an eye opener,” she said of the experience, “because I’ve never had time to go out and do anything physically.”Ms. Osaka ignited a furious debate over the role of the tennis media with her announcement that she’d pay a $15,000 fine rather than attend a news conference that she said was bad for her mental health. Her decision, and the response from tennis officials, ended with her withdrawal from the French Open. The British tennis writer Andrew Castle called her decision “a very dangerous precedent” that would be “hugely destructive and a massive commercial blow to everyone in the sport.”If the freak-out over the cancellation of an inevitably boring news conference seemed a bit oversized, it was because Ms. Osaka didn’t just open a new conversation about mental health in sports. She touched a raw nerve in the intertwined businesses of sports and media: the ever-growing, irresistible power of the star. We journalists are touchy about retaining what is often pathetically minimal access to athletes. The media was once the main way that sports stars found fame, glory and lucrative endorsements, and a glossy profile can still play a role in elevating an obscure player. But the rise of social media and of a widening array of new outlets has produced a power shift, as my colleague Lindsay Crouse wrote in June, “redistributing leverage among public figures, the journalists and publications that cover them.”Ms. Osaka walked into the middle of that dynamic during the French Open. While tennis news conferences can be quite weird — some local journalist in the room amuses the traveling press by confusing one Russian player for another, or asks a particularly off-the-wall question — the mood is usually pretty sedate. Most players roll with them without complaint. And Ms. Osaka wasn’t being grilled about her personal life or her mental health. She was bothered by questions about her performance on clay courts. Another recent question concerned what she planned to wear to the Met Gala, a high-society Manhattan event of which she is a co-chair.She has become the best-paid woman in sports, earning about $60 million last year according to Forbes, and almost universally positive coverage hasn’t hurt her ability to build a portfolio that includes swimwear and skin care lines, two Nike sneakers and the Naomi Osaka bowl at Sweetgreen. And she drew broad and favorable coverage when she provoked a tournament into taking a day off to make a statement on police killings of Black Americans. She has a cover essay in the next issue of Time that is conciliatory toward the media even as it expands on her statements about mental health, a person familiar with it said.“The press is a willing accomplice to what most of these athletes are trying to accomplish,” said the Tennis Channel commentator Brett Haber.Ms. Osaka at the Australian Open. She set off a debate about the media’s role with her announcement at the French Open that she’d rather pay a fine than attend a news conference.Mackenzie Sweetnam/Getty ImagesI have an impulse to defend the need for athletes to give news conferences, on the principle that what Naomi Osaka does today, Joe Biden will do tomorrow. But there’s an additional layer that muddies the media’s position, which is that athletes are only talking to us because they’re under contract. “I’m just here so I won’t get fined,” the running back Marshawn Lynch groused repeatedly in a video Ms. Osaka also posted. There’s something a bit compromising in athletes appearing at a news conference not because they need, or even respect, the power of journalism but because a corporation is paying them to sit on the dais and reluctantly have no comment.Enterprising reporters can still get insight from news conferences, and many athletes don’t share Ms. Osaka’s stress about them. “It’s like pretty easygoing,” the Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek said last week. But while independent journalists can still deliver everything from breakthrough investigations to commentary, the role of journalism as a mere conduit for athletes’ words doesn’t make that much sense anymore. Ms. Osaka “could do a press conference on Instagram live if she wanted,” her agent, Stuart Duguid, told me.The ritual is “a relic of an era when they needed the press — when the press were the accepted conduit between athletes and the public,” a Guardian sportswriter, Jonathan Liew, said in an interview.But the Osaka story has broader resonance because sports, and the media that covers them, are often leading indicators of the direction in which we’re all headed. In 2007, Hillary Clinton’s top spokesman, Howard Wolfson, told me he was preoccupied with Major League Baseball’s site, MLB.com, and how the league had created a media entity that it totally controlled. Why couldn’t a politician and her campaign do the same, he wondered? It didn’t quite work for her, but by 2008, Barack Obama was producing videos far more compelling than anything the networks were making. In 2016, the Trump Show was the best thing on TV, syndicated to your local cable network.The assault on the independent sports media reached its peak with the 2014 introduction of The Players’ Tribune, with the promise of giving players their own voice. But that effort pretty much fizzled, selling to an Israeli media company in 2019. Though it occasionally published powerful essays, it mostly had that sterile quality of a glorified news release.Athletes’ more successful ventures into media have avoided taking on journalism directly. The model is the Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James, who has spent a decade building a media company that has done deals for TV shows and movies with HBO, Netflix, Warner Brothers and others. And at its best, these platforms can elicit more than you’d get at a news conference. Mr. James built his company, in part, on the insight that athletes would open up to one another, and “didn’t want to be asked questions that everyone should know the answers to,” said Josh Pyatt, the co-head of WME Sports, who has been at the center of building media companies for athletes.On a recent episode of “The Shop,” produced for HBO by Mr. James, the quarterback Tom Brady acknowledged the wooden quality of many athletes’ comments to the press.