It didn’t make sense that Patriots-Rams would be the matchup in New Orleans. One team was known for things that seemed to be euphemisms for a lack of beauty. It was industrious and hardworking, gritty and conscientious. The other team had won it all before, two years earlier, and was even better this time. It was stacked with speed and style, two MVP candidates, and a colorful nickname that belonged, in circus font, on the side of a traveling bus: THE GREATEST SHOW ON TURF.
Not surprisingly, there weren’t a variety of perspectives on what the game might become. The Rams had played the Patriots once already, in Foxboro, and won. It was popular and understandable to reason that if the Rams had handled the Patriots in outdoor conditions, which wasn’t their preference, they might annihilate them in the comfort of the Superdome.
The problem with that logic is that it works only if teams remain static. The Rams very well could have been a different team, even a better team, than they had been in November. Time in the NFL doesn’t function in a normal continuum, so a game three months earlier felt like it was from another generation. The Patriots were also changed, in some ways that could be seen on the field and in others that could be measured only in fraternity and brotherhood.
“We were in that space where we knew we had a good football team and no one else knew how good,” Seymour says. “If we were talking boxing, we’d have been the boxer people should have been afraid to fight.”
Several hours before the game, Seymour, who was just twenty-two years old, had a moment with Romeo Crennel. The defensive coordinator hadn’t looked at and spoken to him like this all season. He gave his youngest defensive starter permission to do as he saw fit on the field. The veterans sometimes did that on their own, changing plans and assignments just before the snap, with no time to run it by the coaches for approval. Rookies rarely got that luxury. But what Crennel was telling Seymour, essentially, was that he was in the club now. He was no longer a rookie. He was valuable and they trusted him.
The relationship had deepened between a coach and player, and that was consistent with what was happening all over the team. Willie McGinest had taken giant steps as a leader, more than the coaches realized. He connected with veterans like Phifer and instructed rookies like Seymour. He was a big brother as well as Big Brother.
“Willie was a man among men,” Phifer says. “He got into a couple of scuffles with teammates. They were bigger than him; he got the better of them. But Willie comes in peace. If you wanted to be loud and boisterous, he would let it be known who was in charge. But people had so much respect for Willie that the atmosphere wasn’t one of fear; it was about unity. And he was probably the biggest reason of why it was like that.”
Before the game, one gesture captured the journey from New England to New Orleans. One look, and listen, got to the foundation of the Patriots’ story. “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the public address announcer began, “choosing to be introduced as a team, the New England Patriots…” And out they ran, a mass of red, white, and blue. It was the first surprise of many more to come.
John Madden, during the Fox telecast, said that he had spoken with Rams coach Mike Martz the day before, and Martz thought the game would be lopsided by halftime. “I think he felt he was going to open up this game the first half and blow the roof off this stadium with this offense,” Madden told the largest football audience of the year. But if national football fans hadn’t been paying attention to the Patriots since the emergence of Brady, they were now.
In fact, the Rams game was an anthology of the Patriots season, neatly packaged into sixty minutes, no overwhelming backstory required. It started with Belichick, who had deconstructed the Rams offense and then, just as Roman Phifer had grown used to, broken the game plan into three key points. Number one was to stop running back Marshall Faulk. It continued with Brady, who, despite speculation that he might not start the Super Bowl, heavily taped his left ankle and prepared to make his decisive calls in the huddle.
From there, really, the formula was the opposite of touristy New Orleans; it was, in a word, unadorned. While Martz was telling Madden that the game shouldn’t be close, Belichick was explaining how the Patriots planned to slow it down. He may have understood complexities, but his appeal to those around him was that he made the complex quite simple.
“He’s the smartest guy in football,” says Lionel Vital, who scouted for Belichick in Cleveland and New England. “Yet he never flexes the mental muscle over anybody. When he’s in Germany, he speaks German. When he’s got an audience of sixth-graders, he can speak to them so they understand exactly what he’s saying. He’s very deep; very discerning.”
