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Legendary NFL columnist Peter King quarterbacks a wide-ranging and wildly informative and entertaining Q&A with Post columnist Steve Serby, sharing never-told tales across 40 years of NFL history from his riveting new book “The Game,” which will be released Tuesday.
Q: What was the most shocking thing you learned during your research?
A: Probably that Paul Tagliabue was legitimately concerned about a nuclear attack on the United States, because of his past. When he got out of law school, he took a job with the Defense Department. His first really big project there was on the viability of how our enemies could get a nuclear bomb into the United States, and let it be kind of like in a sleeper cell until they were ready to detonate it. That’s why he was so scared on September 11, 2001, as he walked home from his office, through the soot of Manhattan to his Upper East Side apartment.
Q: Describe the state of the NFL game today.
A: I think the product is really a lot of fun. The bottom line is in America, I really think we need football. We’re in such a divisive time in our history, and we need football. We need it badly. Stop trying to ask players to do more. Players don’t need to do more, they’re doing enough already. And the game is good. It can be tweaked. But I love the game the way it is.
Q: A Bill Parcells anecdote.
A: Being in the car with him on the morning after they beat Denver in the Super Bowl [XXI on Jan. 25, 1987]. Getting picked up at the Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California, by the NFL Director of Security Charlie Jackson. Sitting in the backseat with Parcells and we’re barely out of the parking lot. Parcells — who is, like gleeful — he puts his two arms over that seat in front of him, he’s sitting in the back in some sort of limo, and he says, “Hey Charlie, tell me: Was [Mike] Ditka as happy last year as I am right now? How was Ditka last year right at this time?” And Charlie Jackson just laughed and he said, “He was pretty happy, Coach. But I think you might be happier.”
Q: Bill Belichick?
A: I did not agree with George Young one bit when George Young thought that Bill Belichick would not be a good head coach in the NFL. Everybody thought it was because that Bill Belichick was surly and not communicative and everything like that. Look, when Lawrence Taylor loves you, and when all the players on your defense love you, there’s a reason for that. You know what the reason is? Because he put them in position to win games, and he told them the answers to the test. I talked to Art Modell when he was looking for a coach the time he hired Belichick [with the Browns in 1991], and I gave him my opinion. I said, “Hey, he’s not gonna win the press conference, but I think he’s gonna win a lot of games.”
Q: A Wellington Mara anecdote.
A: First year I covered the team. It’s Dec. 22 or 23, and a PC Richards truck pulls up into my driveway, and two guys come out and they bring a huge color TV to my door in a box. They knocked on the door and they said, “Peter King? Where do you want us to put this?” And I said, “I didn’t order a TV.” And they said, “Oh, it’s from the New York Giants.” So I looked at [wife] Ann and I said, “I can’t keep this TV.” A neighbor had a pickup truck, so he and I drove to the Giants the next morning, he helped me carry it in to the lobby. I said, “Hey, could I see Wellington?” I walked down to his office and I said, “Wellington, I can’t accept this TV you guys apparently sent to me.” And he said, “Why? Peter, you’ve been covering us the whole year, you do a great job. Even though I know it’s sometimes adversarial, we consider you guys to be members of the family.” And I said, “That’s great of you, I appreciate it, but I just can’t take it.” That was one of the nicest men I’ve ever met in my life. Wellington, to me, was the absolute perfect NFL owner if I was a player. He’d do anything to win.
Q: Lawrence Taylor.
A: I covered the guy for four years, if I was passing him on the street right now, I would guess he wouldn’t even recognize me. He just didn’t have relationships with writers that other guys had. I consider it a great privilege to have covered him for four years, but I didn’t know him at all.
Q: Greatest defensive player of all time, Lawrence Taylor or Reggie White?
A: Lawrence Taylor. Lawrence Taylor just struck fear into other teams. I think all-timers have to have a mythic quality. He had a mythic quality.
Q: Peyton Manning.
