War Room

by Michael Holley

  Phil and Beth Emery loved each other and football, and they had to because the game took them across the country. They lived in the Southwest, Southeast, Mid-South, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. Phil was coaching at the time, but he always thought of scouting. When he was at Navy, he developed a friendship with Andy Dengler, a scout for the Jaguars. He’d ask Dengler dozens of questions about the business, and it became clear that Emery’s true passion and future were in scouting. A mutual friend of Emery and Dengler’s, Tim Mincey, mentioned that there were some openings in Chicago, and in 1998, Emery got his NFL break as a Southeast area scout for the Bears.

  He brought depth, patience, and open-mindedness to the job, and it wasn’t just because he loved football. He learned a lot about subtlety and nuance from Beth, who was a skilled expressionist oil painter. Beth already had a degree from Northern Arizona University in the speech-language field, and she was such an accomplished artist that she got a second degree, in studio art, from Florida State. Like most parents, Phil and Beth saw life differently after the birth of their daughter, April. Throughout her early development, April was as active and bright as most kids her age. When she was six, she started having infrequent seizures, usually when she was going into or coming out of sleep.

  It wasn’t long before the seizures occurred more frequently and at odd times. Clearly, there was a neurological disorder, although doctors couldn’t immediately say what it was. When they determined that Phil and Beth’s six-year-old girl had epilepsy, they attempted to control it with medication. They tried a half-dozen medications over the next several years, and none could combat the severity of the seizures. Phil and Beth’s prayers, initially, were to get back to what they considered normal. They had been to the best hospitals, from Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia to Shands in Gainesville. They had authorized different surgeries and procedures, from the corpus callostomy to the vagus nerve stimulation. They had seen a lot of medications, and they were going to see more, as many as fifteen. Eventually they got to the point where they embraced the life that they had as their normal family life.

  “Once we reached the point of true realization that some of the special-needs issues my daughter has were permanent, and after we worked through the sense of loss that realization brings for her and to us, we were forced to look at life and all people in a different light,” Emery says.

  They learned many new things, and some things they already knew they had reconfirmed, such as their love for one another. You learn the depth of your relationship when something unexpected happens to the family. There was enough growth and acceptance that they were able to offer advice and wisdom to other couples who were first experiencing what the Emerys had years earlier. Even that became an opportunity to learn, because while some families listen, as Emery puts it, some aren’t able “because they don’t think they’re going there. There’s some denial because they don’t believe they’re like you; they don’t believe their kid is that kid.”

  Phil and Beth both got past the stage where they were overwhelmed with feelings of loss and what used to be. The emphasis was on living and enjoying what they had. They understood that there would be around-the-clock monitoring of April and that their knowledge, and helpers’ knowledge, of her medications and patterns could be the difference between spending the night at home and spending it in the emergency room. That was their new life. But there would still be Phil’s scouting and Beth’s painting. There would still be family dinners and family vacations. There would still be father-daughter drives where they’d listen to music on the radio, stop for lunch, go bargain shopping, and talk football.

  It didn’t matter if the job was in Atlanta or Kansas City and if the man in charge was named Dimitroff or Pioli. Phil Emery was not only going to manage your scouts and help you efficiently evaluate the best players for your team, he was someone you could trust. “He dots the i’s and crosses the t’s,” Dimitroff says, “and then goes back to dot and cross again.” He appeared to be all business with his deliberate speech and purposeful walk that could be heard long before he was seen. But what made him so good at what he did was that he realized that an appearance was just the beginning of the story. It’s one of the many lessons he and Beth have learned over the twenty-one years April has been battling epilepsy.

  “More than a learning process, it’s been a maturing process,” he says. “We matured in patience. We matured in seeing the grace and perfection in people, no matter what their perceived imperfections may be. I think we both learned to reach out and help others in a way that we may not have before.

  “Although my daughter has been through numerous surgeries and has several physical limitations, when she awakes in the morning and I look down at her, I see what any parent does when they see their child: an example of God’s grace and what His picture of beauty is.”

  In a sense, the old guys with Patriots rings should have seen where things were headed toward the end of the 2008 season. They were the players in the locker room who were born in the 1970s, which meant they were operating with an entirely different set of winning and pop-culture references than most of their teammates. Of the seventeen players on the roster who had won at least one title in New England, thirteen of them were born in the seventies, and eight of them had played at the now-demolished Foxboro Stadium.

  They were like those wise heads at the park who still do newspaper crosswords, play chess, and talk about some of the greats they’ve seen while youths with iPads and iPhones tweet and text around them. The elite eight, which included the likes of Vrabel, Kevin Faulk, Richard Seymour, and Tedy Bruschi, could remember when Gillette Stadium was just a hole in the ground. They remembered when there was no such thing as an outdoor mall called Patriot Place, with high-priced restaurants, two theaters, and a four-star hotel with spa services. Back in the day, the team’s hall of fame was not housed in a modern, well-designed building with memorabilia and exhibits. No, the hall was actually just a wall with framed jerseys hanging there.