“What I say versus what I think are two totally different things,” said Mr. Brady, who co-founded another media company, Religion of Sports, with Michael Strahan, the former New York Giant and current “Good Morning America” host. “Ninety percent of what I say is probably not what I’m thinking.”Who wants that? But somewhere between the compulsory news conference and the glory days of Sports Illustrated, there’s space for a new independent sports journalism, one that reckons with the power athletes now wield on their own platforms but also retains a degree of journalistic independence that most of the athlete-owned media companies don’t attempt.That, at least, is the thinking behind Racquet, a gorgeous print tennis quarterly that started in 2016 with literary ambitions (the first issue included not one but two reconsiderations of the novelist David Foster Wallace) and has an ambitious, diverse roster of writers. Its next issue, due in August, will be guest edited by Ms. Osaka. It includes the interview with her (by Thessaly La Force, who is also a features director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine); an essay on the Japanese discovery, through Ms. Osaka, a Japanese citizen, of the Black Lives Matter movement; and a photo essay on the tennis culture in Ms. Osaka’s father’s native Haiti.An illustration for Racquet magazine that accompanies an interview with Ms. Osaka.Photo illustration by Johanna Goodman/Getty Images for Racquet MagazineA tennis media that revolves around daily news cycles is “still living in an age where pulling quotes from a presser makes a headline, makes a story,” said Caitlin Thompson, a former college tennis player and veteran journalist who is Racquet’s publisher and co-founder, with David Shaftel. “They’re not operating in a world where an athlete can reach more people and be more attuned to the larger cultural and social contexts than they are.”Racquet has tried to straddle those worlds. Its contributors include Andrea Petkovic, a top German player (and another Foster Wallace fan), and the Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas, who is also a photographer. But it also published a tough investigation of allegations of domestic abuse against the German tennis star Alexander Zverev. And Thompson said that younger players “understand what we’re doing because they’re children of the internet — they’re all Gen Z.” The Australian Nick Kyrgios, for instance, has a “context in which he wants to be seen, which is this kid playing Call of Duty between matches and being more into the Celtics than the men’s tour,” Ms. Thompson said. (The August Racquet issue also explores Ms. Osaka’s medium of choice, manga.)Ms. Osaka skipped Wimbledon, but she’s expected to be back for the Tokyo Olympics this summer. And the Racquet issue offers a bit of the texture of a young star’s strange life — between hotel rooms and tennis courts — that you would be hard-pressed to find at a news conference.Ms. Osaka sometimes describes herself as shy, but she told Racquet: “Tennis is a thing that I’m least shy about. At the end of the day, even if I don’t win that match, I know that I have played better than 99 percent of the population, so there’s not anything to be shy about.” More

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      in Soccer

      Harry Kane on England, Goals and His Future at Spurs

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      LONDON — There are a lot of things that everybody knows about Harry Kane. First and foremost, there is the fact that he is the captain of England’s national soccer team, a status that bestows upon its bearer the sort of profile unavailable to most athletes, particularly in tournament years. It is part-of-the-furniture fame, royal family fame. Everyone has heard of Harry Kane.Then there are the goals. Harry Kane scores goals with startling efficiency. He scores goals with both feet and with his head. He scores goals from close range and from long distance, for good teams and bad. He does not really seem to be subject to things like form or confidence. He simply started scoring goals seven years ago and never stopped.He has scored so many that he is seventh on the list of the Premier League’s career top scorers; with a fair wind, he will be third next year at this time and within touching distance of the record-holder, Alan Shearer, not long after he turns 30. By that stage, in all likelihood, he will have usurped Wayne Rooney as England’s leading scorer, too.What colors he will be wearing as he does so is anyone’s guess. Everyone has known for some time, of course, that Harry Kane is one of Tottenham’s own, the star of the team he supported as a child.Over the last few weeks, though, a drip feed of interviews has made it clear that, in Harry Kane’s mind, that might have to change this summer, if he is to fulfill his ambition of winning collective awards, rather than individual ones. The expectation is that at some point, one of Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea will make him the most expensive English player in history.Kane scored 23 goals for Tottenham this season, winning the Premier League scoring title for the third time.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesBut that is where the knowledge stops. Harry Kane is captain of England, he scores a lot of goals and he is about to star in his very own transfer saga. Beyond that, Harry Kane is something of an enigma. It is a neat trick: for a player of his status, and an athlete of his generation, to be as well known as he is and yet not well known at all.Occasionally, some trivial jetsam floats to shore. He went to the same school as David Beckham. He married his childhood sweetheart. He likes “Dexter,” the television show. He is an ardent fan of the N.F.L. in general and Tom Brady in particular, and harbors hopes of playing that other kind of football — as a kicker — someday.They are mere details, glimpses of what lies beneath, rather than a whole picture of a personality. His name, perhaps, illustrates it best. Most players are referred to exclusively by their surname, a tradition that reminds them they are just cogs in a machine. Only a select handful are afforded the privilege of being known simply by their first name.For Harry Kane, it is neither. Calling him “Kane” would seem disrespectful: He is more than just another player. But he is not a “Harry,” either: Somehow that would be too intimate, too familiar.Instead, he will lead England into this summer’s European Championship — hoping to win an international tournament in a final on home soil — as Harry Kane, forename and surname, like a reverse Pelé. It is an honor, in a way, but it is