Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  All of that had changed by January 2004. Change, in fact, was another Patriots element that was difficult to analyze. They were forever in motion—in a good way. They forced you to update your scouting reports on them weekly, because what you saw two months ago might be irrelevant today. So Sapp was probably right about the ’02 version of Hochstein. The Bucs did, after all, give up on him. But he was valuable to the Patriots, and even the man he replaced could see it.

  “Russ is like three-quarters of the guys on the line,” Woody explained. “He doesn’t have the greatest athletic skills, but he’s an overachiever, he works hard, and he’s smart. That’s about it. I think Warren was jealous. We were in the Super Bowl, and he was at home eating a sandwich.”

  Figuratively, that was true. Literally, Sapp was on the loose at Tuesday’s Media Day, the annual breeding ground for the absurd. Sapp had a microphone, an NFL Network camera crew, a bodyguard, and curious members of the media following him around the Reliant Stadium field. He approached Hochstein and asked, “Aren’t you glad I made you the center of attention?” Hochstein stared at Sapp and replied, “No more questions.” Sapp would later joke about Hochstein moving as if both of his shoes were tied together.

  Maybe it wasn’t so overt during the season, but the Patriots were used to the skeptics. There was Sapp. There was Tennessee guard Zach Piller, who said he would be shocked if the Patriots won the title. Following the AFC Championship game, when league co-MVP Peyton Manning threw five interceptions, there were complaints that the Patriots might have stretched the rules with all of their contact at the line. The Patriots obviously won a lot, but the feeling was that they didn’t win by large enough margins to snuff out the hope of their opponents.

  “I don’t want to say that we didn’t get any respect, because we did,” Brady says. “I just don’t think a lot of teams felt we were that good. They thought we were good, but not like the 49ers or the Steelers or Cowboys.”

  That was part of their motivation during the week. They had been reminded many times that they and the Panthers had accomplished the same thing. All they had done, on Wednesday of Super Bowl Week, was qualify for the game. Would they really be considered one of history’s great teams if they lost the Super Bowl? Who would be talking about the fourteen-game winning streak then? These were the things they talked about when they went to the second level of the Inter-Continental and held their meetings in Champions Ballroom. They talked about it at lunch, on the first floor, in a room called “Legends.” They tried to have good practices at Rice University so they would be ready for whatever Carolina showed them. Their actual practices were good in terms of execution and speed. But there were other problems.

  “We can’t practice here,” Belichick said as he watched his team run. The coach didn’t like the layout of the field. Just over a yard away from the playing surface, Belichick saw what he described as drainage pipes. He thought the field was too wet, and after seeing Rodney Harrison do a split—unintentionally—during one sequence, he made up his mind. He was going to the league and telling it that the venue had to be changed. He made his case and was told that the alternative venue was the Houston Texans’ practice bubble. It was to be used when it was raining. “Well,” Belichick said, “let’s pretend it’s raining.” He was told that the league did not want to favor one team and thus create some type of unfair advantage. He said he was not looking for an advantage. He just wanted to keep his players from injuring themselves on a sloped field that he said “looks like a fairway.” Belichick wasn’t going to let this one go. He pressed, and the venue was changed.

  As the Patriots moved toward the weekend there was more to think about than the condition of the practice field. Belichick had been told by NFL security that there had been an issue at the Panthers’ hotel. Carolina was staying at the Wyndham Greenspoint in north Houston, about twenty miles and twenty-five minutes away from the Inter- Continental.

  A man had been caught in the stairwell of the Wyndham—on the players’ floor—and he was in possession of shells. After a search of the stairwell, a gun was found as well. When Belichick received all the information, he relayed it to his players. He told them that the story was likely to break and that they would be asked about it. He told them to be careful and also emphasized that there had been no security problems where they were staying.

  The man with the gun was arrested, but surprisingly, the story never surfaced. (The Houston police department denied a request for the police report, claiming that the investigation is active.) Anyone who was thinking of the possibilities could have been frightened by the story, and anyone who was looking for a motive could have been confused by it. In the days before the game, collectively, the Patriots did neither.

