Hot Reads: Roger Goodell, At The Eye Of An NFL Storm At Super Bowl XLV

As we get closer to Super Bowl 45, there will be a lot to read on the Packers, Steelers, and everything in between. To help you sift through the massive amounts of coverage, we’ll pick out each day’s best stories.

1. It says a lot about the NFL right now that a league executive is who makes the cover of the biggest magazine in sports before the biggest game of the year. And it makes sense. Regardless of what happens Sunday, the history of the league will be shaped in a much bigger way by Roger Goodell over the next few months. Sports Illustrated sat down with him for a candid interview, and even if a lot of it seems like propaganda being spoon-fed to an all-too eager Peter King, it’s worth a look. Some excerpts are after the jump.

Goodell had better enjoy this week’s Super Bowl, because it’s going to be all rancorous business after that. D day is coming. Unless a new labor agreement is reached in the next five weeks, the owners will lock the players out of all team facilities on March 4, and the clock will start ticking on the 2011 season, which is tentatively due to begin seven months after Pittsburgh and Green Bay leave the field in north Texas on Sunday night.

“If Roger’s in office for 25 years,” says Carolina’s Jerry Richardson, chief labor negotiator among the 32 owners, “this will be the toughest challenge he’ll ever face. However it turns out, it’s a resolution he’ll have to live with for the rest of his career.”

And then there’s this:

Living in Washington turned the Goodell boys into Redskins fans; as a boy Roger slept with an official NFL ball in his bed. When Charles resumed law practice in New York City, the family moved to Westchester County, but the football bug remained strong in Roger; he lifted weights to beef up—he played safety, running back and tight end—and he became a three-sport captain at Bronxville High. He planned to play football at little Washington & Jefferson (he was rejected by his first-choice college, Davidson) but tore a knee ligament while training the summer before he left for school. Instead of having surgery and rehabbing, he figured it was time to focus on academics. In his first semester he stunned his family by getting a 4.0 grade point average.

[...]

By the time he was a junior, applying for a job at the Landmark, Goodell had figured out his career path. “When I asked him what he wanted to do with his life,” says Tim Foil, “he said, ‘I’m going to be the National Football League commissioner.’ Oh, O.K. Sure.”

Okay, so that’s pretty cool.

2. Super Bowl parties are back, baby! Check it out, courtesy of Sports Business Daily:

After several “recession-deflating years, the Super Bowl party and corporate hospitality scene is back, some say to pre-recession levels,” according to Terry Lefton in this week’s SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL. Some sources “counted parties, official and unofficial, at more than a hundred.” NFL agent Leigh Steinberg is hosting the “granddaddy of Super Bowl parties.” What is “being billed as Steinberg’s 25th and final party is slated for Saturday” from 1:00pm-1:00am in downtown Dallas.

What’s that, Egyptians fighting for their freedom in the streets of Cairo? Sorry, we can’t hear you. WE’RE HAVING A TWELVE HOUR SUPER BOWL PARTY OVER HERE.

3. ESPN’s Wright Thompson is a good enough writer to make just about anything interesting. Yes, this includes Vince Lombardi’s old house in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

4. You can now wave a terrible towel using Twitter. Just shoot me in the f***ing face.

5. Finally, the one thing you MUST read today is about a Super Bowl that happened 25 years ago, and it comes courtesy of GQ:

For years—with the exception of a cocaine-addled Dallas Cowboys linebacker named Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson questioning the intelligence of the Steelers’ Terry Bradshaw*—the week leading up the Super Bowl, post Namath, had been positively boring.

And then came the Bears, who were already national icons, who had already recorded a pulsating rap song proclaiming their intention to win the Super Bowl, whose gap-toothed defensive lineman was guzzling Big Macs and scoring touchdowns and reveling in his girth, whose blustery coach had been arrested for drunk driving after getting toasted on the team plane, and whose quarterback had gone on Letterman and declared he had no intention to pay a fine levied by the commissioner for wearing a headband bearing the logo of a German shoe company.

James Robert McMahon Jr. was the quarterback’s name, and despite the significant contributions of sidemen like Ditka and William “Refrigerator” Perry, Jim McMahon was the frontman for the Bears’ short-lived pop-cultural explosion. He enjoyed drinking beer, he did not particularly care for authority figures, and he played with such reckless abandon that he once managed to shred open his kidney like a mylar balloon during a playoff game. By the time Super Bowl week arrived, McMahon was the center of attention, enough of a crossover star that he already had a ghostwriter for his autobiography, and a Rolling Stone reporter trailing him for a cover story.

And it only gets better from there... LONG LIVE DA BEARS.