Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

If Tomlinson was hell-bent on vengeance after the way his team logo and teammate’s beloved sack dance was disrespected, he took a hard pass at trying for it on this day. And even if you give him the benefit of the doubt that he was legitimately hurt, it was a terrible look given the way his quarterback had manned up.

  So the Patriots didn’t win easily, but they won, to become the first 18–0 team in pro football history. They were heading to their fourth Super Bowl since 2001, against the one team in the NFC we probably should have wanted to face above all others but really didn’t want to.

  22

  Any Day the Giants Lose (Is a Good Day)

  Unless you exist only as an avatar in a perfect cyberworld simulation—meaning you live an actual life on this planet—you’ve been through bad moments you’d rather not think about. That car you totaled. The money you blew on something stupid. The time you got cheated on. The time you got caught cheating. That regrettable moment mom just came barging into your room and why can’t people knock first because you’re not a little kid anymore. Anyone who’s ever seen video of themselves dancing at a wedding knows that cringy feeling that never goes away.

  It doesn’t matter how smart you are. Regret is part of the human condition. Napoleon was a brilliant military strategist, statesman and scholar. And when he was living in exile on Elba, I can guarantee you he and his cronies sat around talking about the Austrian princesses they boinked and not the Russian campaign.

  I know the therapists say it’s not healthy to repress painful memories, but that’s nonsense. Some demons are best left unconfronted, plain and simple. I know I have mine. (Why didn’t you let me go to the Boys Room when I asked, Mrs. Logan? Why???) Chief among them is Super Bowl XLII.

  Even the letter combination in that Roman number triggers me to this day. I’ve lived through some excruciatingly painful sports losses as I pass through this Vale of Tears, but that’s the one that still makes me ball up my fist and suck air through my teeth. Because not even seeing cruel fate de-pants the Red Sox in their moment of glory all those times was as horrible as losing that Super Bowl. Yes, the Sox were trying to win their first World Series since Woodrow Wilson, but the stakes for the 2007 Patriots were even higher. They were going for perfection.

  If the Pats went 19–0, they would’ve been The Greatest Football Team of All Time. By acclimation. Without a floor vote. The motion is carried. It would’ve brought total vindication of all their behaviors. Shut up all their critics. Proved beyond a doubt that their success had nothing to do with pointing cameras at the Jets’ sideline (the equivalent of peeking at the test of the C student at the next desk). It had everything to do with being better, smarter, more prepared.

  Plus, it would have had the added bonus of ruining Super Bowl Sunday for everyone. By this point, the Patriots were full-fledged villains. They were Tony Montana in Scarface, walking through the upscale restaurant of sports saying, “You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin’ fingers and say, ‘That’s the bad guy.’ So say goodnight to the bad guy!” A Patriots victory would give them all maximum discomfort that would be beautiful to behold.

  For me, it was partly personal. The Patriots were heading to the University of Phoenix stadium to face the same New York Giants they’d just struggled to beat at the end of the regular season. The 10–6 Giants had gone on the road for three games in the NFC playoffs, winning at Tampa, at Dallas and beating the Packers in Green Bay, thanks to a terrible Brett Favre interception in overtime that handed them a game-winning field goal.

  So in the days before the game I wrote a piece for Barstool with the headline “Why I Hate the New York Giants.” It was a thousand words on my life spent despising this franchise, going back to when I was a little kid. Not that they had any kind of a rivalry with the Patriots, or any history at all to speak of. Just because they were always being shoved down our throats. Any time the Patriots weren’t on TV (which was a lot when they couldn’t sell out home games), we were force-fed the G-Men, regardless of how bad they were. It went back to the days the Patriots did not exist and New England was Giants country.

  There are still remnants of that around the region—old guys who still root for them and guys like my buddy Kenny who loves them because his dad always did. It’s like a bad gene that gets passed down through generations that science hasn’t been able to eradicate. I had to endure sitting next to Kenny while the Giants won two Super Bowls in the Bill Parcells era. I mentioned how one of my fondest childhood memories is “The Miracle at the Meadowlands,” watching live as Joe Pisarcik fumbled against the Eagles on the final play as Herm Edwards picked it up and ran it in for the game-winning touchdown. “Any day the Giants lose, is a good day,” I wrote.

