Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  Adding to the surreal feel to the year was the announcement by the team in October that they were becoming the first pro franchise to have its own airline. Specifically, they revealed that they had bought a pair of 767 jumbo jets. Named Air Kraft One and Air Kraft Two, the planes had been converted to give players more space and were given a kickass design, painted with team colors, with the Patriots’ insignia on the side and five Lombardi trophies on the tail fin. And, I assume, the latest in long-range spy tech and nuclear capability. I mean, if you’re going to buy your own air force, you don’t settle for second best.

  There was one handsome young Top Gun ace who would never get to fly in those jets, though. Because into the middle of this already odd season, the Patriots dropped the mother of all personnel moves by trading Jimmy Garoppolo to the San Francisco 49ers for the seemingly low, low price of a second-round draft pick.

  The story went off like a grenade. Even with the team getting former Patriot Brian Hoyer in return, it felt like giving up a huge asset for next to nothing, especially when teams like the Cleveland Browns had been sitting on a slew of draft picks and were desperate for a QB, and cost them the guy most people assumed was Tom Brady’s heir apparent. This immediately gave birth to a litter of rumors that Belichick was forced to trade Garoppolo by the Krafts in order to placate Brady, who felt threatened by Jimmy G’s very existence.

  Then somewhere in all this came the news that Belichick had barred Alex Guerrero from the Patriots’ sidelines and traveling on the team plane. Given everything that Guerrero means to Brady, not just in terms of keeping him in peak condition physically and mentally but also their bond as friends and business partners, it seemed like a harsh move, the kind very few coaches would make with their franchise player. And for seemingly the hundredth time in the Bradichick Era, there were wild rumors about a “rift” between the two and rampant speculation that Brady was furious at his coach and was complaining to ownership.

  Yet through all of it, they managed to put on a run, winning eight of their next nine games. The whole season—not just for the Patriots but for the whole league—seemed to be coming down to one game: the Patriots at Pittsburgh in week 15. Barring anything crazy happening, that game would likely determine home field in the playoffs. Steelers coach Mike Tomlin certainly thought so, as he gave an interview two weeks earlier where he admitted he was already thinking about playing New England.

  But as fate would have it, the Game of the Year in the NFL lived up to the billing. With the Patriots trailing 24–19 and just over 2 minutes to play, Brady and Rob Gronkowski took over the game, connecting for exactly 69 yards (I pause here in case Gronk reads this so he can have a laugh for himself) to set up Dion Lewis with the go-ahead touchdown run.

  Then instantaneously, Ben Roethlisberger hit rookie JuJu Schuster-Smith (not the bad juju I mentioned earlier) on a simple out route, which he then broke up field, slipping tackles for 69 yards (that’ll be enough, Gronkowski) to the Patriots’ 10 as the entire New England region watched in stunned horror. Next, Roethlisberger hit tight end Jesse James at the one. He reached across the goal line with what looked like the game-winning score.

  Except it wasn’t the game winner. The ball came loose after it hit the ground. Thanks to the byzantine, incomprehensible, federal tax code–like rule that determines what a catch is in the NFL, that is not a touchdown. The officials reversed it. A subsequent Duron Harmon interception in the end zone preserved the win.

  The Patriots won the game, more or less locking up home field throughout the playoffs. They flew home on December 17. They wouldn’t have to hop a plane again until January 27. The Air Kraft jets were still ultra-cool, but the winning made it so they weren’t very cost-effective.

  So with that, a bye week in the playoffs and two home games standing between the Patriots and their eighth trip to the Super Bowl since the 2001 season, you would assume everything would be tranquil. That the controversies of the Jimmy Garoppolo trade and the latest alleged Brady-Belichick “rift” would be in their rearview and all eyes would be on the road ahead. And if you thought that, then you clearly learned nothing in the previous 17 years. (I slowly raise my hand.)

