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  By 1981, Rozelle had weathered two players’ strikes and was locked in a heated battle with Al Davis, the renegade owner of the Oakland Raiders, who was hell-bent on moving his storied franchise from the Bay Area to Los Angeles.

  Goodell had called himself a great admirer of Rozelle. Unlike the commissioner, Roger was not a forward thinker, but he would grow to understand Rozelle’s philosophy of leadership: control equaled power.

  Roger absorbed what he could in his junior role with the league and was hungry to learn more. The following year, he landed an internship with the New York Jets’ public relations staff for the 1983 season. The Jets went 7–9 that year and finished at the bottom of the AFC East. Goodell, who had only played football in high school, was offered an entry-level job on the team’s coaching staff for the following season but decided to return to NFL headquarters instead.

  He stayed and never left.

  When Pete Rozelle retired in 1989, the league owners went outside league headquarters for the next commissioner and elected Washington, D.C., power lawyer Paul Tagliabue to take his place. Tagliabue was well known to the owners, having served as a lawyer for the NFL. He also was very aware of the giant shoes he had to fill. After all, his predecessor had been inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1985 while he was still commissioner.

  Tagliabue’s leadership style was vastly different from that of Rozelle, whose dominant personality and innovative ideas made him larger than life. Still, though Tagliabue was seen as a kinder, gentler commissioner, he was also one who understood the value of growth. He expanded the league with new franchises in Jacksonville, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, while also looking overseas for the opportunity to build new marketplaces for the NFL brand. Soon, a European developmental program, awkwardly called the World League of American Football, and later known as NFL Europe, whet the appetite of sports fans in Barcelona, Frankfurt, and London. The commissioner also understood the value of having a strong team around him. One of the league office’s brightest young stars was Roger Goodell. Tagliabue grew to trust the young executive and valued his judgment enough to appoint him as the go-between with Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Association, during labor talks. Goodell was also chosen to lead the league’s negotiations with the city of Los Angeles in its quest to return to the NFL market after losing both the Rams franchise to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland. Roger found himself front and center in just about every important league economic decision during the Tagliabue era. He had also found the mentor he had so desperately been searching for.

  “My advice to most people is just to be yourself and continue to be thoughtful,” the paternal Tagliabue once counseled.15

  Soon another father figure would enter Goodell’s life, a man who would groom Roger for power and prestige and one whom Goodell would ultimately attempt to destroy.

  Chapter Four

  The Ultimate Fan

  Eleven-year-old Robert Kraft heard the news and wept. Bobby, as he was known to friends and family then, cried uncontrollably when he learned that his favorite baseball team, the Boston Braves, had decided to move to Milwaukee, the first relocation of a major league franchise in fifty years. Like other kids growing up in and around Boston, Bobby was devoted to the team that played on the 800 block of Commonwealth Avenue, now home to Boston University’s Nickerson Field. The Braves boasted rising star Sam Jethroe, a former rookie of the year who had hit eighteen home runs in 1950. More importantly, the African-American Jethroe had broken the color barrier in Boston sports. But the Red Sox, that other team in town, had Ted Williams, who was arguably the greatest hitter in the game and one of the league’s biggest gate attractions. The rise of the mighty Williams meant that Boston could not support two major league teams, so the Braves took their show on the road to Wisconsin. The day of the announcement became known as “Black Friday” to Boston sports fans, and none took the news harder than young Kraft, who sold newspapers at Braves Field. His parents, Harry and Sarah Kraft, consoled their son and told him to “seek unity in family and community.”16

  Kraft’s father, Harry, who owned a small garment business, was a deeply religious man who sent his three children, Bobby, Avram, and Elizabeth, to Hebrew school each day and abided by the strict rules of the Sabbath on weekends. Young Bobby made friends easily in his Brookline neighborhood and had a comforting demeanor that impressed his father. During one trip to the beach when Kraft was a child, his father took his hand and gazed out at the ocean waves.

