Five Rings Read online

  It’s about a team that has been all about extremes. Hated by a nation in a way that has made their own fan base like them that much more because of it. But it’s also a story of remarkable people doing special things because they decided the price of greatness was one worth paying.

  And in my small part, it’s the story of one guy who, after all those years of obscurity and irrelevance, wasn’t about to let all this success pass by without making the most of every nanosecond.

  As the head coach who is most responsible for it all put it, “No. Days. Off.”

  1

  Bears, Cheeseheads, and Tuna

  The Boston/New England Patriots were founded in 1960 as one of the eight teams in the old American Football League that was later absorbed into the National Football League. Their owner, Billy Sullivan, like a lot of Irishmen, had dreams and aspirations that far exceeded another personal trait far more useful when it comes to running a pro sports franchise: wealth.

  Perpetually broke, the Patriots spent the better part of the 20th century struggling financially, attempting to build a state-of-the-art stadium like other markets had, fighting off bankruptcy, and simply trying to be competitive. And mostly failing.

  In their first four decades of existence, the Patriots put together three teams that you could really call successful by any objective standard. And all three had one thing in common. No sooner had their ships left port, cruised into calm waters before a following sea, and seemed ready to take New England on a long and pleasant journey to Championship Island that they struck icebergs of failure and sank to the bottom of the standings again. And two of those times, the captain abandoned ship, leaving every man, woman, and child to fend for ourselves.

  1978

  Patriots head coach Chuck Fairbanks had built a running attack that still holds the NFL single-season rushing record. One that carried the team to a franchise-first AFC East division title. The ’78 Pats were young. They were talented. Fairbanks had helped develop some coaching innovations that are in use to this day, like the 3–4 defense and the Erhardt-Perkins offensive system the Patriots still employ. He had just signed a long-term contract extension with Sullivan. The Patriots were poised for greatness. The franchise was the most stable it had ever been. Chuck Fairbanks was the master of all he surveyed.

  Until he blew it all up.

  It was discovered late in the ’78 season that Fairbanks wanted out. Actually, he didn’t just want out, he had actively gone out and taken another job, to go back to college and coach the University of Colorado, the team he’d built in New England, the legally binding contract he’d just signed, and the simple commitment of a man keeping his word be damned.

  Pats’ ownership discovered that not only had Chuck agreed to take the job and was accepting checks from Colorado boosters, but he was also using his office to call recruits. The whole affair, coming as the Patriots were ready to make a legitimate Super Bowl run, rolled a Batman villain-like canister of Chaos Gas into the locker room. Sullivan fired Fairbanks. He told his players Chuck was “an asshole.” Then, in order to reach Fiasco Level: Maximum, in the lead-up to the first home postseason game in franchise history, Sullivan doubled down on the bad decision making and brought Fairbanks back. With predictable results. As a subsequent Patriots coach liked to say, “If you give players an excuse to lose, they’ll take it every time.” These players did. The Houston Oilers came to Foxboro and wiped the Astroturf with them, 31–14, in a game that wasn’t even that close.

  1985

  There were still some holdovers from that ’78 division champs team on the roster, coached by the quiet, cerebral, and universally respected Hall of Fame wideout Raymond Berry. Under Berry’s leadership, and in spite of never having won an NFL playoff game going into the season, the Patriots had pulled off the nearly impossible task of winning three straight playoff games on the road and were heading to Super Bowl XX. And only one thing stood between them and immortality: Armageddon. Often referred to by its other name: The 1985 Chicago Bears.

  If every NFL coach who’s ever led his team to a title game got together in a room to hold a fantasy draft of the Team You’d Least Want to Face, the ’85 Bears would be the consensus No. 1 pick. To this day, they’re the gold standard of NFL greatness, particularly on the defensive side of the ball. You can scarcely compliment a very good defense today without invoking their name. It’s like TV analysts are contractually obligated to include, “Well, I’m not saying they’re the ’85 Bears.” They’ve become their own noun, like Band-Aids when you mean flesh-colored bandages or Kleenex when you mean snot rags. The kind of cultural icon that inspires T-shirts, Saturday Night Live recurring characters, and Halloween costumes to this day.

