New England Patriots

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America’s Team? The Patriots

Every year sportswriters across the continent wish and wonder if the Dallas Cowboys will finally restore the glory of their Superbowl dominance in the 1990’s. Back then they were known as “America’s Team,” although the title appears to have been taken by fiat, rather than election. Still, they never befouled the NFL with scandal or unattractive cheerleaders, so they rode the title to three championships without protest across the land.

The New England Patriots, on the other hand, won four Superbowl titles in the Twenty-first century, while having two “-gates” to their shame– “Spygate” and “Deflate-gate.” Despite their colonial symbols and red, white, and blue uniforms, they could not aspire to the title “America’s Team,” because of their tainted reputation.

So, as the 2015 season begins, hearts throb for Tony Romo, but clench at the sight of Tom Brady. The nation pins its hope on a billionaire oil baron from Texas, instead of the master craftsman of football franchises, Robert Kraft. The Cowboys represent the hard-driving cattleman, paying out generous salaries to defensive linemen and skill positions alike, while the Patriots let half their defensive backfield fly off in free agency. Put all their hope in a pretty boy from California and a freakishly large and agile Polish tight end.

Are we sure we are not succumbing to regional prejudices here? Is Texas the politically correct birthplace of football champions, while New England gives rise to the crafty braintrust, the kind of brains you just can’t trust? Why does a team that hasn’t played in a Superbowl for twenty years cause fans to tremble with summer expectations, while the team that rules the AFC East and annually challenges for the AFC championship receives annual contempt outside of New England?

Yeah, Spygate was a pernicious plot and Deflategate had the taint of unfairness, but the first was summarily punished and the second was full of sound and psi, signifying nothing. If any of this happened in Dallas, the franchise would take its licks and come out the next year as the slightly muted America’s Team. We’d say they were bad boys and take away their scholarships. Oops, that would be the University of Texas.

No, I am not proud of the “gates” attributed to New England, and Bill Belichick can be a turd at times, but most of the time he runs a football team the way everyone wishes theirs was run. No loose-mouths or alibis. No prima donnas or sour grapes. Just gettin’ a little better with every game until the playoffs, and then play your ass off. That’s Belichick football, and everyone wishes their team played like that.

Just don’t let them play in New England, where the sissies play baseball and hockey, even in October.

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The Vision

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?

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NewsGossip

During his tenure with the New England Patriots Bill Belichick has taken a lot of abuse for controlling the information doled out to the press. His laconic style has starved the media of stories about stories and personal views about brewing controversies.   Now it all makes sense. Belichick was right all along.

The media frenzy surrounding professional athletes crosses the line of gossip every day.  The New York Jets were transformed from mediocre performance to soap opera by the New York media. Tim Tebow was rescued by the Patriots, because there was no better sanctuary from the insatiable media.   Every member of the Patriots has been questioned about their views on a team mate now under indictment for murder, and yet no sensations have emerged at the outset of the summer camp.

The problem, of course, is that there is a story to be told in each of these cases. The question is when does the story become idle chatter and filling up airspace and column inches?

The Hernandez story has reached that threshold. A man is on trial for a capital crime, and his team mates are asked to pass judgment on that crime and indeed on the man’s character as a football player.  The Patriots have responded with characteristic restraint, including forbidding unauthorized commentary to the media.  Sound strategy for the team, as well as the legal process.

Now Belichick looks like a prophet of media control. The discipline he has enforced with the Patriots has made them a model of discretion and team solidarity.  They refuse to give fuel to the story-within-the-story, the idle chatter, known also as gossip.  They released their views of the Hernandez proceeding through their team captains and made it clear that Hernandez would not be the story to cover during training camp.  They shrank the gossip factor to zero.

Although I enjoy a story drained to its dregs as much as the next reader, I also think the need-to-know is an American obsession, challenged only by the British lunatic stalking of the royal family.  Athletes and celebrities who resist the pressure of the media and its voyeuristic readers can preserve a team culture, preserve family or fraternal solidarity, and prevent perversion of justice.  The news that is fit to print or broadcast is a lot less than the media deems necessary.

Belichick got it right.  Opinionating needs to be restrained in an era of omnipresent news coverage.  Professional athletes have no obligation to fill the media’s appetite for gossip, and they are wiser not to indulge it. But don’t expect the media to give Belichick credit for shutting them out.