Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  Brady threw on their first five plays and completed all of them, to Amendola, White, Hogan, White again, and Edelman. Three of those completions went for first downs. Then White picked up another first with a 10-yard run. The Falcons’ defenders were reeling.

  A shot at the end zone to Martellus Bennett was broken up only by an obvious pass interference penalty, setting up a first and goal from the 1. The one near mistake, the one flaw in the almost perfect masterwork that was this overtime, was Brady’s fade pass to Bennett that could’ve been picked off by linebacker Vic Beasley. But there is no trophy presentation for the team that almost intercepted a championship-winning touchdown, so it’s a footnote in history.

  On the final play, the Patriots lined up three wide receivers to the right: Mitchell on the outside, Hogan in tight, and Edelman between them. Prior to the snap, Edelman came in motion, drawing Alford with him. At the snap, he blocked down hard on Poole, while Hogan took out Beasley. Marcus Cannon pulled while White took the pitch from Brady and followed his block and Mitchell’s on the outside. Still, the defense swarmed the ball and White had to break tackles from Allen and Alford. But he stayed low, kept his momentum going forward, and clearly got in. Brilliant play call. Executed to perfection. Touchdown. Game over.

  Not that it was official yet. The audience at home was treated to the sight of Edelman trying to leap on Brady, only to be met by cold, hard resistance. It looked like a reverse of Brady trying to jump all over Drew Bledsoe before the Super Bowl in 2002 and getting rejected. But it was just Brady staying in the moment telling him the play had to be reviewed. But hundreds of people had stormed the field and the confetti cannons had been fired. God only knows how they would’ve handled it if they’d said White’s knee was down before he got in or whatever.

  So Edelman actually tried for a minute or two to get everybody off the field, like a teenager whose house party got out of control. “Seriously, you guys, you gotta leave! My folks are gonna kill me . . .” Finally, he was met by Bill Belichick looking for a hug, but Edelman told him, “They gotta review it!”

  “They did!” he replied.

  Tears.

  My phone immediately rang, and it was from Camp Lejeune, while Corporal Thornton’s brother and mother were running around the house screaming. There was no trying to process how it had come to this.

  We were just happy.

  Happiness is the “B” side of the misery you feel when the team you care about is so hyper-relevant that they don’t have the luxury of easy wins or easy losses. When my son was little, we shared this ride together, and now his calling made it a long-distance thing. It was a price I was willing to pay, because it was still our thing.

  It was our family’s.

  I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried real tears on the phone over a football team—by no means for the first time and I promise you not for the last time. The ones I feel sorry for at times like that are the people who don’t care enough to know what that’s like.

  Once it was official, the first people Brady sought out in the chaos were his family. His mother hadn’t beaten back cancer to be second best to manufacturers of pizza products and beer companies. For family reasons and several others, this was the most satisfying win of all five. More emotional. With more riding on it on so many levels.

  Within minutes of the victory, a local commercial ran on Boston TV featuring Tom Brady. It was an ad that had been running for months, for an MRI firm where he’s going in for his checkup and the technician asks him to remove all jewelry and put it in the locker. “Sure,” he says. “No problem!” and he removes all four of his Super Bowl rings. It was one we’d all seen a hundred times.

  Except this time, she says, “Is that all?” And Brady replies, “Oh, wait! I forgot this one,” reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a fifth ring. “It’s kinda new.”

  “We’re going to have to get you a bigger locker,” she says.

  And the punch line says as much about the last few years as any two words possibly could.

  “Roger that!” Brady says.

  36

  You Can’t Always Get What You Want

  Strictly from a performance level, those final 17 minutes against the Falcons in Super Bowl LI were the finest hour of the Patriots, and of Tom Brady. The 25-point comeback with so little time left was unprecedented in football history.

  On a human, emotional level, it was vindication. For the team it meant that they weren’t “the Cheatriots,” that their success wasn’t about breaking rules and clandestine operations and “arrogance.” For the quarterback, it wasn’t about needing doctored footballs so badly you’d bribe low-level operatives to cheat for you and then literally make a federal case out of it. For both, it’s about outworking, outthinking, and outpreparing everybody else.