A: I was at Sports Illustrated the year that he won Sportsman of the Year. Peyton would not come to New York for the award because it was on a Tuesday during the season. So he said, “If I’m going to accept this in person, it’s gotta be in Denver.” I sat with him and Patrick Smyth, the PR guy of the Broncos the day before the event, and he was going over the run of show, and he looked at the menu, there were two vegetables on the menu and he didn’t like ’em and he wanted ’em changed, so we changed the vegetables on the menu.
Q: Eli Manning.
A: I guess I had been kind of hard on Eli early on. After the fantastic [2011 NFC Championship game] win in San Francisco, I waited for him, so finally he turns around and sees me, I’m the only one there and I said, “Eli, you’ve been criticized a lot over the years,” for this, that or the other thing. He said, “Oh, like by you?” I had such great admiration for him because to me, he was Derek Jeter. He never cared about the superfluous crap like what’s on the back page of the papers, ’cause that didn’t have anything to do with whether he was gonna be able to win the game on Sunday.
Q: Tom Brady.
A:. They beat Atlanta in the greatest Super Bowl comeback, one of the greatest games ever. I texted him on Monday night and said, “Anytime between now and Sunday at 9 p.m., anywhere in the world, could you give me one hour of time?” No answer Tuesday. No answer Wednesday. Thursday morning I wake up and I said, “Tom, if you’re away and can’t do this I totally get it.” I put in the text: “The time to remember the greatest game in your career is now. Not after you retire. You need to get on record everything that happened in that comeback. Your kids are gonna want to know someday.” I’m trying to make the best pitch I can. So when I wake up Friday morning, there’s a text from Brady, he says, “OK. You can have one hour Friday in Boston, or Sunday in Montana.” So I met him in Montana, and we spent 86 minutes together, and I recorded everything for a two-part podcast [“MMQB,” Monday Morning Quarterback]. And at the end I said, “I need to get a picture.” And he goes, “I’ll only take a picture if it’s me and you.” So we walked outside at this ski place where he had a home and he goes, “Honey! Honey!” And so here comes Gisele Bündchen. So she took the picture. I had a two-part story in the next day, it was part one, and there was a photo of me and Brady on a snowy backdrop, and below it, it said, “Photo for the MMQB by Gisele Bündchen.” I always wanted to be able to tell the story that everybody wanted to tell.
Q: How were his recollections of the Super Bowl?
A: Incredibly vivid. Easily one of the best interviews I’ve ever done in my life.
Q: Spygate.
A: Patriots got what they deserved. And if it had been worse, I would have said, “That’s OK,” because Bill Belichick knew what he was doing. And he did it anyway. Even after Eric Mangini said to him before that season, “Hey, I know how things work around here.” And I’m vastly paraphrasing ’cause I don’t know what he said, I just know that he went to Belichick and said, “Don’t pull that before we [Jets] play you at the Meadowlands.” It is a competitive advantage, and it was against the rules. So they broke the rules.
Q: Deflategate.
A: I believe that Roger Goodell used a 100-pound sledgehammer to kill an ant. In my opinion, what Roger Goodell should have done in that case is on Tuesday morning, go up to Foxborough, and quietly sit in a room first with Tom Brady, then with Belichick, then with [Robert] Kraft, and just say, “somehow, some way, somebody here knew what was going on.” It doesn’t really have any sort of impact on the game. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the footballs had been a pound deflated each. Tom Brady’s numbers in the previous nine years for home and road games might have been 1 percent different. So in my opinion, there are times when I think a commissioner should say, “Cut this out, and don’t ever let us catch you doing this again.” Because it really didn’t matter.
Q: The Tush Push.
A: I hate the Tush Push. It’s a bastardization of the rules. When football was invented, it wasn’t invented with the thought that 800 or 900 pounds of man would be allowed to push a ballcarrier from behind.
Q: The evolution of instant replay.
A: I like replay. It has an important place in the game. What I don’t like is the micromanaging of it, and the desire, for instance, to take 50 seconds to look back and forth, forth and back, for the teeniest bit of evidence to overturn a call. Officiating mistakes will be made. We should learn to live with the imperfections.