His idea was for the Patriots to treat Faulk as if he were the quarterback. He wanted to concede shorter passes because he figured the Rams really wanted the deep ones. He wanted a defensive approach just short of bullying, because the Rams were prone to turnovers.
Martz was right in that the game wasn’t all that close at halftime. The Patriots, on the strength of two turnovers, including an interception that Ty Law returned for a touchdown, led 14–3. “If I had dropped that, I would have been pretty damn clumsy,” Law says. “I would have been a nonathlete because the pass was right in the bread bucket. I mean, it wasn’t hard at all.” The lead inched to 17–3 at the beginning of the final quarter. That’s when the Rams finally played to Martz’s expectations and tied the score.
With eighty-one seconds remaining and no timeouts, Brady calmly took the Patriots from their own seventeen-yard line to the St. Louis thirty. In the Super Bowl dream, the starting quarterback drops back and surgically places one into a receiver’s hands in the end zone. But this way was better. This involved a drive in which the 199th pick in one draft completed passes to the 198th pick in another; this was a drive that a born-and-raised Bostonian, tight end Jermaine Wiggins, was a part of; this drive was going to give the last word to the special teams, which they all were a part of, and give some glory to the kicker.
It was the least dramatic dramatic kick in team history. It was thumped with force, and it was geometrically perfect. Right down the middle.
“I’ve only seen my father cry twice,” Phifer says. “My grandmother’s funeral and this game.”
James Phifer was not alone. There were tears and deep exhales all over the field. Belichick ran to the turf to get a better view of the forty-eight-yard kick, and he was still there when it went through. He was sandwiched in a hug by his daughter, Amanda, and his Pro Bowl safety, Lawyer Milloy. Some players danced, some prayed, some openly wept, and a few of them approached Scott Pioli and simply expressed thank-yous.
“When we won, it really was that feeling of emerging from the dark tunnel and seeing the light,” Damien Woody says. “Playing for Coach Belichick, you were on edge every single week. You got comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s never easy. He demands a lot, all the time. If you can’t get it right, he just gives this cold stare like, ‘Are you shitting me right now? How do you not know this?’ So to win it, and hold that trophy, it was finally relief.”
Brady stood on a podium with both hands on his head, smiling. On the same night, he had become a champion and a victim of his team’s accepted script. Since the story was that the Patriots were the recipients of good luck and magic, those qualities were assigned to him as well. He was the game’s MVP, although most people still considered the Rams’ Kurt Warner the better quarterback.
In fact, the Rams had been so impressive during the regular season that a young woman had bought her boyfriend, a University of Louisville football player, a Rams jersey with his name on the back. The Rams seemed to be in a dynamic offense and a paradise for receivers, so she thought the gift made sense. But Deion Branch’s girlfriend, Shola, had the right idea and the wrong team. They watched the Super Bowl together and imagined his future. He’d be there one day, too, with the Patriots.
CHAPTER FIVE
LEAVING THE PACK
They all sensed it as soon as they piled into trucks and rolle
d through the narrow streets of downtown Boston. It was twenty-eight degrees, and the windchill made it feel like zero. And yet there were two sixteen-year-old boys, bare-chested, with one rib cage painted GO and the other PATS. They should have had shirts and coats on. They should have been in school. There were a lot of should-haves that were being overlooked and, as the Patriots were witnessing, all of it was taking place in the biggest crowd anyone had ever seen.
It was just after noon, and some people had come as early as six a.m. to stake their positions at City Hall Plaza. That’s where the trucks were going to stop and spill the Patriots onto a performance stage. But the people swarmed everywhere. On Boylston and Tremont Streets. In Boston Common. On top of buildings, where another shirtless man ran across a roof in boxer shorts and sneakers. On Court and Congress Streets. On shoulders. On trees. Out of windows. City officials knew it would be the party of the year, or more precisely, the after-party of the year. State employees were given the day off, and although most schools were open, thousands of students happened to be missing with mysterious colds and coughs. Ten bus routes were diverted, the subway service on the T was increased, and parking bans were in effect until the celebration ended.
