Five Rings Read online

  The big news came on Day 2, when the Patriots announced they had traded Bledsoe. The team that finally upped their bid to the required first-round draft pick was the Buffalo Bills. The Pats would have to wait until the 2003 draft, but they got the return they wanted.

  That they traded their former franchise quarterback and what they got for him was no surprise. But where they traded him was a total stunner. For any team in any sport to trade with a close rival in their own division was unheard of. It was like Israel selling arms to Syria. It just wasn’t done. Besides, these Bills were good. They’d made the playoffs a couple of years earlier. And most of New England was convinced if the 1999 Bills had just let Boston College legend Doug Flutie start their Wild Card round game instead of benching him for the mediocre Rob Johnson, they might have made a Super Bowl run. So solving Buffalo’s quarterback situation for them in exchange for a draft pick who wouldn’t help for another year either seemed like gutsy genius or pure lunacy, depending on whom you were talking to.

  Belichick had already won me over to the point I would’ve walked through the gates of Hell covered in Sterno for him. So I was in the camp that admired the pure balls of the move. Most of the writers were more skeptical. Bear in mind that this was still two years before the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. And if any of the columnists in town tried to resist comparing this trade to the time the Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, I’m afraid none of them succeeded.

  Then again, the reaction would be nothing like the next time one of the Patriots’ cornerstone players would land in Buffalo. Not by a damned sight.

  The Bledsoe trade was the yellow highlighter that drew over some points Belichick and Pioli had made earlier in the off-season: that they were fearless and would have no sacred cows. The NFL had finally rectified that weird business of having an odd number of teams by adding a 32nd franchise, the Houston Texans. That meant the other 31 teams would be allowed to protect a certain number of veterans, and the Texans could grab anyone left unprotected. Among the Patriots players left exposed were core defensive stars Willie McGinest and Ted Johnson. Fortunately, the Texans cooperated by signing neither player and they both returned for the 2002 season.

  Even without any money to spend in 2001, Belichick had struck gold with virtually every free agent signing he’d made. And he’d have to keep mining for nuggets if he was going to bring the influx of talent he admitted he needed. He brought in veteran Donald Hayes as wide receiver depth. Defensive back Victor Green had always been someone Pats coaches admired with the Jets, and at age 33 he still seemed athletic enough to take a chance on. Massive journeyman Steve Martin was signed to be the run-stuffing nose tackle they needed in the middle of the defensive line. And even though Jermaine Wiggins had been one of the heroes of the Snow Bowl, he was gone, replaced with Christian Fauria of the Seahawks. Again, no sacred cows.

  The closest thing the Patriots had to a farm animal with any amount of holiness to him was the quarterback. Belichick had staked the immediate future of the organization on the 25-year-old the second he traded Bledsoe. And so in August they did right by Brady, giving him a four-year contract extension worth $30 million.

  A lesser writer than me would segue into this next story by saying, “Speaking of cows . . .” but I respect you too much for that. Because in the summer of 2002, a Patriots coach almost died for what would’ve been the second year in a row of losing a key member of their staff.

  Offensive coordinator Charlie Weis chose to undergo risky stomach bypass surgery. Weis had been a big guy for years, and due to the stress of the job and the long hours, he was never able to get his weight under control. Knowing that he’d probably never get a head coaching position looking like he did, he opted for the surgery.

  And, as is often the case, it didn’t go well.

  The surgery led to severe internal bleeding, nerve damage, and sepsis. It was bad to the point that Weis and his wife Maura, both devout Catholics, had a priest come in to perform last rites. There was a rumor I can’t confirm that the doctors told Mrs. Weis that Archbishop Bernard Law was available, but because he was directly involved in the Boston Archdiocese sexual abuse scandal, she demanded a real priest. It might just be urban legend, but it’s one of those stories I believe just because I want to believe it. Because screw him.

  What we do know as fact is who was there holding Maura’s hand throughout this period. While waiting for the rest of the Weis family to arrive at the hospital, “Brady came in, just so he wouldn’t have to listen to my garbage if he didn’t come to visit me,” Weis explained. “The next thing you know I’m in intensive care and extremely critical condition. He stayed there with my wife until the troops could get there. . . . All day Saturday and all day Sunday, the one person who was helping my wife was Tommy.”

  Weis pulled through. He spent a good portion of training camp riding around in a golf cart, but by the season opener against the Steelers on that Monday night, he was fully recovered and back on the sideline.

  And if ever there was a way to open the first legitimate, NFL-quality stadium in the 42-year history of the franchise, this was it.

  8

  Finally, We Could Have Nice Things

  The Patriots opened the 2002 season in their new home, Gillette Stadium. For a while there, during the peak of the dot-com boom, the place was originally supposed to be named CMGI Stadium, a name that not only doesn’t roll off the tongue, but was also for a company that to this day I have no idea what they did. If there were goods or services they ever provided, it’s a damned mystery to me. But like most of those early Internet firms, their bubble burst and a Boston-based razor company stepped in to buy the naming rights to this state-of-the-art palace.