  Just days after New Year’s, with the Pats waiting to face the Tennessee Titans after their upset win over the Chiefs, ESPN dropped yet another cherry bomb into the Patriots’ toilet, again written by Seth Wickersham. This would be the same ESPN that had been the NFL’s Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment during Deflategate and the same Wickersham who co-authored that hit piece between Tom Brady’s successful appeal and the start of the 2015 season that accused the Patriots of all manner of cheating crimes against humanity.

  In this one, Wickersham indiscriminately sprayed bullets in all directions. Brady went to the Krafts to force the Garoppolo trade. He resented his backup so much, he had him banned from his TB 12 Fitness facility. Belichick wanted to trade Brady and stake his future on Jimmy G. The coach held a secret meeting with Roger Goodell, just to stick it to the Krafts. The coach was quitting right after the season. Brady had not been playing up to his usual standards over the last month or so, and Guerrero’s banishment and the “rift” were the cause. And on and on.

  Before the article was even posted I had a very reliable source telling me the only truth contained within was that Brady and Jimmy G had issues in the past, but had worked them out. That Brady and Belichick were never best friends but had a good working relationship. Mostly, that nobody from ownership ever told Belichick what to do. And I published what I knew.

  But none of that registered. As had happened so many times before, the confirmation bias kicked in and the world believed what it wanted to believe. It was the biggest story of the week, nationwide. Bigger than the Wild Card playoff games. Bigger than the stories of the coaches who inevitably get fired at the end of every NFL regular season. Bigger than anything. Even with a week off, the Patriots were incapable of avoiding being the epicenter of the national news cycle.

  The fire of this latest controversy raged so hot that the team took the unusual step of trying to douse it with a joint statement by Kraft, Belichick, and Brady to say how much they love working together and they’re just focused on winning. But as is so often the case, that only fanned the flames. In his weekly interview on my old WEEI show, Belichick specifically said he had “a good relationship” with both Brady and Guerrero. Some elements of Wickersham’s story were proven to be flat-out wrong. For instance, the NFL confirmed Roger Goodell was nowhere near Belichick or even Massachusetts during the week mentioned in the report. Jimmy Garoppolo was not only not barred from TB 12, but he had his own key card and worked out there constantly. But still the fire burned, only to be doused, at the end of a long week, by the actual playing of football.

  The Patriots hosted the Tennessee Titans, who were upset winners over Kansas City the previous week. That was a huge break for New England, as Tennessee did not pose nearly the threat the Chiefs would have. After a 7–7 first quarter, the Patriots made the necessary adjustments and scored the next 28 points of the game on their way to a 35–14 blowout.

  Another break came the following day, when the Steelers were upset at home by Jacksonville. As had happened back in the regular season, the Steelers had openly talked about facing the Patriots before taking care of the Jaguars, and it cost them. Instead of facing their top rival in the AFC championship game, the Pats were 7.5-point favorites. Assuming they too didn’t take Jacksonville for granted, they had the easiest path back to the Super Bowl we could have dreamed of. And for a few blessed days, the season was relatively free of controversy.

  Of course that couldn’t last. On Wednesday, another landmine went off, this of the bad, old-fashioned football injury kind. In practice, something had happened to the World’s Most Important Hand. Tom Brady’s throwing hand, to be exact. The team wouldn’t give specifics. But the next day he was spotted in the media portion of practice wearing gloves on both hands, something he never did. Rumors were all over the p
lace, everything from he’d broken it to it was just a minor boo-boo and he was playing it up to keep Jacksonville guessing. I heard from someone who told me that Brady had separated his thumb and was incapable of throwing a football. Within an hour the same guy told me he’d just had a few stitches and he was out there throwing lasers. I was told by someone else that Brady had been playing with a broken throwing hand since the game against Tampa Bay, which I believe to be true. It would certainly explain a lot.

  So we were faced with the possible nightmare scenario of relying on Brian Hoyer to lead us to Super Bowl LII. Which only brought back the talk of the Krafts forcing Belichick to trade Jimmy Garoppolo, how angry the coach was, and how he was thinking about quitting out of pure disgust. One report out of New York insisted he wanted to go back there to coach the Giants.

