Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  And they’d get it.

  What no one knew at the time was that people within the Ravens organization contacted the Colts to tell them they believed the Patriots were doing something with their game balls. Why they didn’t say anything to the officials to get the allegedly doctored balls out of the game is an even bigger mystery than why they would give a flying shit about the footballs when they should have been worrying about not covering the player the game officials told them not to.

  Also unclear is why an NFL team would contact another NFL team—a rival NFL team—and help them as they prepared for a third NFL team. They were two countries forming the secret alliances that set off World War I. All we know is that it happened. We know this for a fact because emails were later released sent from Colts’ equipment manager Sean Sullivan to head coach Chuck Pagano.

  Dated January 17, the day before the AFC championship game, Sullivan mentions in writing that Pagano, who used to work for the Ravens, had gotten a call from Ravens’ assistant Jerry Rosburg, tipping him off to issues he had with kicking balls in the divisional playoff.

  “They were given new footballs instead of the ones that were prepared correctly,” Sullivan says in the email. “It is well known around the league that after the Patriots’ game balls are checked by the officials and brought out for game usage the ball boys for the Patriots will let out some air with a ball needle because their quarterback [Brady] likes a smaller football so he can grip it better. It would be great if someone would be able to check the air in the game balls as the game goes on so they don’t get an illegal advantage.”

  Grigson then forwarded it to NFL game operations managers Dave Gardi and Mike Kensil, who forwarded it along to several other NFL officials. Grigson added his own smarmy bit of kissassery. “Again, all the Indianapolis Colts want is a completely level playing field. Thank you for being vigilant stewards of that not only for us but for the shield and overall integrity of the game.”

  The Ravens would deny that any such collusion ever took place. But someone forgot to check with Colts’ GM Ryan Grigson, who showed up at the NFL Combine in February and made it clear the Colts had put the league on notice that they thought the Patriots were up to something. “Earlier that week prior to the AFC championship game, we notified the league about our concern,” Grigson told reporters. “We went into the game. We had some issues.”

  Not that anyone did anything, or said a word to anyone in the Patriots organization about the issue being brought up. The Colts, the game officials, representatives from the NFL in charge of running the show, all played the wife who says everything is fine. Just fine. There’s nothing wrong. But what they really mean is nothing is at all fine and everything is wrong.

  Still, the game went off without any kind of a glitch, save for the fact it started late because the NFC game, between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers, had gone into overtime, and no one took the field for warm-ups until Seattle’s Russell Wilson had hit Jermaine Kearse with the game-winning touchdown. Then it was time for a quick pee break and everyone hit the field.

  In a lot of ways, it was your typical Patriots-Colts game of this period of time. It was a cold, wet night, with temperatures dropping into the mid-40s. The Patriots were clearly intent on establishing the power running game on the back of LeGarrette Blount, as they had with Jonas Gray back in November. He ran the ball five times on the team’s second drive, capping it off with a touchdown. After an Adam Vinatieri missed field goal, the Patriots then mixed it up against a Colts’ defense that was loaded up to stop Blount. An end around to Julian Edelman was followed by a 30-yard completion to Shane Vereen. And then on the goal line, the Patriots surprised everyone with a touchdown pass to blocking back James Develin to make it 14–0. It felt like the rout was on.

  It wasn’t. Not yet. Indy answered back to make it 14–7, and then killed a Patriots drive with an interception. And it is here, in this moment, that the troubles began.

  30

  Because Karma

  One of the great lines in movie history is from the John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and it goes, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this case, the legend that has been printed ever since, including in legal rulings by a federal court, is that in the second quarter, Colts’ linebacker D’Qwell Jackson intercepted Brady, took the ball with him to the sideline, and said something to the effect of, “Hey guys! Gee whiz. Is it me, or does this ball feel kinda squishy to you?” And that the ball was then handed to equipment guy Sean Sullivan, who measured the air pressure of the ball and was shocked shocked! to find it was below the 12.5 psi mandated by the league. So Sullivan, having this complete surprise handed to him completely out of the blue (Note: Am I making my sarcasm clear here? Sometimes it doesn’t come out in writing), alerted Director of Football Operations for the NFL Mike Kensil, who was also totally blindsided by this revelation he knew nothing about.

