THE STRANGE THING about people from Massachusetts is that they never stop rooting for teams from Boston. (Another strange thing is that, whenever someone from Massachusetts begins a column, “The strange thing about people from Massachusetts . . .” you can be sure he’s bragging. Forgive me.) I’ve never met a Bostonian who would say, “Well, I grew up with Bobby Orr, but I’m a big Columbus Blue Jackets fan now . . . ,” or “Bill Russell and Larry Bird may have been good ballplayers, but for real basketball, you can’t match the Memphis Grizzlies.”
The New England Patriots form the only partial exception to this rule. Every other autumn or so, one of the networks will condescend to show the New England Patriots to a national television audience–usually when they’re set up to get drubbed by the Miami Dolphins or the San Francisco 49ers, or some other team that people actually want to watch–and I’m reminded of how much I love the Pats, and have done so since my childhood, when we had season tickets. I still root for them.
But I don’t imagine all New Englanders do. As the Patriots head to their third Super Bowl in the last sixteen years–a feat that only Denver, Buffalo, Dallas, San Francisco and the New York Giants have matched during that period of time–I can’t be alone in thinking fortune has smiled on the wrong team. In Boston, we have the Red Sox, who for all their problems have been among the two or three best teams in baseball for the past half century; the Bruins, who put the best teams in NHL history on the ice in the 1970s; and the Celtics, who are, quite simply, the Celtics.
The Patriots have always been kind of the Memphis Grizzlies of Boston sports–a team that not only lost, but lost with a consistent lack of lovability and glamour. This is not a team whose games Jack Nicholson would consider it chic to be seen attending. There is a whole so-bad-it’s-good history that Patriots fans can recite by heart:
-The early-1960s team walking to practice at a high-school field underneath a Logan Airport overpass–in their uniforms, because the field lacked dressing rooms.
-Coach Clive Rush electrocuting himself at a live microphone when he was hired in 1969.
-The stands burning down during their first exhibition game in 1970 (which happened to be the first game I ever went to).
-Clive Rush (see above), having cut half his backfield in a temper tantrum just before game-time, paging third-string running back Bob “Harpo” Gladieux over the public-address system and asking him to please report to the dressing room.
-Fans urinating in the aisles when the toilets flooded during the Pats’ first Monday night game against the New York Jets.
-A drug-addled Irving Fryar getting arrested for reckless driving after running his car into a tree, during a game.
Yet the Patriots have turned into the most successful franchise in the region. And not just successful–beloved, even around the country, as maybe the great Cinderella story in the last decade of pro sports. And not just beloved–fated to greatness, since the Pats, with their two top-flight quarterbacks, can now trade either Drew Bledsoe or Tom Brady in the off-season for a brace of number-one draft picks.
This success has left Pats fans smiling. It may even induce a few of the older ones to howl “All Hail to Ye Patriots,” the 1970-1985-era ditty that still stands as the worst fight song in the history of professional or amateur sports. But the Pats’ post-season prowess is also a reversal of the local sports ontology we grew up with. And on Sunday it will leave diehards scratching our heads as we watch them.
Watch them win.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