also a sign of some subconscious distance, as though he is a brand, or a corporation, or a place.There are a lot of things everyone knows about Harry Kane. But knowing who he is, or what he is like, is not one of them.BalanceAt the end of his first campaign with Tottenham, Kane and his teammates traveled to Australia for a brief tour. It had been Kane’s breakout year: He had scored 21 goals in 34 Premier League games. Almost overnight, he had gone from a fringe player, forever being shipped out on loan, to a blossoming idol.Kane, though, had not noticed the transformation. While he was in Sydney, he decided that he fancied a stroll. He took himself to the nearest mall, expecting to be able to quietly wander around in peace. Instead, within a few minutes, he found himself swarmed by hundreds of fans. Unable to escape, he had to call the club to get him out.The memory has stayed with him. “I think, at the start, I was a bit naïve about what being famous would be like in terms of what you can and can’t do,” he said. “I appreciate it, obviously, and I enjoy parts of it, and I suppose when I retire and it’s gone, I’ll be able to tell you if I miss it or not. But there are restrictions that come with it.”Kane in the stands after England’s victory in the 2018 World Cup Russia quarterfinals.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesKane traces that naïveté to the fact that he had never really considered the “famous” part of “famous footballer.” He grew up, in Chingford, Essex, on London’s northeast fringe, dreaming of playing for Tottenham and for England. His idol was Beckham. Kane cites him as his “role model,” but that admiration went only so far.“I had a mohawk when he had one,” Kane said. “But he wasn’t a role model for me in terms of what he was wearing. It was how he conducted himself. I wanted to be a footballer, that was it. I was not really worried about being in the public eye.”Kane never lost that single-mindedness. Long before he established himself at Tottenham, as he made his way around the country with the smaller clubs where he had been sent, countless coaches were impressed by his doggedness, his determination.At Norwich, Chris Hughton recalled Kane practicing finishing for so long that all of his teammates, as well as the goalkeepers, left him to his own devices. At Millwall, he asked his manager, Kenny Jackett, if he could help him get better in the air. Even now — when most of Kane’s week is spent recovering from one game and preparing for another — he admits to being a little “addicted” to improving his performance data.“I compete with myself,” he said. “When I broke into the Premier League, I was not quite as physically developed as the other players. With Mauricio Pochettino, we did a lot in the gym, trying to improve my strength and speed and power. I got a bit addicted to improving the statistics. I put pressure on myself to get better.”He takes the same approach to the other aspects of being one of the most famous athletes in the country. Kane is not, by his own admission, the sort to “get into situations where I am photographed on a night out.” That side of celebrity, so available to him, is rejected not through necessity but inclination.He keeps his commercial commitments restricted, too. He will not commit to any sponsor engagements 48 hours before a game: Even if they might largely involve, in his words, “standing around,” a photo shoot lasting a few hours can be draining. “And the games are the most important thing,” he said.He works only with a handful of carefully selected sponsors, ones deemed by the player and his brother, Charlie, who is also his agent, to be a natural fit. “If it’s just for the money, it can be hard work,” he said. Like most players, he has a portfolio of charitable causes that he supports, too, some public and some private.Last year, Kane struck an innovative deal to become the main jersey sponsor of Leyton Orient, the east London club where he first played senior soccer, as a way of supporting it during the pandemic. (Kane gave the advertising real estate over to three of his chosen charities.)A 17-year-old Kane at Leyton Orient, during one of several loan stints early in his career.Paul Childs/Action ImagesHis business interests are growing, too. He is one of several England players to have invested in STATSports, a technology company that provides GPS tracking vests to teams across a range of sports. He made the decision not just for profit, but because he felt it “fitted my personality well.”But Kane’s extracurricular activities are notably limited compared with some of his peers’. He could probably have an arrangement with Egyptian Steel, but doesn’t. He might prove a powerful advocate for a facial fitness product in Japan, but he is not tempted to find out. Kane is a familiar face, a familiar name, but not because he is relentlessly marketed. He does not seek to trade too much on his fame, because to him his fame is secondary.There is a reason the things that everyone knows about Kane extend no further, really, than the field itself: because that is all that he has focused on. “I don’t want that attention,” he said. “It is a conscious effort to avoid it. Football is my job. I dedicated a lot of time and work to be where I am now, and I think some players lose sight of that. You start to think the other things are more important, more exciting, but what I am paid for is to work hard and be professional.”What we know about Harry Kane, in other words, are the things that he wants us to know.A Star’s HavenBy his own estimate, Kane has watched “The Brady 6,” a documentary about the six quarterbacks chosen ahead of Tom Brady in the 2000 N.F.L. draft, a dozen or so times. Last spring, like millions of others, he found himself captivated by “The Last Dance,” the documentary series highlighting Michael Jordan’s final year with the Chicago Bulls.Given the scarcity of information about Kane, those two fairly unsurprising viewing choices — professional athlete is intrigued by stories of great athletes — are often co-opted as false insight into who the 27-year-old Kane is away from the field. Barring evidence to the contrary, they prove, after all, that he likes the N.F.L. and basketball.But neither one seems particularly extracurricular. Kane has spoken previously of the echoes he hears of his own story in Brady’s rise — a player written off by most before his career had begun, who managed to go on and conquer the world — and “The Last Dance” is, in the eyes of more than one soccer player, a case study in the nature of greatness. These are not outside interests for Kane. It is background reading.The one place that Kane does seek solace from soccer — the one place he goes deliberately to escape — is the golf course. It is his haven, his chance to take his mind off his relentless drive to self-improve by persistently trying to get better at something else. “It is my way of meditating,” he said. “When you’re playing, it is all you are thinking about for four or five hours. It gets me away from football.”Kane hinted at his potential departure from Spurs during a golf-course interview this year.