Five Rings Page 3

  But, like most things I don’t like and that bore me because they don’t appeal to my need for instant gratification, the Belichick/Pioli approach was entirely necessary and would eventually prove to be the intellectual foundation of a sports dynasty. But at the time it felt truly uninspiring.

  What few people knew, though, was that behind the scenes, the other, equally important part of dynasty building was underway. The part where asses get kicked. While Belichick publicly might not have been doing a Braveheart, inside the walls of the team facility he was pulling a Patton, inspecting his troops, finding them lacking, and saying, “If they don’t dress like soldiers and act like soldiers, how can we expect them to fight like soldiers?”

  Pete Carroll had been the ultimate “Players’ Coach,” the fun, cheerleading, enthusiastic, West Coast Patron Saint of Positivity who Kraft had turned to three years earlier as an alternative to Parcells’s surly, New Jersey, type A, control freak disciplinarian. If you’ll allow me to click on my Cliché Generator app for a second, Carroll liked to “Let Boys Be Boys.” And in this case, his boys completely ignored his rules and made their own, as boys like to do.

  So Belichick wasted not one hot second sending the message that they could knock that shit right the hell off.

  The 2000 season was by no means a success. The Patriots had two losing streaks of four games early on, and then alternated wins and losses down the stretch to finish a dismal 5–11. Which, maybe not coincidentally, is what their record was in Parcells’s first season, seven years earlier. And like that year, if you treated it like an Impressionist painting, stepping way back to look at the big picture as opposed to staring closely at the messy details, you saw a master at work.

  In the off-season, using Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli’s core principles of building a winner by only shopping in the thrift store and using coupons, they added free agents like guard Mike Compton, who’d stabilize the offensive line opposite last year’s signing, Joe Andruzzi. They added a linebacker everybody knew in Roman Phifer and another, Bryan Cox, was reportedly coming soon. Plus another linebacker, Mike Vrabel, who meant nothing to me besides being the guy who recovered a Bledsoe fumble that sealed a 7–6 loss to the Steelers in the 1997 playoffs.

  To that list we could’ve added the year’s crop of drafted rookies. Thanks to the Patriots’ bad record, they were drafting sixth in every round. They went defensive lineman in the first round and offensive tackle in the second, and it was not received well. The feeling was summed up by established anti-Belichick zealot Ron Borges, who said Georgia’s Richard Seymour “is too tall to play tackle at six foot six and too slow to play defensive end,” and followed up with “tackle Matt Light [drafted out of Purdue] . . . will not help any time soon.”

  It wasn’t exactly a metric butt ton of optimism to work with, but it was all we had. And for a franchise that in its 40 years of existence had played in one American Football League championship game and two Super Bowls and lost all three by a combined score of 143–41, a little debilitating, all-encompassing pessimism at the start of the season was standard operating procedure.

  What no one could have known was that this 2001 Patriots team would be the one that changed the pro sports world forever.

  2

  Time Is a Flat Circle

  There’s a theory behind writing fiction popularly known as “Chekhov’s Gun.” Unfortunately for me, it’s not a Star Trek: The Original Series reference. Instead, it comes from the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who taught that if you’re going to write a play in which there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, then it needs to be fired in the third act. Otherwise, don’t include it at all or you’re doing a disservice to your audience.

  In the very nonfiction drama that is the history of the Boston/New England Patriots, practically everything that happened to the team turned out to be a Chekhov’s Gun going off later in the story. Their first owner fought with crooked politicians to get a stadium built exactly the way the fourth owner fought with crooked politicians to get a stadium built. Their first great coach quit on the team to take another job in the same way the next great coach quit on the team to take another job. The Patriots fought with the Jets to keep them from stealing away their head coach, and three years later, the Jets fought with the Pats to keep them from stealing away their head coach. And so on. With this team, it seemed as though everything foreshadowed something else. Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done we will do again.

  And that would never be truer than with the 2001 Patriots, a season in which hundreds—or even thousands—of little moments had to fall into place exactly as they did in order to change the course of pro football human events. And with coincidences, irony, and symbolism all over the place. Change one of these events even a little, and the whole 21st century in the NFL would look nothing like it has.

  Consider that the Patriots finished 11–5 in the regular season. That earned them a bye week in the playoff and a home game. Alter those results in any way, and there is no telling how their future—or the future of pro football—would have turned out. Small events, large events, and monumental, life-altering, tragic historic events all fell into place over the five-plus months from September 2001 to the first Sunday in February 2002 to turn the fate of the franchise to the good forever.

  For openers, the moment the team arrived in Foxboro after training camp ended there was a metaphor about coming changes being too massive to ignore. A new stadium was being built in the parking lot behind their decrepit old one. After years of going through the same struggles to find an adequate facility to play in that had plagued the Patriots’ previous owners for decades, after dealing with the same empty promises from crooked Massachusetts lawmakers about putting a building in downtown Boston that nearly broke Billy Sullivan’s will, Robert Kraft finally said “to hell with it” and built his own place on his own land.

