In any case, things didn’t look good. The Patriots went three plays and out on their next possession after the Seahawks touchdown, and with Seattle getting the ball and up by 10, a classic game had a chance to turn ugly. New England got a soon-to-be forgotten big play from Rob Ninkovich, an eight-yard sack of Russell Wilson, to stop a Seattle drive and return the ball to the offense and Brady.
Before the offense took the field, Belichick had been on the sideline, instructing. Brady was on the bench and Belichick was on one knee in front of him. “No negative plays,” he reminded him. “If you gotta get rid of it, you gotta get rid of it. The chances of them playing three good plays on defense in a row; they don’t look very good. You know, pass rush, everybody is running by you. They get misplaced in their zone, you know what I mean? Just no negative plays, and we’ll keep it close.”
After a nine-play drive that began with 12:10 left in the fourth quarter, Brady responded with a touchdown to Danny Amendola, and it was 24–21.
Seattle, strangely, got pass-happy. Leading by 3 with the ball and under eight minutes remaining, the Seahawks didn’t try to grind it away with Lynch. They tried two passes and a run, and gave the ball back to Brady and the Patriots.
Ten plays and nearly five minutes later, Brady found Julian Edelman for a touchdown and 28–24 advantage. “That’s a championship drive, Jules,” he told him.
Seattle coach Pete Carroll, the man who had the distinction of succeeding Bill Parcells and preceding Bill Belichick as the Patriots head coach, was unconcerned. “Here we go. We’ve got two minutes to go,” he said into his headset as he confidently walked the sideline. “We’ve got three timeouts. We need a touchdown to win. We’ve been doing this all year. Let’s go do it again.”
No one in the stadium or New England was relaxed. The Patriots had been here before, and these were the situations that had led to abbreviated nights of sleep and what-if debates over breakfast in the cafeteria. They had led the Giants by 4 here in 2008, roughly with the same amount of time in the game, and lost. They led the Giants again, in 2012, late in the game. Ahead by 2. And lost. Belichick always talked about doing your job, and part of that meant focusing on the present, not reliving yesteryear.
But it was hard. On the very first play of the drive, Wilson found—who else?—Lynch on a wheel route for thirty-one yards. One play, and nearly one-third of the field was taken. This was going to be yet another dramatic finish. The Patriots just didn’t play breathe-easy Super Bowls.
After Malcolm Butler defended a pass to Kearse and defensive back Brandon Browner, a former Seahawk, did the same thing on an attempt to Chris Matthews, agita descended on the Patriots bench. Brady sat next to McDaniels and they both shook their heads, silently, as if they both knew they were in an impossible spot. Kearse was defended by Butler, and young Strap made a good play by getting his hands on the ball and tipping it. But Kearse continued to focus on it and made the reception on his back. Butler kept his eyes on the receiver, noticed that he still had the ball, and got up to tackle him at the five.
“He caught it! He caught it! He caught the ball!” Carroll exulted.
“Man,” Brady said softly, his energy from a few minutes earlier gone. He had thrown for 328 yards and four touchdowns. He was well on his way to being the Super Bowl MVP, for the third time. He was going to match Joe Montana with his fourth Super Bowl win. None of that mattered now. “The D’s gotta make a play,” he said to McDaniels.
Lynch got the ball on the next play and barreled four yards to the one. There were smiles across the Seattle sideline, and Super Bowl parties in the Pacific Northwest were jubilant with the expected winning score. It wasn’t just the Northwest. It was everybody but New England. They were the cheaters, the guys who were one yard away from remaining in the noose of Spygate and, now, Deflategate.
Palms were sweating. The crowd had a nervous buzz. Time seemed to be going faster than it was. “If I’m Bill Belichick, I’ve got to be calling timeout!” a raspy-voiced Boomer Esiason told his national radio audience. The clock went from fifty-seven seconds to fifty to forty-five. “I don’t understand why he’s not calling timeout!” The clock went all the way to twenty-six seconds. The Seahawks had called a timeout, surprised that Belichick hadn’t done it first. His assistants had shouted into his headset, asking him if he wanted to pause here and discuss strategies, but he hadn’t said anything. His eyes were fastened on the Seahawks and the activity on their sideline. They seemed to be in a bit of chaos.