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesPerhaps, then, it was only on the golf course that Kane felt comfortable enough, detached enough, to confront the issue of his future. He had been dropping hints for months — if not longer — that his ambitions and Tottenham’s might be starting to diverge, though as a rule he had stopped short of anything that might be considered undiplomatic.Last month, though, while playing golf with Gary Neville, the former Manchester United captain turned television pundit, he was blunt. A difficult conversation with Tottenham was coming, he told Neville; he felt he could go on and win trophies for years to come, and if the club could not provide a team to do that, he would have to consider his options.He is at the stage of his career when he is starting to think about legacy, weighing those individual awards, the scoring titles and the player of the year accolades, against the ones that define a player: the titles won and the cups lifted and the trophies claimed.In an interview with The New York Times in late April he said he “didn’t panic” about it, that he did not believe he had one last shot at winning something, but he will know, too, that time is not limitless. He will turn 28 in July, and is starting to think of what people will know about him when, years down the line, he is no longer the England captain, no longer scoring goals.And he knows that one thing stands out above all others. “England is No. 1 for me,” he said. “It is the biggest thing you can achieve. I dreamed of playing for England, but I also dreamed of winning something for England. That is on top of my list. You play Premier Leagues and Champions Leagues every year, but a major tournament only comes around once every two years. The window is a lot smaller. To win something with England: That would be No. 1.”It would outstrip whatever he achieves, for himself and for his club, whichever club that is: to be England captain, winning a major trophy for the first time in almost 60 years, and doing so on home soil. Make that happen, and that will be the only thing that people will know about Harry Kane. It is the only thing they will need to know. It will be the only thing that matters.“I dreamed of playing for England, but I also dreamed of winning something for England. That is on top of my list.”Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      in Football

      After a Workout Push, the N.F.L. Players Union Falls Flat

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      Union leadership had led a charge for players to workout on their own. But when the Broncos cut a player after a season-ending injury, tensions over the effort were revealed.At the beginning of May, just a few days after the N.F.L. draft, the N.F.L. Players Association hosted a conference call for hundreds of rookies and their agents. The call was ostensibly to welcome the players to the league and explain their benefits as union members. But during the discussion, J.C. Tretter, the union’s president, also repeated a pitch that he has made to veterans for months: Most off-season workouts are voluntary, and no player should feel obliged to attend them.Harold Lewis, one of the agents on the call, pushed back. Telling rookies to avoid off-season workouts was “complete insanity,” he said in a phone interview, because they are critical opportunities to impress coaches. Veterans with guaranteed contracts may feel secure enough in their jobs to skip a week or two of workouts, but players who still must earn a roster spot may not.“When you’re talking about rookies, whether it’s the first pick or Mr. Irrelevant, to tell them not to show up, I don’t understand it,” Lewis said, recounting his dispute with union leadership on the call. “And for an undrafted player, it’s suicidal.”The rookies were just the latest group that the players’ union has pushed to avoid off-season workouts. At the N.F.L.P.A.’s urging, veterans from half the N.F.L.’s teams pledged not to attend voluntary camps, with Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady out in front on the issue. Tretter, an offensive lineman for Cleveland, claimed that less than half of all players showed up for the first workouts in late April.The union’s campaign to dilute off-season workouts hit an unexpected and unfortunate speed bump on May 4, a day after the pitch to rookies. Ja’Wuan James, an offensive lineman for the Denver Broncos with seven years’ experience, tore an Achilles’ tendon while working out on his own, instead of at the team’s facility. The Broncos put him on the non-football injury list, which is normally for players who get hurt doing activities other than training for football.Seeming to back the Broncos’ decision, the N.F.L. sent teams a memo on May 5 with the reminder that they are under no obligation to pay players injured away from team facilities. A week later, the Broncos then released James, with the option to void the $10 million salary he would have been paid this season.DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the players’ union, said this week that James could reach a settlement with Denver, or the union may file a grievance on his behalf. James’s agent did not return a request for comment.Still, James said on social media that he felt snookered. His salary would not have been at risk if he was injured during a voluntary workout at the team’s facility, a fine point detailed in the league’s labor agreement that applies to all players.But James followed the union’s advice and now he is suffering the unintended consequences. He added his voice to calls for the players’ union to indemnify players who were injured working out on their own. “@NFLPA if your gonna advise all of us we need you to have our backs on the other end of this,” he wrote on Twitter.After James called on the