12

by Casey Sherman

  Kravitz waited until he got to the parking lot at Gillette Stadium and then got out his phone.

  “The Patriots are being investigated by the league for deflating footballs,” the source told him.

  “Get the fuck outta here,” Kravitz responded incredulously. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” the source told him.

  “I can’t run with the story unless I get confirmation.”

  “Then I suggest you do.”

  Kravitz hung up and began texting and tweeting other league sources and soon got ahold of another trusted NFL insider.

  “Is it true the Patriots are being investigated for deflating footballs in the AFC championship?” he asked.

  “If you write it, you won’t be wrong,” the insider replied.

  Kravitz’s mind was now racing. He still had to get back to his hotel room in nearby Smithfield, Rhode Island, to finish his column about the Colts’ blowout loss. But the game itself seemed like an afterthought to him now. He had been given the opportunity to break a major story, and it couldn’t wait for the morning news cycle. The columnist decided to report the allegations in a tweet. He began to type—Breaking: A league source tells me the NFL is investigating the possibility the Patriots deflated footballs Sunday night. More to come.

  He showed his phone screen to his boss, WTHR Indianapolis sports director Dave Calabro.

  “You know this is gonna raise holy hell,” Calabro warned.

  Kravitz nodded. He had begun to sweat in the cold New England night. Taking a deep breath, he pressed his thick index finger on the send button. The time was 1:55 a.m.

  “Here goes nothing. Let’s go break the Internet.”

  Chapter Two

  Storm Fronts

  Bob Kravitz placed his head on a pillow and stared at the ceiling of his small hotel room. He closed his eyes but sleep would not come. He’d been a sports reporter and columnist for thirty-five years, and he describes his knowledge of the inner workings of the NFL as “a mile wide and an inch deep. Just enough to be dangerous.”3

  His social media post was potentially the most dangerous dispatch of his career. He lay awake wondering if he would even have a career in the morning.

  There’s a chance you could be wrong, Kravitz told himself. Your balls are now on the line.

  Unlike Kravitz, Tom Brady slept soundly that Sunday night. After the game, he had returned home to his supermodel wife, Gisele Bündchen, and his mansion in Brookline, a tony Boston suburb, where team owner Robert Kraft also resided. Brady’s body felt strong and healthy. He hadn’t been punished by the Colts defense as he had been the previous week during an epic and physically draining come-from-behind win against the rugged Baltimore Ravens at Gillette Stadium. In that game, Ravens defenders repeatedly broke through the barrier reef formed by Brady’s offensive line to agitate the quarterback with angry shoves and violent pro wrestling–style hits.

  While the aging legend struggled early, opposing Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco was going for the kill. Flacco had been a mystery to Patriots coaches, players, and fans throughout his career. He had never been intimidated by the aura of Bill Belichick and was immune to the three championship banners hanging from the rafters above the south end zone inside Gillette Stadium. Historically, Flacco performed well in New England, especially in the playoffs. He’d thrown five touchdowns and passed for more than five hundred yards over their past three showdowns and had two big wins over Brady and the Patriots to show for it. The six-foot-six signal caller had also thrown thirteen touchdowns with zero interceptions over his last five playoff appearances. The 2015 divisional playoff game appeared to be following Flacco’s script. In the first quarter, he threw a nineteen-yard touchdown strike to wide receiver Kamar Aiken, himself a former Patriot, and then followed it up with a nine-yard score to respected veteran Steve Smith Sr., who caught cornerback Darrelle Revis on the inside for an easy touchdown.

