On Monday, much of Boston welcomed the news that the city formally withdrew its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. After months of growing opposition, Mayor Marty Walsh read the poll numbers and effectively pulled his support. As a result, the United States Olympic Committee and the city mutually agreed to end their deal. The Olympic dream had died.
For those opposing Boston 2024’s efforts from the start, there should have been time to bask in the satisfaction of snubbing an event that many thought would burden Bostonians a huge tax bill. The news cycle wouldn’t allow that to happen.
Less than 24 hours later came word that the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, would uphold the four-game suspension the league had handed down to New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. The ruling vindicated the previous Wells Report, which found it “most likely” that somebody in the Patriots camp had tampered with the footballs in the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts. The Patriots would go on to defeat the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl.
Although it once again became the top topic in town, the only major new accusation to emerge was that Brady had destroyed his cell phone during the initial investigations. It was exactly the type of “the cover up is worse than the crime” detail that Goodell – reviewing an appeal of a report he himself had commissioned – needed to gain public support. Partly because the crime itself amounted to little more than using footballs that were a little too mushy.
In a 48 hour time span, the two longest running sports stories in Boston in 2015 had taken wildly disparate turns. The influential anti-Boston 2024 group No Boston Olympics poked fun of the timing on Twitter by retweeting the following comment, comparing Goodell’s ruling to the recently released revised Olympics bid:
Today was Roger Goodell's Bid 2.0. He should ask #Boston 2024 how it worked out for them.
— Jake Duhaime (@jakeduhaime) July 28, 2015
It’s hard not to see a connection between the two events, if only because of the similarity in the local response.
An easy temptation in linking the stories would be to tie in the loss of both Brady and a potential Olympics with the undeniable fact that the Boston Red Sox have been playing like garbage for the second straight season. But while the city’s sports talk radio has been more frustrated than normal, the “worst Boston sports summer ever” pieces, like the AP report below, don’t quite capture the mood:
Although Boston’s short-lived bid for the 2024 Olympics was unpopular from the start — doomed by the organizers’ inability to ease taxpayers’ concerns that they’d be on the hook for any overspending — few are happy that the city nicknamed the “Hub,” as in the center of the universe, let a shine-on-the-world-stage opportunity slip away.
This is just untrue, there was happiness everywhere, even unrestrained glee, after the news broke. The No Boston Olympics even held a party open to the public to commemorate the occasion.
It’s also not entirely accurate to say that the Brady v Goodell narrative has been a bad thing. It’s been something to talk about to avoid the fact that the beloved Fenway Park has devolved into a home for misery, projectile vomiting and whatever the starting pitching equivalent to projectile vomiting is. Say, what you will about the exhausting Deflategate saga, it’s saved us from non-stop Joe Kelly talk at least.
Articles such as these repeat the biggest mistake that Boston 2024 made: believing that residents thought hosting the Olympics would solidify Boston’s reputation as a “world class city.” Bostonians, by and large, already believe that this is the case. Early attempts to paint those who questioned the wisdom of holding the Olympics as somehow lacking in civil pride, or even patriotism, backfired badly. They were seeking to shame us for a provincialism that most of us have long-ago proudly embraced.
The whole Boston Olympics thing felt personal and condescending from the start, that was the true reason that this issue bridged the left and the right in opposition. The Boston 2024 team sold their bid, which they refused to fully reveal to the public until late July, with a Lyle Lanley song-and-dance about how the Olympic would magically “make the city great” and wouldn’t cost a single cent of public funds.
People didn’t buy it. The Olympics proposal was presented with such a contempt for the people of Boston that even some inclined to support the concept felt insulted. It smelt like bullshit to us and so does the Wells Report.
For a variety of reasons, some more sensible than others, Patriots fans have treated this gigantic soap opera/impromptu science lesson as evidence that the NFL has been targeting the Patriots. Many Pats fans believe that because they are highly successful and have been caught breaking rules in the recent past, attacking the Patriots has become an easy way for the NFL to earn points from team and fans of the other 31 teams.
So, Goodell couldn’t pick a better target to distract the public and media from other more serious issues: whether his inability to properly punish off-the-field behavior like domestic violence to his increasingly ghoulish attempts to downplay the growing medical consensus that the game itself hobbles, incapacitates and even kills many of its players. It’s just less depressing to talk about the star quarterback who was possibly cheating in a big game than it is to read about CTE, watch disturbing elevator footage or hear team owners hold cities hostage to ensure public funding for privately owned stadiums.
As DJ Gallo has pointed out in these pages, nearly everything Goodell is accusing Brady of doing is a small potatoes version of something Goodell himself has gotten under fire for doing. It’s a little bit “history repeats first as tragedy and then as comedy” and a little bit “I learned it by watching you dad!”
So, yes, Patriots fans in the area feel insulted by Goodell, of all people, bringing the hammer down on Brady.
Not that Bostonians can do anything about it. The continuing battle between the NFL and the Patriots is a very different fight than the one that ultimately doomed the Olympics bid. The Olympics bid needed local support in order to advance, instead they had to deal with ever-increasing opposition.
The NFL neither needed nor expected support from New England. There’s not going to be any local campaign that will get the NFL to reverse the ruling against Brady. If that happens (spoiler alert: it won’t) it will have to happen in court. Complaining about the unfairness of it all might just be harming whatever case the Patriots have.
As a general rule, Boston doesn’t stay quiet when it feels like its getting screwed over. We won’t shut up even if the cause is not exactly noble, the chances for success are practically nonexistent and the long-term future of the entire state is not in the balance (like it was during the Olympics debate). The opposition here locally will be just as vehement over the Brady suspension as it was about the mercifully failed Olympics bid.
Go ahead and call us provincial for this. We’re OK with that.