  They continued as they had in the past, reciting the tendencies of the Panthers. They knew then that they were not going to be switching to any sub defenses on third down, because they were determined to take away Davis as a runner. And the Panthers were not afraid to run with Davis or DeShaun Foster on any down. The receivers had been told, over and over, that they were going to have to beat man-to-man coverage against the Carolina corners, who liked to play physically. The defenders knew all about Jake Delhomme, the quarterback who may have been more effective when the original plays broke down and he was forced to freelance. He was a good freelancer, but the guys on defense had been told to look for the ball because Delhomme was also a fumbler. The Patriots were becoming experts on the Panthers, and Belichick thought the process was happening at the right time. With the extra week, he didn’t want the team to be ready too soon and bored in the days before the game. Now they could have the buildup they needed before pursuing the second championship in the franchise’s 44-season history.

  On Saturday night at 9:45, one hour and fifteen minutes before curfew, Tom Brady sat in the Houston Airport Marriott. He was eating crab legs and talking with backup quarterback Damon Huard. It was the best conversation they’d ever had. They didn’t talk much football, even though the game was less than twenty-four hours away. It was going to be Huard’s last game under contract with the Patriots, so they talked about the future and the past.

  “He was very much at peace with himself, and that led to a philosophical discussion,” Brady says. “We may have mentioned the game for two minutes, but the rest of it was just b.s.-ing about life. I remember thinking, What a great night, no matter what happens tomorrow.”

  He said, “no matter what happens,” but he had an idea of what was going to take place the next day. On Friday he and Huard did have a football conversation. One of the comments he made to Huard then was that, throughout his career, the final game of the season had always come down to some last-minute or overtime situation. That’s what happened when he directed the University of Michigan to an Orange Bowl win over Alabama, 35–34 in overtime. At the end of the 2001 season he had the drive in the Super Bowl against the Rams. In 2002 he tried to save the season at the end, sore arm and all. The Patriots were down 10 to the Dolphins with five minutes to play, and he led them to a win in overtime. Why would this game on Sunday afternoon be any different?

  That’s really the way he looked at it too. It was the game on Sunday, and if anything, he could handle a game in the literal sense. His “game” used to make him tense. He is viewed as a sex symbol now, an image that makes him laugh when he thinks of all the times he couldn’t get a date. He remembers being shy with a young woman at Michigan, a woman he adored—and a woman who ignored him. He and his friend Aaron Shea used to drive by her house and hope that she’d be outside. Brady would see her at clubs, and she would barely talk to him. Sex symbol? He thinks of incidents like that when he hears about the women who want to wear his jersey, frame his picture, or be the ones who would never ignore him at clubs.

  “That’s the stuff that makes me most uncomfortable. I’m very confident as a football player; I have no problems. I’m not natural with cameras and pictures. Put me in a room with my family, and I’m the one cracking jokes.
Put me in a room with people I don’t know, I’ll be a little shy for a while until I can figure out what to say. What it comes down to is that I just want to be a great football player.”

  He is intrigued by complex minds. He goes out of his way to applaud a good piece of literature, a provocative film—he was amazed that Mel Gibson could even conceptualize a movie about the Passion of Jesus Christ—or an act of courage. He wants to be a great football player, but he says the greatness of football doesn’t compare to other things he has seen. He mentions his oldest sister, Maureen. “She’s tough,” he says. “I admire what she’s able to do.” What she’s able to do, Brady says, is be a single mother who takes care of her children. He recognizes the difficulty in that, and it’s more likely to get his praise than something he does at the back end of a game.

  But he does play football, and he plays it well. His teammates listen to him, believe in him, trust him. He is the one looking over the game plan on Tuesday nights and saying to himself, How in the hell am I ever going to get this down by Sunday? He always gets it, though. He’ll be away from the office and call Charlie Weis, wanting to talk about plays. There are some he likes and there are some he would like to tweak. Weis knows Brady so well and trusts him so much that he never forces any plays on him. Once Brady is able to practice the plays and let them run through his mind in practice, he feels like his team can beat anybody’s.