  While you can’t exactly quantify these things, it’s hard to imagine any championship being more gratifying than this one was. Roger Goodell, who had become the frustrated Gargamel to the Patriots’ rambunctious Smurfs, was forced to stand before the world and hand them their fifth Lombardi Trophy while a stadium filled with only Patriots fans rained boos down upon him like the crowd at the Roman Colosseum demanding he be put to the sword. Naturally, he awkwardly tried to put a happy spin on it. “What a great football game tonight!” the commissioner shouted over the hatred. “That is what NFL football is all about!”

  Robert Kraft was happy to play to the mob. “Two years ago, we won our fourth Super Bowl down in Arizona. I told our fans that was the sweetest one of all. But a lot has transpired during the last two years,” he began, then started drawing out his words for emphasis. “I don’t think that needs any explanation. But I want to say to our fans, our brilliant coaching staff, our amazing players who are so spectacular, this is . . . unequivocally . . . the . . . sweetest. I’m proud to say, for the fifth time, we are all Patriots!” The crowd, as they say, went wild.

  The images that came out over the next few hours were incredible. One of my favorites was a shot of Julian Edelman talking to reporters on the field while a few feet away sat Adriana Lima, one of the most beautiful women the human race has ever produced, giving him heart-eyes like a 16-year-old waiting for Harry Styles’s autograph. Someone sent me a video they took of Gisele Bundchen in the immediate aftermath, looking up at one of Barstool’s Goodell clown-face towels being waved, pointing to it, and pumping her fist in solidarity. Then we were treated to the sight of defensive coordinator Matt Patricia getting off the team plane wearing a Goodell clown-face T-shirt, which was stunning given the fact he was considered one of the leading head-coaching candidates in the league. The general mood among the Patriots and their fan base was a smoothie of celebration and pride mixed with utter defiance. It was joyous.

  The feeling was that the NFL had changed the rules to stop the way the Patriots covered receivers. Suspended their franchise player. Taken away draft picks. Banned the Patriots’ gadget formations. Outlawed jumping the center to block kicks. And still couldn’t stop them from winning titles. So that animosity was not going away anytime soon.

  The best moment came that Monday morning, when the Awkwardness Meter would certainly be dialed up to 11. That’s when the commissioner would have to hand Tom Brady the game MVP award in a small function room at a semi-intimate press conference. So there would be no escaping the tension. And Brady did not disappoint.

  After receiving the award, he turned to the man who had destroyed his reputation and said, “Listen up, you sniveling little tool. How dare you speak my name out of that thin-lipped lie hole you call a mouth? You defend wife beaters and child abusers. You look the other way when other players are accused of using PEDs. I’ve done nothing but play by the rules and represent this league with class and dignity. But you spend millions to ruin my name and now you want to be nice to me?” Then he bent Goodell over and, with all his Super Bowl rings on his hand, fisted the commissioner in a scene right out of one of Caligula’s palace orgies.

  No, wait. Brady did
none of those things. That’s just how I imagined it. My apologies. Actually, what he did was take the dreaded high road and accept the trophy with grace and humility. And Goodell forced a smile like an android programmed to imitate human behavior. That was not the favorite moment of most Patriots fans, I would say.

  Those fans got their shot, though. And they took it. The duck boat parade that followed a couple of days later was as much about sticking it to the NFL as it was support for Brady and the Pats. A light snow fell that morning, just enough for someone to mark out some giant block letters in an empty lot that spelled “FUCK U GOODELL” with an enormous penis. There were Barstool clown shirts and towels everywhere. Literally hundreds of handmade “Roger That” signs. And heartfelt sentiments such as “Roses are red / Violets are blue / The Pats got the win / Fuck you, Roger.”