Q: Brett Favre.
A: We went to dinner on a Friday night in Green Bay at the Oneida Country Club. When we got in the car to go back to his house, he said, “Hey, we’ll have a contest.” So he put on the oldies station, and you had to sing the song. Favre had an incredible memory. The rule was if he finished the song, then it was on to the next oldies song. If he didn’t know the song then you had to sing that song. He flubbed, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” And I knew every word to “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” I beat Brett Favre in a memory contest. That guy saw “Sling Blade” and could tell you paragraphs from the movie. He saw it one time. It’s one of the reasons he was able to sleep through meetings, and Steve Mariucci used to say, “I’ll never worry about him because he hears it once and he knows it.”
Q: Jerry Jones.
A: He gave me a tour of his new stadium, and he took me into the bowels of the stadium all over the place, and in one place he takes me into a refrigerated room that is 3,700 square feet big, with fairly high ceilings. And from floor to ceiling there’s cases of beer. It’s like an alcoholic’s nirvana. Jerry just loved it and he said, “Hey, and this is only for the people in the end zone.” He took an hour and a half one day to show me everything, to show me the modern art gallery that he had in there because his wife loved modern art. It might have been the biggest modern art museum in the western United States. It was like he was showing me his newborn twins. He loved that place.
Q: What should people remember about John Madden?
A: That he was real, and that he was legitimate. I’m not saying he sat there on a bus for 51 hours and was in character the whole time. The moment on that trip I’ll never forget on a blazing warm Thursday afternoon driving across Nebraska, John Madden told the bus driver to stop because there was a field of red wildflowers to the right of the bus ahead of us. And he took out a book from a drawer, and the book was called “Wildflowers Across America.” And he went out of the bus and he stood there with the book. He flipped through the pages and found the flower. It was the spotted knapweed, and he was all excited. And I said, “I’m gonna ruin your reputation, I’m gonna tell everybody in the NFL you love wildflowers.” And he said, “Good, tell ’em, ’cause I do.”
Q: Steve Young.
A: After he has the greatest game of his life, my job for Sports Illustrated was to tail him after the game. I think he did 24 interviews after the game, and at one point he said, “Man, I’m so thirsty.” So I went and found three kind of big bottles of red Gatorade and some cookies. He drank all three bottles, like, right away. About a half hour later we’re in the back of the car, and he said, “Uh-oh” [on the way] back to his hotel, and he just vomits a red streak looking like a scene out of the “Exorcist,” and half of it goes on [agent] Leigh Steinberg’s shoes. And Steinberg says right away, “Well, never wash these shoes again.” People need to understand that Steve Young is quite possibly the most decent human being who’s ever played in the National Football League. At one point, one of his uncles in the back of this party, Steve is laid out, he’s got IVs in his arm, yells out, “Joe who?” And it’s the only time that whole night that Steve got cross, and Steve got mad, he said: “No! Don’t say that.” And he talked about what a great guy Joe [Montana] was. And I’m paraphrasing, “But it’s not Joe’s fault that we were thrown together like this.”
Q: Pete Rozelle.
A: I was sitting in his office interviewing him one Friday afternoon when I worked for Newsday. He was a really good interview, but he just seemed tired, and I think he had really been worn down by all the battles he had fought with Al Davis. I don’t know how many Carltons he smoked a day, but my guess the Over/Under would 50. I felt for him. I make the point in the book that maybe he stayed too long at the party, because in his last seven years, there were two strikes, and they had the USFL lawsuit, and there were no strikes in Paul Tagliabue’s term, there have been no strikes in Roger Goodell’s term. It was a contentious time, and I think in some ways you gotta give him a little bit of a mulligan on that because he was a great commissioner.
Q: Colin Kaepernick.