  In choosing a design, the Kraft family had opted for space over cramming a maximum number of seats into the place, choosing to put walkways and ramps in some of the corners where you could go stand with a beer and watch the game. The torture devices that were the old aluminum benches, with their seating capacity jammed so close together a preschool ballet class couldn’t fit in their assigned spaces, were replaced with comfortable, fat-ass–friendly seats with actual cup holders. They might as well have been crowns of gold, sporting gems and the skulls of our vanquished enemies.

  And they’d done something that had never been done in the 30-year history of the concrete toilet seat that was the old place: they paved the parking lot. That might not sound like a lot, but for the generations of Patriots fans who grew up breathing the dust, slogging through the mud, or snapping their axles in the giant potholes of the old parking lots, it felt like Fresh Prince moving to Bel Air.

  And the team put two plaques in the blacktop, one marking the exact location of Adam Vinatieri’s 45-yard game-tying kick against Oakland, and the other in the spot of his game-winner in overtime, the last play ever in the old stadium. Finally, we could have nice things.

  When you move into your brand-new dream home, it’s only natural that the first thing you want to unpack is your proudest achievement and put that up first. Only for the Patriots organization, it wasn’t that bass they caught to win the fishing tournament, a bowling trophy, or the framed photo from the steak house that time they finished the 64-ounce rib-eye.

  They christened Gillette by dropping the Super Bowl XXXVI banner. You simply cannot do better.

  Former President George H. W. Bush was on hand to do the coin flip at the pregame festivities before the prime-time rematch of the AFC championship game. And this time, the Steelers were even less competitive; they hung in there for a while, trailing by only three at the half. But then they put on a drive that stalled at the Patriots 1-yard line and when new kicker Todd Peterson missed the chip shot field goal, all the fight went out of them.

  After being unable to run the ball much in the first half, Charlie Weis went to a spread offense, throwing the ball on 25 consecutive plays, and Tom Brady looked uniquely comfortable in it, finishing the day with just under 300 yards and three touc
hdowns on the way to the convincing 30–14 win. It would be really dramatic to say this game was the birth of some new, high-octane, nitro-powered funny car, hurry-up attack the Patriots would take into a brave new world of football. But it would also be mostly horseshit. What this mainly was, was a demonstration of how versatile they could be, adjusting from what isn’t working to what can work in a given game.

  The Patriots scored more than 40 points in their next two games to start their title defense 3–0. If there was any kind of a Super Bowl hangover, they weren’t showing it. But as experienced hangover experts (I slowly raise my hand) can tell you, sometimes you don’t feel it right away. Sometimes the night before doesn’t catch up to you until late in the afternoon the next day. That is essentially what happened to the 2002 Patriots.

  The headache and vomiting started at the end of September. They lost their fourth game and didn’t win again until November. They lost four straight without scoring as much as 17 points in any of them. Fortunately, they were able to shake it off thanks to the extra motivation that came from facing their old pal.

  Drew Bledsoe had been welcomed to Buffalo as a savior. His arrival by jet was greeted with a rally on the airport tarmac like he was the Beatles landing at LaGuardia in 1964. And the results during Bledsoe’s first year with the team were not bad. The Bills were 5–3, a half-game out of first place in the AFC East and a half-game up on New England. Plus, Bledsoe’s offense was scoring roughly double what Brady’s was over the last month. So the Team Drew forces were doing a collective arms-folded, squinty-eyed, slow head-nod “See? Toldya so” thing.

  And with the game in Buffalo, Bills fans were sky high, making deafening amounts of drunken noise to prove that their new hero was better than the fluke who replaced him and the Patriots had made a terrible mistake they would live to regret.

  At least until game time, at which point Brady, by any objective standard, quarterbacked circles around Bledsoe. He completed an impressive 22 of 26 passes for three touchdowns, while Bledsoe threw one TD and got intercepted by Ty Law.

  The Patriots walked all over the Bills, 38–7, which you could feel great about, because divisional wins against quality teams on the road like that don’t happen very often. Plus, it shut up the pro-Bledsoe resistance fighters who were still living among us as a sort of Fifth Column. But there was another way to look at it that, looking back, was much more accurate. And that was to ask, “Where has this been for the last month?”

  It wasn’t a real positive sign that they’d gotten so up for a game against their old franchise player. It suggested that they were underachieving, that their effort was coming and going, depending on the situation. One Patriots player pulled back the blinds to give us a window into the team’s soul by saying something about them getting their “swagger” back. Michael Holley’s 2004 book Patriot Reign detailed the coach’s response. To this day it is possibly my all-time favorite Bill Belichick rant:

  I’ve read a couple of comments. Now I don’t spend a lot of time reading the paper, I really don’t. But I do watch a little about what we say and what we think. I’ve seen a couple comments here, some of the players talking about we need to get our “swagger” back. Our attitude back. You know what. We didn’t have a “swagger” last year. If you fucking think about it, we didn’t have a swagger. What we had was a sense of urgency, a sense of urgency about playing well, being smart and capitalizing on every opportunity and situation that came our way . . . it wasn’t about a fucking swagger. You can take that swagger and shove it up your ass, okay?

  When we build the Belichick Monument on the Mall in Washington, D.C., I want that chiseled in granite on an 80-foot wall.

