There are certain public events that you anticipate with an unreserved glee but that, even when they turn out precisely the way you might have hoped, leave you feeling sad and sordid rather than satisfied. So it was with the press conference on Thursday evening in Foxborough, Massachusetts, in which Tom Brady attempted to answer a series of shouted questions regarding the Deflategate scandal, which, judging by its position as the top story on all three network newscasts last night, seems now to qualify as a national scandal.
On Thursday morning, Brady’s coach, Bill Belichick, had given a lengthy statement on the matter, denying having any knowledge about how eleven of the twelve footballs that the team provided for its A.F.C. Championship game, against the Colts, were reportedly inflated below the required level. (The situation is currently being investigated by the N.F.L.) He said that he had never given much thought to the footballs used in games—that was something that the quarterback dealt with. “Tom’s personal preferences on his footballs are something that he can talk about in much better detail and information than I could possibly provide,” Belichick said. It appeared to many that he was shifting the focus, and possibly the blame, onto his star player. Brady had originally been scheduled to meet with the media on Friday, but his press conference was moved up: he’d be speaking around four o’clock. And so the moment was marked on the day’s calendar—the kind of high-drama, low-consequence spectacle that we’ve come to rely upon to get us through our days.
Leading up to the presser, the former players now employed as talkers on ESPN suggested that Brady might confess, or that he’d at least provide an explanation. Maybe he would even apologize, though it was still unclear exactly what for.
Brady emerged, wearing a crew-neck sweater and a team-logo toque. He looked wide-eyed and nervous, like a man who knew that he was at the podium to talk about an issue of domestic policy (even the Vice President had weighed in on the issue of “soft balls”) rather than to relive, as he usually does in these settings, the nice passes he’d just made in a game. But, right from the start, we were reminded of the limited usefulness of the press-conference format. It was clear that Brady was not going to be confessing. “I would never do anything outside of the rules of play. I would never have anyone do something,” he said. (Remarkably, Brady said that he had not even been interviewed yet by the league on the matter.) And it quickly became obvious that he would not be very helpful in explaining whatever process he or anyone else goes through in choosing footballs. “I have no knowledge of anything,” he said early on, and then spent a half an hour confirming just that.
As a mode of investigative journalism, the press conference is shot in the dark. Members of the fifth estate may like to think that if they could just craft the perfect question, like Matlock with a press pass, they would trip the speaker up in his lies or obfuscations, unravelling the entire story in front of our eyes. That’s a dream in the best of circumstances; in the scrum of yesterday’s circus, the hopes for case-cracking, or enlightenment of any form, were especially slim. There are still more questions than answers about these footballs: no one from the league has offered an official explanation of the process by which they were tested by officials before this particular game or of why, if they were suspected of being under-inflated during the game, they were permitted to be used. At this point, there isn’t even evidence that they were necessarily tampered with at all. If Tom Brady was telling the truth, and did not know anything about the deflated footballs, then the assembled members of the press were asking him to do something impossible: to apologize for something that he didn’t do and couldn’t explain. If he was lying, the minor Helen Thomases in the room weren’t going to get it out of him.
The obvious point was to get Brady on record, so he can be hanged by his own words if the truth turns out to be against him. But the real purpose, the joy of the matter for the reporters, was to prod the handsome millionaire along though the familiar ritual of humiliation on national television. If he wasn’t going to provide Deflategate’s dramatic final act, then he could at least provide a little wish fulfillment, by making himself abject, or else ridiculous.
“This has raised a lot of uncomfortable conversations from people around this country who view you, a three-time Super Bowl champion and a two-time M.V.P., as their idol,” someone said. “The question they’re asking themselves is, ‘What’s up with our hero?’ So can you answer right now: Is Tom Brady a cheater?” This isn’t the kind of question that expects an answer it’s a timeless straw-man expression of fan populism—”Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Another reporter was more to the point: “A lot of fans are disappointed in the situation. For those, is this a moment where you should pause and say, whether it was by design or accidental, is this a moment to just say, ‘I’m sorry to the fans of the NFL and to the fans of Tom Brady’?” Again, no one watching had the slightest idea yet what Brady needed to be sorry for—you can’t hurry along the Oprah moment.
If Brady denied us the satisfaction of an apology, what he offered instead was his foolishness. And while some may take limitless satisfaction in rewatching clips of Tom Brady talking about balls, the joke of it became less and less funny as the tweets went on. Near the end, when Brady said, “Things are going to be fine—this isn’t ISIS,” you felt sorry for him. It was an odd and unthinking thing to say—and, owing to the jarring reminder of the state and weight of things, sorry for us all.