  All of the old guys were close to that symbolic wall, closer to being plaques than future Patriots. In September 2008, one of the best they’d ever seen, Troy Brown, went to the wall. He had spent his entire fifteen-year career as a Patriot and defied the age of specialization by specializing in everything. In January 2009, Rodney Harrison was attending events in Tampa prior to Super Bowl XLIII and unintentionally hinted about his future when he referred to the Patriots as “they.” In February, Vrabel was traded. Rosevelt Colvin had literally come in off the couch late in the 2008 season, but by 2009 he knew his future was as a UPS franchisee, running a store in Indianapolis, his hometown. Bruschi had been about two minutes and eighty-three yards from retiring in February 2008, but when the New York Giants pulled off the biggest upset in Super Bowl history, Bruschi knew he had to return. You can’t always choose your endings, but sometimes you can, and he decided that game, with all of its near misses, was not the taste he wanted to be left with going into retirement.

  There was a bit of a twist developing in Foxboro when Bruschi came back to play in 2008, and it’s one of the most difficult things to explain in sports. Who knows why the power shifts in a locker room from one season to the next? Was it based on popularity, common interests, performance, contract status, or who talked the loudest? Or was it a little of all of them? The power in the room was changing in 2008 and it had officially changed by training camp in 2009, and that fact alone was fine. There were times as young players when Bruschi, Faulk, and Seymour followed policy rather than set it, so a new power group was to be expected. The problem was that it wasn’t always clear what the agenda of some of the leaders was.

  Some of them were seventies players, too, but they had never won with the Patriots. One of them was Adalius Thomas, a 270-pound linebacker with the speed and smarts to play anywhere on defense. Thomas, who turned thirty-two during ’09 training camp, had arrived in New England in 2007 as a highly regarded and highly paid free agent from the Ravens. Free agency in itself is a gamb
le, but the Patriots had reeled off a string of hits there, in all shapes and sizes, since 2000. Even in cases where the signees were unproductive or not on board with Patriot business, none had the ability to make a dent in team culture. It was too strong. But late in 2008 and during camp of ’09, Thomas proved that he and the culture were different from what had been seen in the past.

  “I remember that he just started to question a lot of things in meetings. ‘Why are we doing that?… Why don’t we just do this?… What is that, man?’ He stopped buying in on what the coaches thought,” Bruschi says. “He really did think he had all the answers, you know? And that’s what he turned into: the answer man. That’s when I was on my way out, and I was glad to get out at that point. It just so happens that he was one of the most demonstrative guys that I had ever been around. Loud voice. Very strong opinions, on football and otherwise.

  “A lot of guys would gravitate to him, actually. I don’t know how he got to the point of helping us almost go 19–0 to, all of a sudden, he was being a distraction. And being very critical of what was going on in the organization in a bad way. He was outspoken to a lot of guys, trying to rally them. I think he really resented the way he ended up being used in the defense.”

  That’s how Thomas was long before his issues with Belichick became public. In late August 2009, Bruschi was starting to see and feel that he wasn’t going to be around Thomas or any other Patriot for much longer. He was a thirty-six-year-old linebacker, something his body reminded him of daily. He had hurt his left knee at the end of the ’08 season and thought that getting it “scoped” in the off-season would help him. But when he ran early in camp, the knee throbbed and swelled and it forced him to take three weeks off to rest it.

  And then there was something he couldn’t escape. Film. He liked to watch it as intensely as the coaches did, and he took great pride in his careful viewing as it led him to insights that some players missed. One day in camp, the coaches were trying to show the team how a particular defense was supposed to be run. The coaches would show 2009 film of the defense and compare it to film from 2001, when the defense was executed the way they wanted. Bruschi was uncomfortable as he sat there and thought, “Damn, I’m slow.” The film said it all. If he saw it and said it, he knew the coaches were seeing and saying the same thing.

  As for the locker room, it was so different that it was hard to articulate. Bruschi loved some of the new guys, like Jerod Mayo, a young man with an old soul. Mayo had been a top-ten pick who didn’t act like one. On draft day, when the best of the best are invited to New York, often wearing made-for-the-occasion tailored suits, Mayo had been home in Virginia with his family raking leaves. He was a worker there and a worker in Foxboro. In the offseason, he’d come to the stadium and watch film, even when there were no coaches to be found. He loved the game, and it could be seen by the way he played middle linebacker, never turning down an opportunity to plug a hole or run sideline to sideline. There weren’t a lot of Mayos, though.

  Some of the new-era Patriots didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they weren’t always eager to learn. If Thomas was the free-agent definition of that mentality, Laurence Maroney was the representative for the draft picks. Maroney coasted on his natural talent, which was considerable, and it didn’t seem to affect him that he was a better player his first year in the pros than he was in his fourth. He wasn’t improving. That was probably the biggest division between the generations. Guys like Brown, Faulk, Bruschi, and Vrabel had improved during their careers. Mistakes bothered them. They’d fight to find and correct the errors before the coaches did. Between them they had appeared in three Pro Bowls, but they had a dozen Super Bowl rings, and that’s what they practiced and played for. It’s something they thought about when they were at the office and at home. It was just a different ethic, a different outlook, a different time.

