Five Rings Read online

  Still this was no gimme by any stretch for Adam Vinatieri. It’s a scientific fact that a putt is harder to hit when it’s for a birdie than when it’s for a sextuple bogey. And when it’s to win the U.S. Open, it’s infinitely harder. A 48-yard field goal is tough enough in training camp. This was to complete the fantasy that every high school kicker plays out in his head to motivate himself at captain’s practices. “One second left. This one is to win the Super Bowl . . .”

  The kick Jeff Wilkins had missed earlier was from 52, only 12 feet longer than this one. On the other hand, this was a dome. And all that was riding on it aside, the 45-yarder through the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”–like conditions in the Raiders’ game was much harder.

  And Vinatieri proved it. The nanosecond the ball left his foot, all doubt was removed. It wasn’t just good; it was perfect, with distance to spare and bisecting the post that holds up the crossbar.

  The Patriots were Super Bowl champions for the first time. Improbably. Unimaginably. Preposterously. It took a while to sink in. I’m not lying when I say a part of me worried that maybe they’d find some reason to re-kick. Or find some time left on the clock. But nope. It counted.

  In the aftermath, Bill Belichick ran out onto the field with both arms raised straight up, all by himself, until getting a fond, loving bear hug from notoriously angry badass Lawyer Milloy. Then Belichick’s daughter joined in and the three of them shared the moment together for a while.

  The most famous camera shot showed the whole Patriots sideline bursting onto the field at once like horses coming out of the starting gate, led by Antowain Smith, high-stepping and pumping his helmet in the air with his fist. In another iconic shot, Brady spotted his sisters in the crowd, with his hands in his hair and shaking his head to say, “Can you believe this just happened?”

  It was a good question. Nobody really knew how to wrap their brains around it. We remembered everything backwards, the way we do most things. Vinatieri’s kick, preceded by the plays by Troy Brown and J. R. Redmond, preceded by the decision to play for the win, etc.

  Lost in all that immediacy were most of the thousands of little moments of fate that all had to fall into place just right or else none of this would’ve happened. Drew Bledsoe’s heroics. The Tuck Rule. The schedule. David Patten’s unconscious head touching the sidelines. Mo Lewis’s hit on Bledsoe. Just too many to count.

  Plus no one for the life of us had the first clue what this would mean going forward. Whether this was just one-and-done like some fluky college basketball national champion that caught fire for a few weeks, never to return to the Final Four, or the start of something lasting. There were so many clutch performances, but would the likes of Brady, Brown, and Vinatieri be able to duplicate them, or were they onetime things?

  But those were questions for other days. This was all about living in the moment and making the most of it. Of listening to Patriots radio announcer Gil Santos’s call: “Snap. Ball down. Kick is on the way. It is up and . . . it is . . . GOOD! It’s GOOD! It’s GOOD!!!” I swear to you that even all these years later, I can’t hear that call without happy-crying like I’ve been pepper sprayed.

  I just couldn’t have imagined things for Patriots fans would actually get better.

  7

  You Always Remember Your First

  The immediate aftermath of Super Bowl XXXVI was unlike anything New England fans had experienced in generations; a surprise championship from a lovable collection of underdogs simply didn’t happen in our sports. It had been a long time since any titles came our way, and those had come from Celtics and Bruins rosters lousy with Hall of Famers and statue-worthy legends. This happened in other markets.

  But we were in uncharted waters—as was waking up from a Super Bowl appearance in New Orleans without having a major, team-killing controversy blow up in our faces like a package delivered by Bugs Bunny. Instead, people who didn’t have the foresight to schedule a personal day for Monday were actually glad they hadn’t. It meant having that many more people you could talk to about what you’d just witnessed or where you’d watched the game. Or, to try to explain how the worst franchise in all of sports somehow just broke a 15-year Boston sports drought. Meaning there were a lot of discussions consisting of palms-up shrugs and “I dunno’s.” A whole region was waking up to that good kind of hangover, the kind you have after your own wedding or a great party where you unexpectedly scored with a good-looking stranger who was out of your league. The world just kind of had a glow to it.

