As a life-long fan of the New England Patriots, what came to be called Deflategate began–for me–not in the 2014 AFC Championship game, but 10 years earlier on Halloween 2004. That was the first time I attended a professional football game since 1976. I was 11 in ’76, and my dad took my younger brother and me to a Monday night head-to-head between the Patriots and the Jets. The Pats won in a blowout that night, 41-7, and the game was well in hand by the middle of the second quarter.
That’s when things got ugly at Schaefer Stadium, the Pat’s old, creaky, pre-Gillette home. The 50,000-plus New Englanders in attendance got bored and very drunk. Lacking an opposing team to root against, the fans turned on one another. Fights broke out all over the stadium. In the third quarter, someone ran out onto the field. He was cheered, before being dragged to the sideline, so, of course, someone else ran out onto the field. And then someone else. The fans had found a new game to play.
It was strange to be 11 years old and surrounded by grown men, who were behaving worse than any of my classmates had on the playground. There was a lot of strangeness that night. Patriots fans were not used to rooting for a winner.
The Pats had gone 3-11 the year before–a bad year, for sure, but not so strange for them. Now, this year with their new mobile quarterback Steve Grogan, they had in three successive weeks beaten Don Shula’s Dolphins, Terry Bradshaw’s Steelers, and then demolished John Madden and Ken Stabler’s Raiders.
What was happening? It was hard to say, but the Patriots just kept winning in ’76 and finished with a remarkable 11-3. We were going to the playoffs! My brother, my sister, my divorced parents, and I gathered in our living room on a cold December evening to watch the Pats play the Raiders in the first round of the playoffs. The Pats were leading late in the fourth quarter and close to a win when Ken Stabler’s fourth-down pass fell, incomplete.
Unfortunately, “Sugar Bear” Ray Hamilton was called for a dubious roughing the passer penalty. As a result, the Raiders were awarded a first down and went on to win 24-21. This would come to be known as the “phantom call” in New England, and we were all very upset. Reality–at least–had reasserted itself. The Pats were losers, again.
No matter, though. I was, now, a full-fledged Pats fan, cheering them on, season after season. I would cheer for them through the ’86 season, when, as a wildcard team, they surprised everyone by winning three road games and making it to the Super Bowl. Never mind the fact that they lost to the Chicago Bears by a score I will not repeat here.
Still, I kept cheering for them. It wasn’t always easy to do so because most of the home games were blacked out, meaning not enough people had bought tickets, so, as a kind of punishment, the local affiliates wouldn’t broadcast the games. No one could blame New Englanders for staying home. Many considered Schaefer to be the worst stadium in the NFL with its cold, minor-league benches and crumbling façade. Except for the occasional spike in victories, the Pats remained mired in mediocrity and failure.
Failure, especially in sports, has a kind of momentum of its own. I knew from my own experience playing football and running track that the difference between winning and losing, between making a catch and not, often hinged on the smallest of moments, where my full attention would either be brought to focus or diverted by a single thought of those who were meant for the podium (or not).
How quickly things can unravel. Before you know it, you find that it’s just easier to lose and end the senseless struggle to attain things that you can’t even seem to remember wanting anymore.
I kept cheering for the Pats, anyway. I cheered for them when they drafted Drew Bledsoe and hired surly Bill Parcells. In January of 1997, having followed a young love of mine to Seattle, I sat with my wife’s family, who cared little about football and less about the Patriots, and watched, as Desmond Howard’s 99-yard kick off return ended our hopes of upsetting the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XXXII. Parcells quit after the game and went to coach the much-hated Jets. So it goes with the Patriots. A soap opera of crushing defeat and disappointment always follows any kind of success.
By 2004, however, everything had changed. I still lived in Seattle, but the Patriots had transformed themselves from perennial losers—a dysfunctional, backwoods, hapless, awkward younger-brother of a football team–to unequivocal winners. By 2004, I was even used to them winning. How could I not be? They had pulled off a stunning upset in the 2001 Super Bowl, led by a brilliant, enigmatic coach and a young, matinee-idol quarterback.
When I learned that Tom Brady had replaced a now-injured Drew Bledsoe, the Pats fan of 25 years in me thought, “Well, time to write off another season.” Tom Brady was not the name of a great NFL quarterback. I still linked the name Brady, indelibly, in my mind to that 70s sit-com–a wholesome, kitschy, silly, edgeless, and predictable package of a show. I watched it, sometimes, because there was nothing else to do in the 70s when the Patriots were still a joke, themselves. It would be just like the Patriots to be stuck with a Brady, as a quarterback. Hadn’t they suffered enough? Must the humiliation continue?
Apparently not. The Pats won that first Super Bowl, and then another in 2003. Then, in the autumn of 2004, they were on an incredible streak. As my oldest son, Max, and I wound our way through downtown Seattle toward Qwest Field, the Patriots preparing to play the Steelers at Heinz Field in Pittsburg. Dating back to the previous season, the Pats had won a record 18 consecutive games. Funny that there existed a time when it seemed that the Patriots couldn’t have won 18 games in a decade.
I didn’t just cheer for the Patriots any more; I loved them!
Seeing their uniforms on TV filled me with a kind of confidence that I had rarely ever known, before. Their colors symbolized competence, confidence, intelligence, and success. Seeing them, regardless of who occupied them, I sometimes felt the winner within me–that inherent guide toward success I sometimes lost track of, as my attention became transfixed by failures, great and small.
