Five Rings Page 9

  At the same time, the San Diego Chargers had made strong safety Rodney Harrison available. The season before he had turned 30, and the Chargers felt he had lost a step and it was time to move on. Harrison saw it slightly differently. He had suffered a groin pull in the first game of the season. In fact, his muscle had pulled off the bone by 30 percent. “The doctors told me I’d miss eight weeks,” he said. “I missed two.”

  In spite of being a two-time Pro Bowler and former first team All Pro, Harrison drew interest from only two teams. His reputation for being a cheap-shot artist and a headhunter was far more prevalent than the one he earned for how well he played. He led the NFL in unnecessary roughness penalties and fines throughout his 10-year career. He was the NFL’s Dirty Harry Callahan, getting the job done, but always getting called into the chief’s office to get screamed at about how his brutal tactics were getting the department in trouble with the mayor.

  The Patriots were one of those teams; the other was Oakland. After meeting with the Raiders, Harrison was on a flight to Boston and probably a ride to Gillette in a 1972 AMC Pacer for all anyone knows. Harrison says they took him to the Ground Round, an old restaurant chain in the Boston area where you could throw peanut shells on the floor, your kids’ meals cost whatever they weighed, and there was a clown on the premises full time. And after one meeting there with Belichick and Pioli, Harrison didn’t need to talk to anyone else.

  “The first thing Coach Belichick told me was, ‘I like the way you warm up, the intensity of it,’” he told Sports Illustrated. “I’m thinking, ‘Damn, this guy really knows football.’ So we sat there and talked, the coach, Scott Pioli and me, and they told me, ‘You give us a chance to win,’ and that’s what I needed to hear. No B.S., no wining and dining, just straight football.”

  Pioli put it this way: “Bill and I have a rule. If a guy needs the sizzle, he’s not for us.”

  As glad as Patriots fans were to have Harrison on the team, it still seemed an odd move, because he and Lawyer Milloy not only played the same position, but they were also practically the same player. Milloy was basically Harrison, without the football version of a rap sheet. Publicly, the team spun it that Harrison was there to replace Tebucky Jones. But behind the scenes, they were working on Milloy to take a pay cut, which he was resisting. It had to feel for Milloy like he was the youngest kid on a family sitcom that just brought in another kid who is younger and cuter. His days were numbered.

  Next, the Patriots made a big upgrade from Steve Martin—in the most literal sense. Nose tackle Ted Washington had been with four teams in his 12-year NFL career and was a force of nature: a massive, space-eating, but semi-mobile body to plant in the middle of your defensive line that was virtually unblockable. He was officially listed at 365 pounds, but scientists could only estimate his mass by measuring how light bent around him. And in less time than it took for that light to travel, he had the perfect New England nickname, because the highest peak in the region is Mt. Washington.

  On draft day, they added more help to the defense. They went into the draft with two first rounders, their own 19th overall and the 14th, which came from Buffalo in the Drew Bledsoe trade. With the Buffalo pick, they took defensive tackle Ty Warren out of Texas A&M, who, at six foot five, 300 pounds, would be the slightly smaller bookend of Richard Seymour. They then traded their own first rounder to Baltimore, for their first rounder the following year and the 36th overall pick, which they used on defensive back Eugene Wilson.

  As always when this happens, it’s a crushing disappointment. Like all NFL draft nerds, I’m not interested in advance planning and long-term strategy. I’m more of the “What do we want? Instant gratification! When do we want it? When do you think???” type.

  But it wouldn’t take much more than a year to find out this would be one of Belichick and Pioli’s most brilliant moves.

  In the fourth round they further bolstered their defensive backfield with cornerback Asante Samuel out of Central Florida. In the fifth they picked up center Dan Koppen from Boston College, in hopes he’d replace their current center, Bobby Grier’s 1999 first rounder Damien Woody from Boston College. In all, they pulled the trigger on 10 picks, no fewer than five of whom would become starters at some point in their Patriots careers.

