SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
To understand how the NFL has changed over the past 40-plus years, Peter King's new book, "The Game," is a good place to start. The league changed a lot during King's career covering stories on and off the field, mostly for Sports Illustrated. When we spoke recently, King told me he could feel the NFL changing in the moment as he was reporting.
PETER KING: In 1984, my first year covering the league, you know, I remember very well watching the early parts of the draft on ESPN that day. And, you know, as Mel Kiper told me recently, he said we only did a round and a half, and we bailed out of the draft to show a tractor pull.
DETROW: (Laughter).
KING: And there were 125 fans at the draft that year, at a hotel ballroom in New York City. And now, think about the draft. Six hundred thousand people showed up a few years ago when the draft was in Nashville. But, you know, in those days, the NFL was basically in a dead heat with baseball in popularity in the United States. That year, 1984, the World Series killed the NFL in TV ratings. Think about that now. You know, Major League Baseball doesn't want to go up against football, you know, on most days. They try to shy away from that. And so, yeah, that's how much it changed in four decades.
DETROW: Your signature style of journalism over the years was the behind-the-scenes embedding piece, you know, where you just kind of lock in, whether it's traveling with John Madden or following a quarterback through a week of prep. A lot of those are in here, and you kind of retell them and then rereport them in a way. I want to talk about the one where you spent a week with an officiating crew. First of all, why did you want to do that, and how hard was it to convince them to let you tag along?
KING: Why I wanted to do that? 'Cause nobody had ever done it. Following an officiating crew, seeing what they do in their real job, seeing the back judge as a teacher at a high school in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, sitting through his day with him as a single dad to three kids, I mean, it was just incredibly educational.
DETROW: One of the things that you write about, talking to people over the last two years as you put this book together, is a lot of refs did not like that story.
KING: They didn't like it because they didn't want attention drawn to them. But here's what the NFL does now, OK? The NFL, with things like "Hard Knocks" on HBO, the NFL shines a spotlight on the inner workings of the game. They didn't used to, but they do now. If I had not done that story in 2013, the league would have done it. They would have had someone internally do that story at some point.
DETROW: Yeah.
KING: And I just felt like it was a race. I had to do this story first.
DETROW: How much harder did it get over the years to do stories like that? Because the flip side of the NFL becoming this, you know, multitrillion-dollar global enterprise is that they took more and more control of their brand. Like you said, they were doing the videos themselves, and they were less likely to let an outside journalist come in and tell a story that they weren't line-checking. Like, how did you navigate that?
KING: Scott, I'm the luckiest man on the face of the Earth because in 1989, when I got to Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated was bigger than ESPN.
DETROW: Listen, I kept the issues every week. I had the football phone.
KING: Yeah.
DETROW: I am well aware.
KING: (Laughter) Yeah. OK, you know it. And so teams wanted to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I'm not saying it was easy. I still had to really work hard to be able to get inside teams, inside players, but at least it was doable. There's absolutely no way I could have done my job the way I did it in today's NFL.
DETROW: Yeah. You built a personal relationship with the people you covered. You got them to trust you, but at the same time, you were a professional. And can you walk us through how you thought and approached it, like when, say, Brett Favre calls you up on the phone and says, hey, by the way, I'm about to enter rehab, and your reporter light goes off, but you're also talking to him as a human? How did you navigate those lines and think about your job?
KING: It was just so different in those days because, you know, today, if Brett Favre was doing that, he would write it on Instagram and he'd have a long story or a long podcast by himself doing it. At that time, back in the mid-'90s, the only way you can really be able to do a story like that and have a guy call you and confess what happened and how it is he got addicted to Vicodin, the only way was to be there a lot. That's what you have to do. You got to show your face, you got to hang around. But you can't necessarily, you know, just be in the bag at all. You have got to make sure that they know about your ethics and your ethos about this.
DETROW: I want to talk about some of the tougher things that have gone along with the story of the NFL over the last few decades, and you have several chapters on them. Let's start with CTE and traumatic head injuries because they come more and more into focus. And yet it's as popular as ever. It's a global franchise, like you said. How do you account for the reality of what we know about CTE and how we feel about football in America?
KING: We live in a conflicted country, OK? And I'll tell you this, the woman who is really shining a light on the problems of CTE in the NFL and all through football is a woman named Ann McKee, who has done autopsies and has studied brain tissues of more than 700 former football players. Scott, she's got bobbleheads of Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre in her office. She grew up in Wisconsin. And although she doesn't watch much football anymore, her husband does.
DETROW: Yeah.
KING: He loves the game. So everyone, I think, has a certain bit of conflict 'cause the game is so much fun and so compelling to watch.
DETROW: I was kind of relieved to pick up on the page - maybe I'm misinterpreting, I don't think I am - that you feel pretty disgusted about the intertwined state of gambling and professional sports these days.
KING: Hate it.
DETROW: Yeah.
KING: Hate it. I think in five years, Scott, there's going to be more people in Gamblers Anonymous than Alcoholics Anonymous. It was only 10 years ago that the NFL looked at gambling as the decline of Western civilization, and now it's fully embraced because they can make money on it. Personally, I'm disgusted by it.
DETROW: But there doesn't seem to be any going back.
KING: There's not any going back because of all the money it makes.
DETROW: What do you think we as sports fans lose when there's not kind of the long-form storytelling part of the journalism that was such a big part of it for so many decades?
KING: There's something that we have lost about stories that, even though they were four or five days old by the time you opened Sports Illustrated, the detail in SI just couldn't be matched. And I don't know that we will be able to match that these days because even though there are so many great reporters, there are also so many roadblocks in their way that were not in the way when I was able to spend a week in the life of the Green Bay Packers.
DETROW: Yeah. That's Peter King, author of the new book "The Game." Thank you so much.
KING: Thank you, Scott.
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