  As a matter of fact, in doing so he turned his back on the sweetest deal in the history of sweet deals. The state of Connecticut promised to build him a stadium for the low, low price of nothing and charge him a buck a year in rent. Plus, the state promised him the revenue of full sellouts—meaning that if the Patriots didn’t sell out the place, the state would make up the difference. All it would cost him was the rental on the moving trucks to take his team’s stuff two hours up the road.

  As fiscal policy, it would have been a boondoggle that fleeced the taxpayers just so Connecticut could get whatever prestige comes from having a pro football team. But for the guy on the receiving end of dump trucks filled with public funds for doing absolutely nothing? It was a no-brainer. No one in his right mind would turn down an offer like that.

  But Kraft wasn’t in his right mind. Visionaries rarely are. Whatever business acumen led him to buy the worst facility in North America, and then leverage that to overspend for the worst franchise in sports, convinced him he’d be better off taking all the risk, putting up his own money, and building a state-of-the-art stadium on his property in Foxboro. Set to open at the start of the 2002 season, the new stadium meant the end of 41 years of living in squalor. The Patriots were a family moving out of the tenement and getting a brand-new house on a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. And when they finally moved in, they’d do so in a style no one could possibly have predicted.

  The next thing you couldn’t help notice was a weird quirk in the NFL schedule that existed for only a three-year period in the history of the league. After Art Modell moved the original Browns to Baltimore in 1995 (inadvertently turning Bill Belichick into an Enemy of the State in northeast Ohio), the league scrambled to put a Browns expansion team back in Cleveland. They succeeded in 1999. But because they had added just the one franchise, that meant there was an odd number of teams in the NFL. That also meant at least one team had to have its bye week during each week of the season as opposed to Weeks 5–11, the way it usually is. This would only last until Houston was awarded the Texans in 2002. But for this season, it was very real. And the P
atriots were the ones stuck with the raw deal of playing 16 straight games, followed by their bye in the final game of the season, week 17, when it was essentially useless.

  The Patriots opened the 2001 season at home against Cincinnati, a pretty uninspiring 23–17 loss in which they couldn’t get anything going on the ground and Drew Bledsoe was sacked four times.

  If that game had been memorable, the memory wouldn’t have lasted long, because two days later, history came crashing down upon the United States. All too literally.

  There are much better places than here to dive deep into the events of 9/11. If you’re old enough, you’ve got your memories to process, I’ve got mine, and the people who were directly affected have theirs. It would demean all of them to think that how the attacks impacted pro sports leagues is anywhere in the top 10 million most important aspects. We can all agree on that. And to the NFL’s eternal credit, they did the right thing and wasted no time postponing the following weekend’s games. Back in 1963, they’d played a full schedule of games within days of President Kennedy getting his life snuffed out of him in front of the whole world, a decision that haunted Commissioner Pete Rozelle until the day he died. It would not be repeated.

  Instead, they moved all the scheduled games back to what would have been week 17 of the season. For the Patriots, that meant playing the 1–0 Carolina Panthers on January 6, instead of September 16. For rivals like the New York Jets, it meant flying to Oakland in that final week to face the Raiders.

  The first game back after the weekend off would be the Patriots at home against those Jets. It was the country’s first chance to gather in public and pay respects the way we like to best: at sporting events. Sports are the great watering holes of our culture, where all subspecies of Americans gather, and the Patriots were hosting one of the two teams that represented the place hit hardest by the atrocities, where the smoke and dust still hadn’t cleared the air downtown and crews were still digging for victims in the rubble. The ceremonies around the NFL involved both profound mourning and heartfelt national pride. And they were pitch perfect.

  I’ll never forget hearing the massive numbers of casualties and the estimated count of evacuees from the greatest rescue in world history and thinking that we’d all be, at most, two degrees of separation from someone who was on the scene in Manhattan, the Pentagon, or United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. That we’d all either personally know someone or know someone who knows someone.

  For the New England Patriots, it was one degree of separation.

  Guard Joe Andruzzi had signed with the Patriots the year before out of Green Bay. As an interior offensive lineman who’d played in just 11 games for a five-win team, he wasn’t exactly New England’s highest profile athlete. But during the pregame at Foxboro Stadium, everybody learned who he was. And they would never forget it.

  Andruzzi took the field with his father, a retired New York City police officer, and his three brothers, all of whom were NYFD firefighters who were on duty the day the towers fell. One of the brothers had barely made it out alive. It was one of those moments that gives you a psychic, emotional bond with those living in a rival city and reminds you who we really are as a people.

  And yet, President Bush had said that we needed to get back to our way of life as soon as possible, or else the terrorists win. So for a few hours on Sunday, that meant hating the Jets again like it was our duty.

  If that was going to be a challenge, given the way everyone was really feeling about New York in the actual world outside the football field, the Jets cooperated. In fact, they made it easy.

  For starters, Curtis Martin, the best running back in Patriots history, whom the Jets had stolen away with a brilliantly handled free agent swindle a few years before, ran all over them, as he always did. He had 100 yards on the ground and scored the game’s only touchdown. He was a living, ball-carrying reminder of how smart Bill Parcells was and how quickly he’d made his new team better than his old one.