N.F.L.P.A. for support, Tretter did not say what help it would provide, only that there was no way to fully protect players. “As players competing at the sport’s highest level, the reality is that we must train year-round, meaning we assume an inherent level of risk during the majority of the off-season while preparing on our own away from the facility,” he wrote in his newsletter on Monday.James’s injury ignited an already simmering debate about off-season workouts, and the union’s one-size-fits-all advice to members who have very different priorities.At issue are “voluntary” workouts that coaches have made all but mandatory in recent years, according to the union. Tretter pointed to 2020, when all off-season workouts were scrapped because of the coronavirus pandemic and players made it through training camp and the season no worse for the wear. He also claimed that there were an inordinate number of injuries during these off-season workouts that could have been avoided if coaches didn’t push players so hard.In a league as cutthroat as the N.F.L., players without assured roster spots or roles — and there are hundreds of them — have no choice but to show up to the minicamps in April, May and June if they hope to win one. Even though James had a long-term contract, he too had something to prove: He opted not to play last year during the pandemic, and a knee injury limited him to just three games in 2019, his first season in Denver after five with Miami.These competing priorities are another reminder of the vast gap between the top tier of players, including Brady, who has backed the union’s push, and the far less wealthy players who fill most roster spots and are typically out of the league after just a few years. The union’s campaign to reduce injuries during the off-season is admirable, but telling players to stay home raises questions about whose bidding the N.F.L.P.A. is doing.DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the union, said this week that James could reach a settlement with his old team, or the union may file a grievance on his behalf. Perry Knotts/NFL, via Associated Press“It might be fine for Tom Brady to avoid minicamp, but he isn’t a representative example of a football player,” said Brad Sohn, a lawyer who has represented numerous injured players. “This speaks to who the union is trying to represent, its loudest and most influential constituents or all of its members.”News reports suggest the percentage of players at the second set of workouts that began this week is higher, a sign that rank-and-file players are having second thoughts.Lewis said one of his clients, Keanu Neal, has gone to Cowboys’ minicamp this spring because he wanted to impress his new bosses (he spent his first five years with the Falcons) and start learning his new position, linebacker. “Of course he’d like to be back home in Florida with his wife and newborn baby, but he is trying to build a future for them and the sacrifice of just a few weeks is worth it,” Lewis said.Ross Tucker, a former offensive lineman, said he battled for roster spots throughout his seven-year career and always attended off-season workouts because he never wanted to give a coach a reason to cut him. “There’s no way I would have hurt my career because of a new N.F.L.P.A. initiative,” said Tucker, who has his own football podcast.But there are only nine weeks of off-season workouts, so players are left alone for 20 weeks. Tucker said that he knew that his salary was at risk if he was injured away from the facility, so he stopped playing basketball and skiing while he was in the league.Most players, though, don’t listen to the warnings, which is a problem when the union tells its members to consider skipping minicamps, he said.“You’re talking with guys in their 20s and a lot of them feel invincible and they’re not reading up on what the rules are,” he said. “It’s hard to help guys who don’t want to be helped.” More

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      in Football

      Tom Brady Charted a New Path. Aaron Rodgers Struggles to Do the Same.

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      When Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks like Brady, Rodgers and Russell Wilson grow frustrated with their teams, the nature of N.F.L. contracts makes it hard to scramble away. Brady ultimately succeeded by running out the clock.The final contract that Tom Brady signed in New England, in August 2019, contained a clever provision that prevented the Patriots from placing a franchise or transition tag on him, ensuring that, as he desired, Brady would become a free agent after the season.In this booming era for quarterbacks in the N.F.L., even average players are paid tens millions of dollars, to say nothing of stars like Brady, who got $22 million guaranteed in that deal. Five quarterbacks were taken in the first round of the draft Thursday night — including at the first three spots — as teams fervently aimed to build around personality and production at the most important position in American pro sports.Yet, as Aaron Rodgers is discovering, quarterbacks have little power, because this is the N.F.L. and not the N.B.A., where the best players, armed with guaranteed contracts, can prioritize winning over financial concerns. In the N.F.L., players who want to change teams are at the mercy of their contract structures and have barely a modicum of control over their careers.However disenchanted Brady became in New England — with the lack of receiving talent, with his diminishing power to influence personnel decisions — he did not air his grievances publicly. Done with the Patriots after two decades and six titles, Brady didn’t pout. He just left. His contract allowed him to do so.And in Tampa Bay, where Brady signed before the 2020 season, he found a better roster, a front office that valued his opinion and, in the end, a vindicating championship.Among the few to see Brady’s seventh Super Bowl win in person was the Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, who has become the N.F.L.’s most sacked quarterback across his first nine seasons since the league merged with the A.F.L. more than a half-century ago. Wilson must have noted that the 43-year-old Brady shredded Kansas City’s secondary from a clean pocket.Seven days after the game, Wilson told the news media that he wanted a larger voice in Seattle’s personnel decisions. His agent also let it be known that there were four teams that Wilson