Owners don’t belong in any hall of fame for any sport.
Take the name Robert Kraft out of it. Take the controversy surrounding Bill Belichick’s exclusion out of it. There is no valid argument for any owner to be enshrined in any sport’s hall of fame.
It’s shocking to read a column from Mike Chappell trying to justify voting for a team owner over the best coach the NFL has ever seen. If the Patriots’ attempts to gain an advantage over the rest of the NFL with Spygate and Deflategate soured him on the idea of voting for Belichick, boy is he gonna feel like an idiot when he finds out who owned the Patriots during those scandals. Obviously, he knows who it is. That makes you wonder if Chappell likes football or if he is just impressed by money.
My objection comes down to three things. First, there is a narrative to hall of fame induction, one that the media covering every sport is all too eager to participate in. The second is the impact an owner has on the people who support his/her team. Finally, there is the role inside the organization.
The Narrative
Being inducted into your appropriate hall of fame is an honor. It’s supposed to be the culmination of years of sacrifice and accomplishment. That’s true of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, the International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and any other such organization your mind can conjure.
Sacrifice is at the heart of all of these narratives. Think about all of the speeches that have included acknowledgements of the families that missed out on time with dad or spouse because the craft (no pun intended) was just as important to him as the people that are supposed to come first.
What does a billionaire owner have to sacrifice? As we’ve seen over and over, even something as monumental as a new stadium doesn’t require them to spend much of their own money. He provides the money to meet his payroll, and he provides a vote on league issues. Those aren’t exactly hall-of-fame-calibre duties.
That sacrifice is why so many of these guys break down in tears, and it always makes for great television. See, the networks and people that cover the NFL are eager to be a part of these moments, whether it’s Hall of Fame President David Baker coming on a studio set to surprise a new inductee, a broadcast partner being the one to deliver the good news, or setting up something truly unique like Shannon Sharpe telling his brother Sterling that they were now both hall of famers.
People in the media know what that induction moment means to these guys. That’s why they are willing to go overboard to be a part of it. The inductees earned their accolades after earning the right to even be associated with a team’s logo and uniform. The people who cover these players day-to-day should value that. How can you be up close with great players and coaches and think that a guy who could put together enough money to meet an asking price deserves to be held in similar esteem?
The Impact
Perhaps what I find most egregious about the idea of an owner being worthy of anyone’s hall of fame vote is the absolute lack of positive impact he or she can have on the team and its fans. Sports history is riddled with terrible owners – Donald Sterling, Peter Angelos, and Marge Schott among them.
Now think about the great owners. What makes them good? They made good hires. Sometimes it was the result of due diligence. Sometimes it was just dumb luck.
Belichick called the plays. Brady made the plays. Belichick made the roster. Brady made the roster great. Those men deserve New Englanders’ praise. Tom Brady brought the team back from a 28-3 deficit in Super Bowl LI. Bill Belichick evaluated and selected guys like Brady, Rob Gronkowski, Richard Seymour, and Vince Wilfork. What they did was hard.
Kraft was simply there to foot the bill. The most Patriots fans should thank him for is staying out of the football people’s way.
The Ego
Robert Kraft’s Apple TV documentary about the Patriots dynasty sure does a lot of heavy lifting on his legacy. It paints the accomplishments of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady as those of Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and Robert Kraft.
I would think that fact would be obvious to the people who cover football day in and day out. I certainly never thought I’d be seeing anyone rush to pen a column to let everyone know the propaganda movie worked on them.
Robert Kraft has worked to put himself front and center in NFL decisions in recent years. It doesn’t matter if his ideas are good, just that they are heard. He tried to steer Fox toward Al Michaels in its effort to replace Joe Buck in the network’s A booth, despite Michaels’ best years clearly being behind him. He is pushing hard for an eighteen-game season, despite the mounting injuries that have come along with going from sixteen to seventeen games and a shorter preseason just four years ago.
The man wasn’t born rich. He took his father-in-law’s box and printing company and turned it into an empire. He benefited from skyrocketing league revenues after initially buying the New England Patriots for just $172 million.
The job of a team owner is to get out of the team’s way. Kraft has been amongst the best at that. He has made enough money so that his four sons never have to work if they don’t want to. Their kids don’t have to work if they don’t want to. That’s the reward!
The trappings of wealth are a reward, too. Robert Kraft’s massage parlor scandal? Too hot for Netflix, apparently, but no big deal to Hall of Fame voters. Maybe being rich also gives you control of clocks and calendars, because if votes were due just a little bit later, anyone considering Kraft would have had to wrestle with his link to Jeffery Epstein.
But the mental illness of being a billionaire is that the money and its benefits are impossible to enjoy if they don’t also come with praise, or in this case, a gold jacket.
It’s nuts that Bill Belichick didn’t get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on his first ballot, but that’s not why I feel bad for him. He’ll get in next year. The HOF isn’t going anywhere, and neither are all of his wins and rings.
The reason I feel bad for Belichick is that some voters saw him and Robert Kraft and saw two cases worth debating. At least one person was proud to say that he thought Kraft’s case had more merit.
Football is drawing up plays, hitting, getting hit, catching the ball, and outmaneuvering your competition. None of that describes the role of a team owner. People that cover the sport should be smarter than to consider one of them worthy of hall of fame induction.