A police spokesman was asked when, exactly, the party would stop. He answered, half-jokingly, March. For the players, most of them born and raised outside of New England, it was shocking that 1.2 million people showed up in the early February cold to celebrate the win over the Rams. But this outpouring is exactly what many of the fans had been trying to express over the years as they discussed their local teams. Yes, they were tougher on their pro teams than most American cities were on theirs. The rationale, though, was often parental: We scold because we love. At the root of the hysteria and overwrought calls to sports-talk radio stations was hunger for a champion who could accurately reflect them. Now they had it.
They had always related to the passionate Lawyer Milloy, and the connection became even deeper when the Patriots safety, snug in a black fur coat, held the Lombardi Trophy to the sky and shouted from the stage, “City of Boston! It’s been a long time coming, huh?”
Everyone could sense that Milloy was the perfect personality for the region. He heard everything that was said about his team, and he took it personally. Two days before the Patriots played the Steelers for the conference title, Milloy heard a line of questioning that he felt was insulting to the Patriots. He was in a Pittsburgh hotel ballroom when he heard it, and he frowned and paced. “I feel like Mike Tyson right now,” he said with fists clenched. After the win over the Rams, he sat on Fox’s on-field studio set and told the nation what the win symbolized.
“Look, we shocked the world. This is not for anybody else but us and our fans, the greatest fans in America. This is what it’s all about. Can’t nobody take this from us, for life!” He was asked, truly, if he thought the Patriots were capable of shutting down one of the best offenses in NFL history the way that they had. “We believed,” he replied before the question was fully complete. “People die for their beliefs, and we believe in our team.”
He was that guy. And he was speaking to thousands of people who felt and thought the same way he did. There were several dignitaries on the City Hall stage. The mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts both were there, and so was Senator John Kerry. The Patriots were bigger than all of them on this day. Milloy used the stage as a club floor and danced with teammate Ty Law, who reenacted his end zone celebration in New Orleans. Law then made Tom Brady and Bill Belichick dance for the excited crowd. Then the cornerback said, “Hey, Mr. Kraft. Can I get an ownership, I own the team, I pay all y’all fools’ money… Can I get a little dance?” So Robert Kraft from Brookline, who understood the psychology of the crowd as much as anyone there, danced.
But despite all the smiles, painted faces, pennants, amplified music, a Jumbotron at City Hall Plaza, and, of course, chants of “Yankees suck,” all of it was going to end in a few hours. The kids would be back in school and the adults would be back to work. That included the Patriots.
The freezing parade had been fun, and it distracted some people from the notable absences on that stage. Willie McGinest, who cried bittersweet tears after the Super Bowl, was missing. His salary cap number for the upcoming season was a bulging $8.3 million, and he and many of his teammates thought that his last game as a Patriot had taken place in New Orleans. It was also a smart bet because the Patriots had already submitted their names for the expansion draft. McGinest’s was on the list. If the Houston Texans wanted him, they could have him.
Also missing from the parade was Drew Bledsoe. Many in the crowd called for him, cheering wildly each time they did it, but Bledsoe was thousands of miles away at his ranch in Montana. He hadn’t even returned to Boston after the Super Bowl. He had flown in a different direction, symbolic of what was going to inevitably happen.
The campaign was long over. Brady-Bledsoe buttons, bumper stickers, and arguments were artifacts. The kid had dramatically taken the job, and it was amazing how quickly the majority of people in the region, fans and media alike, had moved on. No one had expected the Patriots to win the Super Bowl, but if that prediction had been made months earlier, the thought would have been that Bledsoe would be the quarterback dancing near Milloy and Law. Instead it was the twenty-four-year-old Super Bowl MVP, wearing a black trench coat, standing in the background, and listening to squeals from the crowd.
