Home Team II: Texans
This longish piece comes with a content warning: some sexual language, accusations of sexual assault, anger, frustration and snarkiness. Also, halfway through, many, many numbers. I have finally written about Deshaun Watson, something I have been afraid to do. I started to write a piece for the Houston Chronicle op-ed page (I had one last year on Simone Biles), but was put off by the specter of death threats. I know these are common nowadays, and that they usually do not result in death, but I am, it turns out, not very brave. So here is my piece, the second on the concept of “Home Team” for my private/public blog. I have now covered baseball (Astros and Mets) and football (Texans) and will finish the trilogy with a piece on the Rockets that will probably not be dangerous at all.
All-sports Radio
First, another sports-related confession. I listen to all-sports radio. A lot. Every day. Every morning over breakfast, and in the car driving to and from work. This means that the voices I wake up to and drive with, those voices that I hear when I am technically alone, belong to a group of men talking, as if to me, about Houston’s three major sports teams. My grandmother, and then my mother, aged into intense identifications with particular newscasters and TV meteorologists; I was only about 22 when I became able to recognize, over crackling radios, the distinct voices of sports commentators. There were brief periods in my life when I listened in the car to more dignified radio stations—NPR, for example. I have gone through stretches listening to music. But the default, the radio settings, the place I turn when I don’t want to decide, is, and has been for a long time, all-sports radio, the “all” signifying not the variety of kinds of competitions covered (there is very little talk about anything but men’s professional baseball, football, and basketball) but the ubiquity, the 24-7-ness of conversations about sports (aside from Saturday morning shows on cars and carpentry).
I toggle between two stations: Sports Radio 610 and 790. 610 has my favorite morning and lunchtime hosts, but since it is the station that broadcasts the Texans, there is sometimes too much emphasis on football, even in the long off season. This is especially annoying because the Texans are Houston’s worst professional team. Although my favorite hosts on 610 are by no means homers, uncritical of the team with which the station is associated, I have been disappointed in several of those for whom I have the most respect—and even warmth—during the latest Texans’ scandal over the quarterback Deshaun Watson. I don’t like the hosts on 790 as much, except perhaps for former Texan and Rice alum, N.D. Kalou, whose development as a radio personality I have very much enjoyed listening to (I almost said “being a part of” and of course that’s the point.) 790 hosts, since they are not working for a station associated with the Texans, can afford to be more critical of Watson.
The Story
So, what is the Watson “scandal” I mention as if everyone were as obsessed with it as I am? As if everyone consumed developments in the case along with their scrambled eggs and spinach? I feel a need to summarize although the once-local story has gone national not only with two major Sports Illustrated articles, but also with recent in-depth reporting by the New York Times. The short version is that Deshaun Watson, the first supremely talented quarterback in the relatively short history of the Texans, is being sued by atleast (as of this writing) 24 female massage therapists for inappropriate sexual behavior during and in some cases after the massage. Three of these women filed criminal charges; recently a Houston grand jury declined to indict. The complainants represent over a third of the 66 women the New York Times estimates that Watson hired as massage therapists in a 17-month period. Four of them seem to be from a firm with whom the Texans have a contract. Watson contacted the remaining 62 of them online and most on Instagram or other social media. Although there have been periodic rumors of settlement in the two years in which this story has unfolded, as of today, all the civil suits are still active, with two of them being very recently added.
The legal aspect of the case is being handled and very publicly negotiated by two of Houston’s most well-known legal figures. Watson’s lead attorney, Rusty Hardin, has a successful history of defending celebrities in civil and criminal matters: his clients have included Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm embroiled in the Enron scandal, as well as local sports stars from Roger Clemens to Warren Moon, to Adrian Peterson. The prosecuting attorney and property developer, Tony Buzbee, ran unsuccessfully for Houston mayor in 2019 and sued BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The football side of things is complicated. Just before the accusations were made public, Watson made it known he no longer wanted to play for the Texans, despite having recently signed a lucrative contract extension. Although he never directly stated his reasons for the request, he hinted that the Texans had broken a promise to involve him in the hiring of a new coach and general manager; it was around this time that the Texans got rid of some of his most talented teammates. When the accusations trickled out, many fans assumed Watson would be put on the Commissioner’s Exempt List, a kind of holding pen for players who are in legal trouble or who have violated NFL rules. Players on the list continue to be paid but do not count towards the team’s active roster. Roger Goodell, the NFL Commissioner, chose not to place Watson on the list: despite taking up an active roster spot, Watson did not practice or play for the Texans during the 2021 season. While Watson remained virtually silent about his status, apart from a few obscure tweets mostly involving lyrics from rap songs, the Texans prevaricated for several months until it became clear he was not going to be on the field. While of course Watson’s absence weakened an already terrible team, it seems neither Watson nor the Texans wanted Watson to risk injury and thus diminish his trade value, should any team be willing to take him with what is usually referred to as his “baggage.” It turns out that this careful preservation of Watson’s value paid off; as soon as the grand jury declined to indict him this spring, the Texans fielded multiple offers from NFL teams, finally trading him to the Cleveland Browns, who announced that they had done a “thorough investigation” of the case and that they had no concerns about singing him. The thorough investigation apparently did not involve talking to the complainants or their attorneys. Watson then signed a record-breaking contract with the team.