  For the first time since the 1986 Celtics, Boston would host a championship parade. Those ones always ended at City Hall Plaza, a massive, miserable expanse of brick that is essentially Satan’s patio and stands at the foot of the eyesore building that is a monument to the bad architecture of the 1960s, the 20th-century’s most embarrassing decade. But at least the Celtics parades were in June, when the place is almost tolerable. In February the plaza was like the steppes in Siberia.

  Not that anyone was complaining. As the Celts had always done, the Patriots came out on that balcony and held one of those awkward parties when you’re just so happy you don’t care what anyone thinks. Ty Law was the de facto emcee of the event, thank God, because, as was always the case in Boston when a team went on a playoff run, this one brought out all the politicians who otherwise can’t name a single player and whose handlers tell them that pretending to care about sports tests really well with the focus groups.

  Law seemed determined to test the old adage that you should dance like no one is watching. He first made Brady and Belichick bust moves, then called up Robert Kraft. “Hey, Mr. Kraft,” he began. “Can I get an ‘Ownership, I Own the Team, I Pay All Y’All Fools Money’ . . . dance?” And like the hilarious uncle at the wedding who’s having more fun than anyone can and gives zero shits how goofy he’ll look on the videos later, he complied. It was a blast.

  Of course, you wondered if the Patriots would ever be able to do this again. Given how many things had broken exactly the way the team needed them to all season long, it was a fair question. Only time would tell if this Super Bowl was the first sign of future greatness or they were just One Hit Wonders. Whether it was the “Love Me Do” to their Beatles, or they were Biz Markie and it would forever be their “Just a Friend.”

  But that was for down the road. The days and weeks after were all about just enjoying it, for New England and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the country. Because for the first time in their existence, the Pats were collectively America’s Sweetheart. It’s not overstating it to say the nation fell in love with the Patriots and their story: the plucky, overachieving ragtag bunch that put the team before the individual and shocked the world.

  We can only guess how many cringe-worthy purple prose columns were written tying these scrappy underdogs in red, white, and blue and the literally patriotic name to the national mood, the way they did the 1980 Miracle on Ice hockey team. But hopefully they’ve all been scrubbed from the Internet. One that unfortunately still does exist is an NFL Films tribute to Foxboro Stadium called Farewell to Foxboro, which included ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio opining that God wanted the Patriots to win to heal the nation after 9/11. I’m no theologian, but looking back at it now, I can’t decide which is more bizarre, the idea that the Almighty would allow 3,000 people to be killed in the middle of a workday so He could later on cheer everyone up with a football game, or the fact that someone at ESPN once said the Patriots were a force for good in the world.

  In the spring of 2002, the Patriots had become the Next Big Thing. For a fairly spot-on comparison, picture the opening montage of Rocky III, which starts with Balboa (I am NOT giving you a Spoiler Alert for this) winning the title at the end of Rocky II, and then landing on the cover of every magazine, in credit card ads, and in The Muppet Show. Adam Vinatieri became a household name in a way that probably no placekicker ever had. He guested on Late Night with David Letterman, sitting at the desk with Dave in uber-stylish leather pants. Then came a bit
where Letterman took him up on the roof of a building to kick footballs onto the parking garage across the street. What was more significant than the obvious danger of booting footballs all over a crowded block in downtown Manhattan was who Letterman had standing on the other roof in the dark, waiting to field Vinatieri’s kicks: Donald J. Trump.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Letterman began. “Is Donald Trump bothering you? I’ll tell you something truthful, we didn’t ask him to come up here. We just found him standing on the roof of the parking garage. I think he’s up there every night.”

  Given all that’s transpired since, it’s hard to believe that world ever existed. Or that the one we’re in now does.

  The first inkling I had that Tom Brady was a different sort of star athlete than we had ever seen in New England in my lifetime was the magazine covers he was on. By way of full disclosure, up until that time in my life, I could never tell a good-looking guy from a bad-looking one. I’d enjoyed Braveheart and Ocean’s 11 without any clue that Mel Gibson and George Clooney were making panties drop all over the world. I think I’m better at it now, but then I simply had no sense of what kind of man women (or men) find attractive. So to my surprise, it turned out that the quarterback who’d imprinted on my heart for his clutch play was a heartthrob. Go figure.