would agree to be traded to — without actually, you know, demanding a trade.Even before losing to Brady and the Buccaneers in last season’s N.F.C. championship game, Rodgers called his future in Green Bay “a beautiful mystery.”Mark Lomoglio/Associated PressThis week, reports of Aaron Rodgers’s dissatisfaction with management detonated in the frenetic hours before the draft. His veiled refusal to play for Green Bay again was swatted down just hours after reports of it surfaced. The team’s general manager, Brian Gutekunst, avowed that Rodgers would not be traded. Rodgers and the Packers, it should be noted, lost to Brady and the Buccaneers in the N.F.C. title game in January.That the news of Rodgers’s discontent broke when it did suggested a calculated disruption by one of the league’s most calculating disrupters, an attempt by the quarterback’s camp to embarrass the Packers just as they embarrassed him on draft night last year. That was when they traded up to draft a quarterback, Jordan Love, without communicating their intentions to Rodgers, who then had four years left on his contract.Either way, the Packers’ clunky handling of the situation and long-term draft strategy antagonized Rodgers. Craving vengeance, he had the best season of his career.Rodgers tends to choose his words with the precision of a safecracker, and he sprinkled cryptic hints about his feelings in various interviews. To wit, he acknowledged his tenuous relationship with the team a few days before losing the conference title game, calling his future “a beautiful mystery.”And that was before Packers Coach Matt LaFleur made the confounding decision to attempt a close field goal, while down by 8 points late in the game, instead of trusting Rodgers to throw a tying touchdown.Both Rodgers and Wilson have publicly broached the possibility of divorce from their teams, sending implicit “make me happy or I’ll ask out” threats. But neither Green Bay nor Seattle is incentivized to do anything beyond listen to its quarterback’s gripes and try to improve the overall quality of the roster.Rodgers was surprised, and miffed, when the Packers traded up to pick quarterback Jordan Love, left, in the 2020 N.F.L. draft.Morry Gash/Associated PressRodgers, 37, is contractually tied to the Packers through 2023. His only options in the wake of that draft-day report are toothless: He can skip mandatory minicamp in June or training camp in July, and he can remain absent once the season starts. But by holding out or even retiring, Rodgers would accrue fines and even, perhaps, lose some bonus money he is still owed. Rumor has it “Jeopardy!” is looking for a full-time host.Considering the more palatable salary-cap charges Green Bay would incur if it traded Rodgers next year — $17.2 million, according to Jason Fitzgerald of the website Over the Cap — it’s far more likely that the Packers, when they drafted Love, were envisioning parting with Rodgers before the 2022 season. Rodgers has reportedly declined an extension.“There’s pride involved, it’s personal and there’s money,” said the longtime N.F.L. executive Randy Mueller, who served as general manager in Miami and New Orleans. “You’re talking about three ingredients that are like kerosene.”Before allegations of sexual misconduct by Deshaun Watson surfaced in lawsuits, the Texans’ quarterback harbored similar disenchantment with his team. Incensed by Houston’s front-office dysfunction and roster mismanagement, and coming off a 2020 season in which he led the league in passing yards, Watson insisted that he would never play for Houston again.Watson had a no-trade clause negotiated into the four-year extension he signed in September 2020, giving him sway over where he would play next, but the Texans also had leverage: They signed Tyrod Taylor in March, setting up a scenario in which the team could let Watson sit out the full 2021 season, perhaps longer, while fining him millions of dollars for missed time. Russell Wilson has been sacked more times in his first nine N.F.L. seasons than any other quarterback since the league merged with the A.F.L.  Stephen Brashear/Associated PressAt one point not long ago, Brady and Rodgers each envisioned spending his entire career in one place, playing into his 40s with the team that drafted him. But circumstances changed. The Packers drafted Love; Bill Belichick — the Patriots’ coach, general manager and jury — stared his quarterback down. So Brady moved south to win with a team that valued his input.“Everybody wants to be Brady,” said Marc Ross, a longtime personnel executive with the Giants and the Eagles. “To try to compare what he does and the things that he’s accomplished and the maneuvers that he can make, he’s just really one of a kind.”The Packers, like the Texans, had already solved one of the biggest team-building conundrums in professional sports. If the most precious commodity in the N.F.L. is a star quarterback, the hardest task is finding one — and team owners didn’t get to be as rich as they are by always treating commodities like people. More

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      Months Before Season, N.F.L. and Players Clash Over Pandemic Workouts

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      Players on 14 teams announced they would not attend off-season programming because of concerns about the coronavirus. Some may give up financial benefits in the process.Five months before the regular season starts, the N.F.L. and its players are facing their first clash over playing in the pandemic, with players for nearly half of the teams vowing to skip voluntary off-season workouts.Players on 14 of the league’s 32 teams, including the Giants, the Jets and the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, said in statements released by the N.F.L. Players Association that they would not participate in the workouts scheduled to begin Monday because of concerns it would be unsafe to gather.Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady was among players who spoke out to the news media and on social media.“We feel very strongly about the game, the short- and long-term health of the players, and there is no game without strong, healthy players,” Brady said in a conference call with The New York Times and the union’s leadership. “People within the league may think, ‘Oh, let’s just get back to business, let’s go back to what we’ve usually done.’ But I think it’s really smart for people and players to think, ‘Is this the best possible way to do things?’ Not, ‘Is this tolerable, but is it the best way to deal with the situation?’”The N.F.L. declined to comment.The union has called for a virtual off-season — essentially players working out on their own away from team complexes — similar to what took place in 2020. Although a nationwide vaccine campaign is underway, the union argues that the danger is still high.Last season, the N.F.L. shifted its off-season program to a virtual format, with the only in-person work happening at training camps in August. This spring, the union asked the league to use a similar format, while allowing for a mandatory minicamp in June. The league declined, citing protocols that it said would allow the workouts to occur safely.That prompted the players to mobilize. J.C. Tretter, a center for the Cleveland Browns and the president of the union, wrote an open letter to members with DeMaurice Smith, the union executive director, encouraging players not to attend.The league and the union signed a new collective bargaining agreement in 2020, stipulating that off-season workouts were optional, which Smith and Tretter’s letter emphasized. Players then organized calls and team meetings to discuss their stances, some choosing to collectively release statements.The nine-week off-season regimen, which the league published on Wednesday, consists of three phases that gradually increase the level of physical interaction. The first phase will be virtual, with chances for players to work out in the team weight rooms. The next phase allows for on-field work at a gradual pace before traditional full-speed, organized team activities and the minicamp conclude the program.Last season, despite virus outbreaks at team facilities and a flurry of schedule changes, the N.F.L. played all 256 regular-season games and a full playoff slate, culminating with the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla.The N.F.L., which had put in place protocols such as regular testing, mask wearing and social distancing at team facilities, reported that 262 players and 463 team personnel tested positive for the coronavirus, yielding a 0.08 percent positive rate. Similar protocols would be in place this off-season.But Smith said those procedures did not apply to the current situation. More players will be in team buildings as they vie for a spot on the active roster, increasing the possibility for transmission. Others may not live in the city where the team is based during the spring and summer — Tretter said he was one of about six players who had entered the Browns’ facility this off-season — and travel will create chances for exposure.Players should not need to jeopardize their health for optional workouts, unlike during the regular season when they would need to be present daily, Smith said.“It’s balancing necessary versus unnecessary risks,” Smith said. “Our guys have to be there from week to week to compete at the level that our fans want them to compete on Sunday. Off-season workouts are something we know that is not needed for a successful season.”Data compiled by the players association show 172 concussions were reported in 2020, a 30 percent drop from the average of 247 concussions reported per year over the last five seasons. Missed-time injuries, defined as injuries sustained that affect a player’s availability during the season, dropped to 2,716, a 23 percent decrease from the five-season average of 3,524.Tretter argued that those statistics show it is in the N.F.L.’s best interest to continue last season’s template, something Brady agreed with.“If we want to make the game better, we have to continue to make better year-round choices as individuals, as teams, as a league.” Brady said.Tretter said that the workouts had “completely lost the definition of voluntary” and that some players might feel forced to go. “There’s an expectation that you’re just supposed to show up and put up with whatever the N.F.L. asks of you,” Tretter said. “Guys are remembering now that they have a choice to attend.”Still, some view the off-season programs as beneficial. More than 200 players could receive financial bonuses for attending off-season workouts, according to OvertheCap.com, a perk included in their contracts. Teams have discretion to qualify what counts as a workout, including whether they want a player to attend physically or virtually.The face-to-face interaction can build camaraderie between new players, and offers those on the fringe of the roster a chance to impress coaches early.Leigh Steinberg, a longtime agent who represents Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, said he sided with the union, but would advise any client to make the best individual decision.“When they call for advice, it’s a personal choice,” Steinberg said. “It’s predicated on their position with the team, how secure they feel in their position and how much work they really need.” More

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      Serena Williams and Tom Brady: Ageless Wonders With a Difference

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Super Bowl 2021N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearGame HighlightsThe CommercialsHalftime ShowWhat We LearnedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrom a World Away, One Ageless Wonder Marvels at Another“Amazing!” Serena Williams said of Tom Brady’s seventh Super Bowl win. Of course, he’s never won a title while pregnant.Serena Williams dropped only two games in her first-round win at the Australian Open.Credit…William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 8, 2021Updated 3:57 p.m. ETMELBOURNE, Australia — As fans fished for autographs by tying cords around oversize tennis balls and dangling them over the rail for Serena Williams, her mind drifted to the other side of the world.