  Fortunately, none of those things came to be. In what was probably a great marketing campaign for TB 12, Brady showed the healing power of (Michigan) Wolverine. What was revealed to be a cut between his thumb and forefinger was stitched up, sealed with medical glue, and hidden under a big piece of black tape. And he showed no effects from it, throwing for almost 300 yards and hitting Danny Amendola for two fourth-quarter touchdowns to turn a 20–10 deficit into a 24–20 win. In spite of everything, the Patriots were still winning games and heading back to their third Super Bowl in the last four years.

  The winner of the NFC was the Philadelphia Eagles, despite the fact they’d lost Carson Wentz, their starting quarterback and favorite for league MVP for the season. The Eagles had been underdogs in both of their playoff games and carpet bombed the Vikings into oblivion in the conference title game. The fact that the Patriots would be facing the Eagles was sort of fitting because it gave them the chance to perfectly mirror what they’d done at the beginning of this dynasty. Consider—

  2001: Super Bowl win over St. Louis, winners of the NFC West

  2003: Super Bowl win over Carolina, winners of the NFC South

  2004: Super Bowl win over Philadelphia.

  And then—

  2014: Super Bowl win over Seattle, winners of the NFC West

  2016: Super Bowl win over Atlanta, winners of the NFC South

  2017: Super Bowl win over Philadelphia (possible).

  It was like the two sides of a great seesaw of greatness, with that great huge cosmic titty-twister of the 18–1 season as the fulcrum balancing it all. Plus, after that earlier win over Philly, the Patriots lost both coordinators to head-coaching jobs, and this time they were expected to lose Matt Patricia to the Lions and Josh McDaniels to the Colts. Because time is a flat circle. Everything we have done we will do again.

  Yet still, while they were headed to Minneapolis, they were taking all this psychological baggage with them. If you listened to the noise and believed the rumors, it felt like the trip to New Orleans back in 1997 with the Robert Kraft–Bill Parcells divorce being the story no one could shut up about.

  The 2017 Patriots season had taken on the feel of one long episode of Black Mirror, the Netflix anthology series that takes place in a dystopian near-future where every show starts out relatively normal until we realize the characters are living in a cyber hell brought about by their addiction to their screens. In the case of the Patriots, one of those screens happened to be Brady’s Facebook page as he began releasing chapters of his documentary Tom vs. Time, a behind-the-scenes look at his family life, workouts, and game preparation.

  The series was not only well done and gave the public a look into his personal life, but it was also cute—the Brady-Bundchen family as we’ve never seen them before. It was impossible not to like it. So naturally, some people hated it. A WEEI fill-in host called Brady’s five-year-old daughter “an annoying little pissant.” In a later Tom vs. Time, he’s shown kissing his 11-year-old son on the lips, which prompted CBS New York to conduct interviews with random strangers in the street and “parenting experts” to get their considered opinions on this super-important issue of our times. And somehow all this got more attention than the little matter of the fact that, at the age of 40, Brady had won the NFL’s MVP award.

  Again, Bananaland.

  Super Bowl week was more of the same. New England’s own hyper-relevance combined with the nation’s debilitating case of Patriots Derangement Syndrome to create even more rumors that this was the end of the line for the dynasty. It didn’t quiet things down any when, in a TV interview, Robert and Jonathan Kraft admitted there was “tension” in the organization and were asked if Belichick would be back coaching in 2018. Kraft the Elder answered, “You’ll just have to find out,” when fans wanted nothing less than a “Hell, YEAH!” Then came reports that the owners, head coach, and quarterback were all planning to have a meeting once the season was over, which sounded a lot like when your mom and dad were having a “discussion.” No good ever came out of those.

  Here’s where I was hoping to put a happy ending on this. To say that once Super Bowl LII started, all the ills of the world were chased away. That the Patriots found the same winning formula that worked before, banded together, and pulled it off. That Frodo destroyed the Ring. Harry killed the Dark Lord. And Andy made it out of Shawshank. But you’re holding a book called Five Rings. And I assume you can count.