  Like I said before, this was not a great Giants team on either side of the ball. Their quarterback Eli Manning, or as I liked to call him, “the Runt of the Manning Litter,” was 25th in the NFL in passer rating. But he had been the best quarterback in the playoffs in either conference, with zero interceptions through three games.

  The Giants were coached by Tom Coughlin, the architect of the Jaguars’ win over a 15–1 Broncos team in Denver that sent the Patriots to Super Bowl XXXI, as well as some huge upsets when he was at Boston College. He had talent to work with. Michael Strahan and Osi Umenyiora were his bookend defensive ends, and even though the defense was only ranked 17th overall and 15th against the pass, those two were a big factor in the Giants leading the NFL in sacks.

  But no one was thinking in those terms. The Patriots were heavily favored; Vegas set the line at 12.5. Although it was reasonable to think the Giants might cover, if you were saying you thought the Giants would win outright, you were in exclusive company.

  Everything was primed and ready for the final climb up the slopes of Perfection to the summit of Mt. History, with the Spygate thing mostly left down at base camp. Until the day before the game, when an avalanche of bad publicity came crashing down.

  The Boston Herald went to press with a front-page report that went way beyond the shenanigans of the week 1 game against the Jets. They claimed sources were confirming that the Patriots had secretly videotaped the Rams walk-through practice prior to Super Bowl XXXVI. It was a nuclear-tipped bombshell, and if true, it would confirm everyone’s worst suspicions that nothing the Patriots had won in the Belichick-Brady era was legit.

  The Patriots denied the report. In time, they were proven right. After the Super Bowl the NFL looked into it and found no credibility to it. A month later the Boston Globe did their own investigation and found that the cameras belonging to the Patriots that were out in plain sight the day of the Rams walk-through had no batteries and nowhere to plug into. No one ever came forward with copies of said tapes. Eventually, the Herald had to print a front-page retraction with an apology saying John Tomase, the author of the piece, admitted he got it wrong.

  But the damage was done. I was doing a regular appearance on a radio show hosted by the Herald’s Mike Felger, who tried to dismiss it as no big deal. I responded that if it’s not, then perhaps he wouldn’t mind if I wrote a fake report about his coworker Tomase doing nasty things with farm animals and published it the day before his wedding. The damage would also prove to be permanent. The accusations about the Rams tape still get brought up to this day as if the tape actually exists. As the lawyers say, you can’t unring that bell.

  Internally, the Patriots coaches had discussions about whether to even mention it to the players who were in their pre–Super Bowl cocoon. Ultimately, they decided to stick with their “Ignore the Noise” philosophy. Think of that part in Apollo 13 when the crew was just about to splashdown after everything possible had gone wrong with their mission, and the NASA people are wondering if they should warn them there are typhoons in the area. “Can they do anything about it?” someone asks. The answer is no. “Then why bother telling them?”

  It might seem like perfect hindsight to say this now, but you could see that there was something a little bit o
ff with the Patriots from the beginning of the day. Body language. A look in their eyes. Some nonverbal clues they weren’t in a great head space. During the national anthem they looked tense, like they weren’t having any fun whatsoever. It was hard not to see those sideline shots and not immediately think of Brady jumping all over Drew Bledsoe in the tunnel before the Rams Super Bowl like a hyperactive puppy.

  But it was understandable. The stakes were that high. They’d end up immortalized, no matter the outcome, but it would be either for being part of the greatest single-season team in the history of your profession, or for being on the wrong end of one of the worst losses ever. It was binary. There was no third option.

  It showed. The Patriots played tight from the beginning. The Giants had the ball first and orchestrated a drive that just went on forever. They converted on four third-down attempts and ate up over 9 minutes of the quarter before settling for a field goal. The Patriots’ offense got the ball and answered with a touchdown. But keeping with team tradition to never score in the first quarter of any Super Bowl, they waited until the first play of the second before they punched it in.

