Hard to understand that one. Goodell must have dirt on him.
Today, Kraft Group is the sole supplier of catering to the league, so I heard...
[from SI]:
After buying the team, Kraft had explored building a stadium in south Boston, but that fell through. Then he had decided he’d pay for a new stadium himself and build it on his own land in Foxborough, if only the state would chip in money for infrastructure. He had reached an agreement with the state Senate that would have had Massachusetts pay $72 million. But the House, led by Speaker Tom Finneran, wouldn’t approve it. “The House was very, very difficult,” says Tom Birmingham, the Senate president at the time. “Kraft had basically been driven out of Massachusetts.”
[Just like Mr. Billy Sullivan - the guy Bob Kraft was determined to be "better than" - was driven out of Boston]
Kraft finally signed the Hartford stadium deal in February 1999, but only after he met with Governor Rowland and negotiated several out-clauses. Governor Rowland didn’t seem entirely concerned. His thinking was, Who would walk away from the best stadium deal in NFL history?
What Governor Rowland didn’t know was that momentum had been building back in Massachusetts to keep the Patriots. In December 1998, Dan Rooney, the owner of the Steelers and an influential figure in league circles, bumped into Paul Kirk Jr., the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, at a dinner in Washington, D.C. Kirk was a Boston power player, with deep ties to both the political and business scenes, and he also knew the league well. He was on the short list of candidates when the NFL last picked a commissioner. “What can you do to help us keep the Patriots in Massachusetts?” Rooney asked. Like others around the league, Rooney was concerned about abandoning the Boston TV market.
Kirk said he’d be happy to help, so, a few days later, Rooney put him in touch with NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. They spoke about creating a stadium plan in Massachusetts, to give the Patriots an alternative to the Hartford deal. After that, Kirk decided to build a team of civic leaders to lead the effort, and
Tagliabue decided to send a league executive to help. His stadium expert: Roger Goodell. Since the Hartford deal forbade Kraft from negotiating with other states, Goodell would essentially act as a liaison for both the league and Kraft, negotiating a deal on the Patriots’ behalf.
By early January 1999, while Kraft fretted over the steam plant, Goodell traveled to Boston to meet with Kirk and his team. The team included the Rev. J. Donald Monan, the chancellor of Boston College; Jack Connors, the advertising executive; William Connell, the industrialist; and a few others. They called themselves Operation Team Back.
In that first meeting, Goodell laid out the gravity of the situation. He indicated that the league was taking the Hartford stadium deal seriously. The NFL would be voting on Kraft’s pitch to relocate at the league’s spring meeting in late May, and if Kraft’s only option was moving to Hartford, Goodell told the room, “then that’s the way the vote will go.”
Goodell also helped them map out a plan of action, to be carried out largely in private over the next few months. The group started by secretly meeting with key decision makers, including Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and the House Speaker Thomas Finneran, who had opposed Kraft’s failed stadium effort. “Some bridges had been burned on Beacon Hill,” Kirk said, referring to the state capital, “and they had to be re-constructed.” Then they started rallying leaders in the business community, the people who would be buying luxury boxes.
All along, Goodell called Kirk two to three times a day, checking in to make sure everything went smoothly and then reporting back to Kraft. “He was enormously helpful,” Kirk said.
Around mid-April, about two weeks before Kraft could opt out of the Hartford deal, Kirk and his group went public in Massachusetts, writing an op-ed column in The Boston Globe. They warned the leaders on Beacon Hill beforehand so as not to come across as too aggressive, but the column called on the state legislatures to act now, before it was too late. The media jumped on the story, and the stadium push was in the news cycle for the next week.
Beacon Hill seemed react to positively. Even Finneran, the House Speaker who had opposed the stadium for years, had been slowly coming around since March, when the NFL owners approved a new loan program designed to keep its teams in larger cities. The NFL could now essentially give out favorable loans of up to $150 million to owners who put up their own money to build new stadiums. “It was really a key turning point,” Finneran would later say, according to The Boston Globe. “It meant the league might be willing to participate. And it was a tacit acceptance of what the House had argued all along: that those who stood to benefit from a new stadium, like NFL owners, also had to participate in funding it.”
If Finneran wavered, the group still had one strong ally, Tom Birmingham, the Senate president, who had been a big supporter of Kraft’s failed stadium deal. At one point that spring, after dropping his daughter off for a play date, Birmingham happened to bump into Jonathan Kraft, Robert’s son, at a coffee shop in Chestnut Hill. “Is this thing for real?” Birmingham asked him, referring to the Hartford deal. “Is there anything we can still do?” If Jonathan was caught speaking with Birmingham, the State of Connecticut could potentially sue him.
They walked outside and chatted for a bit, and Birmingham left the conversation believing the Krafts wanted to find a way to remain in Massachusetts.
Kraft told Birmingham if he really wanted to get a deal done, he needed to reach out to Roger Goodell—and do it fast.
“I thought there was still an opening,” Birmingham says now. “[Jonathan] clearly indicated that he wanted to be back in Massachusetts, although he didn’t say that per se. Just the whole line of questioning suggested he would prefer to be in Massachusetts.”
On April 26, six days before Kraft’s opt-out deadline, Birmingham invited the key political players to his office to discuss a stadium deal for the Patriots in Foxborough. Joining him in the room were Kirk, Finneran, Goodell, and Massachusetts Governor Paul Celluci. They negotiated over the course of two days, and, by the end of the second day, Finneran had come around completely. It became clear that a deal would get done. A few times that night, Finneran’s staff looked shocked at what he was agreeing to, because he’d fought the stadium deal for so long. “They had a conference or two with him, [as if to say], ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ ” Birmingham says. “I don’t know if he got scared of the prospects of the Patriots actually leaving. But the House made a dramatic change.”
Late in the night, they reached an agreement. Kraft would build the stadium himself, with the help of the NFL’s new loan program, and the state would pay about $70 million for infrastructure improvements in Foxborough. It was remarkably similar to the deal Finneran had originally shot down, which had sent Kraft to Hartford in the first place.
A few days later, on April 30, Kraft sent Governor Rowland a letter notifying him that he was opting out of the Hartford stadium deal. The steam plant delays were largely to blame. “The scope of this project was a mountainous undertaking and much more complex than anyone anticipated when our discussions originally began,” Kraft wrote in the letter.
Rowland responded by threatening to sue Kraft and the NFL. “It’s now official,” Rowland said in a press conference. “I am a New York Jets fan, now and probably forever.”
***
So, this is how Goodell became Kraft's hero...
