Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  Bruschi had been a fan favorite, if not from the beginning of his career then certainly from the time he got off the bench. He made himself into a starter and evolved into an integral part of the team. He’d obviously become a team leader. Women loved him. He’d made the difficult switch from an edge pass rusher to top-flight inside linebacker. He famously negotiated all his own contracts to ensure that he’d stay in New England.

  Not to mention his name, which was so perfect you didn’t have to make the obvious jokes about it—though some people did anyway. I distinctly remember a game that season I was watching with my Weymouth buddies in our townie bar, and Bruschi made a big play. Some drunk sitting at the bar by himself (never, ever a good sign) said, “Hey, fellas! Raise ya beeahs!” Huh? What? “Hold up ya beeahs because Bruschi made a play. Get it? Brewski! Bwahahaha!” Like nobody had ever thought of that before. So I said, “What would you tell us to hold up if Ted Johnson made the play?”

  All of which is to say that Bruschi was beloved in New England. He was the kind of player whose No. 54 jersey you bought for yourself or were proud to put on your kid, which made the news that hit three days after the Pro Bowl all the more stunning. He’d been rushed to the hospital with a stroke.

  Bruschi had woken up in his home feeling . . . I believe the medical term is “weird.” Blurred vision. Numbness. His wife Heidi called 911 and a day or two later he was released. But the news footage of her leading him to their car was gut-wrenching. He was walking slowly and deliberately with short baby steps, unsteady on his feet. I’m not being a wiseass, just being descriptive when I say it reminded you of Jack Nicholson in his hospital johnny at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His doctors confirmed the stroke was probably due in part to the lousy circulation caused by being on the long flight from Honolulu, combined with a congenital condition in his heart called an atrial septal defect, which they repaired surgically.

  Bruschi announced that he planned to sit out the 2005 season. To a person, we were all thinking the same thing: 2005? We’d just watched him need help getting into a car. He has a heart condition. None of us ever expected to see him play again. In fact, the idea was terrifying to anyone who remembered Boston Celtics star and local legend Reggie Lewis come back from a heart condition against the advice of a slew of doctors, only to drop dead. Which was all of us.

  If there were a way you wanted to begin an off-season in which you were trying to be the first team ever to win three straight Super Bowls, this was the polar opposite.

  The horrible news about Bruschi engendered a lot of sympathy nationwide. He was a universally respected player who won over a lot of people with that video of him playing with his sons, and he was a proven winner. So that notwithstanding, I’ve always been convinced that it was somewhere around this time, meaning after the third championship, that the world began to turn on the Patriots.

  Not that they were seen as cheaters or lucky or outrageously obnoxious, necessarily. Just that the Patriots had begun to commit the one unpardonable sin in American sports in the 21st century.

  They didn’t go away.

  We had all become a Limited Attention Span people. We were starting to zip past commercials with our DVRs and TiVo, texting, and setting up our own music playlists. The days with Joe Louis being the heavyweight champ every year, the Yankees going to every World Series, and the Celtics winning eight straight NBA titles were your grandfather’s world. The Patriots were the center of the galaxy for three out of the last four Super Sundays, and it was time for them to fade into obscurity.

  The NFL is set up to make sure that happens. Assistant coaches leave to go prove they can be the head guy somewhere else. Players who’ve won rings want to get paid. And opposing teams are willing to pay them, hoping their winning ways will spread throughout the organization, like transplanting hair onto a bald spot.

  That had happened to the three-time champion Cowboys a decade earlier, and they never made it back to another Super Bowl. The late-90s Broncos actually violated the salary cap to win their back-to-back titles, and between having to cut payroll and losing John Elway to retirement, they couldn’t compete for years to come.

  The Patriots went into the 2005 off-season with major decisions to make. Bill Belichick had lost both his coordinators to job promotions elsewhere and they needed to be replaced. He had core players who had won multiple rings whose contracts were coming up and they would not be cheap to keep. And once again, his team’s postseason run had given the rest of the league a head start. There was a lot of heavy lifting ahead.