He noticed that they were sending three receivers onto the field, so the Patriots were going to match the formation with their goal-line package, which included three corners. One of them was Strap. “Three corners, three corners. Malcolm, go!” yelled safeties coach Brian Flores.
Less than a year ago, he was unemployed. Now he was lined up in the Super Bowl, and he knew exactly what was coming. He had been beaten on this play in practice, and the coaches told him that he needed to do his job better and get over to the receiver faster. It was a pick play, and there was a two-step method to defending it: quick recognition and relying on a teammate. It was the formula that made the first three Super Bowl winners so beloved in New England. Those players studied, and they leaned on one another.
In this case, thirteen years after the Patriots’ first Super Bowl win in New Orleans, Butler needed to know what the two receivers across from him and Browner wanted to do. Kearse planned to pick Butler, setting up a clear path for intended receiver Ricardo Lockette. The Seahawks had run the play three times during the season in the same situation, and they hadn’t been stopped. Butler remembered this play from practice and so did Browner. The veteran, Browner, would jam Kearse and allow Butler to make a one-on-one football play with Lockette.
The Seahawks had a former first-round pick in the backfield in running back Lynch. They had a third-round pick at quarterback who could run in Wilson. But with one yard to decide the Super Bowl winner, this came down to two undrafted players from the South, Butler and Lockette. One of them, either Butler from Vicksburg, Mississippi, or Lockette from Albany, Georgia, was going to become his hometown’s star of the night.
At the beginning of the season, in New England, the idea was that a new cornerback would help the Patriots win a Super Bowl. But Darrelle Revis was in a matchup on the other side of the field.
Just as expected, the play came. Butler was ready for it. He ran full speed and got to the spot the same time as Lockette, which was the receiver’s first surprise. Lockette had been a track star in high school, and his raw speed at the scouting combine was the characteristic that made teams remember him. But Belichick always preferred football-playing speed over sprinting, and the instincts of Butler proved why that was so important. The second surprise for Lockette was that he was bumped off the play and lost sight of the ball. He fell to the ground, initially facing the Patriots bench, and the first person he identified was number 12, Brady, excitedly jumping and screaming. Then he turned to the other sideline, with all his teammates and coaches, and that was truly his ground-level view of what had just happened. Back at Butler’s last school, West Alabama, the motto was in flashing lights; Butler had unquestionably done something that mattered.
“It’s intercepted at the goal line!” Kevin Harlan declared on the radio. “It’s intercepted by Malcolm Butler! Malcolm Butler has intercepted Russell Wilson… at the goal line!”
It was the play that won Super Bowl XLIX, with a nod to the previous three that the Patriots had already captured. They used to be known for players and plays like this. They knew all about low-drafted and undrafted players, starting with their quarterback. They knew about the power of collaboration, which is why they got a thrill from being introduced as a team and promoting football’s least regarded, the kicker, as one of their heroes. They even knew about cornerbacks changing the course of Super Bowls with interceptions. Now there was a link, from Law to Butler.
“No matter what he does the rest of his career, he’s got a memory th
at’s going to extend beyond his own lifetime,” Law says. “I thought that was a helluva play. He went in hard, he read it, he knew it. He was confident. For a young guy to have that type of confidence and go for it, I love it. Just that play right there is going to put him in the conversation with the greats. Forever. If he puts in a decent body of work over a period of time, that’s going to define him. You never want one play to define you, but sometimes it’s not your choice.”
Butler was so overcome by the moment that he cried. He had a hard time speaking when teammate Chandler Jones looked at him, beaming, and said, “Hey, man. You just won us the Super Bowl.” Brady approached and said, “Malcolm! Are you kidding me? You’re unbelievable, man.” Brady was due a new truck for being the game’s MVP, but he had already decided what driveway that vehicle would be parked in: Butler’s. Because of tax codes, this was going to be a costly gift from Brady to Butler, even though the car was free. It didn’t matter.
