Jerry Thornton - Six Rings: The Super Bowl History of the New England Patriots

To Nick and Jack, whose spirit, courage, faith, and humor make me endlessly proud every day. And to their mom, the most beautiful soul Ive ever known. Thank you for wearing the one ring that will always matter most.

Contents

Introduction

Spring 2020

This is exactly what I pictured the world would be like if Tom Brady ever stopped being the quarterback of the New England Patriots.

Worldwide societal collapse. Businesses and schools shut down. Restaurants and bars closed. Economies in free fall. Streets and highways empty. Major cities around the globe being reclaimed by nature, with animals roaming freely. People self-isolating in their homes. Parents forced to homeschool their kids and building third-grade math lessons around how many glasses of wine they can pour before they have to open another box.

Sure, government officials, the medical community, future historians, and common sense will say the cause of it all was a pandemic. And Im not some unhinged conspiracy theory crackpot claiming they were all just in the pocket of Big Toilet Paper or whatever. Im just saying that not all the despair, fear, and anxiety was caused by a virus. In New Englands little corner of the world at least, some of it was the result of a viral message from the greatest football player in history that he was leaving after 20 years.

A few years earlier, I had written a book, From Darkness to Dynasty: The First 40 Years of the New England Patriots , about the bizarre, ridiculous, dysfunctional, and sometimes tragic early history of one of the least successful franchises in all of pro sports. And while I probably shouldnt give away the ending, Titanic made a lot of money and I think most of the audience saw where that story was headed. Besides, its right in the title. Like it was with Finding Nemo . Spoiler alert: at the end, Nemo gets found. So I dont mind skipping to the last chapter of my book and telling you that all the high strangeness of the Patriots first four decades of existence ended with Bradys ascension in 2001.

From the moment Brady came off New Englands bench for an injured Drew Bledsoe in the NFLs first weekend of action after canceling games following the 9/11 terrorist attackson the road against the New York Jets, no lessto ending that season with a Super Bowl championship, the entire identity of the Patriots organization changed. Permanently.

They went from being synonymous with failure to the gold standard of excellence that every team in every sport aspired to. They pulled the impossible 180-degree turn of going from the worst thing one can be in American cultureirrelevantto hyper-relevant. For 20 years they dominated not only on the field, but in the headlines. Making not just sports news, but national news, for reasons both good and bad. There were times they were actually the top story in the country, knocking less newsworthy items like wars, elections, and other such disasters to Coming up after the break status.

For the better part of their existence, from their founding in 1960 in the old American Football League to 1994, when a season ticket holder and paper goods mogul named Robert Kraft paid $175 million for them, the Pats franchise was broke and constantly in danger of moving to another market. They went 11 years without a stadium of their own. And when they finally built one, originally named Schaefer Stadium, it was the worst facility in modern pro football. Contracted out to the lowest bidder. Four sets of poured concrete bleachers with aluminum benches that would suck the body heat out of your butt cheeks, so that if you went to a game in December, your core temperature wouldnt get back to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit until the following July. It was the worst, cheapest, Eastern Bloc artifice, built in the middle of an unpaved dirt parking lot that looked like the surface of Mars. And yet, in a wild bit of irony, as the turnaround was taking place in 2001, a new, state-of-the-art facility was being built behind the old one, funded almost entirely by the Kraft family themselves. Its construction was a perfect metaphor for the fate of the franchise. And when it opened in September of 2002, the first thing the team did was hang a Super Bowl banner.

Not only is a turnaround like the Patriots have enjoyed unprecedented in pro sports, Ill argue that theres never been anything like it in American pop culture. I defy anyone to come up with an example of any brand, any group, or anyone that went from decades of being largely ignored to instant success, only to become the most despised institution in the land. And then held that status for 20 years. On second thought, let me save you the trouble. You cant.

And all this has happened during a time where pro football isnt just Americas favorite sport. Its Americas favorite thing. In an increasingly fractured and specialized world where there are more and more entertainment outlets fighting for your attentionstreaming services, websites, social media platforms, apps, video games, and so onthe NFL is the only offering on television that gets more viewers every year. It has become the center of our culture. And for the entire 21st century so far, the Patriots have never not been the center of the NFLs culture.

And so it was in the midst of all that unprecedented, unimaginable success that at some point the conversation started to move on from how the team was sustaining it or how long they could keep the dynasty going to how it was going to end. Particularly when it came to Brady. As I went on a book tour to promote FD2D (the droid name of From Darkness to Dynasty ), I could guarantee that at the end of a talk, when Id throw it open to questions, the first or second one was how I thought Bradys Patriots career would end.

But it wasnt just the smart, attractive, fascinating, virtuous people with the good sense to read my books, as you are now doing. It was all of what we call Patriots Nation (rather than come up with a more clever name). Friends. Neighbors. Hardcore Pats fans. Casual fans. The sad, lonely, anti-social virgins who call sports radio shows. They all began this odd Tom Brady End Watch. And the people who hate the team and resented its success formed a sort of doomsday cult that kept predicting its demise. And when the dynastys apocalypse didnt arrive and the Super Bowl appearances kept happening, theyd simply push the date back and insist the End of Days was still nigh and all sinners should get busy repenting.

It might have started with the drafting of backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo in 2014, which was a full 10 years after the Pats had last won a Super Bowl. (And believe me, people were counting.) Brady turned 37 that year. Which is 87 in Quarterback Years. And the fact the team took Jimmy G in the second round was taken as a sign that head coach Bill Belichick was looking at the cold, unfeeling calculus of the QB Actuarial Table and decided Bradys end was near. Because the Grim Reaper is still undefeated, and all that.

Garoppolo was an unknown factor, having played at Division II Eastern Illinois in a stadium that wouldnt pass muster in Texas high school ball, with crowds that looked like they couldve all been friends and relations of the players. But he was one of the few human beings on earth even close to Brady when it came to mens-magazine-cover handsomeness and charm. You could almost envision a world where Brady decided hed had enough football, issued the obligatory public statement about wanting to spend more time with my family, and rode off on a winged steed into retirement Valhalla, leaving the team in the capable hands of the next great, preternaturally- good-looking Alpha Male.