I sat down at 7:55 with a beer and a notepad like an idiot, because I genuinely thought I was going to watch a football event. By 8:14 the commissioner of the National Football League had embraced a 6-foot-5 offensive tackle from Missouri the way a Greek widow embraces a returning son, and my notepad still said, in my own handwriting, kickoff?
I counted the hugs. Thirty-two of them. Roger Goodell, a man who looks like he was assembled in a focus group to test the concept of ‘middle management,’ hugged every single first-round pick last night, and on at least four occasions he held the hug a full second longer than the kid wanted him to. You could see them try to pull away. He would not let them. This is the same man who suspends running backs for being late to a press conference, and last night he was going in for cheek-to-cheek with a defensive end whose name he had clearly just learned phonetically.
Then there was the wardrobe. The third overall pick wore a brooch. I had to look up brooch. The seventh pick wore a pearl necklace and a suit the color of a good lemon, and ESPN cut to a sideline analyst — sorry, draft-side analyst — who described it as ‘a statement.’ A statement of what, the analyst did not say. The analyst was wearing a turtleneck under a blazer, so I’m not sure he was qualified.
When I made my JV roster cuts in the fall of 1986, I posted the list on a piece of typing paper taped to the gym door. Coach DiMaggio walked by, looked at the list, looked at me, and said, ‘You spelled Kowalczyk wrong.’ That was the entire ceremony. Nobody hugged anybody. Nobody wore a brooch. The kids who didn’t make it cried in their cars like Americans.
The green room is now a reality show. They cut to the families every twelve seconds. Mothers crying. Fathers crying. Grandmothers being handed tissues by a producer who is not on camera but is clearly directing the grandmother to look up and to the left. One kid had to wait until the back end of the first round, and the camera sat on his face for what felt like an entire commercial break, watching him perform ‘composure’ for an audience of millions. Let the man eat a dinner roll in private. He’s about to move to Cincinnati.
Mel Kiper Jr. is still doing this. I want that on the record. Mel Kiper Jr., who has had the same haircut since the Carter administration, sat at a desk last night and explained that a linebacker from Alabama ‘plays with a chip on his shoulder,’ which is what Mel Kiper Jr. has said about every linebacker drafted since 1984. At some point during the broadcast, a younger analyst said the word ‘twitchy’ to describe a cornerback, and I’ll be honest, I’m still working on it.
Now — and credit where it’s owed — somewhere in the middle of all this, a kid from a small school in Iowa got picked twenty-eighth overall, and when his name was called he didn’t pose, didn’t pull a flag out of his jacket, didn’t kiss a brooch. He hugged his mother, said something quiet to his father, and walked to the stage like a man going to work. The booth went silent for about four seconds. It was the best four seconds of television I saw all night, and naturally they cut away from it to sell me a truck.
Ray called me at 11:40. Ray watches the draft with a legal pad and a calculator, because Ray is sick. He wanted to argue about a guard who went in the second round of his mock and the third round in real life, and he was genuinely worked up about it, the way other men are worked up about their grandchildren. I told him I was going to bed. He told me he had three more rounds to go tonight and tomorrow. God help him.
Day two is on right now. Goodell, mercifully, does not hug the second-rounders. They send him home. They bring out former players to do the announcing, and the former players look like men who would rather be golfing, which is the correct posture for an adult around this much pageantry. Denise is bringing chicken cutlets at six. She heard about the recipe from a podcast.