Five Rings Page 11

  Or maybe you can. It blew for the Dolphins. It was one of those games where Pats fans had reason to believe the game was over before the visitors got into the terminal.

  It was no box of chocolates for fans going to Gillette, either. Because of the suddenness of the snowfall, there was barely time to clear their seats. People were basically left to dig a space for themselves by hand. For the most part, those who’d made it that far gave zero shits about the conditions. They sat on top of the snow. Formed seats in it. Which sort of gave the game the feel of a snow day from school—only with lots of sweet, sweet booze involved.

  The game could not have been more different from the video game they’d played in the hermetically sealed dome in Indy the Sunday prior. Charlie Weis was livid at his offense for not being able to move the ball. “You’re acting like you’re down 20,” he screamed on the sidelines. “Acting like a bunch of fucking babies out there! Wake the fuck up! Quit making excuses! Play better ball and shut the fuck up!” Now there are the benefits of a Jesuit education. But despite the words of encouragement, only one touchdown was scored the whole game. By the defense. And it was unforgettable.

  In the fourth quarter, with his team trailing 3–0, Dolphins quarterback Jay Fiedler got the ball on his own 4-yard line, went back to pass, and was picked off by Tedy Bruschi. As Bruschi stepped into the end zone, he sort of crouched and duck-walked his way across the goal line. It was part of a pattern. Going back to the previous season, it was the fourth consecutive interception he’d returned for a touchdown, and by far the easiest.

  As he knelt in the end zone, knowing that he’d pretty much put the game away, Bruschi looked up to see that the whole crowd had spontaneously begun to grab handfuls of snow and toss them straight up in the air. The effect was like white fireworks. The stands were filled with them. It was spectacular, both visually and, for lack of a better word, emotionally. It was Massholes making the best of the lousy elements, just like their team did. In Philadelphia, Eagles fans once famously pelted Santa Claus with snowballs. Pats fans had turned the stuff into Snow Fireworks.

  Just like the Cowboys game a few weeks earlier, the final score was 12–0. It was their second shutout of the season and their fifth straight home game without allowing a touchdown. Only a garbage time score at the end of the following week’s game against Jacksonville kept them from extending it to six straight. If they won all their remaining games, they would assure themselves home field advantage throughout the playoffs thanks to that win at Indianapolis. But they had one other side goal in mind. One of the greatest and noble causes a human being can aspire to.

  Revenge.

  Their final game of the 2003 regular season was at home against the Buffalo Bills. And whatever the team might have said publicly about how that 31–0 debacle in the first game was in the past and they were just focused on winning this week, behind the scenes Belichick knew damned well he could use that humiliation as motivation. “These guys got us pretty good,” he told his team. “You don’t always get the chance to settle the score. We need to take advantage of it this week.”

  And they did. To perfection. Tom Brady and Drew Bledsoe threw for almost identical yardage, but Brady had four touchdowns and zero interceptions, where Bledsoe had no TDs and two picks. The Pats led 28–0 at the half. But there wasn’t a man, woman, or child among us who’d have been satisfied with anything less than, as Belichick put it, settling the score. Which they did. In the most literal sense.

  After a scoreless third quarter, Adam Vinatieri kicked a chip shot field goal to make it 31–0. And just coming away with the win would not have been good enough; the score mattered.

  Bledsoe was taken out of the game for the fourth quarter, and backup Travis Brown was having better luck moving the ball. With 17 seconds to go, he’d led the Bills to a first and goal from the Patriots’ 1. But linebacker Larry Izzo stepped in front of his pass to the end zone and intercepted it to preserve the 31–0 score.

  The regular season that began with extreme amounts of turmoil and humiliation was perfectly bookended with identical amounts of stability and triumph. With heavy doses of vengeance.

  At 14–2, it was by far the most successful regular season in franchise history. Their defense was elite. The quarterback who was more or less a caretaker in 2001 had proven he could carry the team when the situation called for it. They’d proven they could win in any fashion, from high-scoring shootouts to low-scoring Greco-Roman wrestling matches. And they could win in the harshest conditions. But that’s something that was about to be tested.