  The Patriots took a 17–7 lead into the locker room at halftime. When they came out of the locker room for the second half, some assistants were greeted by Kensil telling them, “We caught you! We weighed the balls! You’re in big fucking trouble!” Few, if any, knew what he was screaming about. Fewer still knew that he had once been the president of the New York Jets and was there when Bill Belichick handed in his formal resignation scrap paper back in 2000. There was a half of championship game football to be played. And with few exceptions, the Patriots were focused on that particular task. Everything else would have to wait. Which the world had to do, because for reasons nobody understood, there was a delay getting the half started.

  And they did take care of business. A relatively close game was blown wide open in the third quarter. The Patriots were handed a bag with a dozen backup balls and played precision football the rest of the way. They scored touchdowns on their first four possessions, the first coming on another deep pull from the back of the playbook when Brady hit left tackle (and converted college tight end) Nate Solder for the score, the only catch of his career. Solder had survived his battle with testicular cancer earlier in the year, so it was a pretty special moment as his teammates made sure the football came out of the game for him.

  The Colts’ offense alternated punts with Andrew Luck interceptions, one of which was intercepted by Darrelle Revis and brought back 30 yards to set up a one-play scoring drive.

  It was another blowout win over Indy, which was helpless to stop the run. Blount finished with 148 of the Patriots 177 yards on the ground and three scores. Brady was efficient, completing 23 of his 35 attempts. And after that extra-long halftime, they outscored the visitors 28–0. Everyone went to bed happy and began making their plans for Super Bowl XLIX in Phoenix against the Seahawks. All was right with the world.

  For a couple of hours, anyway.

  For me, the news first came from my cohosts and producers in our morning conference call to discuss the show. The Patriots Mondays calls were typically fairly short, since there wasn’t ever much doubt about what we’d talk about that day. But this time, Dale added, “I hope there’s nothing to this story about the footballs being deflated.”

  Huh? Sorry? I had no idea.

  While I was busy both creating and nursing a celebratory hangover, Bob Kravitz of KTHR in Indianapolis had tweeted, “Breaking: A league source tells me the NFL is investigating the possibility the Patriots deflated footballs Sunday night. More to come.”

  Our station’s morning show, Dennis and Callahan with Minihane, did their weekly phone-in interview with Brady that morning and asked him about it. He didn’t really sound like he knew what they were talking about, and laughing, said, “I think I’ve heard it all at this point.” You could practically hear him shaking his head through the radio. On our show, we asked Belichick and he said he knew nothing but would fully tell the league anything he could, and that was it.

  Kravitz’s “more to come” came not from him but from ESPN’s Chris Mortensen. Late Monday night, he tweeted, “NFL has foun
d that 11 of the Patriots footballs used in Sunday’s AFC title game were under-inflated by 2 lbs each, per league sources.”

  Since a football actually weighs about 14 ounces and therefore it would be impossible to take 2 pounds away from it, we had to assume he meant pounds per square inch. But that was the least wrong thing in the Tweet. But it was a bomb going off, regardless of its inaccuracy.

  Like everyone else I knew, my phone blew up. Pats fans wanting to know if this was true. Friends asking if I knew anything. Strangers hitting me up on every social media platform but my AOL account saying the Patriots were caught cheating yet again and would not survive. It was obvious this was going to be huge. So I got up at 5:00 a.m. to find out whatever new information had come out in the meantime. There was nothing. Just the 140 characters from Kravitz and Mortensen, plus the nonanswers from the Patriots who had been asked. Still, I needed to take a stand. I had to be honest, but I had to stake out a position I would not have to move off from, ever.

  So I wrote a piece for my space on our dot-com where I said I seriously doubt there is anything to this. But if that’s how the world is going to see the Patriots, to keep accusing them of cheating, making them out to be the bad guy and insist nothing they did was legitimate, then I was prepared to embrace it. To go full-on villain, like a wrestling heel. Think Hulk Hogan before The Rock made him good again. My mantra going forward would be #EmbracetheHate.