  The first was, naturally enough, the cover of Sports Illustrated. It called Brady “The Natural” and “The New Prince of the NFL,” which was pretty typical stuff given that he was a new star and the youngest MVP in Super Bowl history. Less typical was the photo. He was hugging a football. Shirtless. With a dreamy, side-eye grin that could’ve been any of the boys named Corey in the issue of Non-Threatening Teen Magazine that Homer Simpson bought for Lisa when she was sick.

  The next was the profile People magazine did on him, titled “Super Cool Super Hero.” The cover of the issue featured Greta Van Susteren discussing “Why I Had Plastic Surgery.” But the top corner had a photo of Brady and a banner across the top that read, “Those lips, that chin—that Super Bowl win!” I mean, if Larry Bird ever got a mention on there with “That wispy mustache, those tiny shorts—the best in sports!” I definitely missed it.

  We were a long way from articles about the 1985 team snorting giant rails of cocaine.

  The Patriots were such a feel-good story in the aftermath of the championship that ESPN began working them into their promos. A year earlier, Bill Parcells had retired from the Jets front office and joined ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown show. So they began airing an ad where Parcells meets the rest of the crew in a hotel lobby, says, “How you doing?” to everyone, and shakes hands all around. Then one of them, standing there holding a suitcase, says, “Bill Parcells! Kind of a bummer, huh? You leave New England. Patriots win the Super Bowl. Ouch! That hurts!” So a deadpan Parcells reaches down and flips open the latches on the suitcase, spilling the contents all over the floor. Then he grabs the open luggage by the handle and chucks it across the lobby. “I’ll see you guys later,” he says and walks away. The guy holding the suitcase was the Worldwide Leader’s top NFL reporter, Chris Mortensen. Remember that name.

  While the rest of the country was still taking the Patriots out of the box and shaking the Styrofoam packing peanuts off to get a good long look at their new champions, I think by and large people still didn’t know what to make of Bill Belichick. Make no mistake, among Patriots fans, this championship gave him a Willie Wonka Golden Ticket to godlike status. Permanently. Irrevocably. And even if you weren’t a Pats fan, there was no denying the brilliance of the job he’d done, turning this team on the decline into a winner in just two years.

  But still, there was resistance to Belichick, especially among the old-school press. Those beat writers and newspaper columnists who, with the Internet still in its toddler years, were still operating off the old model where the press made reputations, good and bad. There was an obvious resentment toward the way Belichick talked to them, dismissed their questions at his press conferences, and went to great lengths to give them only the information he was contractually required to give. Not to mention that most of the guys covering the Patriots were still Parcells loyalists who always appreciated how he gave them mountains of material to work with. He was a quote machine who gave them fodder for columns that practically wrote themselves. Some of those who maybe weren’t beholden to Parcells resented the way Belichick had treated Drew Bledsoe. Wherever their loyalties lay, it seemed like whatever credit Belichick grudgingly got from the Boston media was for the most part like poison in their mouths.

  But Pats fans loved Belichick for it. In sports, like politics, there’s usually no better way to fire up your base than by going to war with the media. This was the same press that had been in the business of tossing verbal bombs at the teams we cared about since the days when Boston papers were making life miserable for Ted Williams. It was an upside-down pyramid, with the media putting themselves on top and the people they covered on the bottom. But now Belichick had flipped the pyramid and made himself completely bulletproof in the eyes of the fan base.

  The best part was the manner in which Belichick did battle with them. He didn’t go on the attack. He didn’t get into arguments with them, thus turning them into martyrs. He was just . . . dismissive toward them. He treated the press like something he had to tolerate. He didn’t push them around, so there was nothing for them to push back against. Every press conference became Passive/Aggressive Theater, where every question could be met with a long, deadly silence or a killer eye roll that made it excruciating for the assembled media hordes but appointment viewing for the rest of us.