  The game went into the half still at 7–3. I was at my cousin Phil’s house with my brother Jack and both my sons and the air was definitely coming out of the room for us. Games had gotten tighter for this team as the season wore on and now they were being played steadily by a team that on paper had no business even being in the game with them. A halftime show with Tom Petty was not enough to brighten the mood. As a matter of fact, until Petty died in 2017 and everyone started posting tributes to him, I’d forgotten he’d done this one. Just another memory repressed.

  In the third quarter, the Patriots made a decision that didn’t make sense then and hasn’t gotten any more logical with the passage of time. Facing a fourth and 13 from the Giants’ 31, Belichick chose to try to go for it rather than try a 48-yard field goal. With a young, strong-legged kicker. In a dome. The conversion failed when Brady went deep to Gaffney in the end zone and overthrew him.

  After exchanging punts, the Giants took over at their own 20 and Eli Manning, after looking like the Eli the world had seen throughout his career, morphed back into the QB he’d inexplicably been throughout the playoffs. He immediately flipped the field with a 45-yard completion to Kevin Boss before giving the Giants the lead with a short touchdown to some slapdick depth receiver who had only four receptions in the regular season, David Tyree.

  As the game wore on, the Patriots’ offensive line was increasingly losing the battle in the trenches. Brady was under duress. The pocket kept collapsing, even without Tom Coughlin calling for blitzes. They were losing the one-on-one matchups, meaning the Giants could still keep seven in coverage and take away Brady’s target options. In spite of it, Brady began to spread the ball around to Welker, Moss, and Kevin Faulk to put a drive together. Finally he connected to Randy Moss, who found himself uncovered in the end zone to give New England a 14–10 lead.

  But there was still 2:42 left, which is plenty of time. New York had all three of their time-outs, plus the 2:00 warning, making it an eternity. At least that’s how long I lived in that time.

  The Giants converted on a fourth and 1 to put the ball on their own 39. Manning tried a comebacker to David Tyree but corner Asante Samuel read it all the way, jumped the route, reached up for the interception, and came down with . . . nothing. It went through his fingers, incomplete. It was nightmare fuel. If he had secured that ball, the Patriots would have been in victory formation. Instead, they were still in a rock fight.

  On the very next play, the Patriots’ pass rush got to Manning. They flushed him out of the pocket. Jarvis Green got a hold of him, stopping his forward progress for what felt like an hour, or at least enough to blow the play dead, but the officials would be damned if they were going to make a call like that in a moment like that. So instead, Manning broke free and unleashed a high, desperate parabola down the middle of the field. Toward Tyree.

  I have a hard time describing the catch because I’ve really only seen it that one time. Live. Beyond that, every time I see it’s about to get shown, I turn away. Seeing it once was like staring into Satan’s butthole. I don’t need that again. But somehow he pinned it to the top of his helmet with one hand, with Rodney Harrison, one of the best, strongest safeties of his era, draped all over him, yanking on that arm. The play was good for 32 yards. Or so I’m told. You can’t go by me. Again, I haven’t seen it in years.

  The Patriots still forced New York into a third and 11 from the 25, but Manning hit Steve Smith for 12. Of course he did. Because to just throw the touchdown there would have been swift and merciful. Instead, he waited until the next play to have Plaxico Burress undress Ellis Hobbs on a Slant & Go route to put the Giants ahead, 17–14.

  It was the final score. The Patriots’ final drive went incomplete, sack, incomplete, incomplete. Ball game.

  There was no mitigating this one—although Phil tried, God bless him. All the adults at his party were standing around with the thousand-yard stare Carrie had when they first dumped the pig blood on her and she was trying to figure out what in her life had changed so suddenly. Phil said that basically he’d get over this, that this whole season had been a grind. That between the allegations and the fact they probably had cheated a little bit, it was harder to like this team than say, the 2004 Patriots. But no sale. It didn’t help.