  “You have a wonderful way of not holding grudges that can hurt you,” Harry told him. “Stay that way and you’ll live a happy life.”17

  Those words stuck and provided the building blocks with which Kraft would build his empire.

  In high school, he became president of his senior class and was awarded a scholarship to Columbia University. While in college, he met his future wife, Myra, a student at Brandeis University, who asked him to marry her at the end of their first date. After graduation, Kraft returned to the Boston area to attend Harvard Business School and later went to work for Myra’s father, Jacob Hiatt, a former circuit judge who fled Lithuania in 1935 after the rise of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Many of Hiatt’s family members, however, had remained in Eastern Europe and were killed in the Holocaust. Jacob Hiatt had hoped to continue his law career in the United States but found his way to the packaging industry instead. Hiatt had built the Worcester, Massachusetts–based company Rand-Whitney Group after learning how to make boxes for his brother’s shoe store, which later became Stride Rite.

  Meanwhile, Robert Kraft—no longer answering to Bobby—had a difficult time working for his demanding father-in-law, but he found solace in his growing family and the game of football. After his beloved Braves moved west and Boston lost out on the Hall of Fame career of home-run king Hank Aaron, Kraft turned his attention to the city’s new professional football team, the Boston Patriots. The team was owned by Billy Sullivan, a Boston-based entrepreneur who had aspired to be a sportswriter. In 1959, Sullivan paid $25,000 to the upstart American Football League for the rights to bring a professional football franchise to Boston. The Patriots stumbled out of the gate in their inaugural season played at Nickerson Field, formerly Braves Field. The team finished dead last in the standings, but Kraft fell for the lovable losers. He enjoyed the game of football more than he did basketball in a city where the Celtics were hoisting championship banner after championship banner; more than baseball, as he still blamed the Red Sox for the Braves’ exodus; and more than hockey, the Bruins then still six years away from Bobby Orr’s rookie season. Indeed, Bob Kraft stuck with the Patriots through thick and mostly thin. The team appeared in only one playoff game during the decade, a massacre at the hands of the San Diego Chargers, 51–10, in the 1963 AFL championship. Still, Kraft enjoyed being a member of the fellowship of the miserable. It was considered a badge of honor to stand by the Patriots in a city that was anything but a football town. When Billy Sullivan moved the team from Boston thirty miles south to the town of Foxborough in 1971 and renamed them the New England Patriots, Kraft bought season tickets along a stretch of cold metal benches in section 217, row 23, seats 1–6, in the end zone of what was then called Schaefer Stadium, which resembled a giant tin can that had been pried open. The decision to purchase season tickets sparked a battle in the Kraft household, as Myra considered football a sport played by barbarians. Her husband disagreed and looked to football as a way to bond with his sons. Kraft would routinely dismiss them early from Hebrew school for the long drive from Brookline to Route 1 in Foxborough to watch Patriots home games. Time spent with his boys was important to him. Kraft was blessed with natural paternal instincts.

  “I don’t recall my father ever missing a birthday,” eldest son Jonathan Kraft later recalled. “If he wasn’t traveling, he would come home every night for dinner with the family. Even when he was traveling I spoke with him every day.”18

  The proud father would even kiss his sons
in public. These traits would later endear Kraft to many partners in his professional life as well, including Roger Goodell.

  As a new season-ticket holder, Kraft and his sons witnessed the Patriots go 6–8 in the first year in their new stadium, under rookie quarterback Jim Plunkett, who was awarded rookie of the year honors. Plunkett, the former Heisman Trophy winner from Stanford, appeared to be the franchise quarterback the team had long been waiting for. But the young signal caller would never get his chance to shine, at least with the Patriots. The team had a porous offensive line that kept Plunkett on his back most times and out of the end zone. He’d eventually get replaced by Steve Grogan, a running quarterback from Kansas State whose tough play and ever-present neck roll turned him into a fan favorite.