  But there were still layers of the Belichick onion to peel back. For instance, that Sports Illustrated issue that had shirtless, teen heartthrob Tom Brady on the cover had a revelation about the coach that was borderline shocking to those of us who only knew him as the gruff, Mr. Crankpants who monotoned his way through reporters’ questions.

  In a long interview with Cleveland Brown’s legend Jim Brown, who was in prison for smashing his wife’s car windows in with a shovel and refusing a judge’s order to get counseling, Brown was being critical of modern-day athletes, particularly black athletes, who he felt weren’t doing enough to further the cause of social justice. Asked if there were any contemporary athletes he admired, Brown said, “Let me tell you about someone I do admire. Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots has contributed more to the work I surround myself with than any black athlete in modern times—financially, intellectually, every way. He’s been in the prisons with me. He’s met gang members in my home; he’s met gang members in Cleveland [where Belichick coached the Browns from ’91 to ’95]. He’s put up money. He’s opened up areas of education for us very quietly and very strongly. Imagine what would happen if Michael Jordan did the same thing.”

  It was mind-boggling. At the time, Belichick had just struck me as a man who, when he wasn’t breaking down film to game plan for football games, relaxed by breaking down film to game plan for other football games. This was a side to him I had no idea existed. I was already smitten with the man for what he had done on the sidelines and in the front office.

  From that moment forward, Bill Belichick was my Spirit Animal.

  Belichick was under no illusions about his team. He fully realized that while they showed exactly the kind of toughness, tenacity, and clutch play that football coaches are dreaming about when they’re lying on the rug twitching their legs and barking, he also knew they got every break. There was an element of luck to that championship, and they were not talented enough to compete year in and year out. Reportedly he was in his office minutes after the Super Bowl and someone asked how many roster spots he’d have to upgrade to be a perennial contender. “About twenty,” he said.

  Repeatedly, the Patriots denied they had any intention of trading Bledsoe, despite the obvious fact that there was no way they could bring him back. First of all, for all of Bledsoe’s high-road good-teammatism, he was miserable—a six-foot-five, 240-pou
nd tower of resentment. Not to read too much into body language, but that was made clear by the extra footage that came out of the Super Bowl pregame. A wild, pumped-up Tom Brady was jumping all over Bledsoe in the tunnel, grabbing him by the shoulders, screaming, “I told you I’d get you here!!!” like a hyperactive puppy, with Drew looking like the old dog who wants no part of it.

  Secondly, there was just no way to make it work from a practical standpoint. Bledsoe, the backup, was the highest paid quarterback in football. Brady, the starter and Super Bowl MVP, was the league’s lowest paid starter, at $375,000 per year. Not to mention the contract that Patriots VP Andy Wasynczuk had negotiated with Bledsoe’s agent the year before basically assured they’d deal him, because it meant a salary cap hit of less than a million bucks.

  Still, the Patriots stuck to the story that they were perfectly content to bring both quarterbacks to camp, which was fine by me. Maybe Mick should’ve told Rock and Adrian the truth. But like any husband who’s ever been asked, “Do I look OK in this?” I’m all about harmless falsehoods when they serve the greater good. In the wise words of Fleetwood Mac, tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

  It was a game of chicken between the Patriots and the 20 or so teams that could’ve used the services of a three-time Pro Bowl QB who’d just turned 30, and Belichick, along with VP of Player Personnel Scott Pioli, didn’t blink. The bidding war for Bledsoe was on, and the Patriots held the gavel. As the April draft approached, you just assumed someone in the gallery would hold up their paddle and say, “A first round pick,” but no one did. Day 1 of the draft came and went and still, crickets.

  They did make a trade in the first round of the draft, but it was moving up from their spot with the 32nd pick up to No. 21, where they took tight end Daniel Graham out of Colorado. In the second round, they took wide receiver Deion Branch out of Louisville; he was solidly built, but only five foot nine. In the seventh round they took another receiver, David Givens out of Notre Dame. While not nearly as highly rated, at six feet and 212 pounds, he could hopefully give them the size Branch lacked.