The first time Jay Glazer landed a big Super Bowl scoop, he was in San Diego in a limousine headed to a Styx concert, drinking beer and surrounded by about ten women.
This was 2003. The day before Tampa Bay beat Oakland in Super Bowl XXXVII. "I get a call," Glazer tells me, "and my source says, 'You may want to get out of the limo. [Raiders center] Barret Robbins lost his mind and left the team. Not playing tomorrow, and apparently he's down in Mexico.' Then I get a call back from someone in the [Raiders] locker room who says, 'You calling about B-Rob? We are going to freaking kill him if we see his ass. We are so pissed off.' And then somebody else called. And then,
boom, boom—I've got my three sources."
"Why were you going to a Styx concert?" I ask. "Do you like Styx?"
Glazer looks at me like I'm an idiot. "I get a call from one of the girls like, 'You wanna go to a Styx concert?' Yeah, I love Styx."
Barret Robbins's wild bender is among the all-time-classic off-the-field Super Bowl stories—the resulting chaos basically murdered the Raiders' chances—and Glazer, then at CBS, now at Fox, was the guy who broke it. So, no Styx concert for him.
"I said, 'Ladies, as much as I want to hang with you, I've got to go.' "
And that right there is the perfect Jay Glazer story, starring Jay Glazer breaking news in the most Jay Glazer-y way imaginable.
If something crazy happens at this month's Super Bowl, chances are you'll learn about it from Jay Glazer,
Fox NFL Sunday's in-house league reporter and the best-connected man in football. The Robbins fiasco, the resolution of the 2011 NFL lockout, Brett Favre's trade to the Jets, the secret videotape of the New England Patriots illegally spying on another team—Glazer got all of it first. He is the king of information at a time when there are way more media outlets trying to dig it up—and when NFL players, coaching staffs, and front offices have way less incentive to share it. And how he managed to find himself in this position involves a curious mix of old-school reporting chops and being—how do I put this?—the world's most charming maniac.
We'll start with the journalist-y stuff first. Because of Glazer's three-source rule—he won't run a story with anything less—his reports are rarely, if ever, wrong. He claims he's never had to correct or retract a story in his career, which would make him an anomaly not just in NFL circles but in the entire profession of journalism. His network of NFL sources is so vast that he claims players and teams routinely consult with him about coaching hires and free-agent destinations.
"I'm an information broker," Glazer says. "People call me about players. Players call me about coaches:
I'm a free agent—do I want to work with this guy or this guy? Every locker room talks."
Turns out that working hundred-hour weeks leaves head coaches with little time to learn about what the hell is going on with the other thirty-one teams in football, so Glazer is one of the very few guys they hit up when they need to explore the strange world outside their own film rooms. It also helps that Glazer keeps the same kind of insane working hours that coaches do, staying up all night on Saturdays working the phone to secure at least five scoops for his segments on Fox's
NFL Sunday broadcast. (He says Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez enjoys prank-calling him in the dead of night. "You know how many times he's woken me up?" he says, laughing. "fukk him.") Steal his phone and you'd have direct lines to just about everyone in the NFL, including commissioner Roger Goodell.
"I text him a lot," he says. "More inappropriate stuff than anything."
Can I see one of the texts?
"Uh, no."
Do the players like him?
"No."
Do you
like him?
"You'll never meet him and think he's an a$$hole. Never. He's not like that. He's a regular guy."
And that right there is the real key to Glazer's success, the thing that separates him from the dozen or so other super-sourced reporters on the NFL beat: an easy identification—some might say an
overidentification—with the manly men he covers. He's 205 pounds and built like a fukking grain silo, and in his spare time he trains NFL players in mixed martial arts—from stars like Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews to randoms like Saints wideout Kenny Stills.
Glazer's immersion in the world of MMA is how he scored the first interview with Richie Incognito, the Miami Dolphin suspended for bullying his teammate: Glazer hooked up Incognito with one of his MMA trainers. Glazer insists he's never made a profit from training a player, and weeks after the fact he still bristles at the accusation—levied by lots of sports reporters at the time—that he was soft on Incognito because they were friends.
"I was fukkin' right down the pipeline. Could've asked him a thousand times: He's not going to admit he's a racist."
Did you think he was a racist?
"He's an idiot."
Do you like Incognito?
"Yeah."
But he's an idiot. Why do you like him?
"I have a love for idiots. He's a meathead, you know what I mean? I love everybody."
And Glazer especially loves giving everybody shyt. From the moment you meet him, you are not you. You are "jerky boy" or "slap nuts" or "dikkhead." The first time he met Tim Tebow—just recently, during a night out in Los Angeles—he teased him about his chastity.
"I said to Tebow, 'You coming out to the club?' He's like, 'Yeah, yeah.' I said, 'When you come, you're the bait. You're a virgin, dude. You're not hooking up with anybody, so you're the bait. You sit right up there, and when all the girls come over, they're all for me.' "
Later that night, Glazer sent Tebow a text that read
Jay Glazer: Nonvirgin! Then he shows me what Tebow texted back:
Tim Tebow: Nonreporter!
"I think I'm a different breed. I'm a personality, right?"
No argument there. Glazer has an antic, aggressive personality. He sleeps very little. He's always moving. He can't bear to be in the same room for more than two minutes. Text him once and you get seven texts back.
"I said to him, jokingly, sometimes when he's doing his [TV] pieces, it looks like he's selling ShamWow," Glazer's friend and Fox Sports colleague Howie Long, the Raiders' Hall of Fame defensive lineman, told me. "He's so wired and intense."
We're at the Beverly Wilshire hotel on a Saturday night as part of Glazer's weekly pregame ritual. Every week, he must come here and get three orders of the same appetizer—steak-tartare crostini—before working the phones all night. He's telling me about the videotape he obtained in 2007 that showed the Patriots illegally filming the opposing team, the smoking gun in a scandal that came to be known as Spygate. Glazer has never revealed his source for the tape—he still has it and used to play it at parties—and says he'll take it with him to his grave. But I give it a shot anyway.
How'd you get the Spygate video?
"C'mon, fukker. Are you gonna do a profile, or are you gonna ask these bullshyt questions?"
Hang out with Glazer for a few days and it becomes clear just how little fans know about what's really going on in the NFL. The information that he makes public represents roughly .001 percent of what he actually knows. "One player one time got suspended for ExtenZe," he says, referring to the bullshyt penis-enlarging pill. "The guy that they caught doing it—the guy had the biggest dikk in the locker room already. So I had to talk to him, like, 'You already have the biggest dikk—why are you taking ExtenZe?' "
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