Anyone who has followed this blog or who knows me personally knows that I was born and raised just outside of Boston and, as such, am a HUGE, unabashed Boston sports fan. I grew up watching every Celtics game with Gil Santos and Bob Cousy on WBZ, Channel 4. Every single Bruins game on WSBK, channel 38 with John Cusick. Every Red Sox game on WSBK with Ned Martin and Bob "Monty" Montgomery.
If you know Boston, you know that the city lives and dies with the Red Sox. The 80's was a weird time for the Sox as they made the World Series in 86 with a great team and...well, let's not talk about that. They made the AL Championship a couple more times, but got ousted by the juggernaut A's teams. The Curse of the Bambino was a live and well (thanks to Dan "Shank" Shaughnessy) and it seemed the Sox would never, ever win a World Series.
The Patriots, on the other hand, were a different story. For most of my childhood, the Patriots were the laughingstock of the NFL. This meant that I didn't always get the watch them, because they were so bad that they didn't sell out their games, which meant that their local games were 'blacked out' - they would not show them on tv because they didn't sell out the stadium. It was a tough way to grow up trying to support your local team and many - and I mean MANY - kids my age in New England switched allegiances to the successful teams of the time like the Steelers, Cowboys and 49ers. But not me. My local teams were my local teams and I stood by them, win or lose. I honestly could never fathom or comprehend how kids in my region could cheer for teams from other regions or cities, it just went against everything I grew up loving about sports. My faith was seemingly rewarded in 1985 when they went on an improbable run, won the AFC East, and against all odds, beat the heavily favored - and Dan Marino led- Miami Dolphins in the Orange Bowl to make their first ever Superbowl. Of course, we all remember happened next, as the Chicago Bears Superbowl shuffled all over their asses to the tune of a then-record 46-10 victory. My love of the Patriots never wavered though.
Admittedly, the Celtics pretty much carried me through the 80's. My earliest memories were them drafting Larry Bird and he was just such an amazing player to watch, it was like he could do anything. I feel confident in saying that I watched every single Celtic game between 1979 and 1990 and though few 'experts' would ever agree with me, I honestly think Larry is the best all around NBA player I've personally ever watched, with apologies to Michael Jordan. They won the NBA Championship in 81, 84, and 86, but unfortunately the only taste of greatness we experienced in the 1980's.
The Bruins in the 80's were fun to watch, had some great players, and I watched them religiously. But they just could never put together a good enough team in a decade dominated by the Islanders and later, the Gretzky-led Oilers. In the late 80's, they had Cam Neely - still my favorite all-time Bruin - and had a couple teams that could have won it all, but got stonewalled in the NHL finals, twice by - who else- the Oilers.
The 90's was a veritable sports desert for Boston sports. Sox had a modicum of success but never sniffed another World Series. Bruins started the decade with a Stanley Cup appearance but were dismissed in heartbreaking fashion by the well oiled Oilers and toiled the rest of the decade in anonymity. The Celtics never recovered from the Larry Bird's premature retirement due to injury and the tragic loss of budding superstar Reggie Lewis who lost his life to a heart ailment way too young. I still remember driving on the highway when the news came on and having to pull over to the side of the road when the news came on because I was so shook. Reggie was not just a great basketball player, he was the greatest of us as person, spending much of his time trying to mend racial divides in various Boston neighborhoods. He was going to be the next great Boston superstar, it was just accepted among us Boston fans, and that day was one of the worst we've ever experienced.
So let's talk about the Patriots in the 90's. In 1990, the Patriots won exactly ONE game. Their final record was 1-15, the worst record in franchise history. There was the locker room scandal with a Boston Herald reporter and it seemed like the Patriots had hit complete rock bottom. We were the laughing stock of the NFL, possibly the worst franchise in the history of the league. Things just could not get any lower for us.
Then things suddenly changed. Sort of.