A: He talked a lot about his tattoos, because in Turlock [Calif.], the cops who were there kind of policing the event, they all wanted to meet him, and they were interviewing him about his tattoos. America still was a little bit in the fence about tattoos all over one’s body, and he had ’em everywhere. The headline on the story in the “MMQB” was “Colin Kaepernick does not care what you think about his tattoos.” He was a man of conviction, but he was also the nicest dude. … Look, we all know somebody shoulda signed him. But I also think that when he went for the tryout in Atlanta a few years later, he shoulda signed the standard injury waiver, whatever, which he would not agree to sign. If you’re desperate to play in the NFL, sign the damn waiver and do the tryout.
Q: Tom Coughlin.
A: Tom has got this demeanor that is very prickly, but Tom is such a good human being. They just don’t make many better human beings than Tom Coughlin. Coughlin knew that people kind of talked behind his back and ridiculed him a little bit. He didn’t care. He was unapologetically Coughlin. I just loved it.
Q: Jimmy Johnson.
A: Jimmy had a habit that after every game, win or lose, he would go downstairs into the bowels of old Texas Stadium, and he and his coaches and staff and wives, girlfriends whatever, would just sit there and have a few beers while the parking lot thinned out. Jimmy was telling me a bunch of stuff off the record, and on this particular day, the off the record stuff was pretty sensitive. As I’m getting ready to leave, he looks at me with a dead serious face, and he says: “Peter, if you F–k me on this story, I will squash you like a squirrel in the road.” And I loved it, because I want people to tell me exactly where we stand, how we stand.
Q: George Young.
A: George was exceedingly helpful to the writers in an acerbic way. I think he respected the profession and really wanted us to get it right. We’re in an NFL meeting in Hawaii when free agency was the topic and everybody in the NFL was anti-free agency. But George had given me the same speech 64 times, and he said, “How many times do I have to tell you? We are not interchangeable parts. You can’t put a guard on the Giants and then a guard on the Eagles and expect him to play if he was like a second baseman on the Mets and then a second baseman on the Phillies.” I understood where George was coming from, but I just never bought it because I always thought, “These guys work 90 hours a week, they’ll figure it out,” and eventually they did.
Q: Aaron Rodgers wasn’t on your top 10 quarterbacks list.
A: I think it’s because I honor history a little bit more than most people do. The toughest decision for me was putting Patrick Mahomes 4, because he’s in mid-career. I think history will show Favre to be just a tad better than Rodgers.
Q: Jim Brown.
A: Jim Brown was a staunch defender of Bill Belichick. And I remember, the game after the Browns announced they were moving to Baltimore, Jim Brown was in the locker room and he had a cane in those days. He was just sitting there and he was just sad. They had gotten their ass kicked, and he was just sad. I asked him what today was like, and he said, “Basically the only thing that this reminds me of is the Sunday we played after Kennedy was assassinated.”
Q: John Harbaugh.
A: The Ravens had just beaten Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh in a playoff game. It was a great team, everybody pulling in one direction. And I don’t know why I said this to him: “You know what, John? I have a prediction. You’re gonna be to Baltimore what Chuck Noll was to Pittsburgh. You’re gonna be here as long as Chuck Noll was in Pittsburgh.” He goes, “You really think so?” He was made to coach the New York Giants. He is the perfect coach for the New York Giants. … Players are going to respect him because he’s never gonna BS them. They know that if they follow him, he’s gonna help make ’em better, he and his staff.
Q: Aaron Rodgers.
A: A few months before Bart Starr died, I’m working for NBC. One of the ideas was that I thought would be really cool, I want to ride in the backseat when he and Danica Patrick, who was his girlfriend at the time, were driving to work one day, and I ran these ideas by him, and he goes, “I’ll tell you, 1) we’re definitely not doing is that one.” He didn’t like any of the ideas, but finally I thought of one because I read that he really loved Bart Starr. Bart Starr had said to him, when he was sitting behind Favre for three years, “Keep your head up, your time will come.” And I said “What if I got Bart” who at the time had had a stroke and wasn’t doing that well, “What if I got you and Bart Starr to say something to each other like on video?” I went to Birmingham, Alabama, and we got maybe 25 seconds of usable tape of Bart Starr sending a message of admiration to Aaron Rodgers. And I went back to Green Bay, and when we finished, I looked at Rodgers, and he didn’t say a word. I was emotional watching Rodgers be a little bit emotional thinking, “My God, I’m so glad I got Bart Starr in my corner.”
