Edge of Sports

Arlen Specter says fandom alone is fueling his NFL investigation.

It’s never a good sign for your company when a 75-year-old woman becomes so enraged with customer service that she enters the local office with a hammer and starts smashing things. And when people so identify with her pluck they nickname her “the Hammer Lady.”

It’s also hardly ever a good sign when people start websites wishing for your company to “die.” And it’s never a good sign when people start to whisper that your company is pushing a dignified cancer-surviving 78-year-old U.S. senator to butt heads with the most popular sports institution in the history of time, the National Football League. Welcome to the increasing scrutiny accompanying Comcast cable’s relationship with Arlen Specter in his investigation of the NFL, known as Spygate.

Spygate is the sports scandal centered on the New England Patriots’ surreptitious videotaping of the New York Jets during their season-opening game, and the subsequent destruction of the tapes by commissioner Roger Goodell. In response to Goodell’s gaffe, Specter has been raising hell on the Hill.

Goodell denied there was anything unusual in destroying videotapes, but that didn’t stop Specter from calling Goodell a liar, saying, “The commissioner’s explanation as to why he destroyed the tapes does not ring true.”

Specter has been lavished with praise, as a man taking on the fraud of a multibillion-dollar business. Take this bit of praise in the Allentown Morning Call: “The crushing defeat that ruined the near-perfect season [of the Pats] may be the least of their worries … especially if Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania’s senior U.S. senator and a football fan, has anything to say about it.”

Goodell is a juicy target. But despite Goodell’s executive idiocy, his bosses in the owner’s box have supported him. Giants co-owner John Mara says of Specter, “I’d like to think that maybe there are other, more important things to worry about in the world these days.”

Specter justified this extraordinary—and solitary—level of attention in a press conference by saying, “I think the Congress has a legitimate interest. It really all melds together with their other practices, which are not really too concerned about the fan and the consumers. We have a right to have honest football games that are played according to the rules.”

Yet the closer one looks at Specter, the more one would be excused for seeing Comcast’s Philadelphia fingertips all over these actions.

For several years Specter has challenged the popular NFL Network and its exclusive relationship with DirecTV. Comcast has been going 15 rounds with the NFL over whether they can charge their customers for the NFL Network, unlike DirecTV. Here’s where haters start to snipe that the senator from Comcast comes into action.

Comcast is the No. 2 source of campaign funds for the senator, with their execs and employees giving $153,600 in contributions going back to 1989. The No. 1 contributor since ’89 is Blank Rome LLC, a lobbying firm that has dumped $358,483 into Specter’s coffers. Comcast is a chief client of Blank Rome.

Goodell has pulled no punches on Comcast, saying, “They’re just finding another way which they can charge our consumers more money. We think it should be available on a broader basis.” Asked if Specter’s vendetta is related to Comcast, Goodell only says, “I’m not addressing that point.”

Goodell hasn’t addressed it, but others are starting to.

“If you simply took Specter at face value, and assumed his passion for grilling the NFL in his official Senate capacity is the passion of a jilted fan, that alone would be an outrageous abuse of his authority,” writes the Daily News’ Will Bunch. “But the truth is much worse, because Specter’s interest in this issue dovetails far too closely with those of his two largest contributors, whose employees have given his campaign more than half a million dollars to keep him in office. I believe if there’s any Senate hearing involving the NFL and Arlen Specter, it ought to be the Senate Ethics Committee, looking at a potential link to these donors.”

Specter’s office disputes this assertion. Spokesperson Kate Kelly emails, “Comcast has nothing to do with the senator’s interest in the matter. The senator’s had a longstanding interest in the NFL’s antitrust exemption dating as far as back to 1983, when he introduced legislation on the matter—way before Comcast was even in existence.” (Actually, Comcast was founded in Tupelo, Miss., in 1963)

Specter himself told the Inquirer’s David Aldridge, “Well, what I’ve got to do is figure out what the percentage is of the contributions is out of the $23 million I raised. It’s a fraction of 1 percent and got nothing to do with what I’m doing here. I think I’ve got a pretty strong record for integrity and not letting campaign contributions interfere with my public duty.”

We still have a rather stubborn set of facts. Normally the allure of sports scandal is like crack cocaine to Congress, addicted as they are to ESPN and C-SPAN simulcasts. The most dangerous place in D.C. is between a politician and a camera. And yet in the case of Spygate, Specter stands alone. Is he a prophet of the next great sports scandal or a mule for Comcast, with balloons of bandwidth in his belly?

The answer is less important than the question: If there is a congressional battle to be waged on Goodell and co., Specter seems like a poor choice to lead the charge.