  12

  Superhorse

  The Patriots were the No. 1 seed in the playoffs for the first time in the 44-year history of the franchise, but were still by no means the prohibitive favorites in the AFC. The general consensus was that the Pats weren’t clearly better than the 12–4 Colts or the 13–3 Kansas City Chiefs. They’d caught every break in that game in Indy, just as they had all those lucky bounces in 2001. Besides, to get to this year’s Super Bowl, they’d have to get through two co-MVPs of the league, Manning of the Colts and Steve McNair of the Tennessee Titans.

  After the playoff bye week, they were set to face Tennessee at Gillette. Like the Snow Bowl two years earlier, it was a Saturday night prime-time game. And like that one, the weather would be a factor.

  Except this night made that one look like the cover of a brochure for Sandals: Jamaica.

  There was a nasty cold front due to settle in and spend the weekend in New England. Record-breaking cold. Ice Planet Hoth–level cold. The forecast called for temperatures at around zero and wind chills in the negative teens. It was the kind of weather where the newspapers do features telling lifelong residents of the Northeast how to dress if they plan to go outside. I had plans to watch the game at my brother Jack’s very insulated and heated house, a few towns away from mine, like two sane people.

  On Thursday, Jack called. “We’re still on for Saturday?” I asked. “That’s why I’m calling,” he said. “Because of the weather, people are basically giving tickets away. We can get them for less than face value. Would you be interested?”

  Now I was at that stage in life where my whole existence orbited around two young kids. So I literally had not been to a Pats game since the Bill Parcells era. But there’s that thing that exists deep in the reptilian brain stem of every man that every once in a while compels him to do things that are stupid on every level. And I was long overdue. Without a second’s hesitation, this disembodied voice in my head just answered, “Yes . . .” I was in.

  On Saturday, I piled on layer upon layer, starting with a worn-out pair of my Irish Rose’s pantyhose, because I’d remembered seeing a feature on a freezing playoff game in Cincinnati back in the day where that’s what Bengals receiver Cris Collinsworth wore under his uniform. Unfortunately, under all those layers of fleece and ski pants, no one could see what they did for my legs, because I looked dynamite. But that’s their loss.

  With a Goodwill bin’s worth of clothes on my back and a few of those little heat packs in my boots and gloves, I’m not lying when I say I was perfectly comfortable. I’m an enormously delicate little sissy when it comes to the cold, and there was no denying how cripplingly severe the conditions were. We were opening beers in the parking lot only to have them bubble up out of the top of the bottle like the baking soda volcano at a middle school science fair. Cell phones buried deep in inner pockets refused to work. Using the tailgate scene porta-potties meant risking getting your fingers stuck to your man parts like a tongue getting frozen to a flag pole.

  Of course, this was still a football game, which means that there are no conditions so severe that there won’t be some dudes taking their shirts off. And we saw them. I’ve always felt that if America wants the rest of the world to stop messing with us, we should just send them all footage of our nation’s beloved fat guys, their naked bellies hanging over their jeans, and ask them, “Do you really want to incur the wrath of these deranged imbeciles?” Boom
. National security problems solved.

  In one of those anecdotes that sounds like your grandfather saying he walked to school with a hot potato in his pocket to keep him warm and then ate the potato for lunch but I swear is true, our cousin Phil bought a bottle of water at halftime. By the time he got back to our seats, the whole bottle was solid ice. I swear that happened.

  So under those conditions, you could forgive both teams if the game wasn’t an artistic masterpiece. Brady completed only about 50 percent of his passes, but managed to connect with Bethel Johnson on a 41-yard touchdown. All things considered, it’s remarkable that McNair managed to complete 18 of 26. But he got picked off by Rodney Harrison, who returned it near midfield to set up another New England touchdown and a 14–7 lead at the half.

  A 70-yard touchdown drive by the Titans tied it up. Eventually, Adam Vinatieri was somehow able to connect on a 46-yard field goal that in those conditions, I can only imagine felt like kicking a butternut squash.

