After twenty-two years of living in the Midwest, I still root for Boston teams in baseball, football and basketball. It has nothing to do with loyalty, because I am a New Yorker by birth, but more about the culture of the teams and the shrewdness of the head coaches. You always sense there is something more important than the stars, the salaries, and the won/ loss record. Teams are built on trust, leadership and flexibility.
The vision emerging over the decades has been strong defense, team over celebrity, character over talent.
Maybe it started with Red Auerbach in the 1950’s. Or more recently with Bill Belichick, the senior statesman and prophet of strategic coaching. Why is he more “strategic” than any other football coach? Aren’t they all “strategic”? He designs his teams to be adaptable to every game, to counter the strengths of every opponent, and no one person makes the team what it is. Even when Tom Brady went down at the beginning of 2011, the Patriots went to the playoffs, and their back-up quarterback went on to start for other teams. People always link Belichick to Brady, as though inseparable, but Belichick would be a great coach without Tom Brady.
Darelle Revis is the defensive anchor that Tom Brady is for the offense, but Belichick sent him home a week ago for chronic lateness to team meetings. There’s a strong message in this: no individual is above the discipline of the team. And the complementary notion that every individual is valuable to the team is more than an empty creed. Week after week, a different player shines, and the players work to make their team mates succeed.
Baseball is a different game, but the Red Sox follow a similar strategy. Dustin Pedroia is the face of the Red Sox, and like Tom Brady, he works to make his team mates better. He works in the off-season with whomever the shortstop heir-apparent might be, whether Jose Iglesias or Xander Bogaerts. He keeps his head down and focuses on the next game. He runs out the ground ball. He has that same “baseball is life” attitude that Brady has about football, and he plays that way.
The Red Sox showed that the team was more than its parts last summer by dismantling it in the middle of the season–most of the starting rotation was scattered to the four winds to bring in some sorely needed offense. They are still a work in progress,but you can bet this team will be built on strong defense and multiple role-players, as the Patriots are constructed every season. They will not be the Kansas City Royals, but there is much in that pattern of interdependence that the Red Sox will try to duplicate.
The Boston Celtics could justifiably claim to be Boston’s oldest model of professional team-building, going back to Red Auerbach and coming forward to Doc Rivers and Brad Stevens. The team was always built on relentless defense, even in the Larry Bird era, and the bench players always felt they were vital to the team’s success. They may have found their Brady and Pedroia in the first-round draftee Marcus Smart. Everyone says he “brings energy” to the team with his aggressive defense.
Danny Ainge went after Brad Stevens as coach with the same determination as Robert Kraft pursued Bill Belichick and the same ferocity as John Henry in getting John Farrell back from the Blue Jays.
The three teams had an ideal leader they saw in these three men and signed them with long-term contracts. The Celtics are on a down-cycle after dismantling their team a year ago, but they have complete faith that Stevens will mold a team in the Auerbach image, with smothering defense and shared offensive production. Stevens shows public faith in his star, Rachon Rondo, but everyone knows if the right player becomes available, Rondo is on his way out of Boston. There is something bigger than Rondo under construction.
Inevitably these three teams elevate players to stardom, but they are not coddled stars with no respect for the team. Pedroia, Brady and the Celtics’ incumbent leaders preach their coaches’ gospel of every player essential to victory. They are quick to praise the role-player’s contribution to the team, and they deflect every attempt to make them the cog of the wheel. This ethos persists in the good times and the bad.
Boston coaches and managers have a paradoxical “Sports is Life” approach. It is not so much that everything depends on their sport as that they play the game as they live, with ferocity and integrity. Sports gives meaning to their lives and so it becomes sacred, but winning seldom becomes more important than winning well. Players who don’t internalize this creed find their way to other teams. Players thought to be prima donas discover they have a role to play when they come to Boston.
Growing up I hated the Celtics and the Red Sox, because they both gave their New York opponents fits. I moved to Boston in 1971 and converted to the Red Sox in 1978. The Larry Bird Celtics sucked me in. The Bill Belichick Patriots pulled me into the orbit. And since then Boston has been my hub. Not The Hub of the Universe (as they would like to be known), but the hub of coaching, teamwork, and hope for the next game. Is there any other city that lives up to that vision?