  In short, it was a debacle. The Patriots were the Washington Generals to the Bears’ Globetrotters, losing 46–10 in a game that wasn’t even that close. In just over three hours, we’d watched the most unlikely, unexpected, and exciting run in Patriots franchise history go up in the smelly, toxic flames of a raging Dumpster fire. But these Bears weren’t just very good; they were all-time great. We’d run into exactly the wrong team at exactly the wrong moment in history. And it would be more than a decade before the Patriots would get that close again. Within just a few seasons, they were the worst team in the NFL again and stayed near the bottom for years.

  1996

  In the 1980s, a band named Frankie Goes to Hollywood produced a huge breakout single called “Relax.” They then capitalized on the success of that with a follow-up hit, “Two Tribes.” Their third single was a dance mix of “Relax” and “Two Tribes” that might as well have been called “These Were All the Ideas We Had” because they were never heard from again.

  I bring this up because by the 1990s, the Patriots franchise had produced two great teams, one in the 70s and one in the 80s. The first fell apart when the head coach quit on them during a playoff run. The second fell apart after getting manhandled in the Super Bowl by a team filled with legends. The 1996 season witnessed the third great Pats team. And it would end like a mashup of those first two, the “Relax/Two Tribes” dance mix of things ending badly.

  In 1993, the Patriots were on their third owner, James Busch Orthwein of the Anheuser-Busch family fortune. He cleaned house of all the old guard who had mismanaged his new team since their inception in 1960 and gave complete control of the football operation to future Hall of Famer Bill Parcells, who had coached the New York Giants to two Super Bowl titles. And the nanosecond Parcells walked into the press conference that announced his hiring, the Patriots gained credibility they had never had in their history.

  Parcells was more than competent. He was a genius at public relations. He knew how to control the press. He was a quote machine of pure New Jersey cockiness. He understood human nature and how to get the most out of his players through a perfectly blended cocktail of fear, sarcasm, and intimidation, a recipe that he had perfected. “The Tuna” was exactly the right man at exactly the right time to save the franchise from total irrelevance.

  He understood how to build a winning program of tough, smart, physical football players who responded to his authoritarian style, and he succeeded in doing so over his first four years in Foxboro. He built a powerhouse through the draft, including quarterback Drew Bledsoe, linebackers Willie McGinest and Tedy Bruschi, and defensive backs Ty Law and Lawyer Milloy.

  There was just one major shortcoming Parcells had, and that was getting along with the boss. In 1994, Orthwein sold the team to the man who owned the stadium, a paper products and real estate mogul named Robert Kraft, who used his lease with the team as leverage to buy Orthwein out.

  Kraft and Parcells were both highly intelligent, driven, and successful people in their fields. And as such, had no business being in business together. They were both alphas, and the conflict began almost from the beginning of the arrangement. Kraft wanted to understand the inner workings of the business he had just shelled out $175 million of his family’s money on, which Parcells saw as me
ddling in something Kraft knew nothing about. All of which came to a head on draft day of ’96, when Kraft accepted the recommendation of his team’s scouting department to veto Parcells’s choice for the No. 7 overall pick in the draft and instead take Ohio State wideout Terry Glenn.

  Parcells was livid. He felt undermined and lied to and made no effort to hide his resentment. “If they’re gonna ask you to cook the dinner,” he famously said, “then they at least ought to let you shop for the groceries.” He was gone at the end of the season, and everybody knew it. Kraft vs. Parcells was a messy breakup that was played out in the papers and on sports talk radio on a daily basis all season.

  But in an unexpected development, while mom and dad were splitting up, the kids made it all the way to Super Bowl XXXI. And once again, they’d be facing one of pro football’s legendary franchises at the height of its powers.