Q: John Randle.
A: The wild-and-craziest player I ever covered, because of his frenetic style. He influenced me for another reason. He grew up in rural poverty in a tiny south Texas town, a single mom and three kids crammed into a 400-square-foot wooden shack set on cinder blocks. I visited him in Texas and we went to his childhood home, and he got embarrassed by it. I grew up in white-bread America and was shocked to imagine humans actually living like this. And I understood why Randle and so many players with similar backgrounds were so motivated to be great at football. They didn’t want to go back to their old lives.
Q: Your greatest Super Bowl.
A: The New England comeback against Atlanta [Super Bowl LI, Feb. 5, 2017]. For 24 minutes I think of real game time, everything had to go right for the Patriots.
Q: If you could go back in time and cover one game in NFL history, which would it be?
A: The easy answer is the ’58 Championship Game, but I’d want to cover Super Bowl III. Between ’65 and ’75, in my formative years, I was totally fascinated by Joe Namath. He’s the only guy — and I didn’t say this to him — he’s the only guy who when I interviewed him I was slightly intimidated. Think about when I was a kid, the three most famous men in America were Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon and Joe Namath — and not in that order. Now that I’ve learned all these things about the Super Bowl … the beach chair, and regaling the writers — would that have been the greatest time to cover the NFL!? And then, the drama of winning that game. He epitomized everything in the ethos of a quarterback that you want.
Q: What one question would you have asked Vince Lombardi?
A: Why on God’s green earth did you think you could win in Green Bay? It was a downtrodden, horses–t organization, and they just weren’t winning, and to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and think that you could win. … What about the Giants? What about anywhere else? Why didn’t you wait for the Eagles? Why didn’t you wait for a premier job? Maybe he just didn’t have the confidence to think he would ever get another chance. … One of the most interesting things that I learned doing this book was the guts of steel that Steve Sabol had. How amazing it was that Vince Lombardi kind of looked at him and told him, “Hey, it’s probably time to turn that off now.” And Sabol just laughed, and he kept going. Here’s a guy what, two years out of college, if that, and he’s, “I’m not turning this off because, you know what, I am in the middle of an NFL dynasty and I am somewhere where no one has ever been.” Steve Sabol oughta be an inspiration for young reporters, young videographers today.
Q: Three dinner guests.
A: Lefty King [father], Vince Lombardi, Abraham Lincoln.
Q: Favorite movie?
A: “North by Northwest.”
Q: Favorite actor?
A: Humphrey Bogart.
Q: Favorite actress?
A: Frances McDormand, Jodie Foster (tie).
Q: Favorite entertainer?
A: Bruce Springsteen.
Q: Favorite meal?
A: Angel hair with Ann King’s marinara, passed down from her Pittsburgh Italian family
Q: If you were NFL commissioner, you would …
A: I would tell the owners we’re not playing an 18th game, period. If you want to play an 18th game, you’re gonna have to hire a different commissioner. No. 2, I would say, “Listen, you’re gonna have to accept a little less money, but we’re getting out of bed with the gambling companies.” I don’t think gambling should be illegal. I don’t think the NFL should ban any attempt at gambling, but I think the NFL, which 10 years ago talked about gambling like it was smallpox, now talks about gambling like, “Bring it on and give us more. And let’s have more Super Bowls in Vegas.” Look, I’m fine with having a Super Bowl in Vegas and having a franchise there. But let’s have a little bit of a conscience about what gambling does to people in this country. Ten years from now, I think there’ll be more people in Gamblers Anonymous than Alcoholics Anonymous. And part of that will be that people love sitting there on Sunday betting on the NFL. And the only other thing I would do is I would make defensive pass interference a 15-yard penalty and not a spot foul.