Max, for his part, was new to this football thing. He was not an athlete like his father had been, but by age 10–the same age I had first discovered the Patriots–he had taken a liking to the Seahawks. Poor Max. The Seahawks, at that time, reminded me of the Patriots of old. They always seemed to play just well enough to raise one’s hopes to a height from which the inevitable fall would deliver a meaningful bruise.
The year, before, Max wept, when an overtime loss to the Packers eliminated the Seahawks from the playoffs. “Get out while you can, Max,” I thought. But no, he returned for another “dose” the next year, even managing to talk his father into buying two tickets to a home game. I don’t like crowds, and that night in Foxboro had seared its way into my memory. Nonetheless, he was persistent, and, so, there we were.
What a spectacle! The sports stadium remains a reality impossible to replicate, elsewhere. It’s like a beehive of 70,000 people, who’ve organized themselves in a giant bowl for an afternoon. As a result, you had to divide your awareness between the game on the field and the jet-engine energy of the crowd. The game began, but watching it live was nothing like watching it on television. The players seemed so small, and it was easy to become distracted, watching the tight-end run his slant route, while the pass went to the slot receiver, who streaked down the sideline. Fortunately, the jumbotron suspended high above the far end zone replayed every down, showed every score.
Football teams were battling it out all across the country. While the Seahawks methodically dismantled the undermanned Panthers, the jumbotron kept us abreast of the other games. The Chiefs were beating the Colts; the Raiders were losing to the Chargers; the Bills were up on the Cardinals. Unlike the replays, the scores had no impact on the crowd. We did not boo or cheer a single result. In a way, the scores were just information for the curious like CNN news, playing on airport TV monitors. Then came the score for the Patriots game.
It is important to remember that this was before Spygate, before Deflategate, and before Super Bowl XLIX and Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception. The Patriots and Seahawks had virtually no shared history. They played in different conferences and on opposite ends of the country. The Patriots (it seemed to me) had never once stood between the Seahawks fans and their shared dreams of gridiron glory.
The jumbotron showed the score: Steelers 21, Patriots 3, 10:24 remaining in the 2nd quarter. What happened next occurred in rapid succession. First, that old familiar death feeling of loss bloomed in my heart. They weren’t going to pull this one off. In a split-second, however, while still grieving the end of the Patriots record-setting run, the crowd erupted.
Had something occurred on the field? No…the game was between plays. I returned my attention to the jumbotron, where the score remained. The crowd was still roaring. The cheering wasn’t for the Steelers, I realized; it was for the Patriots. They roared as if a Patriots loss meant a Seahawks victory. They roared, exactly, as I used to against the Raiders, the Steelers, and the Dolphins in the 70s and 80s–teams that year-after-year just kept winning and winning and winning.
I underwent a kind of vertigo. In my mind, the Patriots were still climbing, game-by-game, out of three decades of disappointment. They were the Good Guys–the losers who had transformed themselves into winners. Apparently, in every stadium, except Gillette in Foxboro, they were, now, the Bad Guys. This seemed extremely premature to me, but it would not be long before the Patriots would be compared to The Empire from Star Wars with a hooded Bill Belichick as the Sith Lord Emperor Palpatine.
The game ended and everyone was happy. Even me, actually. The Patriots may have lost, but Max was glad the Seahawks didn’t. Besides, it was hard not to join a crowd of 70,000 in celebration. Plus, as we made our way out of the stadium and back through Seattle, I began to sense that today’s Patriots loss would not often be repeated, and I was right. The Pats would go on to finish 14-2, beat the Steelers in the AFC Championship game, and defeat the Philadelphia Eagles for their third Super Bowl victory in four years. The Empire had completed its Death Star.
Since then, there have been three Super Bowl losses and two more victories, a near-perfect season, and scandals. It was not easy to be a Patriots fan during their 30 years of cyclical mediocrity, but it is maybe even more challenging, now, that they are a dynasty. I am a “good guy,” you see. But then again, so is everyone. We are all the heroes of our own story, being led, whether we listen or not, by our Inner Winners. You are a hero. I am a hero. Tom Brady is a hero, and Roger Goodell is a hero.
This is not, however, the lens through which people typically view sports. Therefore, to remain a Patriots fan, I must ignore an indisputable reality: The Patriots continue to commit the same crime, again and again, of which they have been guilty of for the last 19 years–winning.
I don’t mean to sound smug. As I said, to remain a Patriots fan I must ignore the reality that if I had been born anywhere but New England, I, too, would have been cheering the news on the jumbotron that Halloween Day in Qwest Field when Max and I watched the Seattle Seahawks host the Carolina Panthers. When one team wins too much it seems to upset life’s inherent equilibrium. Yes, even within the football fan’s rabid heart beats the awareness that we are all equal in the end. Ultimately, there is no meaningful difference between the hot dog vendor and Tom Brady because everyone’s story must be told.
All that winning and winning and winning appears to defy this, however. What if some people are just better than others and their stories worthier of telling? What if some of us don’t have that Inner Winner? Truly, an ugly but tempting thought! How comforting it can be when the winners occasionally lose.
Every Darth Vader was once a Luke Skywalker. If you are like me, you probably consider yourself a Luke. If so–you are always in search of some villain to slay. Good simply must conquer evil, after all. While you may not know who will win next Sunday when the Pats face off once again against the Rams, you know you are good. So it is for all the players in the game. After the confetti falls, some will hug each other, others will shake their heads, but each will have a story worth telling if they choose to tell it.
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