  In short order, “28–3” became a viral meme, shorthand both for the victory and for never giving up. At the Boston Marathon, someone stood a mile from the finish line holding up the “28–3” scoreboard logo to inspire the tired runners to keep going. It took off on social media, used for virtually everything, from posts like “Washington might be in chaos, but don’t forget the Patriots were down 28–3” to the reverse, “This Easter, don’t forget the Falcons blew a 28–3 lead.”

  The Patriots’ championship rings, in addition to having the words “Greatest Comeback Ever” inscribed on the inside, were inlaid with 283 diamonds. The comeback was now immortalized in precious gems. Literally, set in stone.

  Everything was coming up Patriots in 2017. Even the White House visit I mentioned at the beginning was surprisingly controversy-free, given the social and political climate. Some Pats players skipped it. Those who did go were of a cross section of backgrounds and political views, united only in their belief that getting to walk through the White House as Super Bowl champions is a pretty goddamned cool thing.

  More importantly, the 2017 off-season was going phenomenally well from a roster-building standpoint. No sooner had free agency begun than the Patriots landed Stephon Gilmore of the Buffalo Bills, the top cornerback on the market. They sent their first-round pick to New Orleans for Brandin Cooks, a wideout who runs like The Flash, had over 1,100 receiving yards each of the last two seasons, and was only 23. They re-signed linebacker Dont’a Hightower, despite the Jets having him on his birthday and giving him cupcakes. Why the Jets stopped short of having face painting, a clown making balloon animals, and a bouncy house, you’d have to ask them.

  By this point, the football sites were beginning to say that the Patriots were not only having one of the best off-seasons of any team in the league, but they were also having the best ever by a Super Bowl champion. It was hard to argue.

  One of the biggest questions of the off-season went unanswered, and that was what they were going to do with Jimmy Garoppolo. He was entering the final season of his rookie contract, and based on the promise he’d showed in his two starts, there had to be a market for him. There were plenty of people arguing for the Pats to keep him. But I was firmly on Team Trade Jimmy for the simple reason that the only way to keep him long-term was to make him the starter in 2018. The market for starting free-agent quarterbacks was $23 million per year.

  My argument was simply that you couldn’t ask him to make less than that and you couldn’t pay him that to stand on the sidelines holding a Microsoft tablet and watching Tom Brady play. But they didn’t trade him. The draft came and went and he was still on the roster, along with Brady and third-stringer Jacoby Brissett.

  So it was a tremendously successful off-season for everyone involved. Which is to say, almost everyone. Malcolm Butler was having a horrible, no good, very bad 2017. The hero of Super Bowl XLIX had worked to become one of the best cornerbacks in football and wanted to be paid like it, a situation that got infinitely worse when they signed Stephon Gilmore to a deal that paid him $14 million per year and $40 million guaranteed. Butler had a point, but frankly so did the team. He was still one year away from being eligible to do likewise.

  Besides, they had spoken to Butler about signing a long-term deal that would benefit both him and the team, but his agent wanted more. It didn’t help matters any that the agent, Derek Simpson, had only one client. He’s a personal injury attorney with no experience negotiating NFL contracts and was reported to be trying to change the way players’ deals are done. The Patriots simply had no interest in setting precedents with the types of lawyers who appear on billboards with their arms folded, saying, “I’ll work for YOU!” Not even for a beloved folk hero.

  Still, any suggestion that Butler would skip optional team workouts or hold out was quickly proven wrong. He showed up to everything. Said and did all the right things. And as the team reported to training camp, optimism was so high that the biggest question going into the new season was “Can the Patriots go 19–0?” A question, by the way, I wanted nothing to do with because 10 years is not enough time to get over the trauma of 18–1. In fact, 10 lifetimes wouldn’t be enough.

  It turned out, I was right not to buy into that hype. No sooner had camp begun than a lot of the roster depth they’d built up began to evaporate before our eyes. Rob Ninkovich was missing from the first day of practice, which was a dead giveaway of what was to happen next. Within days he announced his retirement. Julian Edelman suffered a noncontact injury in a preseason game and was out for the year.