For a night, at least, this was better than the requested apology from the NFL. If the league ever did something like that, it would be forced and corporate. The displays breaking out on the field here were genuine. There was an “I love you” uttered at a rate of once every fifteen seconds. Actor Mark Wahlberg, a Boston native, hugged Brady and told him he was the best quarterback of all time. Julian Edelman told him the same thing, while the receiver told Belichick, “I’ll do anything for you, Coach.”
It was such a special night that even Marshall Faulk, a frequent Patriots critic and Spygate commentator, didn’t mention it once. Instead, he sat on the NFL Network set and smiled and shook hands with Brady, three-time Super Bowl MVP. Brady complimented all the ex-players on the set, Faulk, Michael Irvin, and Deion Sanders. At the end of their nearly ten-minute conversation, Brady warmly put his right hand on Faulk’s bald head and again gave him a compliment. He was aware of all the things Faulk had said over the years, but now those things were irrelevant.
The Patriots had indeed won since Spygate, so there was no need to think about that anymore. But Deflategate wasn’t going away. The bill was due on yet another scandal. It was a scandal with consequences, and thinking about and protesting them was going to occupy most of spring and all of summer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE NATION VERSUS PATRIOTS NATION
This little curve of the city, Boylston Street to Tremont Street to City Hall Plaza, has done something to every shivering soul standing here. It is February 3, 2015, New England’s version of Super Tuesday, and some among the restless crowd are attending their first championship parade of the century. For others, it is their ninth.
Newbies and veterans alike hold up signs and phones into the twenty-two-degree air, hoping to get the attention of a Patriot and, with luck, maybe a short video. This ritual has changed them all and changed the city as well, and that’s not easy to do in Boston. No matter where they stand along the parade route, they are within ten feet of some schoolteacher’s lesson plan. How do you change the course of a city that helped change the course of history?
This is the land of once upon a time, with the country’s oldest public park, its first botanical garden, first restaurant, oldest subway tunnel, aged churches where the first hallelujahs were shouted in the 1700s, and the place where Paul Revere signaled the first signs of trouble to the other patriots. “One if by land, two if by sea…”
And that’s just the history on or near this special-occasion route. Even with the scope limited to recent history, no one thought Bill Belichick and Tom Brady would be a historic duo the first time they rode on duck boats through these streets in February 2002. But that’s what started it all, this new spirit in the old city. They are the ones who initiated this ever-flowing spring of multisport success.
Fifteen years ago, they arrived in a city that wanted to talk about sports scars, featuring a series of generational gut punches thrown by the Red Sox. They heard about second-place finishes and play-off droughts and old men, long gone and in some cases long dead, who were sold by the Sox and gave their best years to the Yankees. Or had too many men on the ice against the Canadiens. Or had more chances to win and still lost the get-rich-quick NBA lottery that had Tim Duncan as its prize. They heard all the stories that helped put the edge and anxiety of the New England sports fan into perspective. Then Belichick and Brady added their story, the one that almost always ended with New England winning, and hardened hearts began to melt.
It explains why Belichick, in an orange boat with his girlfriend Linda Holliday, can see a red, white, and blue sign in the crowd that reads BELICHICK FOR PRESIDENT, 2016. When Brady comes by, holding and kissing his son, Ben, many in the crowd hold up four fingers and begin to chant, “MVP.” They’re the ones who changed the standard for how local coaches and superstars are measured. Their first title was earned when they overcame steep odds and a talent gap that was perceived to be huge. In the eyes of New Englanders, it was also proof of what could be accomplished with the right amount of talent, grit, and want-to. It was the century’s first championship, and appropriately so; it was all New England industriousness, spunk, and substance.
