Five Rings Read online

  FIVE RINGS

  The Super Bowl History

  of the New England Patriots

  (So Far)

  ForeEdge

  ForeEdge

  An imprint of University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2018 Jerry Thornton

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  NAMES: Thornton, Jerry, author.

  TITLE: Five rings: the Super Bowl history of the New England Patriots (so far) / Jerry Thornton.

  DESCRIPTION: Lebanon, New Hampshire: ForeEdge, an imprint of University Press of New England, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2018017738 (print) | LCCN 2018024489 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512602715 (cloth) | ISBN 9781512603224 (eBook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: New England Patriots (Football team)—History. | Super Bowl—History.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC GV956.N36 (ebook) | LCC GV956.N36 T55 2018 (print) | DDC 796.332/640974461—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017738

  TO NICK AND JACK,

  whose spirit, courage, faith, and humor

  make me endlessly proud every day.

  AND TO THEIR MOM,

  the most beautiful soul I’ve ever known.

  Thank you for wearing the one ring

  that will always matter most.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Bears, Cheeseheads, and Tuna

  ONE RING

  2 Time Is a Flat Circle

  3 Legs Twitching, Quietly Barking

  4 Snow Bowl

  5 Quarterback-Shaped Balloon Animal

  6 That Calm Inner Plumbing

  TWO RINGS

  7 You Always Remember Your First

  8 Finally, We Could Have Nice Things

  9 Attitude Adjustment

  10 Pond Scum Again

  11 Schopenhauer on the Fifty

  12 Superhorse

  13 Legit

  THREE RINGS

  14 The Patriot Way

  15 Last Season Meant Nothing

  16 Chum in the Water

  17 Flap Your Wings

  FOUR RINGS

  18 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  19 Martyball

  20 A Van Gogh Underneath

  21 Your Team Cheats (or Asterisks Like Ninja Stars)

  22 Any Day the Giants Lose (Is a Good Day)

  23 Anger, with Sh*tloads of Fighting Back

  24 Losers and Sore Losers

  25 The Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named II

  26 A Tale of Two Tight Ends

  27 “We’ll Take the Wind”

  28 Chaos Theory

  29 Maybe They Oughtta Study the Rule Book

  30 Because Karma

  31 Malcolm GO!

  FIVE RINGS

  32 Defend the Wall

  33 Not Bitter

  34 Like Some Teenage Goth Girl

  35 28–3

  36 You Can’t Always Get What You Want

  Epilogue: The Luxury of Ordinary Losses

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Color illustrations

  Introduction

  The White House, April 19, 2017.

  It was undeniably one of the most surreal moments I’ve ever lived through. One of those times where you find yourself in a situation so bizarre, you try not to think too hard, because if you do, you’ll just give yourself an existential crisis and question your own reality. So I opted for the much simpler approach of telling myself there’s nothing at all weird about this. I know exactly how we all ended up here. It makes perfect sense. Nothing to see here, folks. Go back to bed, Jerry’s subconscious. Let’s all go home and get some sleep.

  The New England Patriots were being welcomed to the White House after their fifth Super Bowl win by President Donald Trump and I was there as a credentialed member of the press representing my employer, Barstool Sports. That’s a statement that is in the lead for the Most Unlikely Sentence Ever Written. To get back to the questioning reality thing, if you believe in the multiverse model of the cosmos where there are an infinite number of parallel universes all existing simultaneously, we live in the only one where this has ever happened.

  As I wrote about in my previous book, From Darkness to Dynasty: The First 40 Years of the New England Patriots, from the time they were founded in 1960 until they finally broke through and won a miraculous championship after the 2001 season, the Patriots weren’t just bad, or anything close to it: they were laughingstocks, on the field and off. The most amateurish, dysfunctional, and mismanaged franchise in all of sports. Morally bankrupt most of the time, financially bankrupt all of the time. They existed for more than a decade before they had their own stadium to play in. And the one they finally built was a cheap, slapped-together, obsolete concrete toilet seat the day it opened and named after Schaefer Beer, the worst swill ever brewed and put into a can. Twice they put together good, young, successful teams only to have their head coach secretly take another job in the middle of the season. And they were constantly dogged by reports the team would be moved to another city.

  But here they were at the White House, for the fifth time in 15 years, the standard of success by which all other professional teams in every sport measure themselves.

  As far back as the 1970s, Donald J. Trump was a silver spoon real estate developer with a genius for self-promotion that had made him into both a nationally recognized brand name and a living cartoon character. He dabbled in everything from slapping his name on casinos and mail-order steaks to owning a team in a startup pro football league to talking about his sex life on the radio to playing himself in movie cameos and abusing D-list celebrities on a bad reality show.

  But here he was, the leader of the free world, a man who’s been given the inside scoop on the aliens who crashed at Roswell in 1947, and with the power to both unleash nuclear Armageddon and pardon the turkey at Thanksgiving.