  The rambunctious hometown crowd grew quiet and waited to see how Brady and the Patriots would respond. It was now time to release the kraken. Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels summoned the pass-catching beast known as Rob Gronkowski and called his number 87 for two big pass plays, one for sixteen yards and another for a whopping forty yards down the left seam on the edge of the Ravens’ coverage. Brady capped the drive with a scrambling run into the end zone. The Patriots were alive again and would soon tie the score, when Brady found slot receiver Danny Amendola, who pulled in a short pass and leaped for a touchdown. But Flacco and the Ravens soon countered with two more scores, and the pendulum continued to swing drastically back and forth as the two quarterbacks battled like prizefighters. Down 28 to 14, Brady brought his team back with a touchdown to Gronkowski. Then slot receiver Julian Edelman, Brady’s favorite target, found a target of his own. Josh McDaniels called a trick play, allowing Edelman, a former Kent State University quarterback, an opportunity for highlight-reel glory. The receiver took a pass from Brady behind the line of scrimmage and then paid it forward with a perfect spiral down the sideline to Amendola, a similarly built receiver twin, for a fifty-one-yard touchdown. There was jubilation in Foxborough.

  A Baltimore field goal put the Ravens back in the lead, but once again, Brady charged back with his third touchdown pass of the game to veteran wide receiver Brandon LaFell. The strike was history in the making as it placed Brady in front of his boyhood idol, San Francisco 49ers legend Joe Montana, and Packers great Brett Favre, as the quarterback with the most postseason touchdowns—forty-six.

  On this night, however, records meant little to Brady. The game was still tight, and the Patriots were holding on to a precarious four-point lead. The ball was now back in Joe Flacco’s hands, and the Ravens quarterback showed why he’d earned the nickname “Joe Cool,” which had been Montana’s moniker a generation ago. He completed a critical fourth-down pass as the clock approached the two-minute warning. But a field goal would do Baltimore no good. The Ravens had to score a touchdown. Two plays later, Flacco heaved the ball to Steve Smith Sr., who was flanked by two Patriots defensive backs near the end zone. Safety Duron Harmon turned toward the play at the optimum moment and made a game-saving interception. Flacco would get one more shot, but a Hail Mary pass came up short and the Patriots were headed to the AFC championship game, where they would go on to trounce the Colts.

  The Ravens, on the other hand, were headed home to Baltimore. They were beaten and angry. Before hopping on the team charter, head coach John Harbaugh addressed the media in a news conference at Gillette Stadium. Harbaugh was outraged that the Patriots had used an unorthodox blocking scheme during the game on a critical third-quarter drive where only four offensive linemen took position at the line of scrimmage. The team still needed a fifth player on the line, so running back Shane Vereen checked into the game as an ineligible receiver and rarely used tight end Michael Hoomanawanui moved over to the left tackle position. The chess move left Harbaugh and Ravens defensive coordinator Dean Pees no time to adjust and figure out who the eligible and ineligible receivers were. As the ball was snapped to Brady, Hoomanawanui raced upfield unchallenged and hauled in the pass. The tight end–turned–left tackle had open room and ran for several more yards before getting pulled down deep in Ravens territory. As the Patriots walked back to the huddle, a bewildered Harbaugh had no idea what he’d just witnessed and marched onto the field to cry foul. The coach drew a penalty for screaming at the officials and was forced to bite his lower lip until the postgame, when he took the podium and blasted the Patriots to reporters.

  “We wanted the opportunity to ID who the eligible receivers were,” Harbaugh said. “They [the Patriots] would announce the eligible player and then time was taken [off the game clock] and they would snap the ball before we had a chance to figure out who was lined up where, and that was the deception part of it. And that’s where it was clearly deception.…Nobody’s ever seen that before.”

  When a reporter asked the coach whether he thought the play was
cheap or dirty, Harbaugh responded with a terse no comment. The Ravens coach had just chummed the water with raw meat, and the sharks smelled blood. For the NFL beat writers, it was an easy and tantalizing story to write. The Patriots were being accused of deception once again. For the legion of football fans across the nation who despised Brady, Belichick, and company, it offered the opportunity to resurrect the Spygate scandal in barroom and online conversations.