  As Kraft sat with his sons in section 217, he began dreaming of owning the team one day. His paper products company was now earning millions, and Myra Kraft no longer had to worry about whether her husband could afford season tickets or not. But Billy Sullivan, though he was one of the most cash-strapped owners in the lucrative NFL and was barely able to keep the Patriots afloat, showed no signs that he was interested in selling the team. So Kraft then turned his attention to the World Team Tennis league, which boasted sixteen franchises, including the New York Apples and the awkwardly named Hawaii Leis. The league struggled to grow a fan base, with most teams selling fewer than three thousand tickets per season; nonetheless, Kraft took over the defunct Philadelphia Freedoms franchise in 1975, moving it to Boston and renaming the team the Lobsters.

  “The lob is one of the most effective shots in tennis so we thought it was a pretty cool name,” Kraft said years later. “If I’ve done anything right in the NFL, I think part of it was having the learning curve and experience of owning a team in the seventies.”19

  Kraft was not alone. Future Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings owner Jerry Buss also received an early education in professional sports management as owner of the Los Angeles Strings, a team that included two of the sport’s biggest stars, Chris Evert and Ilie Nastase. Kraft understood the need to have a star player and landed one of his own in Czech defector Martina Navratilova, whom he signed to the Lobsters in 1977. Navratilova was the world’s number one–ranked women’s tennis player at the time, but the sports fandom of Boston did not seem to care. If the Patriots were the fourth most popular professional sports team in New England, support for the Lobsters was so low that its matches didn’t even garner a mention in the Boston Globe or Boston Herald American. The Lobsters struggled financially in part because Kraft had no control over parking or concessions at the team’s small arena at Boston University. All revenue went to the venue, not the franchise.

  Both the team and the league folded at the end of the 1978 season. But the experience was invaluable for the young businessman. If the opportunity came again to own a professional sports team, he would make sure that he also owned the team’s facilities.

  Although he flirted with the idea of bidding for the Red Sox and Celtics, Kraft always had his eyes on one day owning the Patriots. He did his research and learned that team owner Billy Sullivan had made a huge mistake when building his stadium. Sullivan owned the venue but had failed to buy up or control the property surrounding it. In 1985, Kraft began slowly putting his stranglehold on the Patriots by purchasing Foxborough Raceway, the 330-acre horse track next to the stadium. He would have to thank Michael Jackson for his next opportunity. Billy Sullivan and his sons sponsored the pop star’s ill-fated 1984 Victory Tour and had put up the home of the Patriots, now called Sullivan Stadium, as collateral to guarantee a $36.6 million advance for the King of Pop and the Jackson brothers. But the Sullivans, all new to the world of concert promotion, were a disorganized bunch who had overestimated merchandising opportunities while underestimating the size of the show. The tour was a massive production that reduced seating at venues by up to 33 percent. The Victory Tour was a disaster for the Sullivan family, and they nearly lost everything. Sullivan was forced to sell controlling interest in the team to Remington shaving CEO Victor Kiam for $84 million, and the stadium fell into bankruptcy.

  Bob Kraft seized the opportunity and outbid Kiam and others to buy the property for $22 million. He had learned from his earlier mistake with the Lobsters. He who controls the land controls everything. Kiam was about to learn that, too. The new team owner tried to move the Patriots to Jacksonville, Florida, but Kraft wouldn’t let him break the team’s lease with the stadium, which ran through 2001. Victor Kiam, now in a virtual choke hold, was forced in 1992 to sell the team to Anheuser-Busch heir James Orthwein, who had plans to move the Patriots to his hometown of St. Louis, which had not had a professional football franchise since the Cardinals moved to Phoenix in 1988. It was the business model of the NFL. Struggling teams either had to move or die.

  But now the Patriots were showing value. Orthwein hired head coach Bill Parcells, the larger-than-life football genius and mastermind behind two Super Bowl–winning seasons with the New York Giants. Parcells came out of a brief two-year retirement to coach the Patriots and brought with him several former Giants assistants, with the exception of his trusted defensive coordinator Bill Belichick, who was still coaching the Cleveland Browns at the time.