  “Tom is a cocky sonofabitch,” Damien Woody says. “He knows he’s going to win, and he makes you believe it. You know what? I’d die for the man. I think you know what I mean. He’s the kind of guy who makes you want to bust your ass. He’s a great quarterback, a great leader. He’s so good that he’ll go up to the other team and tell them what he’s going to do. I can’t say enough about him.”

  Brady knew on that Saturday night that he could handle the Panthers. He knew what he was supposed to do, and he knew what the team had to do. He had been ready to play for a week. He was certainly ready when Crennel began his curfew checks at eleven o’clock.

  When he awoke early Sunday morning, Brady immediately went into his routine. He had an iPod programmed for the special day. He had thirty-eight songs for Super Bowl XXXVIII. Jay-Z was on there, along with Aerosmith, Kid Rock, and 50 Cent. He had already grasped, from his first Super Bowl trip to New Orleans, that there wasn’t any reason to be nervous. The early bus would be leaving for Reliant at 1:15, a little more than four hours before the start of the game.

  Belichick had been as confident as Brady on Saturday night. He kept looking at the things Carolina did well, and he feared the potential of those things. He did fight his overconfidence a bit, though, because he saw some weaknesses on the Panthers. He saw those weaknesses and visualized his team pouncing on them. He never thought that once more tilting the game the way he wanted it would almost force Delhomme to win it, or that he would watch the quarterback nearly pull it off.

  All the players were there on Sunday, the first day of February, at noon. They reviewed what they were going to do. They viewed the trophy some of them had worked for in New Orleans. Others had recognized it from television, pictures, the Gillette trophy case, or long reminiscences on the team plane. They wanted to get their own so the team could be united in its philosophy as well as its hardware.

  They arrived at the stadium with the retractable roof, and the question at that time was simple: open or closed? It was cloudy and cool—for Houston—so playing in 60-degree weather was going to be a game-time decision. The roof would be closed, but aesthetically it wasn’t going to matter. The stadium was beautiful. This was a Texas building, super-sized in every category, from price—$449 million—to length of the video boards—360 feet.

  Most players agreed that it was hot on the field, so it was easy to get warmed up. As those warm-ups took place and then came to an end, there was a different kind of heat on the field. Belichick was standing next to defensive tackle Richard Seymour, and they both noticed it.

  “Did you see that shit?” Belichick said to Seymour.

  “Yeah, I did,” he answered.

  What they saw was a group of Panthers—“Deon Grant and a couple of other assholes” is the way Belichick put it—trying to stare them down. The tone would be set for both Belichick’s pregame speech and the first several minutes of the game. Belichick had wanted to say something anyway after hearing the Panthers compared to the Patriots. He had asked his team all season not to give opponents any material to use against the Patriots. But he wasn’t holding back now. He told the team that he was tired of hearing about the great Carolina defensive line, the great receivers, and the tough corners. He said he was tired of hearing that the Panthers were the ’01 Patriots.

  “It’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said, his voice rising. “They’re not what we are. They can’t be what we are. We are what we are.”

  “This is going to sound weird since it was a lot of expletives,” Woody says, “but it was touching. We saw a different side of him. We had never seen him that emotional before. He got me ready. I felt like going out there, strapping it up, and playing on one leg.”

  Woody left the playing to Hochstein and the rest of the Patriots, who decided to come out as a team. The Panthers decided to do the same thing. So there they both were, standing in Texas, minutes away from playing one of the oddest and most exciting of all the Super Bowls. They were about to walk the line between boxing and ballet, pounding each other on one series and floating by one another on the next. “It was as physical a game as I have ever seen,” says Armen Keteyian, who watched from the sideline. “It was an all-time Texas steel cage match.”

