"You hate me! Your really, really hate me!"

I’m generally liked by people. My co-workers seem to like me fine, so do my boss and other leaders at work. I also seem to be liked well enough by friends and family and people I interact with on a daily or even occasional basis. In fact, I think I can say that for the most part, I’ve been pretty well-liked for the vast majority of my life.

I kind of feel like most people have a similar experience. Most people shuffle along and don’t cause enough waves and problems to become disliked. I think our society and our social mores are by and large set up for that.

Certainly, there are truly awful people who richly deserve hate. Murders, rapists, terrorists, hedge fund managers and the like. But that mortal scum did terrible things and probably has a good understanding why people hate them so.

And while I know what it’s like to walk through this world as someone pretty squarely in the “liked” camp, what I don’t know is what it must be like to be someone who is hated – universally hated.

Further, what must it be like to be someone who is absolutely loved and exalted by a select group of insiders, but widely loathed by the larger world?

In other words, what must it be like to be NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell?

Make no bones about it: the man is hated. By the vast majority of people. Universally. He’s hated by the poor, by the rich (except NFL team owners) by whites by blacks, by players, by fans, by sports broadcasters, by liberal commentators. He’s hated by moms and dads, by coaches and politicians, by educators and medical professionals, by actors and writers, by you and by me.

And it’s a little strange. Roger Goodell runs the thing that brings most Americans together. He runs professional football. In many ways he’s helped make it bigger and better than ever before. I know I’m the middle-aged blogger and I know I’m supposed to spout off about how things were better back in the day – but no, football as a game and as a spectacle is better than it was when I was a kid. And Goodell is one of the reasons why that is so.

Yet, we hate him. We hate looking at him. We see him and immediately word-associate: liar, slimy, oily, smug, disingenuous, thoughtless, uncaring, mean, etc. etc.

Let’s face it. Roger Goodell is loved by 32 NFL team owners (and probably a few high level associates of that group) and hated by everyone else. If you plotted that reality on a graph, you’d have one tiny bar hovering pitifully just above the horizontal axis, and the other bar reaching up beyond Mt. Everest.

What the hell is that like?

What is it like to wake up, shower, shave and have breakfast, get in his limo, chauffeured to work, drink his first cup of coffee, gaze out at the splendid view across Park Avenue in Manhattan and know that outside his luxury corner suite the world hates him. And if the glorious window affording such spectacular views somehow gave way and caused him to plummet to his death, a lot of the world would smile - quietly and respectfully - but still, they would be happy.

And that hate is a sustaining kind of hate. It’s not going to go away. The people who hate him now will hate him in five years. He’s not like the detestable Martin Shkreli, AKA “Pharma Bro” who is hated now but will be forgotten about when he either enters a minimum security prison for the rich or flees prosecution in the Seychelles. No. Goodell will be hated for quite some time to come.

I will never have the opportunity to interview the man. But if I ever did there is only one question I’d want to ask. No, I wouldn’t want to ask how many times he saw the Ray Rice video before denying its very existence. I wouldn’t want to ask if he personally coaches the NFL’s fleet of paid neurosurgeons on how to lie to the media about the “lack of evidence” linking football with CTE. I wouldn’t want to ask him how many starving people could have been fed with the money wasted on the “Deflategate” investigation.

No, the only question I’d want to ask is this: What is it like to be hated by millions of people he’s never met nor will ever meet? Does $44 million in annual salary dull the pain in knowing that farm boys in Iowa, hipsters in Brooklyn and wireless phone sales reps in San Diego collectively hate his guts?

I’d want to ask him that because unlike the other questions which touch on his unchecked power, his compulsion to lie and his moral repugnance, I actually believe he wants to answer it without the customary obfuscation, PR and bullshit. If you’ve seen him over the last couple of years at press conferences and official NFL appearances you might agree with me that there are many moments when Goodell looks like the unhappiest man on earth. I truly believe there are moments – just moments – during his day where he’d love to turn his pasty visage toward a questioner and gush forth with all honesty and candor:

“My god it sucks! I’m hated by practically everyone! Jesus Christ, my only ‘friends’ are werewolves like Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones. God, I’d love nothing better than to board my yacht and sail off to some tiny Island in the Caribbean where no one knows who the hell I am. Ah, but whom am I kidding! We’ve got millions of fans in the Islands. Christ we’re number one in Cuba for god sakes. Like a lily-white six-foot-four red-head with a famous face can go unnoticed on the beach in Barbados. Ha! I HATE MY LIFE!!!!!"

And maybe, after he wiped away the tears and spit, adjusted his tie, allowed the rage to drain from his face, composed himself and pretended the outburst never happened, there’d be a moment. A moment while pretending to listen to him drone on about protecting the shield and stating that he didn’t’ become commissioner to make friends, I’d feel something I thought not possible. I’d feel something akin to sympathy for the man in front of me. Sympathy for a smart person whose job and livelihood conspired against him. Sympathy for a man who traded his soul for a lot of money and a lot of power.

I give you Roger Goodell: Ebenezer Scrooge for the 21^st Century. Maybe the Ghost of Junior Seau can visit him some Christmas Eve and save him.