Those complainants’ stories are eerily similar: typically, Watson would make an appointment over the internet, show up with his own small towel that he took away with him. He would ask the therapists to touch his buttocks or his groin, and in some cases pull their hands to those places on his body. Some stories are worse than others: some involve forced oral sex. After a few months, Watson started bringing team-supplied nondisclosure agreements to his appointments; this is relatively recent news and has caused Buzbee to include for the first time the Texans as defendants in the civil suit.
Watson’s own story has changed over time; it is actually unclear when he began to admit that in many cases, sexual acts had indeed taken place. His lawyers insist that the sex, when it happened, was consensual, and indeed that it was always initiated by the women and took place after the massage so there was no question of payment for sexual acts. In perhaps his least successful interview, with hosts from 610, Rusty Hardin defended Watson’s behavior by describing it in what he must have hoped were normalizing terms: these were not assaults, but “happy endings” to massages. The innocuousness of the happy in happy endings is crucial for his defense of his client, as is the idea of “ending” since it is important to the case that the sex happened in the context of the massage and not as an extra for which money changed hands, which would make “happy endings” a crime.
So far, I have summarized both sides of the issue in as neutral a way as I can. Writing this way has delayed recording an all-to-familiar and overwhelming sense of rage that is focused of course on Watson, but also on the Texans, the legal profession, Twitter exchanges, and the talk-show hosts who take up space in my day, my home, and my brain. In my last post, I spoke about what it is like, slowly and in retrospect, to realize that members of your beloved home team are “bad guys.” Despite the fact that I never loved and identified with the Texans as I did the Mets, this one is even more infuriating, perhaps because it is unfolding in real time. To tell the story of my own reactions is also to tell the story of another home team and another sense of intimate betrayal.
Home Team
My investment in the Texans (and in football general) has never been as deep as my investment in baseball or basketball. Partly this is a function of not having had a home football team growing up. As a child in New York I was a fan of Kansas City, a rooting position that felt somewhat abstract, and completely unbound from the exciting entanglement of place and loyalty. When I first moved to Houston, I was taken by the Houston Oilers, who were at the time the city’s NFL franchise. As far as unchecked fandom was concerned, my arrival was belated: I had missed the “Luv Ya Blue” days of the 1970s Oilers, and was not quite ready to luv. By the time I became somewhat emotionally involved with the team, their hated owner, Bud Adams, had decided to move the franchise to Nashville, where they became the Titans. When Houston was granted a replacement franchise by the NFL in 1997, I was ready to fall in love; it was to be a family romance with my husband and sons sharing in my fandom. But the Texans—and the NFL—made it hard. Although I will always be grateful that the Texans’ best season in 2012 coincided with my son’s treatment and recovery from cancer—a distraction of immeasurable value—soon afterwards came a growing consciousness of the NFL’s role in hiding medical information about concussions and player safety. My sons led the way away from football, although it was hard for me to follow. Football remains the only sport I want to watch no matter who is playing—in other words, I don’t need a home team to enjoy the game.
But I was growing away from the Texans, whose front office I increasingly saw as incompetent, self-satisfied, and racist. This started with the then-owner Bob McNair. Although McNair is most infamous for his 2017 comment about the power of players (you can’t have “inmates running the prison”) I was more appalled by the story of this elderly-white, very-Republican millionaire entering the locker-room the day after Obama’s election as president, to express dismay at the outcome. While I am making no assumptions about the party affiliation of the Texans players, McNair must/should have been aware that he was addressing a majority black room and that even some of those who opposed Obama’s politics might still have been profoundly excited by the idea of an African-American President. Ex-Texan receiver Owen Daniels, who is white, has expressed the deep “awkwardness” of this visit.
First under Bob McNair and then, after his death, his son Cal, the Texans deteriorated on the field and as an organization. By the time of Deshaun’s massages, the Texans had become the laughingstock of the NFL for some of their player and management decisions. Most notable was the inexplicable elevation of erstwhile New England Patriots’ team pastor, and master of sanctimonious banality, Jack Easterby, to de facto General Manager. Under Easterby, whom most people saw as the hidden power behind a seize of unpopular football decisions, the Texans, under the always dangerous rubric of “fit,” got rid of some of their best players.
At this point, I saw Watson, with his demand to be traded, as a voice of resistance and reason: why would he want to play on a team that had traded the incomparable DeAndre Hopkins for almost nothing? Up to that point Watson had been everything a fan could want a quarterback to be, famously giving part of his paycheck to the team cafeteria workers after Hurricane Harvey, and making visible progress on the field. With Hopkins and JJ Watt both gone to the Arizona Cardinals, and with the Texans stuck in (to be generous) mediocrity, Watson was the only point of emotional entry to the team. As some fans like to put the problem: “Who else’s jersey would you buy?” The revelations about Watson’s off-the-field behavior, then, were all the more devastating, as the number of complainants increased one by one over a period of a few weeks.
The Numbers
And I do want to focus on numbers to express my feelings of anger, betrayal, and despair. I could invoke Watson’s interviews in which he pulls out the old saw that being raised by women means he respects them, and that he regrets nothing except the allegations. I could talk about how some of the complainants received death threats, and explore my many feelings about Rusty Hardin. I could invoke the towel, which even Watson apologist, drive-time host Clint Stoerner thinks is “weird.” (“very weird” said his co-host.) But I will stick, I think, with numbers, in part because numbers are part of football: although the game is not as entangled with statistics as baseball, is, you turn to numbers—yards per play, sacks and half-sack recorded, time remaining, and of course points scored or given up—to tell the story of the game, to compare one team to another, to indicate value, success, even something like truth.
The numbers in the Watson case are crucial and work in unpredictable ways. One would expect the sheer volume of complaints to work against Watson and on some level of course it does. But, oddly, those same numbers—66, 24, 3—also sometimes work to diminish the experience—and the pain—of any one of the complainants. Even my favorite sports host, Seth Payne, has been known to play an odd numbers game, arguing last week that “some” of the women might have consented to sex with Watson. The calculus here is bewildering: if Watson sexually harassed “only” 14 women out of the 24, women, or even one, wouldn’t that be 14, or 5, or 1 too many?
Others have seen the 22 complaints as a sign of conspiracy. Rather than seeing the behavior as a pattern in Watson’s behavior— a modus operendi, or the repetitive almost ritualistic acts of many sexual predators—the tendency in some cases is to see the pattern of appointments, towels, requests for favors, and the production of NDAs as patterns that tell us something about the women. Of course, when it is convenient, each woman is reduced to her singularity: Steorener is not alone in ignoring the power of numbers in characterizing the situation as “he said/she said.” At what point, at what number, does “she said” become “they said?”
There are so many numbers in this case, that the New York Times article made a list of numerical categories adding up to the 66 women from whom, it claims, Watson received massages. The list includes: the 24 who sued him (including 2 who have filed suit since the trade to the Browns); one woman who withdrew her suit citing security reasons; 15 women who wrote statement of support and said Watson had behaved appropriately and 15 women whom the Times identified as having made appointments about whom we know very little; and 2 women who filed criminal complaints but did not file civil ones. If the numbers don’t add up to 66, it is because I have left out some categories form the article; in a larger sense, though, the numbers move around as new complaints are filed, some women move from category to category.
If I say the numbers don’t add up, I am by no means implying that these women are not telling the truth. Quite the contrary. The numbers don’t add up in part because they are unfathomably large, and constantly changing. We don’t really know what to add, how much bigger the totals will get. Take one small example with a large number attached to it: Watson made appointments with 66 massage therapists in 17 months. I get a lot of massages and like different kinds of massage. In the last four years I have had (and still have) two therapists. If I were a multimillionaire like Watson, I might, who knows, go for three. All of them would be licensed and I would do research on— perhaps a “thorough investigation” of—their skills, particularly if I were, say, a professional football player whose livelihood depended on being at every moment in peak bodily condition. Who can contemplate 66 massage therapists? Not Arian Foster, former Texas running back, who just said today on a podcast that he has had four over the course of his career.
Over the last few weeks, I have sensed a shift in the meaning of the numbers. Perhaps this has something to do with another fantastically big number: Watson’s contract gained him $230 million over 5 years, the most guaranteed money on NFL history. Since he signed with the Browns, two more plaintiffs have surfaced, and there are an additional two women rumored to be signing on with Buzbee in the near future. For some reason, these two (perhaps four) accusations seem to have turned the tide: the conversation--and the numerical calculus--now focus on the length of Watson’s possible suspension by the NFL. While the league has remained silent as of this writing, the Washington Post reports that he could be suspended for as much as a year. Previously, before the new accusations, estimates varied between 2-6 games (there are 17 in an NFL season, up from 16 two years ago.) Anecdotally, and certainly in Houston, there seems to be more criticism of Watson. It is hard to know why 24 (or 26) should be so much more damning than 22. Perhaps it is that number I just mentioned: 230,000,000. Perhaps it is because people are finally facing what it will mean to see Watson on a football field—imagining the boos as he comes out of the tunnel from the locker-room, the in-game commentary, the post-game questions. I don’t understand much of it, and fall back on that cliché which is also a genuine expression of feeling: it doesn’t add up.
It would be nice for next season to be able to conjure with the familiar numbers of the game of football: the 7, 3, and (rarely) 2 points whose combinations make for wins and losses, themselves expressed numerically. But I am haunted by those ever-changing totals: this many accusers, this many months of suspension, this much money promised in salary and settlements.
With the Texans, at least for now included in the lawsuit, any fan’s relation to the team is increasingly complicated. Scarred by having the 1986 Mets as a home team, I am relieved that we—listen to that “we”—have a new head coach and general manager and, frankly, that the Texans have so little talent. I would not want them, like the Mets, to be bad, but also to be the best