  With free agents signed and the draft behind them, the Patriots still had one massive personnel decision left unresolved, and that was still the Lawyer Milloy situation. At age 29, Milloy was in the fourth year of a seven-year, $35 million contract, which gave him a cap hit of just under $5.9 million for the coming season, and the Patriots wanted to restructure the deal to reduce that number. Milloy and his side saw no reason to. A deal is a deal, and they felt he was holding up his end, which was hard to argue against. Milloy had started 109 consecutive games. He’d been elected team captain each of the last three seasons. He was a leader on an elite defense that had brought the franchise their first championship. He led the team in tackles for four straight seasons from 1998 to 2001. On their end, it was kind of hard to identify what he had done to deserve a pay cut, and the negotiations went nowhere from April through deep into training camp.

  The team, as is so often the case, saw things differently. For openers, this was the first great test of the system Belichick had sold to Robert Kraft during the friendly talks they had when Bill Parcells was still running the show and Kraft was wondering where the fun in owning a football franchise was. It was the system that said winning is not all about high-priced talent, and managing your salary structure would directly lead to success on the field. Which, by its very nature, would mean hard decisions would have to be made.

  Next, it was about that attitude adjustment Belichick felt the team needed to make. Without question, Milloy was a hardworking, high-intensity leader of the team, which, counterintuitive though it may be, is not always a good thing. Years later I would talk to a Patriots writer who described it like this: “Did you ever have that guy in your office who’s always bitching that nothing is ever good enough? Saying everything sucks, nobody in management knows what they’re doing, things would be much better off if they’d just listen to him and eventually he just drags everyone down?” That was Lawyer Milloy. He was a good guy of high character and a tireless worker, but what one coach described to Michael Holley in Patriots Reign as “a negative leader.”

  On the Tuesday before the first game of the season, the Patriots announced they had cut Milloy. It was by far the most shocking personnel move in Boston sports in decades—perhaps the biggest since Bobby Orr was traded by the Bruins to the Chicago Blackhawks in the mid-1970s. This wasn’t some veteran at the end of the line getting traded or some free agent leaving to chase big money elsewhere. This was a cornerstone player being kicked down the front steps because he wouldn’t take a pay cut. None of us had ever seen anything like it.

  On the surface, it seemed diabolical. This, after all, was the one player who hugged Belichick in that post–Super Bowl victory moment. Hell, the coach who mostly seemed beyond the capacity for human emotions spent a good minute in the Superdome the center of a Loving Embrace Sandwich between Milloy and his own daughter. It was hard not to see that and extrapolate a father/son relationship there.

  No Patriots fan was used to it. (Author’s note: Yet.) It seemed like some real heartless, cutthroat stuff. Accounting principles applied to a very emotional game. The sports equivalent of The Godfather when Tessio’s plan to have his new Don whacked fails and he says, “Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked him.”

  Belichick didn’t use those exact words, but something close to them. “This is a player and person I have immense respect for, and he meant a lot to this team and organization,” he said. “Unfortunately, he’s a casualty of the system. The timing is not good. We tried to find a way to make it work. In the end, we weren’t able to get to that point.”

  It was only business.

  For everyone outside the Patriots front office, it seemed like lunacy, dropping cherry bombs into t
he toilets of this great new house they’d just built for no apparent reason. Or worse, it was treating people like numbers instead of valuing them as individuals, like George Orwell’s 1984. Or to make a comparison to something I’m actually familiar with, like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Clark Griswold’s boss canceling his Christmas bonus and enrolling him in a Jelly-of-the-Month club instead.

  The Patriots players were more shocked than anyone. Ty Law, for one, wasn’t buying the “It’s not personal, just business” notion. “There’s such a thing as good business and bad business,” Law said. “I don’t know what category this one falls under. But to my eyes, and being selfish, at this late in the game and in regard to him and his family, I’m quite sure this is something that could have been done a long time ago.”

  By this time, Tedy Bruschi had emerged as a fan favorite for his hyperemotional style and his clutch overachieving play as an undersized defensive end turned middle linebacker. Plus, he and Milloy were roommates as rookies back in that 1996 Super Bowl season. He made no effort to hide the effect the move had in the locker room. “Has it ever been this quiet in here? I don’t think it has,” he said. “I think ‘shocked’ is the word. . . . You sort of just shake your head and ask yourself, ‘Why?’”