“How amazing!” Williams muttered, as much to herself as anyone else, while she scribbled her signature after her 6-1, 6-1 first-round victory against Laura Siegemund at the Australian Open on Monday. “Can you imagine winning the Super Bowl at 43?”In the lead-up to this year’s Open, Williams, 39, had repeatedly expressed her admiration for Tom Brady, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback who delivered his seventh Super Bowl title on Sunday night. His determination and excellence have inspired her “since when he beat Kurt Warner,” she said, referring to the New England Patriots’ victory over the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl in February 2002.Brady’s only misstep, Williams joked last week, was his choice of teams last year as a free agent. “I mean, he just should have come to the Dolphins, really,” said Williams, who owns a minority stake in Miami’s N.F.L. franchise along with her sister Venus.Williams sees in Brady a kindred spirit, someone whose appetite for competition and desire to succeed have not receded over time. “I look at Tom Brady, it’s so inspiring,” she said.With his latest title, his first outside New England, Brady brought to a boil the long-simmering debate about sports’ greatest athlete. That discussion must include Williams, a 23-time major winner whose next Grand Slam singles title will tie Margaret Court’s career record. And Williams may be the only member of the greatest-ever debate to have won one of her titles while pregnant. She delivered her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian, via an emergency C-section on Sept. 1, 2017, nearly seven months after she won the Australian Open. She said they haven’t spent a day apart since.“Is that healthy?” Williams said Monday. She laughed. “Not at all. Not even close. But every single day I just want to be around her.”Williams’s choice to be a doting parent, come hell or hard quarantine, may be where her path most clearly diverges from Brady’s. Two weeks before the Super Bowl, Brady was reportedly alone in his Tampa mansion, having sent away his wife and three children so he could give his undivided attention to football for the 12 days leading to the big game.Two weeks before the Australian Open, Williams was finishing a mandatory 14-day self-isolation, which required her to hole up in a hotel for 19 hours a day with her husband, the tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, and their high-spirited daughter.Williams’s daughter, Olympia, with her father, Alexis Ohanian, at an exhibition match last week in Adelaide.Credit…Mark Brake/Getty ImagesWilliams acknowledged that Brady’s preparation made more sense, but said, “I wasn’t strong enough to do the banishment.”She added: “I would not have been able to function without my 3-year-old around. Not even close. I think I would be in a depression.”Elite athletes typically don’t do much in their downtime on the days or weeks in which they are competing, preserving their energy for the bursts of effort their sports demand. For Williams, the accelerating and downshifting processes are compressed. She’s a drag racer, going in a flash from mama to megastar.One of her matches at a tuneup event last week at Melbourne Park ended just after 8 p.m., leaving Williams caught in parenting territory similar to the terra incognita between the service line and baseline. Olympia’s bedtime was 8:30. Should she rush back to tuck in her baby or go through her usual postmatch paces and make peace with not seeing her daughter until the morning?Her instinct was to rush home. “But I’m a little torn,” Williams said in her postmatch news conference that day. “I’m like, maybe I should just let her go to bed so she doesn’t get too moody.”Williams added: “She’s too hyper. She needs her rest. She’s a busy kid. She has a fully booked schedule.”Like mother, like daughter. “She really is,” Williams said with a reflective sigh.Before another of Williams’s matches last week, Ohanian walked to his seat. In his arms he carried a squirming Olympia, who pointed to Williams on the court and said, “Hey, that’s my mama!”Williams said her daughter knows that the court is her office. But does she assume every working woman plays tennis? Williams isn’t sure. Sometimes when Olympia attends matches or practice sessions, she’ll freak out Williams by mimicking everyone else and calling her Serena.Williams said: “I’m like: ‘You can’t say Serena. You have to call me Mama.’”Williams’s second-round opponent will be a 24-year-old Serb, Nina Stojanovic, who was younger than Olympia when Serena won the first of her 73 WTA Tour titles. Stojanovic would do well to tune out the player introductions Wednesday since it requires a sizable chunk of the six-minute warm-up period to recite Williams’s achievements.“When the announcer said on the court, ‘23 Grand Slam titles, seven Australian Opens,’ he was like, ‘14 doubles titles,’ then he starts talking about mixed doubles, I’m like jeez,” Williams said last week.But none of what Williams has done matters as much to her as what is left to accomplish. When Brady said before the Super Bowl that his favorite championship is his next one, it resonated with Williams. “That would absolutely be my answer, for sure,” she said.Why?“Because otherwise you’re living off of what you already did,” she said.That mind-set is why Williams can conduct a tour of the trophy room in her house in Miami, as she recently did for Architectural Digest, and struggle to identify which trophies are from which tournament.It was why she is unbothered that one of her seven Wimbledon trophies disappeared after a party she threw with Venus several years ago. Or maybe it was one of Venus’s five that vanished. “Was that my Wimbledon trophy or was that her Wimbledon trophy?” Williams said. “The argument is still going on.”She added wryly, “Conversations in the Williams home.”Since her daughter’s birth, Williams has appeared in four Grand Slam finals but has yet to win one. With her next Grand Slam title, she can show everybody, as Brady did Sunday in Tampa, that she still has the power to amaze.“You can’t say it was the system he was at formerly,” Williams said, referring to Brady’s six Super Bowl titles under Coach Bill Belichick in New England. But she knows better. “It’s definitely Tom Brady.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tom Brady's Super Bowl Win Is a Familiar End to an Odd Season

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Super Bowl 2021N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearGame HighlightsThe CommercialsHalftime ShowWhat We LearnedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBuccaneers 31, Chiefs 9Tom Brady’s 7th Super Bowl Win Ends N.F.L.’s Most Challenging YearThe N.F.L. season persisted through challenges wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, political discord and a national reckoning on race to reach a familiar ending.Tom Brady celebrated with his children after winning the Super Bowl on Sunday in Tampa, Fla. “I think we knew this was going to happen now, didn’t we?” Brady said.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesPublished More