Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game

by DeMaurice Smith

Random House

368 pps. $32.00

DeMaurice Smith is not happy.

Smith was the head of the NFL Players Association from 2009 to2023. On Aug. 5, he will publish a new book: Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game.

I’ve obtained an early copy of the book after it leaked that Smith had a lot of nasty things to say about various figures in the league. He called the Green Bay Packers Aaron Rodgers “the god of Cheesehead Nation” and said Rogers “was isolated and dismissive” during negotiations. Smith also calls League Commissioner Roger Goodell a “cold, dark void” and says Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is cheap: “If Jerry Jones saw a dollar bill on the ground, I truly believe he’d stop and pick it up.”

While news outlets have focused on the celebrity names in Turf Wars, the book reads less as a collection of celebrity gossip and more like the sort of political screeching you’d expect to hear at a Berkeley protest. Smith does not like the NFL’s owners, to be sure, but he also has harsh things to say about America. 

In the opening of Turf Wars Smith lays out his thesis:

The NFL isn’t a distraction from the country’s problems. It is a mirror image of them: economic disparity driven by corporate greed, an out-of-touch ruling class reluctant to modernize its thinking or its demographics, a baked-in racism that separates the power from the labor on our playing fields as much as in our boardrooms. It’s not just sports. It is, on the other hand, the most accurate look at how our nation was built, a microcosm of how the haves and have-nots stay that way, because even now, much of the NFL is run or influenced by segregationists or their sons. The NFL is the largest, most successful unregulated socialist system in America, its very existence based on a crime. If you could break the law, get rich, and face no consequences, would you? I know thirty-one guys who said yes, who keep saying yes, and they generally lack the moral core that divides right from wrong.

According to Smith, NFL owners are all racist, cheap, sexually immature, and dismissive of any and all government oversight. 

Smith doesn’t offer a lot of proof for these generalized assertions. However, when he does drill down into the particulars, he can make a convincing case, not of widespread criminality or of bias, but of greedy and sometimes racist behavior by individuals. Early in the book, Smith recalls how in January 2023 Damar Hamlin, a safety for the Buffalo Bills, suffered cardiac arrest on the field during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals. 

While people were dithering about what to do, Smith had the obvious answer: stop the game. Smith called NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

“I implored Roger to end the game,” Smith writes,

to take the decision out of players’ and coaches’ hands as the league and union came together to issue a joint statement about doing the right thing. He stalled. This is typical of Roger, who never agrees to anything in the moment. The league paints this as deliberate contemplation. I’ve been reminded many times what really drives it. I could hear in Roger’s voice that he was worried about Damar. I don’t have the power to stop a game—no union can halt a business’s production, short of calling a strike or judicial intervention—and neither does the NFL’s commissioner. Not without permission from his bosses. It was clear I needed to press onward, and I pleaded with him one last time before ending the call. “Roger,” I said, “this game needs to be over.”

This was done, and Hamlin was taken to the hospital where he made a full recovery. He has since returned to football.

Then there is the case of Los Angeles Raiders head coach Jon Gruden. In October 2021, Smith was contacted by a Wall Street Journal reporter. Emails had leaked from Gruden. One of them contained an undeniably nasty racial slur about Smith.

When Smith stays focused on these specific, egregious examples of offensive behavior, he scores. But when he tries to extrapolate from them a pattern of systemic bad behavior, he whiffs.

I also wish Smith had spent more time talking about why he loves football and, even more, what it is about the players that he loves. That would have made the book much more interesting and compelling. Smith mentions his “memories [of] going to RFK Stadium to watch my hometown Washington Redskins alongside my dad. John Riggins, Brig Owens, Charley Taylor: Those are the guys I remember, the players I wanted to be when I grew up. That’s about as clearly as I can sum it up: I do love football. It just so happens that I love the players more.” That’s a nice sentiment, but it’s left to hang there by itself and, given the much stronger theme of complaint in the book, it’s not as convincing as it could have been.

Smith compares his time at the NFLPA to his time working in D.C. His tasks at NFLPA, he says, were:

not unlike when I was a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. The trial may be the show, but the real work occurs long before the judge bangs the gavel. I prepare to the verge of obsession, which isn’t always good for your marriage or mental health, but what made me good as a lawyer and union leader was my willingness to contemplate every possible outcome to every possible scenario.

Again, good stuff. Yet Smith repeatedly uses these discreet examples of problems—which, after all, it was his job to discover and address—to indict the entire league and, worse, America itself. Smith goes so far as to compare NFL owners to capitalist titans like J. P. Morgan, William Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller. Like these men, “NFL owners decide how the rest of us live, work, and interact,” he fumes. If those 19^th-century business titans can be said to have manipulated Americans through our banking, transportation, and education systems, the NFL titans do it through “a billion-dollar business that has the public mesmerized. Of the hundred most-watched television broadcasts in 2023, ninety-three were NFL games.” 

Smith goes on:

We’re conditioned to think the individuals who run this financial and cultural behemoth are well-mannered titans of industry.

They are, in fact, insecure and petulant—men who sneak partially nude photos of their own cheerleaders, destroy suites in other owners’ stadiums, flip each other the bird, and fling drinks on fans. They regularly welch on their own contracts with one another. If it’s to the advantage of one or more owners, they sow division and stoke controversy.

These are explosive and intriguing claims. The problem for Smith, however, is that his anecdotes don’t serve as proof.