  To use the vernacular of the U.S. military around that time frame, Bruschi’s “shock” would turn to “shock and awe” in just a matter of days—which is how long it took Milloy to be signed by the team the Patriots were to face in week 1 of the season: the Bills, at Buffalo. It was bananas.

  10

  Pond Scum Again

  In their first two reunion games against Drew Bledsoe the previous year, the Patriots had won them both by a combined score of 65–24. Even still, there were resentful pro-Bledsoe/anti-Belichick holdouts among us. My brother Jim was still one, to the point where the previous December I drew his name in the Christmas grab and bought him a No. 11 Bledsoe Bills jersey, which he cherished. Now with Milloy also switching uniforms, the emotional poker chips would be stacked up even higher for everyone involved.

  It was a debacle of the highest degree. Regardless of what the actual scoreboard said, on the abstract scoreboard that tracks revenge, it was Bills 1, Patriots negative infinity.

  An early pass interference penalty by Ty Law set up the first Buffalo touchdown. A 15-play Bills drive made it 14–0. Tom Brady then threw an interception to enormous Buffalo defensive lineman Sam Adams, who rumbled with the speed of an advancing glacier 37 yards for another touchdown. And if leaving that mess on the rug wasn’t bad enough for Brady, Bledsoe stuck his nose in it by throwing Adams’s arm over his shoulders and physically helping to escort him back to the sideline.

  And yet, that wasn’t even the low point of the day. Nor did it come on the Patriots’ very next play from scrimmage after the ensuing kickoff, when Adams sacked Brady for a loss of 9 yards. No, the ultimate indignity came on the drive shortly before the half, when Brady was sacked again by . . . wait for it . . . Lawyer Milloy.

  For what wasn’t the first time and by no means will be the last time, I’ll say that you couldn’t make it up.

  Another interception by Brady led to a Bills’ touchdown, and his fourth and final interception set up a field goal that made the final score 31–0. It was humiliating in every way that a football game can be. From the outside looking in, it was almost impossible to see anything other than a team that had lost all their fight thanks to a bookkeeping decision.

  Worse, it all just seemed so unnecessary to those of us who found the topics of fiscal responsibility and sound salary structure boring, like having a meeting with your life insurance rep in the middle of your day off. We simply loved to watch Lawyer Milloy beat the snot out of ball carriers and quarterbacks the way he had Brady. He was an integral part of this team that used to be tough and intimidating and brutal for opponents to face. Now they just felt like victims—not just of a nastier and more motivated team, but also of their own coach’s desire to put accounting methods ahead of flesh-and-blood football players.

  Fans were livid. The Boston Globe’s beat writer Nick Cafardo’s mailbox and inbox were flooded with snail mail letters and emails that caused him to say he had never seen a backlash like it. “If this forum is any indication, and I think it is,” he said, “people are fuming over this.” The Boston Herald’s beat writer Kevin Mannix, never a Belichick fan, was slightly less diplomatic. “Bill Belichick is pond scum again,” he wrote. “Arrogant, megalomaniacal, duplicitous pond scum.”

  The national reaction was even more severe, if that’s possible; it was certainly more to the point. In ESPN’s pregame show the following Sunday, analyst and former Denver Bronco Tom Jackson, in answer to a panel discussion the topic of which was “Has Belichick Lost His Team?” simply said, “I want to put this very clearly: They hate their coach.”

  At that moment the Patriots were in Philadelphia, getting ready for the late afternoon game against the Eagles, and they weren’t exactly thrilled to have this retired player from another team—whom few of them had ever even met—describing their emotional state. “I respect Tom Jackson, but that is one of the stupidest things I ever heard,” Rodney Harrison said the next day. “He has no idea what we think about Belichick. . . . Sometimes you have to make business decisions. I was disappointed that Lawyer left, but it’s business.”