  There was just one sweet thing between the Patriots and Panthers, and it was the voice of Houston native Beyonce Knowles. She sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” angelically. But it was an evening when the sounds—well, the appearance—of pop musicians could not be innocent, and the nation would debate that on Monday morning more than the game. As for the game, all indications were that it would be a low-scoring one. It just made sense when you put the teams side by side. Neither one had a head coach or an offensive coordinator with a drop-backand-let-it-fly mentality. The Panthers liked to run, and the Patriots had allowed just one 100-yard rusher all season. The Patriots were going to try running as well, and there was that line that everyone had heard about.

  So when the teams nearly went the first twenty-seven minutes without scoring, it seemed to be turning into a game that was on its way to a 14–10 finish. Patriots receiver Troy Brown had his nose broken early and still went back in the game. Adam Vinatieri, with a portfolio of winning kicks, already had missed two field goals in the first half.

  The first one he described as a simple miss, from 31 yards away. Shane Burton blocked the next attempt, which was a 36-yarder. Belichick didn’t like this. He had said earlier that Scott O’Brien, the Carolina special-teams coach, knew some of the Patriots specialists better than he did. O’Brien had coached long snapper Brian Kinchen and holder Ken Walter. With an injury to regular snapper Lonie Paxton and a fitful season of punting by Walter—he had already been released and re-signed during the season—part of the Patriots’ kicking game was damaged.

  Vinatieri wanted to be accepted as a football player, not the temperamental kicker-in-residence, so he didn’t complain about a couple of things that were bothering him. He was hurting, with constant pain in his back. And with the injury to Paxton, his timing on his kicks was thrown off. He, Paxton, and Walter had practiced so much together that they never had to think about the technical aspects of their jobs. It was part of their muscle memory: straight snaps by Paxton, clean catches and quick placements by Walter, stress-free kicks by Vinatieri.

  Finally, with just over five minutes left in the half, the Patriots got what they wanted and expected. Mike Vrabel, the defense’s quick-witted scholar, sacked Delhomme at the Carolina 19. He jarred the ball loose, and Seymour recovered it. Four plays and two minutes later, Brady threw a short touchdown pass to Deion Branch.

&nb
sp; Game over, some must have thought. It was that kind of game. Except it really wasn’t what it appeared to be. Fans were going to love it for its unpredictability. Coaches were going to look back, reluctantly, and see all the mistakes that made it so dramatic. It was one of those mistakes that led to a tie with seventy-four seconds left in the half.

  Patriots corner Tyrone Poole was supposed to jam Steve Smith at the line, and rookie safety Eugene Wilson was supposed to be helping with over-the-top coverage. Neither happened. Poole missed Smith at the line, and Wilson went to cover for Ty Law. Law had told him that he had an idea of what Carolina was trying to do, and he needed Wilson to get his back. Geno, as the rookie was called, didn’t go where he was needed. So Poole was left alone on a 39-yard touchdown pass.

  As halftime approached, the energy changed again. The Patriots were able to squeeze in a Brady-to-Givens touch- down, and the Panthers were able to get a 50-yard field goal from John Kasay—set up by a 21-yard Davis run—as time expired.

  Twenty-four points in three minutes and ten seconds. The Patriots led 14–10 at halftime, and halftime was when pop singers introduced a new phrase to pop culture: wardrobe malfunction. Janet Jackson and Justin Timber- lake had been performing “Rock Your Body,” a song that includes the lyrics: “Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song.” It turned out to be a solid bet, because toward the end of the performance Timberlake pulled Jackson’s bustier and more than a hundred million viewers saw her right breast exposed. It was covered by a nipple shield, but it wasn’t covered enough to prevent a stream of complaints, apologies—and Internet searches for close-ups of Jackson’s breast. Jackson said it was a wardrobe malfunction, and she and Timberlake issued apologies.

  For those watching at home, it would have been understandable for the malfunction to be the buzz of the third quarter. Once again, the teams were trading field position but not points. It was a scoreless third.