Never again, absolutely never, would he be the anonymous friend when hanging out with his buddies Chris Eitzmann, Matt Chatham, and Dave Nugent. No more wry smiles as they were asked for autographs while he was ignored. No more background duty. His address was going to change; no more neighbors trying to remember the name of the tall, skinny young man in the Chestnut Ridge condos. He got a Cadillac Escalade for being the game’s MVP, and he said on national TV that it now belonged to the team. He hadn’t allowed himself to think like this, because you never outperform your heroes, but he had become the youngest quarterback to ever win a Super Bowl. Before him, it had been twenty-five-year-old Joe Montana.
It was crazy. Exactly one year earlier, the team had been finalizing Bledsoe’s record $103 million deal and providing quarterback insurance by signing Damon Huard as a backup. Now, everyone was familiar with a clause in Bledsoe’s contract that had initially been skipped over due to it being so unlikely and insignificant. It stated that trading Bledsoe would result in limited salary cap damage to the Patriots, less than $1 million. In other words, there was no reason not to make a trade. The next few months would be devoted to trading Bledsoe, signing free agents, and figuring out the best way to approach the college draft.
It was hard to describe where the franchise was. It was cool and weird. Belichick would never forget the night they won the Super Bowl. He didn’t sleep at all, and around two or three a.m., he had been talked out of walking to the French Quarter and Pat O’Brien’s for their legendary hurricanes; he settled for conversation and drinks in the team’s hotel bar. It had been yet another strategic win for the coach. All of the celebrating and memories didn’t stop him from thinking that his winning team now needed to be rebuilt. It was exceptional in some areas, but others were not at a championship standard. People weren’t just being rude when they had favored the Steelers and Rams over the Patriots. There was a noticeable talent gap in the overall rosters, and Belichick felt it had to be fixed.
As for fixing it with the right people, that was the weird part. Two years earlier, the coach didn’t feel that he’d had sufficient time to do his draft homework because the Patriots’ job wasn’t officially his until late January. He’d be playing catch-up this time because of winning. Imagine that. Winning on the field automatically meant scrambling to keep up in scouting. There was no way around it. Both things couldn’t be done simultaneously, so the field took priority.
The difference between February 2000 and February 2002 was striking in terms of scouting personnel. The room was now populated with a good cross section of smart g
uys who were trained to find exactly what Belichick was looking for. There were scouts in their twenties like Nick Caserio, Bob Quinn, and Kyle O’Brien; men in their thirties with more responsibilities like Scott Pioli, Jason Licht, Jon Robinson, Thomas Dimitroff, and Lionel Vital; there was even a consultant in his eighties, Bucko Kilroy, who had either played against or scouted every type of player imaginable over the years. All, with the exception of Kilroy, were on a rising general manager track.
As spring approached, everyone in the organization knew that they were scouting for Brady’s offense now. Everyone in the NFL knew it, too. No one wanted to meet the Patriots’ hefty price for Bledsoe, a first-round pick, if they didn’t have to. It was a harsh business, so teams wanted to see if they could make the Patriots trade from a position of duress. It wasn’t possible to keep Brady and Bledsoe on the same roster again. Even the teams who most needed quarterbacks refused to give in and create a bidding war for Bledsoe. But one team, the division rival Bills, seemed to inquire too often in the name of due diligence. The Bills tried to be coy, but Belichick and Pioli knew they had their buyer.
There were weeks of haggling between the franchises, and things got so bizarre that Buffalo general manager Tom Donahoe attempted to “tattle” on Belichick and Pioli by going over their heads to Kraft. Donahoe’s strategy seemed to be: They won’t make a reasonable deal with me; maybe you can talk some sense into these two. The Super Bowl after just two years on the job had given Belichick and Pioli tremendous freedom in the building, so Kraft ignored Donahoe and let his football guys sort things out. Besides, the problem was that Donahoe was insisting on a second-round pick for Bledsoe, and the Patriots were adamant that it had to be a first. They went back and forth, agitated at times, before there was a breakthrough. Finally, in April, the deal was complete. Drew Bledsoe to Buffalo for the Bills’ 2003 first-round pick. The initial reviews were that the Bills were big winners.
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