  It was as bad a loss as sport can hand you, one that went beyond the scoreboard and the parade and the championship DVD and all the perks that usually come with these things. This was going to be on everyone’s permanent record, good and bad. And not just for the players. I was out there, living a second life on the Internet as defending this team and was as emotionally invested as I’d been in any not-real-life thing ever. I was going to be facing a reckoning I could not shy away from.

  I had my whole immediate future planned out. I had taken a personal day from my regular job so I could spend the whole day on Barstool, gloating. I planned to spend as much time on the sports channels soaking it in. I was probably going to the parade. I was going to crack the bone of this thing and suck out the marrow.

  My empathetic Irish Rose took me to a movie instead. It seemed like the perfect plan because no one was going to interrupt a movie with replays of Tyree’s catch. I even remember what we saw: Cloverfield. Because I was in the mood to watch New York get destroyed by a gigantic monster. By the time I got back on the grid and checked Barstool, all the other writers had been ending their posts with “P.S. I think Jerry is dead.”

  When I did finally post something, it was basically this: The Giants won for one reason and one reason only. They were the better team. There’d be none of that “if they played 10 times” crap, because they didn’t. It was winner take all. The better team won because winning is how you determine who is better. Still, it was like poison in my mouth. But I was so sick of other cities saying the Patriots won for reasons other than they were the best (looking at you, Pittsburgh) that with the tables turned, I was not going to play that game.

  For the guys in the game, legacies were created. Michael Strahan took advantage of the opportunity to retire, go into TV, and end up with more face time on more shows than Ryan Seacrest. David Tyree was out of football and the last I heard was some gay-bashing zealot or something. Not that anyone cared. Whatever his hang-ups, he made a play he could never make again with infinite cracks at it. Tom Coughlin further cemented his reputation as a great big game coach.

  Senator Arlen Specter grandstanded even harder than ever, claiming that he was going to open Senate hearings into the Patriots’ cheating. Because he was all about justice, and not because he was up for reelection in a state where half the voters were Eagles fans who wanted to believe they’d been screwed and the other half were Steelers fans who wanted to believe they’d been screwed.

  At the time, Barstool threw about a half dozen or so parties at clubs around Boston. A few days after the game, I went to the Mardi Gras party,
which featured, among other things, models in painted-on shirts. One of the regular readers AG and I spent virtually the whole night by the bar, commiserating about what had happened. How. Why. Eventually, he said, “Do you realize this place is crawling with gorgeous topless models and neither one of us is even paying attention to them?” He was right. Happiness was out of the question. Even the happiness that can only come from attractive women in painted-on clothing.

  23

  Anger, with Sh*tloads of Fighting Back

  Naturally, there was no telling how the misery that followed The Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named was going to play out.

  Some of NFL Films’ finest work is the series America’s Game, which chronicles the season of every Super Bowl champion team, with three guys who were on it telling the story in their own words. I couldn’t help think of the one they did on the 1970 Baltimore Colts. That team was loaded with players who were on the Colts team that lost to the Jets two seasons earlier in what is, along with the 2001 Patriots and now the 2007 Giants, among the biggest upsets in NFL history. To a man, those Colts all said that winning Super Bowl V didn’t diminish the sting of losing Super Bowl III even a little bit, that every one of them looks at the ring they won and thinks about the two that he should have. I couldn’t help but think of that episode and wonder if losing this one would always suck as badly as it did in early 2008.

  Even as I say that, I know it deserves to be filed under “First World Problems,” and that I should call some Cleveland Browns fan or one of the poor unfortunates who are cursed by accident of birth with the Detroit Lions. But still. There had never been a loss like this one. The schadenfreude was at an all-time high and the nation was delightedly bathing in New England’s blood.

  Seven years of unfathomable success was now reduced to one, instant, all-purpose catchphrase insult: “18–1.” It didn’t help any when word got around that the Patriots had applied for a copyright on “19–0,” accompanied by the obligatory jokes about crates of 19–0 T-shirts being shipped around the world as free clothing for kids in poor countries.