  For his part, Belichick took a hard pass on answering Jackson back. “I am not going to dignify the comments with any type of response,” was all he had to say. His actual verbal counterattack would come much, much later.

  The more important story line was how his team responded on the field. Their defense flat-out dominated the Eagles on the way to a 31–10 victory. They sacked five-year pro Donovan McNabb eight times and intercepted him twice, the latter of which was picked off by Bruschi and returned for a touchdown. Tom Brady added three touchdown passes of his own. If this was what hating your coach is like, then loving your coach is way overrated.

  What no one could’ve possibly realized is what that victory over Philly meant in the proverbial Big Picture. If anything, the players in the locker room seemed way more affected by an injury to Rosevelt Colvin that would cost him the rest of the season than anything the coach had done to some former player two weeks earlier. Not only were they NOT going to fall apart in the absence of Lawyer Milloy’s leadership; not only did they NOT hate their coach. This was nothing less than the first win of the best back-to-back seasons by any team in NFL history. Before or since. If you’re looking for that one moment that turned this franchise from an unlikely champion into a dynasty, it was this game.

  A win over the Jets the next week was followed by a rather uninspiring loss to the Redskins at Washington, in which Brady threw three interceptions and was more or less outplayed by the immortal Patrick “Career Won/Loss Record of 10–14” Ramsey. Spoiler alert: It was still only September, and yet the Patriots wouldn’t play uninspired football again all year.

  Or lose another game until October. Of 2004.

  And if I can get semi-autobiographical for a moment here, while this was going on, a random series of events had started that, while they had nothing to do with the Patriots, eventually made following the Patriots my job.

  Around this time, I had been contacted by a producer from HBO about a Red Sox documentary they were working on. I’d been doing standup comedy around Boston for years, and a comic I’d worked with who’d seen me do quite a bit of sports material had given them my number. I told the producer I was just getting in the door from my crappy day job, the kids were running around, my wife was at the piano teaching a singing lesson, and I’d almost let the answering machine take his call, but I’d talk to him if he wanted. We ended up talking for an hour and a half, and he said he’d like to schedule an interview.

  The documentary was The Curse of the Bambino. It was basically baseball writers and Boston fans talking about decades of the Red Sox being either terrible or just good enough to get close to a championship and t
hen lose in excruciating ways. I was one of the fans.

  In 2003, it had been 85 years since the Red Sox had won a World Series, and Sox fans existed on a spectrum. On one end were the people who were philosophical about it, the ones who typically wore cardigans with leather patches on the elbows and compared the team’s failures to the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill. I was on the other end, among the less poetic types who compared the terrible losses to the universe kicking us square in the nuts with steel-toed boots.

  The movie included us all when it first aired in mid-September. A few days later I was contacted by my little town paper, the kind with maybe 500 readers, most of whom get the paper for the yard sale notices and none of whom are under the age of 65. They wanted to do a feature on the local guy who was in this premium cable documentary, and interviewed me.

  It was with that as a backdrop that the 2–2 Patriots hosted the Tennessee Titans on a Sunday afternoon. It was game 5 of the Patriots season. And at the same time at Fenway Park, the Sox were hosting the Oakland A’s in game 4 of the American League Division series. They had lost the first two games of the best-of-five series before winning the third, but were still facing elimination. This made for a surreal scene at Gillette.

  The Titans were more than just a quality opponent. Three out of the last four seasons, they’d won 11 games once and 13 games twice. Just four seasons earlier, they’d literally come within a yard of beating the Rams in the Super Bowl. Their offense was led by Eddie George, one of the most accomplished running backs in the league, and quarterback Steve McNair, who was on his way to a co-MVP season. And yet, it was clear that the stadium crowd was paying at least as much attention to the Sox game as they were to the Patriots game playing out in front of their faces.

  Through a combination of portable radios, early generation smartphones, and the Patriots’ own scoreboard updates, the crowd was cheering at seemingly random times having nothing to do with the game. It was like trying to have a serious conversation with your kid who’s reacting to what’s happening over your shoulder on SpongeBob.