  The 1996 Packers led the NFL in both offense and defense. The Patriots were a distant second in scoring and statistically a middle-of-the-pack defensive team. But the Patriots had The Tuna. Which is how we saw it. Or tried to. It’s certainly how the national media covering the game saw it, which says a lot more about Super Bowl press coverage than it does about the Packers, the Patriots, or the coaches.

  The last thing the press wants to talk about when they get to Super Bowl Week is football. It’s the time when even the most self-serious capital “J” sources of Journalism go full-blown supermarket checkout tabloid. The football world lapped up the Kraft-Parcells story like Us Weekly does when The Bachelorette calls off the wedding.

  Sports Illustrated said, “Parcells sucked up more media attention than any coach in Super Bowl history.”

  A razor-sharp, hyper-serious head coach who preached “no distractions” had become the ultimate distraction.

  And like that, it was over. The Patriots fell behind by two touchdowns midway through the third quarter and never scored another point, losing 35–21. It wasn’t the all-time humiliation of the loss to the Bears in 1985, but it did have the added flavor of losing the best coach in franchise history, like the ’78 team did. Parcells did not take the team charter flight home. He was done. Done with coaching this team. Done with working for Robert Kraft. Done with pretending he wasn’t miserable.

  But by no means was he done with coaching pro football, and within days he was attempting to fight his way out of New England so he could take the head job of the New York Jets. It was ugly and litigious for a while. Kraft still had Parcells under contract and was not interested in just allowing him to walk so he could go coach a hated division rival. Eventually, the league stepped in to settle the dispute and Parcells became the head coach of the Jets.

  For three seasons. That’s how long Tuna ran the Jets before he decided he’d finally had enough of the grind of running football franchises and wanted to step aside for the 2000 season. And it is here, in this most unlikely time and place, that the Patriots dynasty of the 21st century began.

  Because like any good all-powerful ruler, Bill Parcells understood the importance of leaving behind a clear line of succession for after you’re gone. Game of Thrones would never even have happened if Robert Baratheon had simply stopped tomcatting around making babies everywhere while Queen Cersei was making babies of her own with her brother. Parcells had his heir to the throne: Bill Belichick.

  Belichick had been not only the defensive coordinator/genius assistant behind Parcells’s two championships with the Giants, but he had been with Parcells in New England as well. Belichick had left the Giants for the head coaching job in Cleveland, was fired after five seasons, joined the Patriots as Parcells’s assistant head coach on the Super Bowl team, and then followed him again to New York. He was the cerebral, logical Spock to Parcells’s emotional, scenery-chewing Kirk, forever solving complex problems while the captain inspired the crew and kicked alien ass in battle.

  The two Bills made a special arrangement. Parcells would lobby Jets ownership on behalf of Belichick to pay him more than any assistant in the league. In exchange, Belichick would not leave for any other head coaching job. And then, when Parcells stepped aside, the Jets job would be his.

  Jets owner Leon Hess signed off on the agreement. He had been part owner going all the way back to 1963 and over the years bought out his partners to become the sole owner. To everyone involved, he represented stability. Hess appreciated that Parcells had brought his team respectability as he had done in New England, but the two men had an understanding that he was a short timer. Hess was also grateful for the chance at a smooth transition of power when the time came, because he liked Belichick and the two had a good working relationship.

  Until that relationship came to an end. Because on May 7, 1999, Leon Hess met the fate that awaits us all. Death placed an icy hand upon the shoulder of the Jets owner and took him off to that Undiscovered Country, from whose bourn no traveler returns. This was the death of the old man that changed the course of Patriots history.

  Hess’s passing threw the whole future of Jets management into uncertainty. The team would be put up for sale, and while he kept it to himself, Belichick didn’t like the idea of taking a job not knowing who his boss would be or even whether a new owner would simply let everyone go and bring in his own people. As the ’99 season wore on, he was privately weighing his options.

  On January 3, 2000, with the New York football press sitting in the Jets’ briefing room ready to talk to the franchise’s newest head coach, Belichick casually walked into team president Steve Gutman’s office and handed him a note hastily scribbled on a piece of scrap paper that said, “I resign as HC of NYJ.”