  For my part, I was there as a guy with zero formal education in journalism or broadcasting and representing Barstoolsports.com, a website I’d been with almost since it began as just a free bimonthly Boston newspaper 12 or so years earlier. I was one of four original writers and wrote in my spare time or goofing off at my lousy, soul-crushing day job for no money, just hoping it would someday turn into something.

  But it was a full-time job for a major sports/pop culture/lifestyle phenomenon that got me past the Secret Service. I was a credentialed journalist, free to wander the grounds of the White House like a free-range chicken.

  That’s the macro, 30,000-feet Google Earth View of how unlikely all this was. Taking the micro, Google Street View, the odds of any of us—the Patriots, The Donald, or The Thornton—being here were astronomical. In the Super Bowl we were there to celebrate, the Pats were losing 28–3 with 2:12 left in the third quarter, when one sports analytics site had their win probability index at 0.4 percent. Trump was down by 12 percentage points with a week to go before the election, his campaign mired in buffoonery and his own self-inflicted wounds. During Super Bowl week, the commissioner of the NFL had had enough of Barstool Sports’ shenanigans and barred us from all league-sponsored events.

  Yet somehow, here we all were. Mere feet away from the guy carrying the briefcase that contains the nuclear launch codes, where none of us had any right to be.

  I’d been to Washington, D.C., before with my wife and kids. And while you can tour the Capitol, press your face against the side of the Washington Monument and look up, or stand right at the foot of
the Lincoln Memorial, the White House is something a tourist can only see from a distance, like looking at the Statue of Liberty from Manhattan. But now I was standing in the shadows of it. The building where Lincoln saved the Union. Where FDR planned World War II. Where Jack and Bobby Kennedy London Bridged Marilyn Monroe at the height of her powers. Where President Bill Pullman barely got out alive before the mother ship blasted it to rubble with a laser in Independence Day.

  Which, again, is why it all seemed so unreal. Like I was wearing a set of VR goggles and was looking at an app that shows sports fans their wildest dreams coming true. Or that I was about to come to in a hospital bed in 2001 and find out I’d passed out drunk, smacked my head, and all this success was just part of a psychotic fever dream.

  And the pessimist in me still hasn’t ruled that out. But until proven otherwise, I’ll keep laboring under the assumption this was really happening.

  You’ll have to excuse me if all this was beyond my reckoning as a lifelong Patriots fan. Because as badly as I made the 20th-century Pats sound during that time when a combination of geography, dumb luck, and piss-poor judgment on my part had them imprinting on my soul, it was actually worse. You can sort of forgive ordinary failure. What you can’t forgive is the sin the Boston/New England Patriots committed for most of my misspent youth: the sin of being irrelevant.

  They went years where they rarely sold out their crappy stadium, so home games were blacked out on local TV. Back when newspapers were a thing, they mostly got more ink in the news section for player arrests, the op-ed page for fan riots, and the business section for owner power struggles than they were getting in the sports section for playing games. Their old Pat Patriot logo is one of the most badass team emblems of all time, but good luck finding it on much merchandise because it just came to symbolize futility.

  So what we’ve seen from the 21st-century Patriots is nothing less than the biggest turnaround in the history of American sports, if not our entire pop culture. Pro football isn’t just our most popular sport; it’s the country’s most popular thing. In an entertainment landscape that gets more fractured and specialized by the week with more options—websites, apps, games, playlists, streaming music, video on demand, and so on—the NFL is the one outlet whose audience has steadily gotten bigger.

  And while the NFL has been dominating the culture, the New England Patriots have dominated the NFL. To use the same phrase I did earlier about laughingstocks, they’ve dominated on and off the field. No team has won more. No team has been talked about more. No one has had anywhere near the controversies. And no organization has been hated more.

  Everything the Pats have done has been done to the extreme. They’ve gone from non-factor to polarizing. From blacked out locally to setting national TV ratings records. From no one giving a tinker’s damn about them to being wildly controversial. From irrelevant to hyper-relevant. From unnoticed to having most of the country dropping to their knees and praying to the god they fear that the Patriots would just finally go away. In an era where the NFL has created a system of free agency designed to keep teams from staying on top for long, since 2001 the Patriots have:

  Been to eight Super Bowls, winning five.

  Played in seven consecutive AFC championship games.

  Won the AFC East nine years in a row.

  Led the AFC East in wins every season, twice losing the division title on tiebreakers.

  Failed to win double-digit wins exactly once (nine wins in 2002).

  Completed a record winning streak of 21 consecutive games, another of 18 games, and a postseason record of 10 consecutive.

  Had seven winning streaks of 10-plus games. Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, only two other franchises have more than one (the Colts with three, the Dolphins with two).

  Put together the best back-to-back seasons in NFL history, going 34–4 and winning two championships.

  All the while playing in some of the tightest, most hard-fought games in Super Bowl history, virtually all coming down to final minutes. Some to the final play. And all played on a razor’s edge such that if a few miracle plays had gone the other way, their 5–2 record could just as easily have been 7–0. Or 0–7.

  Off the field, the Patriots have been a polarizing lightning rod of controversy. A massive black hole of divisiveness with a gravitational pull from which no negative press can escape:

  Twice the NFL commissioner has found them guilty of cheating and punished them by taking a first-round draft pick away.