  More significantly, the Jets handed the Patriots an injury to the one guy they couldn’t afford to lose. Facing a third and 10 from his own 19, Drew Bledsoe looked upfield for a receiver, and not finding anyone open, rolled out and tried to run for the first down. Because Bledsoe’s foot speed was such that he was always in danger of getting reclaimed by nature, it was a terrible idea that had devastating consequences.

  Linebacker Mo Lewis lined Bledsoe with a hit that, while totally clean and positively legal on a football field, would get you charged with attempted manslaughter on the streets. It was one of those collisions you can feel in your sternum just watching on TV. The kind you wonder how these guys get up again. Which Bledsoe did. He was that kind of football player. Seemingly indestructible.

  But there were danger signs that more was wrong than just your typical tough player taking a big hit. The two teams exchanged punts, the Patriots got the ball back, and Bledsoe retook the huddle. They picked up a first down before running back Marc Edwards lost a fumble. On the sidelines, Tom Brady was checking with Bledsoe to see how he was feeling and found him confused to the point of incoherence. “How do we do the ‘check with me’?” Bledsoe asked. “What are the ‘check with mes’?” To which Brady responded by going to the coaches, who immediately pulled Bledsoe from the game.

  What no one realized in the moment was that the hit was even worse than it looked. It sheared a vessel near Bledsoe’s heart and had him bleeding into his lungs. The first ones to really understand how dire the situation was were the doctors who performed the emergency surgery that no doubt saved his life.

  With Bledsoe out of the game, it was up to Brady to try to keep the Patriots from falling to 0–2. He couldn’t. He did lead a 12-play drive in the fourth quarter that moved the ball to the New York 29, but a last-ditch pass to the end zone fell short.

  Lost in the drama of that day was an obscure play from early in the game, one in which the officials reversed a call by invoking an arcane, seldom-used item in the rule book that would become nothing less than the most bitterly debated call in NFL history. It would change the football world. It just wouldn’t be on this day.

  On this day, with about a minute to go in the first half, Jets quarterback Vinny Testaverde went back to pass, pumped his arm, and was hit by the Patriots’ Anthony Pleasant, coughing up the ball as Richard Seymour fell on it. The ruling on the field was a fumble—until the officials reviewed the play and determined that it was an incomplete pass. The Jets retained possession.

  The reason for the reversal? NFL Rule 3, Section 22, Article 2, Note 2: “When [an offensive] player is holding the ball to pass it forward, any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body.” This was later to become famous as “The Tuck Rule.” Not much later. But very, very famous. And I mention it here as the gun Chekhov would put on the wall.

  In the aftermath of the loss, no one knew the extent of Bledsoe’s injury, but everyone knew having the franchise quarterback out for any length of time would have a profound impact on the season.

  We were just dead wrong on what kind of impact.

  3

  Legs Twitching, Quietly Barking

  Any idea that the Patriots would implode in Bledsoe’s absence was delayed on September 30, when they rolled over the Colts, 44–13. Despite the high point total, Brady did nothing to instill boatloads of confidence, because this one was all about the running game and defense. Led by Antowain Smith, they amassed 177 yards on the ground. The defense picked off Peyton Manning three times. Linebacker Bryan Cox set a tone for the season with a knockout hit on Jerome Pathon that made the Mo Lewis hit look like a tickle fight. Brady was more or less along for the ride with no touchdowns.

  Brady’s 13-for-26 and 168 passing yards, combined with Manning’s miserable day, certainly didn’t make it look like the first game between the two greatest individual rivals that pro sports would see in the 21st century.
But let the record show it was.

  The following Sunday was notable for a couple of things, the most significant being that early in the morning we were treated to reports that U.S. bombs were hitting Taliban targets in Afghanistan. That was the last reason New England would have to cheer all day, as the Patriots had a dismal game in the humidity of Miami. Again, Brady only completed half his throws, this time for just 86 yards. He was also sacked four times and the offense overall barely fell forward enough for 149 total yards.

  Bill Belichick’s response was to just bury the memory of it. As in, he led his players out to the practice field where a four-foot hole had been dug, dropped the game ball into it, covered it with dirt, and told them to forget about it. Brady resisted the urge to piss on the grave, but he did stomp on the dirt and tried to psychologically move on.

  He was spectacularly successful. At San Diego, he checked the box on a lot of firsts on his career punch list. His first 300-yard passing game. His first touchdown. His first professional comeback, overcoming a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to send the game into overtime, capped by a touchdown to tight end Jermaine Wiggins over All Pro safety Rodney Harrison with half a minute to go. And Adam Vinatieri won it with a 44-yard field goal at the end, before that would become his thing.

  Helping the Patriots’ cause immensely was the return of Terry Glenn, who found the miracle cure for whatever was keeping him out of the first month’s games long enough to have 100 yards receiving in the first half. Then, deciding 30 minutes of football was enough for one day and he’d said all he needed to say about his contract situation, he called it an afternoon and took the rest of the game off. Fortunately for the Patriots, Troy Brown worked his usual full shift and finished with 110 yards of his own. But unfortunately, Brady’s career will forever carry the taint of his first touchdown pass being caught by a quitter.