How Chandler Jones brought glee back to the gridiron.
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He races down the sideline with a repeated whoop like a siren. His glee carries him 75 yards without his feet hitting the ground. He is a new kind of football player. On pace to break the Patriots’ single season sack record, Chandler Jones is more than a quarterback-hunter.
He is a joyful tackler.
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The Fans
Forgive me, but I am a Patriots Fan. I come by it honestly. I grew up outside of Boston with a sports fanatic for a father. For years our main point of contact was the contact on the field. He loved the narrative arc of the game, the break-out run plays, and, most of all, the stories of the underdogs’ rise to glory on the gridiron.
Despite not knowing an X from an O, I would sit beside him and watch him exalt and bemoan each play. It was the largest range of expressions I ever saw flicker over my father’s face. If I couldn’t be the cause of them, at least I could be emotion adjacent.
The Team
Historically the Patriots were a team lacking flash. Their lines were made of undrafted rookies. Their press conferences were delivered in monotones. Their locker room philosophy put the team before the individual. Injury reports and interviews gave no a shred of information beyond that mandated by the league. From a distance it was easy to dislike this unemotional, faceless team.
Yet there was a grit and scrappiness to these athletes that my father could relate to as a high school drop out estranged from his family. Like my father, the Patriots had been knocked down so many times that many of the players wore an emotional armor under their pads.
They didn’t know it, but they were laying the foundation for a dynasty.
The Quarterback
Then the 199th pick of the 1999 draft arrived in Foxboro.
Shaking team owner Robert Kraft’s hand in their first meeting, Tom Brady brashly declared himself “the best decision you have ever made.” One decade and four Super Bowl rings later, Brady has proven himself prescient as well as persistent.
In addition to bringing the Pats their first Championship, “Tom Terrific” became their first breakout star. With his supermodel wife, cleft chin, and towheaded toddlers, his life captured the flash of the paparazzi. He was the face of the Patriots, and together with Peyton Manning, the face of the NFL.
Inside the stadium he embodied the Patriot way of preparing for football games. He was the first to arrive at the facility, he watched endless film tape, and he restructured his contract to benefit the team. Outside of Gillette Stadium he had the best a man can get, and although he kept his inner circle close he made himself available for endless charity events, autograph signings, and public appearances.
Until something happened that made him shut down as quickly as a goal line stand.
The Scandal
In the 2014 AFC championship game, the Patriots were accused of tampering with the footballs in order to gain a competitive advantage.
Long reviled for a combination of perpetual success and sketchy practice, “Deflategate” put the Patriots right where their detractors wanted them — with a needle focus for their criticism.
Poster-boy Tom Brady felt some of the air taken out of his high-soaring reputation. Those few missing PSI left him pissed at the media and the world beyond the Patriots bench. Tom is no longer terrific with the public. Sideline banter has fallen flat.
Three teams are undefeated in the 2015 season. A meme circulating the internet says all three have big cats as mascots: The Bengals, The Panthers and The Cheetahs.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Now Chandler Jones is on pace to break the single season Patriots sack record.
He might also break the record for biggest smile. Chandler has gotten the Cheetah off of his back.
Last week he was mic’d up by NFL Films so everyone could glimpse his glee. He calls himself a groupie as he cheers on another lighthearted Patriot, TE Rob Gronkowski. He issues the gentlest smack talk to the opposing quarterback right before knocking him down and then helping him back up. He sings. He jokes. He cheers.
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Immediately following the fireworks announcing the start of the 2001 Super Bowl, the Patriots took the field. Eschewing the tradition of announcing each starter to individual applause they ran out through the tunnel as a team, an idea that has been imitated ever since.
Tom Brady became a star that night, unwittingly elevating the individual over the group. But when the Deflategate scandal broke the team’s outwardly unflappable facade, inner turmoil appeared cemented.
The Patriots were grim men. With a cheetah on their backs and a chip on their shoulders they played the game with determination but no delight.
Then came Chandler Jones with his humor and joy, his teasing yet helping hand, and a face-breaking smile showing us a new way to be a Patriot.
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I wonder what my father would have thought of Chandler Jones. Would his peals of laughter and friendly banter have been contagious? Would he have shown my dad a new way to be a fan?
Maybe my father would have seen new way to be a man: showing delight as you joyfully tackle whatever is in your way.
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Photo credit: Flickr/yjdenz
Until the last seconds I thought I had jinxed the Pats by calling them undefeated…Whew!