The multiple annoyances of having The Big'Un in your town do not really become evident until Thursday, and sometimes even as late as Friday. That's when the rubes show up in their cheap Fanatics knockoff jerseys, clogging the airports and highways, swallowing all the restaurant reservations and generally acting like the kind of people you would emigrate to avoid; a peaceful and moderately civilized living experience is suddenly and overwhelmingly overrun by Americans, with all the turbo-ick that implies. This particular Superb Owl being played in Santa Clara doesn't matter, because everyone stays 40 miles away in San Francisco, Home Of The Thousand Dollar Room Rate. The great failing of San Francisco, contrary to all the fulminating on the topic done by weird rich people and the conservative media that sustains their mental illness, is that everything fashionable/extortionate happens in the equivalent of six square miles, which means that the only ways to get in or out of town are two freeways and two bridges. Moving all those people to Santa Clara and back will be, as Pope Leo said the last time he saw the White Sox in person, "a comprehensive shitshow."
But at this point in the week, the Owl still belongs to the NFL's small world—how the Rooney Rule to help promote the advancement of black coaches went from being named for Art to being named for Mickey, how Roger Goodell is planning to farm out the 32 18th games to different countries ("You are looking live from high above Ljubljana, Slovenia . . . "), and now the return of the high comedy and low tea of the Hall of Fame Conspira-fest. America has not arrived yet. It's still just Football Country out here for the time being.
It's a busy country, too. You already know about Bill Belichick, how he didn't get into the Hall Of Fame and how quickly the voters raced to the internet to violate the deeply-held precept of confidentiality. But having learned nothing while wading through the ashes of that hilarity, the Hall has sustained another breach of secrecy with the report that Belichick's former boss and current bête noire, Robert Kraft, also didn't get voted in despite being even more desperate for induction that his noisome former employee.
This partially explodes the conspiracy theory that Kraft, whose hatred of Belichick matches that of, well, everyone else on earth, orchestrated Belichick's defeat so that he could get in first. Too bad, too. EWe like pettiness rewarded commensurately to the opprobrium of the wielder. The beauty of trying to get media members to maintain radio silence is its own punishment and source of delight, but this is great for several reasons:
- Owners don't belong in a Hall of Fame unless they do something far more important than hiring some non-idiots, spending the requisite money, and not going bankrupt or to jail. Almost none meet that standard, because almost all of them are at best money-grubbers who have done little that didn't reward themselves first and most, and at worst they are unregenerate bastards in general.
- Halls of Fame have a significant amount of logrolling and backscratching when it comes to owners; see the spectacularly racist George Preston Marshall or the grimly repellent Harold Ballard, both of whom are in their various halls, as proof.
- Anyone who wants to be in a Hall of Fame this badly without having played or, to a lesser extent, coached deserves never to be enshrined.
- The systems by which Hall of Famers are selected are byzantine bordering on absurd, and humor the process at the cost of the honor. When a voter is jerry-rigging his or her opinions based on some bizarre Steve Kornacki-adjacent arglebargle about saving one spot for a personal favorite, it is designed to elevate the sexy vote-rigging that made Steve Kornacki (yeah, that Steve Kornacki) a network star. And what's worse than process stories? Nearly nothing.
- The handwringing over all those voters violating the sanctity of the secret ballot mirrors the nation's larger electoral spasms, and until we learn that the Trump revolution has been rejected by the nation at large—this will happen, maybe, when he creates a new constitutional crisis after deciding to close Congress and turn it into a Trump/Jiffy Lube—this is our guide to the desecration of the vote.
But never mind any of that. This is about the now, the relatively quiet moment before things American-excessive actually start happening, and that now is about the glorious entertainment generated by these two revolting old croakers whose mutual enmities are obscuring whatever achievements they actually produced. For Belichick, that includes years of defensive expertise, finding and developing Tom Brady, and building a series of teams that helped make him the most successful quarterback of all time. For Kraft, this includes the minutes in which he was in the room while Belichick did all those things, and whatever accounting work he did making sure the outgoing checks all cleared.
As a result, these two are bound together in the minds of football fans as a tightly wound Moebius strip of jealousy, vengeance, and vainglory. Picture a two-headed dog in which each head hates the other, to the point that we must grudgingly give a thought for the people most likely to suffer from this festival of rejection—these men's respective very much younger and burdened consorts. Who doesn't prefer the vision of them listening to their antediluvian boyfriends grouse about the voters and each other to actual voting legitimacy?
And maybe that's the victory here. In Belichick and Kraft we have two men who think they deserve to be inducted not immediately getting what they want. That's satisfying enough in its own right, but the petty jealousies, quietly whispered warnings, and bizarro-world vote-shavings that made it all possible are the real win. If/when Belichick and Kraft do get in, the letdown will be palpable, even for those candidates who have gotten approved, because their triumph will be measured against the abundance of performative outrage to which we have already been gifted. Two guys who still need validation after all the fame and money that has been lavished upon them are bent out of shape because they didn't get more, and on their gimme-gimme timetable. Now who in our modern experience does that mirror?
