BALTIMORE — After four days of news and speculation, twists and turns, best guesses and worst fears, a football game broke out Thursday night in Baltimore.
BALTIMORE — After four days of news and speculation, twists and turns, best guesses and worst fears, a football game broke out Thursday night in Baltimore.
Fans drank beer as the sun set and grooved to the live band playing Daft Punk along the Ravens Walk, the tailgating and social district between Oriole Park at Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium. They advanced toward statues of Johnny Unitas and Ray Lewis, taking photos and honoring better days and the promise of those that lie ahead.
Many NFL fans come to stadiums like this to ease their minds of much other than football, and Thursday night was no different. Football’s power in America, on full display this week for better or worse, is unmistakable. It can overshadow a man who punched his fiancee, the cheers drowning the conversation that has enraptured much of the nation.
At least in this 1 1/2-square-mile area near downtown Baltimore, the nastiness of this week was little more than a bump in the road — perhaps the only corner of the country where the story was something other than Ray Rice knocking Janay Palmer out cold.
The off-field issues, at least to those waiting to push through the turnstiles two hours before kickoff, were a temporary story line. The fallout that has put NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s job in jeopardy, along with the investigation led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller III, is someone else’s problem.
“That’s none of my business. Families go through that stuff every day,” said Adrian Beale, a Ravens fan who walked toward the stadium Thursday night wearing a T-shirt with Rice’s No. 27 on the front.
It was a show of support, she said, for a former star released by the Ravens on Monday, shortly after the website TMZ posted previously unreleased security footage from the Revel Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The video set off a firestorm unlike any seen by the NFL league office, and by Tuesday afternoon Rice had become only a co-star in a major league drama. The future of Goodell, one of the most powerful men in sports, had emerged as the new, juicier subject.
The National Organization for Woman has called for Goodell to step down, and there are concerns Goodell has lost touch with American sentiment — and control of an issue that grows more complicated by the day.
Whispers of a cover-up — the league initially slapped Rice with a two-game suspension before rolling out a new, harsher domestic-violence policy last month, then indefinitely suspending him Monday afternoon — gathered momentum and spread.
What had Goodell and league executives known and when? Would it be enough, in a culture growing increasingly unsatisfied in any conclusion but drastic change, to fire him or force him to resign? Or would it simply blow over, the focus eventually steadying on the games, the same as it did here before a game broadcast nationally by CBS.
Long before kickoff, the Ravens credentialed 700 members of the media, some of the increased presence attributed to the massive crew that travels from one stadium to the next to broadcast a game on prime time. But that hardly explained it all, especially considering about 300 attended the home opener Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Officials made plans for the pregame broadcast and then broke them, abandoning a light-hearted segment in which a song by Rihanna — a past victim of domestic abuse — would play in the background.
On Thursday morning, though, Baltimore resident Kathi Bessling pulled on her Rice jersey and outfitted her three daughters in the No. 27, too.
To Bessling, Rice was more than the man who punched Palmer, now his wife; he was a man her children and their friends had once looked up to, a man they cheered for in a Super Bowl win two seasons ago, a player who had rewarded them with three Pro Bowl seasons. Does that just disappear because of one incident, one video?
It did not for many of those wandering the walkways Thursday.
“He’s still a good guy,” Bessling said, standing near the statue of Lewis, another former Baltimore luminary with a complicated past. “I just feel like the Ravens are being targeted.”
Did Rice’s presence in Baltimore just never happen, as team officials understandably made it seem before the crowds arrived and the first of the beers opened? All apparel featuring Rice’s name and jersey number was removed from the merchandise tents before the game. The Ravens scheduled a jersey exchange for fans who wanted to wear another player’s number, and a nearby pizza joint traded a free pie for any Rice jersey.
On Sunday, Beale asked her boyfriend, Brian Graham, to take her picture near a Ravens Walk pillar featuring a banner with Rice’s likeness. They had followed the story throughout the summer, watching in the first video — the only one the NFL claims to have seen — as Rice dragged his unconscious fiancee from the elevator. They listened as the news traveled that Rice would be suspended the first two games, removing one of the team’s playmakers from the lineup. They wrote the incident off as a private matter between a man and a woman, figuring the two-game suspension would be the end of it.
“Once you’re punished, you’re punished,” Beale said, recounting the feeling she got in November 2012, when Rice burst through the San Diego defense for a first down on fourth and 29. “Hey diddle diddle, Ray Rice up the middle.”
A moment later, Beale went on. Yes, she said, she watched the more graphic video early in the week. No, even that couldn’t change her mind.
“We don’t support what Ray did,” she said. “None of us do.”
Then Graham chimed in.
“But he’s family,” he said.