  Four and a half years after he first told Belichick and team owner Robert Kraft that he was retiring, following his stroke, Bruschi officially did it two weeks before the first game of the 2009 season. There was something inspiring and unsettling about his standing at a lectern saying good-bye. The day before the news broke, he was an old linebacker trying to contribute to the team. But on the morning of his retirement he looked young and energetic. He didn’t have a hair out of place, a contrast to his postgame on-field interviews when he still breathed out the rage of the game, even after wins, and his hair was tussled from his helmet. He wore a stylish tan jacket and a light-blue shirt and he didn’t look down once at notes as he eloquently explained that he had accomplished all that he had wanted in his thirteen-season career. The only thing missing was a producer whispering in his ear to wrap up his point and move on to the next one; a career in television wasn’t far away.

  It was an unusual day, as thousands of New Englanders watched the retirement on live TV. Those viewers sat on the edge of their seats as they saw Belichick come as close to crying as anyone had seen publicly in his entire Patriots career. He spoke softly. His voice shook and cracked. He gave Bruschi the ultimate compliment: “If you ask me to sum up how I feel about Tedy Bruschi in five seconds… He’s the perfect player … he’s the perfect player. He has helped create a tradition here that we’re all proud of. The torch has been passed, and we’ll try to carry it on.”

  Bruschi had improved over his career, through coaching and practice, but he did certain things that couldn’t be taught. No one told him that he needed to be the locker-room enforcer. He just did it, and it was a continuation of what he had done in high school and college. In high school, he had blasted a kid who was half-stepping through a drill that the coach wanted them all to do. That was just him. In the near-perfect season, Bruschi had called Belichick off the team bus and told him that he didn’t like his postgame message to the team. He wanted to be coached harder, and Belichick obliged the next day by tearing into the team and using Bruschi as a frequent target.

  You can’t teach a player to be that. And since Bruschi was one of the first players people thought of when they mentioned the Patriots and their championship, maybe it was true that you could no longer teach a player to be a Patriot. You either were or you weren’t. Clearly Bruschi was at peace with his decision, but the organization was losing yet another employee who knew how to do championship-level things that couldn’t always be explained.

  A week after Bruschi retired, it was time for another farewell. Seymour, who was a month away from his thirtieth birthday, was traded to the Raiders for a first-round pick in 2011. Seymour was Belichick’s first number one draft pick with the Patriots, a rare three-hundred-plus-pound lineman who could actually be described as svelte. He had been a great player for the Patriots and going into 2009 he was still expected to be very good. But he was hoping to negotiate a new contract with the team, and talks hadn’t gone all that well. He fully expected 2009 to be his last season in New England, but the preseason trade surprised and hurt him. While Bruschi’s final press conference was cordial and featured an emotional Belichick, Seymour’s departure was more businesslike. He received the news during a short Sunday-morning phone call from Belichick, and the Patriots released a statement thanking him for all he’d done over his eight seasons in New England.

  Belichick had achieved some historic things in his career, and now there was a new mountain facing him. He still had Tom Brady, who played the most important position on the field and had won 77 percent of his regular-season starts. But Bruschi and Seymour, teammates since 2001, had a record of 111–34 in their Patriots careers. They’d played eight home play-off games without losing, won two conference titles on the road, and been to four Super Bowls. There sure seemed to be a lot of wins, and brains, leaving Foxboro. The head coach would likely be able to replace the production of the players he lost, and no one doubted that he could get his team in position to win even more rings. But he’d have to deal with other rings, the circus kind, first.

  On a Wednesday morning, December 9, there were a few certainties in New England
that no Patriot could ignore. One was their record, 7–5, which had them on a play-off pace but as a team playing without a first-round bye. They couldn’t catch the top-seeded Colts, who were 12–0, and the number two seed, the Chargers, were 9–3 and on a seven-game winning streak. There was also the matter of their record on the road, 1–5, with the single win coming in London against Tampa. The Patriots were not a good road team but they were a memorable one.

  They’d lost in overtime to the Broncos and Josh McDaniels, allowing the first-year coach to begin his career 5–0; they’d lost by three touchdowns in New Orleans, a night of high artistry for Drew Brees, who missed on just five throws and threw five touchdown passes; and they’d lost in Indianapolis after leading by 17 early in the fourth quarter. The Colts loss had its own shorthand: fourth and two. With the Patriots leading by six with two minutes to play and the ball at their own twenty-eight, Belichick called for the offense to go for it on fourth and two. They came up short, gave Peyton Manning a short field, and lost by a point.

  In football terms, the road was a tricky place for the Patriots. In everyday New England life, the same was true: You never knew what wintry hand you’d be dealt in the Northeast, even if it wasn’t technically winter, so you had to prepare for everything. That’s what Belichick reminded his players of when he saw them on December 7. They had the next day off, but if they were in town they probably heard about the storm that was supposed to arrive the next morning. On the Wednesday when they were expected back at the office, the Patriots saw a New England that was slammed with an exotic bad-weather mix. Depending on where you lived, you experienced a foot of snow, a half foot of snow, a sleet special, or high winds with rain. Making things worse, some early-morning drivers in the snowbound areas went to the roads and saw no plows in sight. “What a cluster,” they thought. “Typical.”