  Not since July 4, 1776, has a handwritten note so perfectly expressed anyone’s declared independence.

  Belichick then went to the podium and, talking to about half the assembled media crowd that had been at Parcells’s farewell press conference the day before, delivered a brilliantly off-the-cuff, borderline crazy address that shocked the North American sports world. The few reporters there were dumbfounded as Belichick explained his reasons for leaving. Gutman got up afterward and called him “a man in turmoil” and stopped just shy of saying he should be tranquilized and restrained in a bed before he hurt himself.

  But for Belichick, it was the perfect escape, calculated and executed to perfection. He made himself impossible to hire back. If you’ll excuse the marriage analogy, he went on a self-destructive bender that made his significant other feel like she had to dump him, when he was the one who was leaving.

  In the legal battle that followed, Robert Kraft did in fact want him. Belichick wanted to coach the Patriots. But the Jets were refusing, citing the binding contract he’d signed with the team. It was the reverse selfie image of the protracted lawyer fight where Kraft had tried to keep Parcells (and Belichick) from jumping to the Jets, about a dozen years before reverse selfies became a thing.

  The situation dragged on for weeks. That is, until Parcells called Kraft out of the blue, said, “Hello, Bob. This is Darth Vader,” and agreed to end what he called “The Border War” by releasing Belichick from his Jets deal to Kraft for the Patriots’ 2000 first-round draft pick.

  For New England, it would turn out to be the biggest bargain since the Puritans bought the whole region from the Wampanoags for the price of . . . well no money, actually.

  When Bill Belichick finally arrived in Foxboro to take control of the Patriots in February 2000, he found he’d inherited a mess. The Pats were coming off an 8–8 season. The year before they had been 9–7. The year before that, 10–6. The year before that, Parcells had led them to 11–5 and a trip to the Super Bowl. It didn’t take John Nash to see the mathematical pattern that was developing.

  Just as important by Belichick’s way of thinking was that the previous regime, under general manager Bobby Grier and head coach Pete Carroll, had been running the franchise the way a college freshman runs that first credit card that requires zero payments until after graduation. They were maxed out, with nothing to show for al
l those purchases but trash bags full of empties and the foggy memories of some brutal hangovers.

  Belichick made it clear that fixing that problem was his top priority. Anyone expecting him to introduce himself with a fiery speech, shaking his fist at the heavens with blood in his eyes and vowing before God that he would deliver the team to the Promised Land, was in for a major disappointment. The new head coach of the Patriots ushered in the most controversial, polarizing, despised, scandal-ridden, and successful regime in modern sports with . . . a dad talk. About fiscal responsibility and living within your means.

  One of the things about Belichick that had made the biggest impression on Robert Kraft on his first tour of duty with the Patriots was his theory about managing the NFL salary cap and how responsibly keeping your payroll in check is directly related to winning. And Kraft had been living with the results of failing to do so. The salary cap in 2000 was $57 million. And when Belichick walked in the door, his team’s top-paid 13 players were $10 million over that all by themselves. Bobby Grier wasn’t just maxing out his credit card; he’d been using it to pay off the other cards he’d also maxed out. Belichick, along with his right-hand man and de facto GM Scott Pioli, whom he’d brought with him from the Jets, had to take the scissors to those cards before they could start building the roster they wanted.

  Which, while smart and mature and proven ultimately to be successful, is not exactly what a fan base starved for a winner wants to hear. The NFL salary cap is not just a subject that maybe 100 people in the human race understand (if that); it’s also deathly dull to talk about. Personally, I wanted the new hope of my football team to ride in on horseback in a kilt with his face painted blue screaming about making our enemies pay for their crimes. What I got was the treasurer of the French Club saying we’ve got to start planning the car wash if we’re ever going to pay for that trip to the museum. With everything but the “I really mean it, guys! This is serious!!!”