  Belichick’s first order of business was to name Eric Mangini to replace Romeo Crennel as defensive coordinator. Belichick and Mangini were close, professionally and personally. They met when Mangini was a ball boy with the Browns at the age of 23. Belichick admired his work ethic and desire to learn, so he mentored him, later promoting Mangini to a public relations post and then an offensive assistant’s job to kind of show him the ropes. Belichick then brought Mangini along to be his assistant with the Jets and again when he took the Patriots job. In their personal lives, Mangini had Belichick do a reading at his wedding (I always like that it went, “And Jesus told his disciples do . . . your . . . job . . .”) and named a son, Luke William, after him.

  Surprisingly, Belichick didn’t name an official offensive coordinator. The plan was pretty nonspecific, but it seemed to involve a lot of input from him as well as play calling from the quarterback coach Josh McDaniels, who, at 29, was only one year older than Tom Brady.

  Some of the Patriots’ biggest names and members of the Three Ring Club were looking to get paid like it. Ty Law was especially vocal about it. In fact, he had been for a while. A year earlier, he had called a Patriots’ offer of four years and $26 million “a slap in the face,” cited “irreconcilable differences,” and wanted to buy out his contract. “That bridge is burned,” he said. “I no longer want to be a Patriot. I can’t even see myself putting on that uniform again, that’s how bad I feel about playing here.” He later said Belichick “lies to feed his family.” But neither the coach nor the organization fired back. And as big a deal as fightin’ words like that might be on another team, no one really heard his words over the noise of all those Super Bowl rings clanging together.

  But this off-season, enough was enough. Law’s contract was up. They had just won a title without him. They could do it again. They had young cornerbacks like Asante Samuel they were developing, and they felt they’d gotten the best years of Law’s career. So they let him walk and he signed with the Jets.

  A tougher situation was boiling over with Adam Vinatieri. For all he’d done, he was still a kicker. He was worthy of being paid like the most important kicker in the league, but not worth whatever crazy dollars he could make on the open market from some dumb team looking to make a splashy signing. So they put the Franchise Tag on him, which locked him up for one more year. But that position was going to have to be addressed.

  Probably the ugliest situation was with Richard Seymour, whose contract dispute caused him to dig in his heels and hold out for the first four games. The unintentionally funny part about that was reading the Boston Globe’s Ron Borges, who had ridiculed the team for drafting Seymour in the first place, now talk about him like he was striking a blow for oppressed workers everywhere. A one-man Homestead Mill strike, standing up against Robert Kraft’s evil Carnegie Steel. As long as you were going up against the Patriots in any kind of dispute, you were always an instant hero in the eyes of Boston’s football media. Fortunately, the matter was settled and Seymour signed a long-term extension.

  The reaction to the Patriots’ 2005 draft was eerily similar to that ’01 class the press hated so much. Their first pick at the end of Round 1 was guard Logan Mankins out of Fresno State. I was watching it live with my brother Jack, who practically raised me to be the draft nerd I was. I must not have seen an offensive lineman as a top priority or done any research on the position because my instant reaction was, “I swear
to you, I’ve never heard his name before.” But not everyone was in the dark about Mankins. “I had them taking him,” Jack said, “in the second round.”

  By and large, Mankins was seen as a reach at No. 32 overall. He’d been coached by Belichick’s coaching buddy Pat Hill, so it was suggested there was some kind of weird nepotism going on there. Regardless, OG is the least sexy position in all of sports, so no one was especially excited given that the Patriots had lost Ty Law and Tedy Bruschi and seemed to be doing nothing about it. The reaction was pretty much the same for the rest of the draft, starting with Ellis Hobbs, a five-foot-nine, 188-pound corner from Iowa State.

  By far the most curious pick was quarterback Matt Cassel out of USC in Round 7. Curious because he hadn’t started in college, but he had been the backup to two Heisman Trophy winners for the Trojans, Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, both of whom were top-ten NFL picks. So the thinking was that maybe the kid could play, he just wasn’t as good as the best player in the country.