  As soon as I saved the column to be published later in the morning, someone on our morning show said, “If I’m a Patriots fan, if I’m Thornton right now, I’m embracing this.” I knew I’d done the right thing.

  By that night, it was the top story on the news. Not the sports reports. Not the local news. The national news. The network newscasts all led with it. Not the War on Terror or the economy or one of the worst winters on record, but whether or not the quarterback of a football team spritzed a little air out of the game balls. It was bananas. The anchors all did that Concerned Anchorman Voice they do when they’re reading the TelePrompter about some natural disaster or the list of Christmas toys that will kill your kids. And because they teach you all about the usefulness of suffixes and rhyming words on the first day at Lazy Journalism school, they were all using the same word: “Deflategate.”

  This went on all week, Deflategate Derangement Syndrome reaching pandemic proportions. There were people saying Bill Belichick should be suspended from the Super Bowl. Gregg Doyel of IndyStar actually suggested that as a punishment, the Patriots should have to forfeit their AFC title and the Colts should represent the conference in Phoenix instead.

  Just to confirm that this wasn’t real life and we were living in Bizarro World, on Saturday, Belichick and Brady met with the media in what wasn’t so much press conferences as they were performance pieces. Belichick’s in particular was part science lesson, part stand-up act. So brilliant, it could’ve qualified for a grant under the National Endowment for the Arts.

  He came out defiantly denying that his team had anything to do with deflating footballs. “I’m embarrassed to talk about the amount of time I’ve put into this relative to the other challenge in front of us,” he said. And what he discovered was that footballs naturally deflate in cold and wet conditions. He introduced the nonscientific world to the Ideal Gas Law, PV = nRT. Because I only took the easy science electives and the only formula I remembered from school was Jerry + Chicks = Chemistry, I had never heard of it. But it explains why that light on your dashboard comes on every winter telling you you’ve lost pressure in your tires.

  “Now we all know that air pressure is a function of the atmospheric conditions. It’s a function of that,” the coach and amateur physicist continued. “So if there’s activity in the ball relative to the rubbing process, I think that explains why, when we gave them to the officials, and the officials put it at, let’s say 12.5 [psi], that once the ball reached its equilibrium state it was closer to 11.5.”

  Then things got extra-strength surreal. With this dry, halting, monotone, he dropped a movie reference on everybody. “I’m just telling you what I know,” he said. “I would not say I’m Mona Lisa Vito of the football world, as . . . she was . . . in the . . . car-expertise area.” Really? Out of Belichick? Who could’ve possibly seen that one coming? Within minutes, “Mona Lisa Vito,” “My Cousin Vinny” and “Marisa Tomei” were all in the top five trending terms on Twitter.

  There was one other significant thing he said, in answer to a question about how Tom Brady likes the footballs prepared. He said he didn’t know, but “we’re not polishing fine china here,” adding that any questions about how Brady prefers them can be answered by Brady. Which, ever since those words passed his lips, has been portrayed as him (cliché alert) “throwing Tom under the bus.” It wasn’t. It was simply an acknowledgment that only his quarterback could speak to the issue. And he did, immediately afterward, in a press conference that set journalism back a thousand years.

  The room was filled with regular, “hard news” reporters who demanded answers about why the air pressure was so low in the footballs. Brady said he didn’t know, but that he’s always tried to play within the rules. Not satisfied with the nonanswer, they tried mining for sound-bite gold by playing off the emotional well-being of the football public.

  “This has raised a lot of uncomfortable conversations for people around this country who view you as their idol,” one asked. “The question they’re asking themselves is, ‘What’s up with our hero?’ Can you answer right now, is Tom Brady a cheater?” “Is this a moment to just say ‘I’m sorry,’ to the fans?” went another. “For the fans that are watching and looking into that camera, what do you say?” came the next. It was Theater of the Absurd.

  There was a reason Brady couldn’t explain how 11 of the 12 footballs were underinflated by 2 psi, though no one knew it at the time: it was because 11 of the 12 footballs were not underinflated by 2 psi. Chris Mortensen’s report was wrong. Everyone, including Mortensen and the NFL, admits that now. But at the time, the world was operating off bad intel. Brady was being asked to explain a completely false premise and apologize for something that didn’t happen.

