Effective just hours ago, 47-year-old Roger Goodell (second from left) became the newest commissioner of the National Football League, having been voted to the position unanimously by the League's 31 owners. And the Houston Texans. While the new commissioner was not expected to address the media until Wednesday, he did grant a brief interview to KSK's Monday Morning Punter (not pictured) mere minutes after the exchange of power took place at 6 AM ET this morning. What follows is the first of two excerpts of their exchange, ranging from Mr. Goodell's takes on league business to date, his agenda for the NFL's future, and reminiscing on his early days as a nervous intern in 1982.Monday Morning Punter: Mr. Goodell, thanks so much for this access to you during your first hours as commissioner.
Roger Goddell: Thank you, Punter. please call me Roger.
MMP: Can I call you "The Rogg?"
RG: No.
MMP: Oh. [awkward pause] So, congratulations on the job. How does it feel now, to be the Kim Jong-Il of American sports?
RG: It find it to be an unusual culmination, having first entered these offices as an intern, meeting Pete [Rozelle] for the first time, and now unpacking my office as the commissioner, it's very surreal, but very exciting.
MMP: Have you unpacked your office?
RG: [Laughs] I really haven't had the time. Though Paul [Tagliabue] didn'tofficially leave until today, material regarding the league's more pressing issues has been on my desk for some time.
MMP: What is the league's most pressing issue?
RG: Some of the owners are being retarded. Not just Oklahoma-Miami retarded. I'm talking a spectrum of retarded. Multifaceted retardation.
MMP: Could you be a little more specific?
RG: I'll tell you right now, Ralph Wilson and Mike Brown are fucking killing me. Every week, it seems, we get an email from one of these assholes bitching about not having enough revenue sharing, like some old fucks at a country club complaining about having to tip their caddies. The tight-assest fellows you can find. I'm shocked these dicks even know how to USE email, what with spending most of their day having to dry the toilet water off their balls.
MMP: Because they're very saggy.
RG: Did you know that before Marvin [Lewis] was hired in Cincinnati, the Bengals didn't even have
scouts? Mike had his fuck-up son looking through the newspapers between sessions of eating paste and Nudie Magazine Day. He'd scribble some shit on his hand, and that was their scouting report for the week. When you look at how shitty the Bengals were in the '90s, it was no accident. They cut every cost they could, and some they couldn't.
Today, he has a state-of-the-art stadium, a franchise quarterback, and still one of the most loyal fan bases in our game. And, mind you, only one of those things he had to pay for out of his own pocket. But when he was cutting the ancillary needs of the franchise to line his own pocket, the franchise suffers. Our business suffers.
MMP: Is Mike Brown that far off the reservation? How do you deal with someone with a mentality that far removed from the remainder of the group?
RG: After the first vote [that made me commissioner], I wanted to go after him right then and there. But Tags wanted one more vote, to make it unanimous. So I waited, and the next vote was 32-0. So later that day, I was in the lobby [at the Renaissance hotel in Northbrook, Ill.] thanking most of the owners, but when I came to Mike, I just laid into him. I knew he was thinking about pulling an Art Modell, moving the team out of Cincinnati, so I thought it best to kill his dreams on the spot. I told him "You know we're moving a team to LA. But it won't be you, cheap-ass. You know why, mister? 'Cause you drove a fucking Hyundai to get here tonight, and I drove an eighty thousand dollar BMW.
That's why!"
MMP: So who
is moving to LA? And why move a team there at all?
RG: It's not about football in Southern California. We have teams in San Diego, Oakland, San Francisco--
MMP: What is it about, then?
RG: It's about getting stinky on the hangdown. I was in Pittsburgh for the Steelers-Vikings preseason a couple weeks back, and I swear there weren't ten women in that whole fucking town that I'd be caught having sex with.
MMP: Wait a minute. Aren't you married? Don't you have twin girls?
RG: Jane [my wife] said the same thing. She said, "I won't have to follow you here anymore. These bitches could make a freight train take a gravel road." But a team in LA isn't about bringing football to people in LA. It's about having a League presence in a large American city and pillaging its women. In LA, you have actresses, wannabe actresses, and women that were actresses but are still really hot. It's a market we are desperate to penetrate, and once we get Tom Benson untangled out of that Katrina bullshit, we're there.
MMP: You started working in the League as an intern. Tell me what it was like, back in 1982, Huey Lewis on the radio, the Libyans are doing their thing, and The Rogg is walking into the NFL offices for his first day on the job.
RG: I remember it was on a Tuesday, because Memorial Day was the day before, and a good friend of mine, we'll call him "Matt," was planning to throw a tremendous Memorial Day party. He was taking an analyst job with Bear Stearns in Boston and wanted to throw one last bash. We're like, sweet dude, Matt's last party! So the rest of us are totally looking forward to it, but then my girlfriend starts acting like a complete bitch, and decides she doesn't want to go, at the last fucking minute! I was like, fuck that, man, you know?
MMP: Matt's last party!
RG: For real. So I went without her, and I had serious
blue balls. I walk in and grab a Heinie out of the fridge, turn around, and there's this fucking blonde girl. Right there. Total fucking fox. Six feet tall, really little titties. Fuck yeah, dude. So I start chatting her up. Her name was Brianna, and she's totally on the rebound. We talk until it gets dark, then I take her around back so she can suck me off behind the garbage cans. I had a feeling she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, and she did not disappoint.
MMP: So...your internship --
RG: Hang on, bro, you're fucking up the story.
MMP: Sorry.
RG: It's cool, dawg. So as I'm being fellated in the driveway, I am quickly approaching The Happy Zone, when I see something approach; it was a raccoon, and it lets out this little shriek as it lunges at Brianna's hair! She goes batshit and clamps down on my johnson. Hard. I had to push her off me, and I am buckled over in pain in the gravel. I'm screaming. She's screaming, and even that fucking raccoon is making little screaming noises while clawing at her head. She couldn't shake the fucker off. Nobody came to help us. No one even came. Matt told me later that he did hear us screaming outside, but he thought we were just fucking, not getting attacked by some scavenger rodent.
MMP: Crazy.
RG: Yeah, dude. Man, I miss college.
Most sports have a revered place for the “lovable loser.” Baseball has the Cubs; golf has Phil Mickelson; the NBA has Isiah Thomas. However, we at KSK piss excellence and expect no less from the quality of the NFL product. Losers are despicable rejects and should be treated like the loathsome human garbage they are. With that in mind, we present the latest installment in our preview of all 32 NFL teams... the Cleveland Browns.
The Browns haven't done a damn thing since their return to the NFL in 1999. For that matter, they hadn't done a damn thing years before Art Modell had the good sense to trade a team in a sixth class town for a team in a fifth class town. There is ample evidence that the Cleveland football experiment is a colossal failure. We say shit-can the whole operation. Bulldoze the whole damn thing into Lake Erie. Better yet, send them to Baltimore. Baltimore could use two teams.