  A few days before the season began, they swung another trade with the Colts, this time moving Jacoby Brissett for wideout Phillip Dorsett. It was a bit of a surprise in that the organization seemed to be pretty high on Brissett’s future. But then again, with Edelman out for the season, they needed all the help they could get at receiver. If nothing else, it demonstrated how comfortable they were with Jimmy Garoppolo as their only backup at QB. Or so it seemed. No one knew for sure.

  While I hate to get all metaphysical on you, I really do, I consider myself a learned man. I believe in science. But at the same time, I can’t shake the less-than-scientific principle of juju. The 2017 Patriots’ first game, the traditional Thursday-nighter that kicks off the NFL season, had bad juju as soon as the night began. The celebrity brought in to announce the Super Bowl LI banner reveal was Mark Wahlberg. Look, everybody likes Mark Wahlberg. He’s a Boston guy. He starred in Ted. He’s the Lone Survivor. He gave the world the permanent gift of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. But he also had quite famously left the stadium with the Patriots losing 28–3 in the very game he was now brought in to celebrate in banner form. Passing over a million other Pats fans who hadn’t quit on the team in their most desperate hour just wasn’t right in a karmic sense. And while I’m not saying there’s a direct cause and effect, I’m not not saying it, either.

  What we definitely did not know, but ultimately came to realize, is that was the beginning of what would turn out to be nothing less than the single weirdest season of the Patriots’ championship era. I am not kidding. By the time 2017 turned into 2018, it was Bananaland.

  And the game itself was a debacle. Such a steaming pile of dung that they should’ve treated everyone in attendance for pink eye. The Chiefs put up 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to embarrass New England, 42–27.

  The key question quickly went from “Can they go 19–0?” to “Who the hell are these guys?” The defense was loaded with new, unrecognized names: Lawrence Guy, Adam Butler, Cassius Marsh, and Deatrich Wise Jr.

  It actually got worse. Through six games the Patriots had faced six different quarterbacks and each had over 300 passing yards against them, something that had never happened before. Worse, opposing QBs were averaging 338 yards per game, a pace that would shatter the previous record if it continued.

  To the millions of eyewitnesses to these crime scenes, it looked for all the world that Stephon Gilmore had the blood on his hands. He seemed to repeatedly be blowing assignments. Replays kept showing the entire secondary looking at each other, arms out, palms up, in the universally recognized symbol for “What the fuck are
you doing?!?” Though in Gilmore’s defense, the breakdowns happened when he was out with injury. And oftentimes, the (Malcolm) Butler did it. In one game he left a receiver so open I said if the guy was any more alone, he’d have to put a handprint on the ball and name it Wilson.

  They managed to keep winning games, but it speaks to just how bizarro the whole season was, though not just for the Patriots. The 2017 NFL season was weird from the beginning, thanks in part to players protesting the national anthem. I don’t know that I’ve ever hated a controversy like I hated that one. It just brought out the worst in people, regardless of where they stood. Or sat. Or knelt. Or linked arms or whatever. But I guess you can’t really go by me. I’m an extremist on the issue. I get cheesed off if people don’t put their hands up during Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”

  Anyhoo . . . not to be lost in all the struggles of the Patriots’ defense was the vicious beating Tom Brady was taking. To say the offensive line was struggling to protect him would be like saying the Iraqis had trouble defending Kuwait in Desert Storm. He was sacked 16 times in the first five games, a pace for 51 sacks over 16 games, which would have been by far the most in his career. Plus he was getting hit much more than that, seemingly every other time he released a pass.

  Sometime in all this, Brady released a book called The TB 12 Method, a lifestyle, diet, and fitness book that not only details his workout regimen and love of pliability over strength but also includes recipes like a lasagna made with vegetables instead of pasta and cashews instead of cheese, and makes claims like he doesn’t get sunburns because he drinks so much water. As much as anything, the book is a brochure for TB 12 Fitness, the training center he runs with his business partner and guru, Alex Guerrero. Coming out when it did, The TB 12 Method just added another element of oddness to an already peculiar season.