Q: What made Peter King different as an NFL reporter/columnist/podcaster?
A: I was the luckiest man on the face of the earth because Sports Illustrated allowed me to do all this stuff and to spread my wings. Would Andy Reid have told me and diagrammed the winning play in two Super Bowls for me? No, he wouldn’t have. But, I got to know him, and you nurture your relationships over the years.
Q: But you were also very creative in the stories you pursued.
A: I was bad at taking no for an answer. I always tried to put myself in the shoes of other people. Like with Carson Palmer, a week in the life of a quarterback in 2015.
Q: What are you most proud of about this book?
A: Honestly, that I didn’t replay Peter King’s greatest hits. That I went back in most cases and re-reported the stories and found out stuff — who knew that Bill Walsh was in the middle of such a personal crisis in his last year coaching that he’s sitting there bawling in Eddie DeBartolo’s condo in a game week twice because his life, he felt, in some ways, was falling apart. How in the world did they [49ers] rebound and win the Super Bowl? … I don’t know really that anybody knows the real story of why Reggie White picked Green Bay. Well, I’m gonna tell you in this book. Do people understand how anguished that Paul Tagliabue was on 9/11 because he felt like something else was coming, and something else a lot worse? … One of the most interesting people I interviewed for the book was Nick Foles. His 53rd pro game of his life — far, far, far and away the most pressure — and he outduels Tom Brady and he outthinks Bill Belichick and Matt Patricia [in Super Bowl LII in 2018]. How did that happen, and how were you so cool? How can you play your best in that game, and describing about his mental calm. … I just think anybody who ever is about to play a big game, or wants to know how you get your best performance in a big game, they should read the chapter about Nick Foles. Every quarterback honestly should read that chapter, because it’s amazing how he willed himself to be calm. … One of the things I always liked to do is I like to just think: “OK, who would have an interesting angle in this?” And I said, “I’m gonna call A-Rod about Mahomes,” because Mahomes idolized Alex Rodriguez when he was a kid, and his father was on the Texas Rangers, and Mahomes was 5 or 6 years old when he went and A-Rod taught him how to hit and gave him batting lessons and everything. A-Rod was great to young Patrick. So I called A-Rod, and he was so good and so smart. … One other thing I would say I’m proud of is that look, in order to love football, you have to make peace with everything about football. You have to understand that if you root for this game, there’s a bunch of people on the field most likely who one day are gonna have significant health problems, either physical or mental, because of football. I do a chapter on Ann McKee, the most famous CTE-conscious person in the world, really. We’ve reached the Debbie Downer portion of the program, but that’s part of the program. So we >>>>> should <<<<<reach the Debbie Downer portion of the program, because we all should think about that, and that’s one of the reasons why it is insane that the NFL’s thinking about an 18th game. Somebody have a conscience, please, about the future of the people playing the game.
Q: Why should a football fan read ”The Game”?
A: This is a history book of the last 40 years in the NFL. And let me brag a bit, but it’s a really enjoyable history book with fun stories about the most important people who have made football great. Who inherited a sport that when I started was in a virtual dead heat with baseball for popularity. But now is four times as popular as baseball. How did that happen? And, I just thought to myself when I was reading this book, it’s like you were taking a history class, and the only way you could really enjoy history is to be told the riveting stories of … how did John Wilkes Booth murder Abraham Lincoln? What happened? How in the world did that happen, that somebody could get close enough to a president to shoot him and kill him? How did Reggie White sign with the Green Bay friggin’ Packers? How does Tagliabue get the league through 9/11? The people who write good history books are people who can make readers enjoy history. I think anybody who likes football even a little bit will just love knowing the real stories of so many important things that have made the NFL great today. … I’m a curious person, and I wanted to find out so many things about these great stories I had covered. I didn’t want to just replay the stories, I wanted to go back and ask the people who were at the center of the story ,” What really happened?” That’s what I wanted to do and that’s what I hope people will learn from this book — what really happened — to make the NFL this international powerhouse of sport.