  That the balls were only slightly below the 12.5 psi minimum is not in doubt. What we don’t know for sure is who gave the false numbers to Mortensen. But there were reports at the time that they came from Mike Kensil, which I will go to my grave believing.

  Regardless, the reaction to Brady’s surreal press conference was not positive. Virtually no one outside New England believed him. Saturday Night Live opened their show with a parody of it, with Taran Killam portraying Brady as guilty and trying to play dumb. “A football is a pigskin and I thought the air was the air inside the pig when it died,” etc., and it was their most-viewed sketch on YouTube.

  But the one who stood out most, and turned himself into an instant Deflategate Derangement Syndrome legend in the process, was ESPN’s Mark Brunell, who cried on the air. That’s not me characterizing how he spoke. I mean that he literally cried real tears in front of the cameras. As in, “I just don’t believe (sob) what Tom Brady (whimper) has to say (sniffle).” Which was an interesting reaction from a man who lost all his family’s money in blown real estate deals and Whataburger franchise purchases.

  As the Patriots made their way to Phoenix for the Super Bowl, Roger Goodell was announcing a “fair” and “independent” investigation into Deflategate headed up by New York attorney Ted Wells. An investigation that no sooner began than it started springing leaks, all of which were damaging to the Patriots. The first of which was that during that pregame pee break in the Colts game, a Patriots employee named Jim McNally had carried the bag of Patriots game balls into the men’s room with him, and stayed in there for 90 seconds, the implication being that it was then that he took the air out of them. I was in Phoenix to do our week of shows from “Radio Row,” and bumped into the Herald’s Ron Borges, who asked me about it. “Seriously, what do you think that guy was doing there? In the bathroom like that? For
90 seconds?” I said, “Peeing, Ron. I believe he was peeing.” A few minutes later I was inside and saw Felger and Massarotti about to do their show and related that story to them. Both laughed for a couple of seconds and then one asked, “Seriously, though, what do you think the guy was doing?”

  The Patriots’ charter plane flew in on Monday, with press availability at the team hotel immediately after arrival. Robert Kraft spoke first and was even more defiant than Belichick had been. Reading remarks he had written on the flight, he dug a trench and began fighting the protracted war that was to come. “I want to make it clear that I believe, unconditionally, that the New England Patriots have done nothing inappropriate in this process or in violation of NFL rules,” he said. “If the Wells investigation is not able to definitively determine that our organization tampered with the air pressure in the footballs, I would expect and hope that the league would apologize to our entire team and, in particular, coach Belichick and Tom Brady for what they have had to endure this past week.”

  That week, we did five shows, probably interviewing somewhere around two dozen guests: former players, coaches, broadcasters, reporters. To a man they all said that even if the Patriots did, in fact, take air out of the balls, it was a minor equipment violation, worthy of maybe a fine and nothing more. John Brenkus, who hosts ESPN’s SportScience, told us that even if you did deflate a football by 2.0 psi, the difference is negligible, with a compression of only 1 millimeter and a weight difference less than that of a dollar bill. And yet, the hysteria continued.

  Patriots fans were at their best, winged monkeys flying out of the witch’s castle and attacking anyone who questioned Tom Brady’s integrity and digging up facts that supported the argument that footballs get messed with all the time in the NFL. In cold conditions earlier in the season at Minnesota, Carolina Panther players put the game balls in front of the blast heaters. But they were only told to stop that and behave themselves. No investigation, no cries of cheating. We were reminded that the San Diego Chargers had draped towels covered in Stickum—a banned substance—over the balls, then got rid of the towels when they got caught. The team received a small fine, which was later rescinded. I found a 10,000-word New York Times piece on how particular Eli Manning is about the conditions of his footballs and how protective he gets about making sure no one but him or his equipment guy touches them. Bill Nye, TV’s “The Science Guy,” mocked Belichick’s interpretation of the Ideal Gas Law, and the Internet was suddenly flooded with photos of the Washington native wearing Seahawks and Seattle Mariners gear.