  Instead of winning a sixth title, the Patriots’ season ended in failure. Failure and even more strangeness. Bizarre, weapons-grade weirdness of a kind you’d only expect to find in a peyote-induced fever dream. The game began with Malcolm Butler sobbing uncontrollably during “America the Beautiful.” Not because he was moved by the song, but because he’d just been told he wasn’t going to play. The man who’d become an instant household name in this very game just three years earlier was now standing on the sidelines blubbering in humiliation watching others play in his place. Badly.

  It was as if there were a rip in space-time and through it stepped the Patriots’ early season defense. They were utterly helpless against the Eagles, even with backup QB and game MVP Nick Foles under center. The 41 points they gave up squandered one of the finest performances ever by Tom Brady or, not to put too fine a point on it, almost any human being ever. His 505 passing yards shattered the record of 466 he had set just the year before. He threw three touchdown passes and no interceptions, to become the first quarterback ever to hit those benchmarks in a losing effort.

  But it was a losing effort. And with this franchise in this era, when success is measured only in championships, coming in a close second doesn’t count.

  On a historic level, Ring One, 16 years earlier, came out of nowhere for this franchise and this quarterback. It made them relevant.

  Ring Two confirmed they were a legitimate power in the league, not some one-off Cinderella story.

  Ring Three proved they were an NFL dynasty.

  Ring Four redeemed them from years of near misses.

  Ring Five was confirmation that this was the longest sustained, enduring, and most successful run in the history of America’s most important sport.

  A sixth ring eluded them at the end of a long and very strange season. But as long as this owner, this coach, and this quarterback stay together, you’d have to be insane to think this dynasty’s run will be over anytime soon.

  Epilogue

  The Luxury of Ordinary Losses

  In the immediate aftermath of that Super Bowl LII, there was a lot to process. The decision to bench Malcolm Butler was never really explained. I was told by people who claimed to know that it wasn’t disciplinary or personal in any way. The coaches just felt he wasn’t prepared to play for whatever reason.

  Josh McDaniels ended up leaving the Indianapolis Colts at the altar and returned to New England after being talked into staying by Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick as he was literally on his way to clear out his office. Belichick reportedly told McDaniels, “I want you by my side. I’ll open my world to you.” Which is not only more romantic than anything I’ve said to my wife in 25 years of marriage, but I’m pretty sure it’s a direct quote from Disne
y’s Aladdin. Anyway, this was a development that was either great news because they were keeping an important part of their success or horrifying because it meant he was being kept around to replace Belichick, depending on how you look at it. Or it was simply the Patriots playing the long con to stick it to the Colts after Deflategate. Only time will tell.

  The anti-Patriots media continued to do anti-Patriots media things. Jimmy Garoppolo signed the richest contract in NFL history to stay with the 49ers. Within days, old nemesis Ron Borges went to print with an article claiming Tom Brady was basically furious at the team and planned to skip all off-season workouts (for the first time in his career) unless they paid him more than Garoppolo. His “sources” were three texts from a Pats fan claiming to be Don Yee, the agent of both quarterbacks. So confirmation bias remains alive and well.

  Personally, in the span of a few days I was able to work my way through the stages of grief, past “acceptance,” and move right back to my default setting: defiance. Pure, spitting fire, blood-in-my-eyes defiance.

  The Patriots lost a game they could’ve won. They have five trophies instead of six. That happened. It’s the nature of their existence. They don’t have the luxury of ordinary losses. When you’re flying into space every single time, you either reach orbit or you crash spectacularly. There are no soft landings. Those are for people standing on chairs. Every time the Pats lose it’s the Apocalypse. And that is only because of their own impossible success. It’s the price of greatness.

  So what happens now? Their fans endure. The team does what they have done for 18 years: get right back into the stratosphere and continue to be the bright, shining center of the sports universe. The Eagles have their first Super Bowl and what is everyone still talking about? Who is America’s obsession? Who is making all the news? The hyper-relevant New England Patriots, the ones still taking withering fire from all directions from a nation hell-bent on seeing them fail. Well, this was failure, but not the kind that lasts. And as long as those rounds are being shot at them, I’m going to be right where I’ve been for as long as I can remember: returning fire.