  Hoping to once again strike inexpensive, store-brand, free agent gold at low, low prices, Belichick and Scott Pioli signed linebackers Monty Beisel and Chad Brown to help mitigate the loss of Bruschi and Roman Phifer, who was released. They might have come cheap, but they were not anyone’s idea of gold. Trying to replace Bruschi and Phifer with Beisel and Brown was like making Dumb and Dumberer and casting Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson to replace Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. (Which somebody actually did. And we wonder why the world is so messed up.) It certainly didn’t help any when linebacker Ted Johnson announced his retirement at the start of training camp.

  Once again, the Patriots had earned the Thursday night season kickoff game to drop their third banner in the nation’s face in prime time, this time against Oakland. The Raiders had very few similarities to that team that had skulked out of the old Foxboro stadium after the Snow Bowl game four seasons earlier. They’d been through two coaching changes. Quarterback Rich Gannon had been replaced by Kerry Collins, and the biggest addition to their starting lineup in years was their pickup of Vikings wideout Randy Moss. As I said before, Moss’s reputation was like that of Terrell Owens, one of those modern players who are considered self-absorbed divas who only care about making highlight plays that would get them TV face time. Depending on whom you were talking to, Moss was either an extremely talented free spirit who spoke his mind, or everything that’s wrong with everything. Therefore, he seemed like a perfect fit for the Raiders. Like his new boss Al Davis, Moss was a rebel, a bad boy, and a true original.

  Moss was also virtually uncoverable, as the Patriots quickly found out. He finished the game with 130 yards on five receptions, the most impressive of which was a 73-yard touchdown that gave the Raiders a 14–10 lead. The Patriots managed to come back with three touchdowns, two by Corey Dillon, and win 30–20, but it was a struggle for much of the game against an Oakland team that wasn’t very good.

  Which is how it went for pretty much the whole first half of that title defense season. In fact, the Patriots became the first team in NFL history to alternate wins and losses through the first nine games of a season. The pattern was established with the win over Oakland, a loss at Carolina, and then a tough win over the Steelers in Pittsburgh. In that one, the Patriots managed to come from behind in the fourth quarter and take the lead, see the Steelers tie the game 20–20 with 1:25 to go, then put together a five-play, 37-yard drive to win it on a Vinatieri field goal as time expired. But they paid a heavy price, as Rodney Harrison and left tackle Matt Light were both injured and out for the year.

  Harrison and Light were more than just among the best players on the Patriots; they were vocal, entertaining, and respected leaders on the team. Added to the losses of Law, Bruschi, Phifer, and Johnson, and Seymour’s holdout, from the outside looking in, the team seemed to be in kind of an emotional fugue state. And so were Patriots fans.

  It was during this stretch that I started to pick up this weird sort of negativity, the likes of which I’d never detected in Patriots fans before. A kind of sense of entitlement. I can’t quantify it. There’s no way to measure it, but I know it when I see it. Like every win is expected and every loss is a personal affront. Like you’re owed success. It’s the kind of thing that can only come with too much success. Picture Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, when overnight he goes from hustling for spare change on the streets to living in a mansion, and he starts getting pissed off at his party guests for touching all his nice stuff. Or, to use a sports analogy, think of it by the name I gave it: the Yankeefanification of Pats fans.

  Take, for example, a 41–17 blowout loss to the San Diego Chargers at Gillette. As the score would indicate, it was a terrible performance all around, and the people in the stands let them know it, booing loudly and voting with their feet by streaming out of the stadium early in the fourth quarter. No surprise there. It happens. But this was the Patriots’ first home loss since 2002. Losses like that suck when you’re paying good money and taking a day out of your life to sit there and watch it. New England had just gotten used to not seeing losses and couldn’t deal with it.

  The boy-girl-boy-girl win/loss pattern continued into a wildly emotional Sunday night game against the Bills. Against all odds and expectations, but apparently not against his doctor’s advice, Tedy Bruschi was already back from his stroke. And in the starting lineup.