  Parcells used his first draft pick for the Patriots to select record-setting quarterback Drew Bledsoe out of Washington State. The six-foot-five, 238-pound passer proved as good as advertised in his rookie campaign. The team struggled as a whole, only earning five wins that season, but the quarterback threw fifteen touchdowns and showed a sense of poise and promise at the position that had been absent in New England for years. More importantly there was a buzz around the Patriots that hadn’t been felt since their one trip to the Super Bowl in 1985, when they got stomped by the Chicago Bears. Bill Parcells brought instant credibility to a franchise that had long been considered the doormat of the NFL, and every press conference held by the commanding, quick-witted coach was must-see TV for Boston sports fans. But the new excitement surrounding the team was progressing toward a punch line to the ultimate cruel joke. Absentee owner James Orthwein was about to make good on his plan to uproot the team and move it to Missouri.

  Before the last game of the 1993 season, angry fans burned empty cases of Budweiser in the stadium parking lot. If it was to be the final game ever played in New England, the rookie Bledsoe would give the Patriots faithful something to remember as he led the team to an overtime win against the Miami Dolphins with a touchdown pass to receiver Michael Timpson. Many of the nearly 54,000 fans in attendance began the rally cry “Don’t take our team, don’t take our team!” as Bledsoe and company jogged off the field. Bob Kraft heard the chant as he stepped into an elevator with his son Jonathan. This was the moment he had been waiting for since he watched helplessly as a boy as the Boston Braves left town. This time, however, he had the power and determination to make a difference. James Orthwein was courting potential buyers, and Kraft was among the bidders.

  “There’s no way we’re not winning this,” he told his son Jonathan as the elevator door closed.20

  Kraft traveled to St. Louis for an audience with Orthwein three weeks after the season ended. He offered a bid of $125 million for the team, but the beer baron did not blink. Kraft would have to do better. The stiffest competition came from St. Louis businessman Stan Kroenke, who was willing to plunk down $200 million for the team but demanded that Orthwein pay league fees of about $20 million, for moving the franchise. A deal with Kroenke would also require Orthwein to pay Kraft to get out of the team’s lease on Foxborough Stadium, which would not expire for eight more years. The owner turned his attention back to Kraft and said he’d be willing to part with the Patriots for $172 million. It was the steepest price ever paid in the history of the NFL, roughly $30 million more than Jerry Jones had paid for the Dallas Cowboys, “America’s Team.” Without consulting his wife, Myra, who later told him he was crazy, Bob Kraft accepted Orthwein’s deal.

  “I’m not going to be the m
ost popular man in St. Louis,” Orthwein said at the time. “As far as owning a team, I’m done with that.”21

  James Orthwein was right and couldn’t show his face in his hometown, while Kraft was considered a savior back in Boston. He celebrated the purchase by taking Myra and their four sons to a Celtics game, where he was greeted with a standing ovation from the crowd.

  The new owner pledged to work with his head coach to take advantage of the small window of opportunity under the NFL’s new salary cap, which would force teams to bring player salaries in line. Bill Parcells had other plans. The coach understood that Kraft was a step up from previous owner Orthwein, who had invested nothing in the franchise. During Parcells’s first year with the team, players had to drive their own vehicles in full pads to a nearby field to practice because there was no practice facility adjacent to the stadium. Under Kraft, there was now stability and a willingness to invest in a winner. But the head coach demanded total control of the team and wanted Kraft to sign the checks and stay the hell out of the way. This wasn’t what Kraft had in mind when he bought the team. Parcells learned this fact the hard way during the 1996 NFL draft when the owner trumped his coach’s plans to select a defensive lineman in the first round and, instead, ordered his personnel director Bobby Grier to pick talented but troubled wide receiver Terry Glenn. Parcells was outraged over the slight and made sure that the owner got the message. Kraft considered firing his bombastic coach right on the spot.