  For Harbaugh’s part, his tacit insistence that the Patriots were playing dirty or cheap could have been interpreted as a cheap shot against the organization. The Ravens coach claimed no one had ever seen a play like that before, when in reality the University of Alabama had run a similar play back in November 2014 in an overtime win against the Louisiana State University Tigers. Harbaugh noted that Bill Vinovich, the referee for the Patriots–Ravens game, had also made clear announcements in the stadium that certain Patriots receivers were ineligible, in essence telling the Ravens’ defenders they didn’t need to cover them.

  When John Harbaugh’s comments reached the ears of Tom Brady, the quarterback shot right back during his own postgame press conference.

  “Maybe those guys [the Ravens] gotta study the rule book and figure it out. We obviously knew what we were doing and we made some pretty important plays. It was a real good weapon for us. Maybe we’ll have something in store next week. I don’t know what’s deceiving about that. They [the Ravens] should figure it out.”

  The NFL backed up Brady’s statement, ruling that nothing was illegal about the play in question, but the quarterback’s counterpunch did not sit well with Harbaugh and other members of the Ravens organization, and the repercussions would be gigantic.

  Number 12 later attempted to defuse the situation by saying he had a lot of respect for John Harbaugh as a coach, but the damage was already done and Baltimore plotted its revenge.

  In the days leading up to the AFC championship, Ravens assistant head coach and special teams coordinator Jerry Rosburg placed a phone call to his friend Colts head coach Chuck Pagano. Pagano had close ties to the Baltimore organization, having served as the team’s defensive coordinator in 2011. Rosburg informed his former colleague of something rotten in the state of Denmark. The special teams coach believed that within the palace walls of Gillette Stadium there lurked corruption and deceit on a scale that would have inspired William Shakespeare. Rosburg explained that the Ravens had experienced serious issues when they were in kicking or punt situations during their game with the Patriots. Each time, before they lined up a kick, the Ravens were handed new footballs instead of the balls Rosburg and his team had prepared themselves.

  “Be careful,” he warned Pagano.

  That conversation was then relayed to Colts equipment manager Sean Sullivan, who pushed it up the chain of command to general manager Ryan Grigson. Sullivan surmised that the problems with the footballs went far beyond the kicking game.

  “As far as the game balls are concerned, it is well known around the league that after the Patriots game balls are checked by officials and brought out for game usage by the ball boys, the Patriots will let out some air with a ball needle because their quarterback likes a smaller football so he can grip it better,” Sullivan wrote in an e-mail. “It would be great if someone would check the air in the game ball as the game goes on so that they don’t get an illegal advantage.”

  As the Colts’ coaches prepared their game plan for New England, the Indianapolis front office hatched a plan of its own for the AFC championship.

  Tom Brady, of course, was oblivious to the cloak-and-dagger operation. He had routed the Colts in one of the most decisive playoff wins of his storied career. After that game, Brady made sure he did not get lured into another controversy and was at his controlled best during the postgame press conference, praising both the Colts and the Patriots’ opponent in the upcoming Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks.

  On Monday morning, January 19, 2015, while the football universe was reacting to Bob Kravitz’s tweet, Brady was still unaware of the allegations that broke in the predawn hours. The quarterback called into the Boston sports radio station WEEI for his weekly interview on the Dennis & Callahan Show. As with his previous on-air conversations on the program, Brady expected to discuss candidly the key plays from the previous night’s game, endure some good-natured ribbing from the hosts, and possibly get lured into reliving his two most recent Super Bowl appearances, both ending in crushing losses to the New York Giants. Instead, he was confronted by cohost Kirk Minihane, the show’s resident instigator, about the veracity of the Kravitz tweet. But at this point, even the sports radio jocks were skeptical.

  “We didn’t really give any weight to the story at the time,” Minihane recalls. “Our producer, Chris Curtis, had the Kravitz nugget laid out for us when we arrived at the studio around 5:30 a.m., along with every other news item about the game. We knew that Kravitz was a shit-stirrer and Patriots hater so we just decided to ask Brady the question as a throwaway line, as a punch line.”4

  The interview had approached the nine-minute mark before Minihane asked Brady if he had heard about the Kravitz story. The quarterback said he hadn’t heard about or read the story.