  One major problem was that, while Belichick and Scott Pioli had batted 1.000 with their 2001 free agents, they were hitting like pitchers with their 2002 signings. Christian Fauria was an upgrade over Jermaine Wiggins. But New England Victor Green looked like the slow-motion replay of New York Jets Victor Green. Steve Martin flat-out did not grasp the role of a nose tackle in Romeo Crennel’s defense, which is to stand your ground, controlling the spaces on either side of your blocker, so that seven defenders up front can account for the eight gaps on an offensive line. Martin was constantly getting himself out of position, costing the Patriots the numbers advantage and leaving holes that opponents could exploit.

  But no one was more lost than receiver Donald Hayes. While rookies Deion Branch and David Givens proved that they grasped Weis’s complex offense, with its exponential number of route options out of every formation, mostly based on how the opposition is defending it, Hayes hadn’t a clue. He was obviously a guy who, in his previous job at Carolina, had been told to run a particular route and ran it. He quickly lost Brady’s trust, and the belief that they were reading the pass coverages the same way and that Hayes would be where Brady expected him to be evaporated. Over his last six games, he caught one pass. In Hayes’s final game, Brady threw his way exactly zero times. That was in week 12, and Hayes never played another snap in his pro career.

  Down the stretch, they apparently took Belichick’s advice and shoved the swagger up their ass, because another win over the Bills was followed by losing back-to-back games at Tennessee and at home against the Jets. An overtime win over the Dolphins gave them a final record of 9–7, good enough for a three-way tie with the Jets and Dolphins for the best record in the AFC East. But the Jets, led by Chad Pennington, the first quarterback to come off the board ahead of Brady in that 2000 draft, held the tiebreaker and won the division.

  The Patriots had defended their improbable Super Bowl win by missing the playoffs. Changes were going to have to be made.

  9

  Attitude Adjustment

  Bill Belichick went into the new year of 2003 knowing a few things. The first, that he needed to have a great draft. But that’s a platitude, like your mom saying you need to get good grades. It goes without saying.

  Second, his team needed an attitude adjustment. Not that they were a team of malcontents, but the Super Bowl win had given the club as a whole a certain sense of entitlement. The effort clearly wasn’t there as it had been the year before.

  Lastly, he’d need to do something drastic with his secondary. Not that they were terrible; they had the lowest completion percentage against them in the NFL. But, they had also surrendered the eighth most passing yards and the fifth most yards per completion, meaning teams were beating them with big chunk plays. Most of all, they were expensive. Cornerback Ty Law was the highest paid player on the team. Safety Lawyer Milloy was third, just behind Brady. Tebucky Jones had been drafted as a corner, struggled, and was moved back to safety, where he was adequate. But his contract would be up soon, and the coach was fine with letting him go get paid big money by some other sucker. Within weeks, he was traded to the New Orleans Saints for a pair of draft picks.

  But Belichick and Pioli were not about to wait for the draft to address the needs on defense. The restraint they’d shown on players’ salaries was starting to finally pay off the credit card debt the previous regime had buried them under. For the first time since they took over, they actually had some disposable income to spend.

  Belichick and Pioli had treated their three free-agency periods like holiday shoppers who sleep in on Black Friday, casually walk into the store after all the doorbuster customers have torn each other to shreds, and then sift through the clearance racks. This time, though, they went right after the big trendy toy on the front of the sales flyer.

  Outside linebacker/defensive end Rosevelt Colvin from the Chicago Bears was hitting the market at the age of 25. He was a quick pass rusher and solid against the run. Not to mention he was a thoughtful, interesting guy, with a genuine sense of humor, as opposed to being a goofy “character” type. Surprisingly, the Patriots showed interest. Surprising not because they liked his playing style—how could you not?—but that they’d be getting in on the bidding for a guy who might’ve been the best free agent out there.

  Again, this w
as only three off-seasons into the Belichick/Pioli administration, so everyone was still trying to get a handle on what exactly their philosophy and methods were. And what the 2003 free agency period taught us was a lesson that would be drilled into our heads like the multiplication tables until we learned it: the Patriots were only interested in Football Guys: players to whom football is important and who put winning ahead of everything else.

  First came the visit with Colvin. Most high-value free agents are used to getting treated like visiting royalty by teams trying to demonstrate their interest. Colvin arrived at the airport to find a Patriots employee waiting to drive him to the stadium in what can only be described as a shitbox, a 14-year-old Ford Taurus, the kind usually driven by a high school kid who has to keep the trunk shut with bungee cords and the safety inspection is a crapshoot every year.

  His visit with Belichick and Pioli was less a state dinner for the queen than it was the three of them sitting there breaking down Bears game film and Colvin explaining what his responsibility was on any given play. Then they showed him highlights of the great linebackers they’d coached with the Giants—Lawrence Taylor, Carl Banks, and Pepper Johnson—and related their play to how Colvin would fit their scheme. “Some of the other teams I’d talked to wanted to take me out for dinner and show me a good time,” Colvin later said. “But you can keep all that stuff.”

  He was sold. Colvin left more money from other teams to sign with New England for the team-friendly bargain price of $30 million over seven years.