  My brother Jack and I were at this game. I can honestly tell you Bruschi was all anyone could talk about at the tailgate scene. You didn’t want to worry. You reminded yourself that there are strokes and then there are STROKES, and the medical advice he got was that there was no more risk of harm to him than there was to the other 21 men on the field with him. But still. You couldn’t help think he was taking risks and fearing the worst.

  Until the game began. Then we were all in. On the third play of the game, Buffalo running back Willis McGahee was tackled by Willie McGinest, with some unquantifiable amount of help from Bruschi. As the public address announcer boomed, “Tackle on the play by Willie McGinest and . . . Tedy Bruschi!” the place erupted. Legend has it that any time he got anywhere near the end of the play he was getting credited with the stop. But whatever. Who cares? The official box score had him down for seven tackles, which feels about right. But so what? It’s only stats. If you were ever going to pad them, this was the time.

  What has always stuck with me from that game was an incident that helps prove my point about the changing attitudes of Patriots fans. With the game close and Buffalo facing a third and long, Jack and I started making noise. Not forming words. Not swearing. Not being abusive. Just the kind of “defense” noise people have been making when their team needs a stop since the days of Amos Alonzo Stagg. And the lady sitting in front of us shushed us.

  Literally. She turned around, looked at us, and did the “Shhh!” thing like we were talking behind her at a movie. I was struck dumb. Honestly, there was such a genocide of wrong in it I couldn’t form words. I was like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman when Veronica Corningstone said, “Your hair looks stupid!” “Whaaat?” I whispered. “What did you saaayyy?” Again, Yankeefanification, of a sort that was hard to process when you grew up at Pats games where you felt like if the death toll stayed in the single digits you were having a pleasant day at the game.

  The Pats did manage to pull off a come-from-behind win thanks to 14 unanswered points in the fourth. But whatever inspiration the team was getting out of Tedy’s return didn’t translate into results, the low point coming when the Colts came to town and demolished them, 40–21. The Patriots’ defense was utterly defenseless, giving up 321 yards passing to Peyton Manning and 453 total yards. The Colts put together nine drives and scored on seven of them. In short, they made Indy’s offense look like every team made Indy’s offense look except the Patriots.

  With the right coaching, you can deal with the loss of players and the loss of games. It’s when the real losses hit a team that no amount of coaching can help. And that’s the loss of fa
mily, which happened before the week 11 game against New Orleans. In the locker room after the game, Belichick told the team that his father Steve had died the night before, so he was going to be taking a few hours off to deal with it. The last time the public had seen the two Coach Belichicks together was getting celebratory ice water dumped on them after making history. It was the way every football coach worth his whistle would want to be remembered.

  The younger Belichick’s team rallied somewhat down the stretch, winning five of six games and winning the AFC East with 10 wins going into the final game against Miami. That game mattered only as far as playoff seedings, and what it meant to New England was that if they lost to Miami, then by the tiebreaking formula, they would host the Jacksonville Jaguars, which was by far the most favorable matchup. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Belichick, who looked at all the angles like Pythagoras, did not want to beat Miami.

  The problem was that you’re not supposed to outright throw a game without getting your paying customers, the NFL, and, in extreme cases, the U.S. Department of Justice coming down on you. The Patriots didn’t exactly tank, but they didn’t try their hardest to win, either. It would be better if they lost but didn’t look like they wanted to lose. Like Han Solo said, “Keep your distance, Chewie. But don’t look like you’re trying to keep your distance. . . . Fly casual.”

  The Patriots flew casual in a close game before taking Tom Brady out and subbing in Matt Cassel. Unfortunately, Cassel played really well, which was not part of the plan. In the final seconds of the game he connected with Ben Watson on a touchdown that made it a 28–26 game, Miami. After a time-out and a meeting with Cassel, it was decided that they would in fact go for the conversion to tie it, rather than just admit the obvious that they did not want to tie the game. Cassel went back to pass and, in what I assume was following orders, chucked the ball into the crowd of guys in Revolutionary War costumes who stand 30 feet behind the end zone. Cassel had snatched defeat from the jaws of unwanted victory. He did. His. Job.