  The Spygate controversy in 2007 kicked off a season that saw league-wide calls for coach Bill Belichick’s suspension, but galvanized the team to pull off the only 16–0 season in history.

  The Deflategate story of 2014 broke during the AFC championship game and became the biggest story in the country, leading the network newscasts ahead of the war on terror, the economy, the election, and the worst winter on record.

  Deflategate led to a multimillion-dollar investigation, appeals, and counter appeals in federal court, and ultimately quarterback Tom Brady’s suspension.

  Dozens of other accusations of cheating by the Patriots include, but are not limited to: a report that they had a secret tape of the St. Louis Rams’ pre–Super Bowl walk-through. Rumors that they bug the visitors’ locker room. Suspicion that they steal play sheets out of the trash. Speculation that they jam visiting teams’ sideline-to-helmet radio signals. The belief that a chain restaurant billboard outside the stadium is angled so it can only be seen from their sideline. Innuendo that they put spies in the hills overlooking the Seattle Seahawks’ practices before Super Bowl XLIX.

  Simply playing the Patriots turns otherwise normal opponents into unhinged, InfoWars crackpots, with every win a faked moon landing and every championship the result of secret operatives on a grassy knoll.

  Bill Belichick has become the most respected coach of his era, and the most resented. His dealings with the media are appointment television, Shakespearean tragicomedies of passive/aggressiveness. And even while the rest of the league tries to “strike down upon him with great vengeance and furious anger” for all his supposed cheating, they hire every one of his assistants they can, hoping a branch off his coaching tree will take root and bear fruit. With limited success.

  Tom Brady went from Great American Success Story to reviled by most of the country. By 2016, the guy with the cover boy looks who pulled himself up by the bootstraps to achieve greatness was being mercilessly booed at the Super Bowl in his own hometown. He consistently ranked at the top in opinion polls as the NFL’s Most Hated Player, among the wife beaters, child abusers, drug addicts, and dog torturers.

  The Patriots have evolved from the team no one wanted to play for into the one that great players take massive pay cuts to join in hopes of getting a ring. They became the place that guys with bad reputations sign with hoping to resurrect their careers. For some, like Corey Dillon and Randy Moss, it worked. For others, like Albert Haynesworth, it just hurt the team, on the field and off.

  And while we’re on the subject of off-the-field damage, one of their most popular and promising young players got convicted of murder, barely acquitted of two others, and eventually killed himself in his prison cell.

  So yeah, it’s been a busy, newsworthy, pretty frigging successful though tumultuous decade and a half. In sociological terms, the New England Patriots are that high school A/V squad nerd who couldn’t get girls to talk to him and was on the receiving end of regular swirlies in the boys’ room. But by the 15th class reunion, he’d become the successful dot-com billionaire the valedictorian was begging for a job and the girl voted Most Popular wanted to dump her husband for. The zero who became the hero. Or the antihero, depending on where you’re coming from.

  And in an odd sort of cocktail of Domino Effect mixed with Law of Unintended Consequences, as the Patriots have become relevant, so has the entire New England culture. Their first, improbable Super Bowl championship set off a bizarre chain reaction where not only did all the other tea
ms in Boston achieve greatness, but also the very culture of the city went national. In the 15 years from the 1986 Celtics winning the NBA title until the Patriots’ win over the Rams, Bostonians were calling their own city “Loserville.” No teams won a championship. The city experienced some of the worst nut-punches in sports history. Baseball stars like David Justice were demanding clauses in their contracts saying they couldn’t be traded there. Two potentially great Celtics players died young. Boston had some of the worst owners and most dilapidated stadia in the country.

  But with that win over the Rams in February 2002, everything changed. It became the fulcrum that tipped 15 years of failure into 15 years (and counting) of success. In the decade and a half that followed, Boston won 10 championships in all four major pro sports. The Red Sox ended an 86-year drought, the Celtics one of 33 years, and the Bruins of 39.

  And that doesn’t even begin to describe what all that winning did to the non-sports culture. During the same period, the Bostonian became a sort of American icon. It used to be said if you wanted to win an Academy Award, you had to play someone with a substance abuse problem or a disability. Starting in the late 90s and into the 2000s, the true Oscar bait was Boston. If you were chasing that Actor or Actress Oscar, you needed to start working on that atrocious Southie accent. For Best Picture or Best Director, there was no faster shortcut than basing your film on true Boston events. And as reality TV took over the genre, you couldn’t get a show off the ground without at least one conniving, insufferable, cocky Boston character.

  Possibly the highest praise the culture ever received in this time frame came from the Oxford English Dictionary, which, in 2015, made official a word we’d long used to describe ourselves: Masshole.

  And this is their story—about a football franchise, a culture, and a people, told from the perspective of a guy who fell in love with this team back when it was a mangy stray dog with two different colored eyes and only three legs that followed me home from school. Who’s watched this mutt of a franchise morph into Superdog Krypto before his eyes. And who still hasn’t fully wrapped his brain around it.