If the Patriots could stare down and beat a 14-point favorite like the Rams, then of course the Red Sox could overcome the biggest seven-game series deficit, 0-3, in baseball history and beat the Yankees in 2004. That was the same time when the Patriots were setting an NFL record with twenty-one consecutive wins. The message was loud and bold, and it was for all pro sports teams in the region: Get it done. The odds are irrelevant. Close the deal.
The Celtics caught on in 2008, taking control of the NBA Finals after they erased a 24-point deficit in game four. It was the biggest comeback victory in finals history. And if they could do that, why couldn’t the Bruins feel confident three years later? They were down 0-2, at home, in their first series of the postseason and then won four out of the next five. In their last series of the play-offs, they went down 0-2 again. This time they did it against a Vancouver team that had scored the most goals in the league and given up the fewest. Game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals was in Vancouver. The Bruins won in a shutout.
All that winning can skew a region, internally and externally. It becomes a region of optimists, always hopeful, even if the Seattle Seahawks are a single yard away from keeping the championship count at eight. It becomes a region of fighters, too, unwilling to back down from anyone, any team, any league, no matter how well credentialed and deep pocketed. Optimistic fighters. That’s who these people are in the cold, holding up defiant signs that read DEFLATE THIS and singing along, word for word, to the Beastie Boys. You gotta fight… for your right… to party.
The fight won’t be necessary today. The memories of the game are still too fresh.
Next week will still require no wars. There will be trips to Disney World. Butler will learn how quickly life changes: a trip to the Grammys, where he chats with John Legend on the red carpet; a trip to an auto dealer in Norwood, Massachusetts, who hands him the keys to his red Chevy pickup gifted to him by Brady.
It was coming, though, a fight bloodier than the ones that New England’s Rocky Marciano used to have in the 1950s (although, as almost anyone in the city could tell you, “The Rock” from Brockton never lost a fight). The heavyweight fight over air pressure looked more absurd the more serious it became.
It had been nearly a month since ESPN’s respected football insider, Chris Mortensen, posted the following erroneous tweet: “NFL has found that 11 of the Patriots footballs used in Sunday’s AFC title game were under-inflated by 2 lbs each, per league sources.” There were entire shows on the network, whether news-based or opinion-driven, that were built around the premise that the cheatin’ Patriots were using footballs that were as flat as their reporter suggested. Mortensen never corrected the tweet. When the Patriots made a simple request to the league to publicly correct the misinformation, they were rejected—an ominous sign.
Stacey James, the Patriots’ media relations chief, wrote to Greg Aiello, th
e NFL’s communications head, on February 17: “What is unconscionable to me is that the league holds data that could very well exonerate us from any wrongdoing and completely dismiss the rampant reports and allegations of nefarious actions, but the league refuses to provide the data. I cannot comprehend how withholding the range of PSIs measured in the game is beneficial to the NFL or the Patriots… Meanwhile, leaks continue to cause us irreparable harm. Imagine if you were in my position. I would love to know what you would be doing to get the league to help.”
James had his e-mail forwarded to Jeff Pash, the league’s executive vice president and, according to an NFL-generated press release, a coleader of the league’s football investigation. Pash began communicating with Patriots attorney Robyn Glaser. If it wasn’t obvious to the Patriots then that they were in trouble, it should have been. Glaser sent several e-mails, practically begging the league to at the very least release a statement saying that the often repeated “eleven out of twelve” story line was wildly inaccurate. The tone, from Glaser’s side, was pleading.
Referencing an ESPN story in which Jim McNally was accused of personally handing illegal footballs to officials (which wasn’t true), Glaser wrote to Pash, “Surely you have seen the ABUNDANCE of stories and articles this new ESPN piece has prompted since last night. If not, do let me know so I can send you links. This ESPN piece, which by its own admission is supported by not one but ‘FOUR sources familiar with the investigation’ is yet the latest in League leaks (because the only others ‘familiar’ with this investigation are us, and we can assure you we are not talking to ESPN or anyone else). And, once again, the information is not only inaccurate, but completely inflammatory and profoundly damaging to our brand.”
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