Some crazy stuff happened where various rich dudes bought the team and threatened to move them to places like Hartford, CT and St Louis, MO. The problem with moving them was that there was someone who was smarter than all of us; Mr Robert Kraft. Kraft was a lifelong Patriots season ticket holder and independent businessman who had tried tried on a few occasions to buy the Patriots, but who had been rebuffed time and time again. The Patriots, at that time, had played many years in Foxboro Stadium, which included various racing/gambling venues and Kraft had the foresight to buy all of it - the stadium, the racing/gambing venues...all of it. The jewel in the crown, of course, was Foxboro stadium, because the Patriots had a 10 year lease to play there. So when the rich assholes who wanted to move the Patriots to a new city asked to be let out of their lease with Foxboro stadium, Kraft refused and held them to the lease agreement which would cost them 10s of millions of dollars to break. He also told them that he'd be willing to buy the team if they decided that they wanted to sell (which, they pretty much had no choice but to of at that point, since they couldn't get out of the lease). They finally relented and Kraft bought the team for a $174 million, which was a record at that time for a fee paid for a pro sports franchise.
The rest is history. After a Superbowl appearance in 96 with Bill Parcells, who quit on the team and had accepted a job with the hated Jets before the game was even played, we suffered through a few years with milquetoast coach Pete Carrol before Kraft made the greatest hire ever in bringing in Bill Belichick in 2000.
I went active Army in 1998, right in the middle of the Pete Carroll ERA. We were a good team but never did anything. I remember watching a game against the Atlanta Falcons in the barracks in my NCOIC's room, I confidently wore my Drew Bledsoe jersey but after two quarters of the Falcons just running all over us, I disgustingly took it off and skulked back to my room, tail between my legs. The Patriots, it seemed, were back to their horrible self. The Falcons, of course, went on to make the Superbowl and lose to the Broncos. It was 1999.
After a couple of horrible years, Kraft fired Pete Carroll and made the bold move of hiring Bill Belichick, even giving up a first round draft pick to the hated J-E-T-S in doing so. His belief in Belichick was rewarded with a first year record of 5-11 but things seemed different. Belichick spent the offseason signing several veteran free agents who fit his system or who he believed knew how to win. One such signing that I remember was Antowain Smith; Smith was a bell cow RB out of Houston who had played with the Buffalo Bill the past few seasons and, I thought, was THEE perfect back for a Belichick coached team - a power back who would chew up yards and let the defense do their thing.
I had transferred to a position in Vicenza, Italy by this time and worked in the SETAF Operations Center (SOC). We had a SOC meeting every morning at 0600 and I remember the first one of the NFL season, the Pats had lost to the Bengals, who were, at the time, THEE standard of a losing franchise. People were complaining about how bad their team looked and I remember saying "Fuck all y'all, we lost to the FUCKING BENGALS!". Everyone pretty much agreed that I had the worst loss that week. The next week, of course, is where everything changed. It was against the hated Jets and everyone knows the story - Bledsoe got knocked out and a young, unheralded QB in his second season named Tom Brady took the reins and led them to an improbable Superbowl victory.
But for me, it was much more than that. SO much more...
As part of my job, I was responsible for the VTC system in what we called "The War Room", which was where the Commanding General and his staff conducted their Video-teleconference meetings. As part of the whole audio visual set-up was an AFN hookup. AFN = Armed Forces Network, it was basically the Armed Forces' radio and TV network for overseas. I quickly realized that I could hook up AFN with the VTC network and get AFN on the big screen in the War Room. The Patriots games usually came on in the middle of the night, but I was single at the time and had little else to do, so several times that season, I went into the War Room with a six pack of Sam Adams and bag of chips and watched the Patriot games. One of my greatest memories was when the Patriots inexplicably made the Superbowl that year, I sat there in the War Room, in the Commanding General's chair, and watched my beloved Patriots upset the Greatest Show on Turf Rams to win our first ever Superbowl. Virginia and I were engaged by then and I remember calling her crying at what had just happened - she knew nothing about American sports and my obsession with my Boston sports teams in particular, and how serious we take them, so she had no idea what she was getting herself into. If she knew, she probably never would have married me. She would soon find out...