  But Tennessee was far from done. I was not the biggest fan of Steve McNair. There was a narrative about him where, what seemed to be week after week, he was too injured to practice but somehow managed to summon the courage to gut it out and get his broken body on the field Sunday. That was the story line leading up to this game as well. It seemed to happen throughout his entire career, which eventually made me question if perhaps he wasn’t actually tougher than all the quarterbacks who didn’t take the field every week out of sheer force of will. Maybe he was just more fragile. Or perhaps just didn’t like to practice. Regardless, he put together a final drive and was threatening to tie the game, if not win it.

  McNair threw for two first downs, ran for a third, and then threw for another on just four plays, which got the ball to the New England 33. Now I can tell you in all honesty that as the 2-minute warning hit and all eyes and TV cameras were on McNair, I watched him limp off the field like a wounded soldier. Then, with the network still on a commercial break, he walked back on the field like a guy walking his Golden Doodle at the dog park. But my phone was too frozen to take a video, so you’ll just have to trust my memory. Or not. I saw what I saw.

  The Titans’ drive stalled when two penalties moved them back 20 yards, out of field goal range, and forced them to attempt some desperate throws. A couple were completed until one last fourth and 12 heave ended up in the hands of Drew Bennett, who double-caught the ball, slapped it in the air, and then had the pass broken up on a last-ditch effort by Asante Samuel to save the game.

  The Patriots would be hosting the AFC championship game. And even on Saturday night, there wasn’t much doubt about whom they’d be facing.

  The Colts had to play two playoff games prior to coming to Foxboro. Two weeks earlier in the divisional playoff round, they’d gone into Kansas City and outgunned the Chiefs, 38–31, on the strength of 300 yards passing by Manning and 125 rushing by Edgerrin James. The week before, they’d put together nothing less than the best offensive performance in playoff history. Manning had a perfect passer rating, with almost 400 yards and five touchdowns on 22-for-26 passing. And Indy’s punter never once had to take the field. For the playoffs, Manning had eight touchdowns and no interceptions.

  But then, he wasn’t facing New England’s defense. At Gillette, the Patriots played Manning like a video game they had the cheat codes for. By this stage of his career, he’d put together a freakish and confusing display of audibles and hand signals that disguised calls and drove defensive coordinators nuts. But that day the Patriots read them like they’d been listening to the “Becoming Fluent in Peyton Manning” lessons on Rosetta Stone. Rodney Harrison intercepted Manning in the end zone. On an underneath throw, Ty Law reached back across his body for another pick. Then he jumped underneath an out route for his second interception. Law’s third pick, the Patriots’ fourth of the day, came as he was gesturing to his secondary exactly where Peyton was looking to go with the ball. And he guessed right.

  New England’s offense had a hard time turning all those mistakes into touchdowns and had to settle for Vinatieri’s 5-for-5 field-goal performance. It helped that Indy’s punting unit was so rusty from lack of work that their first attempt was hiked over the punter’s head and he was forced to take the safety. But the 24 points were good enough for the win.

  Just as importantly, it gave a region still in shell shock from the Red Sox gag job back in October something we desperately needed: a nemesis.

  Peyton Manning was the perfect comic foil. He was the celebrity’s kid who grew up with every advantage and the No. 1 overall pick who couldn’t get it done in the big moments. A hothouse flower who played great in his little climate-controlled Pleasure Palace but lacked the toughness to hack it out in Mother Nature. The anti-Brady. Huge in the regular season but not in the playoffs. The Wilt Chamberlain to Brady’s Bill Russell.

  When the game ended, Bill Belichick and Rodney Harrison did what I guess can best be described as “having a moment.” After an awkward semi-hug, which the coach has never done particularly well, he told his safety, “I’m sure glad we got you.” To which Harrison, one of the baddest men in the game, humbly replied, “Thanks for believing in me. Thank you, sir.”