  “Did you have a sense that you had a better grip on the ball than the Colts?” Minihane pressed.

  Brady let out a nervous laugh. “I think I’ve heard everything at this point.”

  Following that interview the quarterback received a text from team equipment assistant John Jastremski. Call me when you get a second, the message read. It was his job to oversee Brady’s footballs, and while the two men had a congenial relationship, it was the first time they had corresponded by text or a phone call in six months. Jastremski was a Massachusetts native and lifelong Patriots fan who grew up in the small town of Hopedale, located in the heart of the Blackstone Valley, midway between Worcester, the state’s second largest city, and Foxborough. He’d played basketball in high school and had an affinity for computers, and, like many kids raised in New England, Jastremski bled Patriots red, white, and blue. He landed a job as a Patriots ball boy in 1994, the year coach Bill Parcells and the organization’s top draft choice, quarterback Drew Bledsoe, joined the team during Robert Kraft’s first year of ownership. Together, the three men resurrected the moribund franchise, and young Jastremski had been given a front-row seat to the dramatic turnaround. But what happened after the Parcells-Bledsoe era was more than any diehard Boston sports fan could wish for. Jastremski graduated Bryant University with a degree in computer information systems but kept his job with the Patriots, where he had celebrated three Super Bowl wins while forging a bond with a quarterback many were already calling “the greatest of all time.”

  Jastremski lived quietly in a condo a few miles away from Foxborough but spent most of his time within the confines of Gillette Stadium, working in the equipment room adjacent to the locker room, where players were always stopping by to pillage and plunder whatever they needed before practices and home games. Like other equipment assistants, Jastremski handed out player jerseys, adjusted helmets, and distributed the proper cleats to satisfy any change in field and game-day conditions. But over the past three seasons, his role had been elevated to “game ball maker.” The designation allowed him to work directly with Brady in preparing game-day footballs. Each NFL team received nearly eight hundred footballs per season, and Jastremski treated each one like a coveted bejeweled Fabergé egg.

  Less than a minute after Brady received the text from Jastremski, he placed the requested call to his “game ball maker,” who answered immediately after seeing the contact TomBrady2 appear on his cell phone screen.5 Their discussion lasted thirteen minutes and four seconds. Jastremski would later claim that the tone of the conversation was lighthearted and that he was “semi-busting Brady’s chops.” The ball handler hadn’t heard the WEEI radio interview but had been alerted to its content by his girlfriend. Jastremski was obviously curious about the details of the allegations, since he was responsible for �
��making” Brady’s footballs and it would be his neck on the chopping block if something went wrong.

  The two men discussed what they had learned of the morning’s media coverage. After Bob Kravitz’s initial tweet, the NBC Pro Sports Talk website had posted a related story at 2:19 a.m. Newsday ran a story almost two hours later with National Football League spokesperson Michael Signora confirming that the league was “looking into the matter.” Signora also stressed that there was no timetable on the investigation and that NFL rules prohibit teams from underinflating footballs during games. There was no indication from either Jastremski or Brady that this initial phone call included discussion of what seemed to be the elephant in the room at that time—the fact that Jastremski’s coworker Jim McNally, the New England Patriots’ official locker room attendant, had been questioned about the team’s footballs by two members of NFL security immediately after the Colts game. Jastremski knew this because McNally had called him at 12:15 a.m. during his ninety-minute drive from the stadium to his home in New Hampshire.

  Jastremski could only imagine what McNally would say under the scrutiny of NFL security. During the initial questioning following the AFC championship, McNally told league security representatives that he had walked the footballs (thirteen game balls stuffed into a sack) onto the field at Gillette Stadium without an escort before the game. Oftentimes, he would be joined on such a walk by game officials or Richard Farley, the NFL security representative for the Patriots.

  “Nothing unusual happened during the walk from the locker room to the field,” McNally insisted during the interview.

  What McNally failed to mention was the fact that he had taken the game balls with him into a bathroom before continuing on to the field.