  In the locker room immediately after, Belichick singled out one man for praise before all the others, and he hadn’t played a snap in the game. Backup quarterback Damon Huard had run the scout team in practice all week long, and he did a spot-on Peyton Manning impression. His moves. His wild pre-snap gesturing. His cadence. He even semi-looked like Manning. He was Frank Caliendo good, before Frank Caliendo was a thing. It backed up a signature catchphrase of Belichick’s that he was beginning to add to public discourse, one that would stick: Do. Your. Job.

  One thing Belichick has always loved as much as he loves winning football games is coming up with metaphors that relate to winning football games. So you could say his interests run the gamut from A to B. Every year he tries to come up with an analogy, either from other sports or some real-life situation, that can get his point across and inspire his team. For instance, one season he took them to see a movie about the Antarctic expedition of Ernest Shackleton, in which the explorer’s ship was trapped in the ice in the most inhospitable place on Earth for over a year but all his crew made it home to England alive.

  In 2003, the metaphor was Secretariat’s win at the Belmont Stakes 30 years earlier. He showed his players film of the race in which it was close going into the final turn, until the superhorse did whatever superhorses do, moved his hooves faster than all the other horses moved theirs, and ran away from the field and into history.

  Once again, the Patriots were going to the Super Bowl. Only this time, it wasn’t in New Orleans; it was at Reliant Stadium in Houston. Most significantly, for the first time in their history, they were going into a championship game in which they were not huge underdogs that nobody believed in.

  13

  Legit

  Oddsmakers had the Patriots as seven-point favorites over the NFC champion Carolina Panthers. That would be the same Panthers that the Patriots beat in the final game of the 2001 season for their 15th consecutive loss. That collapse led to a massive housecleaning in Carolina that resulted in the hiring of head coach John Fox, who had previously been the defensive coordinator in Jacksonville and Oakland. He had quickly turned the Panthers around, installing a tough, tenacious defense and an opportunistic, quick-strike offense led by quarterback Jake Delhomme.

  Just two seasons removed from that 1–15 abomination, Fox got the Panthers to 11–5 and a Wild Card berth. In their opening playoff game, they went to Dallas and dominated Bill Parcells’s Cowboys, 29–10. It took a 65-yard touchdown pass from Delhomme to wideout Steve Smith on the first play of double overtime to defeat the Rams at St. Louis. They then did to the football world what the Patriots themselves had been accused of: ruining the Super Bowl by costing everyone the matchup they really wanted to see. In this case, the country most wanted a Colts–Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl but would not get it
because the Panthers’ defense did an even worse number on the Eagles than the Patriots did on Indy. They also had four interceptions, three on starting QB Donovan McNabb and another on backup Koy Detmer, plus added five sacks and held Philly to three points. The 2003 Panthers might have been unknowns, but there was zero luck involved in them winning the conference title. They went on the road to beat three solid opponents in three very different ways. The Panthers were legit.

  Not that anyone outside of New England and the Carolinas was especially fired up about this matchup. There was no rivalry here of any kind. No history between the teams. There was no otherworldly charismatic team like the ’85 Bears. No dominant personality like Parcells in 1996. Not even a shiny new toy America loved to play with the way the Rams had been. No real hook of any kind other than two very good teams playing for a championship. The New York Daily News called the lead-up “one of the dullest weeks of hype in Super Bowl history—the bland leading the bland.” In fact, the biggest “controversy” of the week—and I’m using the term loosely—was yet another bizarre turn in the road of Tom Brady’s path to superstardom. That was when he randomly showed up in the congressional chamber as a guest of President George W. Bush for the State of the Union address, making him arguably the only person to ever be invited to a constitutionally mandated speech and to do a Snickers commercial in the same lifetime.

  The night before the game, Belichick delivered his own address in a function room at the team hotel. It was the exact opposite of a fiery sermon, with lots of arm-waving and spit flying everywhere, like you usually expect from a football coach pep talk. He kept it monotone, quietly explaining what was expected of everyone in the room. And then, he brought out his secret weapon. The Lombardi Trophy from Super Bowl XXXVI.