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Authors: Michael Holley

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BOOK: Patriot Reign
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Things
didn’t draw Kraft and Parcells together. People
did. On January 12, 1997—the morning of the AFC Championship game—Will
McDonough, the legendary
Boston Globe
columnist, approached
the owner. McDonough was close to both Parcells and Kraft, and while McDonough
believed that Kraft intentionally misled him prior to the
NFL draft in April 1996, he knew he could still talk to him. They needed to
talk. The
Boston Herald
had broken a story that explained why
the Patriots would indeed be due compensation if another team wanted to hire
Parcells. McDonough, also a reporter for NBC, had interviewed Parcells early on
the morning of the 12th. Of course, Parcells had already read and reacted to
the
Herald
article. He suspected that Kraft had given the
story to reporter Kevin Mannix, and he was furious about it.

In
recounting his version of the Kraft-Parcells relationship just over a month
later in the
Globe
, McDonough wrote that he had wanted to talk
with both men in January so that they could—temporarily at least—work together
peacefully. “I told [Parcells], ‘Listen, I’ll grab Kraft when he gets here,
bring him into your office, and straighten this thing out. He told me all along
he wants to take the high road. Let’s see what the deal is.’ ” Kraft remembers
being surprised when McDonough approached him that day in ’97. “Will said to
me, ‘I need to mediate something with you and Bill.’ I said, ‘What are you
talking about?’ He said something about Parcells wanting to get out of his
contract. It felt like they were trying to browbeat me.”

It was a
lot of action, and the AFC Championship game still was four hours away. Once it
started, the Patriots were in control against the Jacksonville Jaguars. They
were 20–6 winners. Kraft, close to his three-year anniversary of ownership, was
going to have a shot at a Super Bowl ring. He spoke on the field after the
game, and no one could have guessed that there had been a problem with Parcells
earlier in the day. He called the coach one of the NFL’s greatest and said,
“This is one of the great moments of my life. This is why
our family got into the sports business. We have built something special here,
and we owe it to the efforts of our players and our coaching staff. I can’t
even describe the feeling. I’m ecstatic. I’m happy. I’m content.”

That feeling would last for a week. On January 20, a depressing Monday
for Patriots fans, McDonough filed a stunning story from New Orleans. The
message in the news story was as blunt as its headline: “Parcells to Leave.”
The major reason given for the decision, McDonough wrote, was a deteriorating
relationship between Kraft and Parcells. Leaving was not going to be that
simple for the coach, but it was probably best for him to leave anyway. He
wasn’t happy with the organization, and it wasn’t happy with him. The season
had been filled with bizarre messages, both overt and subtle, and this topped
all of them. Each member of Parcells’s coaching staff probably had his own
threshold moment, a moment when he realized that the season was actually a
nonfootball weekly drama.

“I don’t know if I could really put my
finger on it,” Belichick says now of the ’96 season. “I mean, there were
times when things would look okay, and there were times when it would look
hopeless. And yet, there could be some fluctuation in there. I think two events
really stick out.”

One was Terry Glenn. The rookie receiver didn’t
like to fly, especially when the weather was bad. He was uncomfortable flying
with the team to New York and was looking for Parcells to talk to him about it.
“So Charlie [Weis] brought him to me because he couldn’t find Bill,” Belichick
says. “We couldn’t find Bill because Bill had left.
He
didn’t
want to fly. And he wound up disciplining Terry for the same
thing the head coach was doing. So it’s hard to show consistency there.”

The second event was Super Bowl XXXI. The Patriots were going to be
facing the Green Bay Packers and league MVP Brett Favre. They were double-digit
underdogs. But the intriguing stories were not about stopping Favre and
blocking defensive lineman Reggie White. The Parcells story was the
story.

“Yeah, I’d say it was a little bit of a distraction all the
way around,” Belichick says. “I can tell you firsthand, there was a lot of
stuff going on prior to the game. I mean, him talking to other teams. He was
trying to make up his mind about what he wanted to do. Which, honestly, I felt
totally inappropriate. How many chances do you get to play for the Super Bowl?
Tell them to get back to you in a couple of days. I’m not saying it was
disrespectful to me, but it was in terms of the overall commitment to the
team.”

The Patriots were staying at the New Orleans Marriott.
According to Parcells’s telephone records, there wasn’t a lot of long-distance
restraint in the Big Easy. His bill showed dozens of itemized phone calls to
Hempstead, New York, the administrative home of the New York Jets. Kraft had
his suspicions about the Jets and was convinced that Parcells already had a
deal in place with them. The phone calls to New York—which were either brazen
or thoughtless, given that the Patriots could view all their employees’
records—were proof that something unusual was happening.

“It was a
very, very strange time,” Jonathan says. “And when you’re not an expert at this
business—you know we were still very new to the business—it can be educational.
Big Bill had kept us in the dark on a lot of things. He probably misled us on some things. And we didn’t know how to go
about questioning it.”

Nothing could be done to save the
relationship—if it could be called that—between Parcells and the Krafts. It was
over. Even without the stories and distractions, it was going to be hard for
the Patriots to defeat the Packers. With everything that happened leading up to
the game, it didn’t seem wise to anticipate a New England win. This was nothing
like the conference championship, when Kraft and Parcells could argue before
the game and compliment one another afterward. That game was in the wintry
comfort of Foxboro, against a team, Jacksonville, that was coming off an upset
of Denver at home.

In Louisiana the Patriots were facing a Green
Bay team that had scored the most points in the league and had given up the
fewest. The Packers were better. They won the game, 35–21. It was competitive
the entire evening, but the championship was secured on a dynamic sequence in
the third quarter. Kickoff returner Desmond Howard ran 99 yards through the New
England special teams and wound up with the game’s final touchdown. It was both
punctuation and puncture.

Robert Kraft left New Orleans knowing
that he wouldn’t be picking up a ring. Jonathan left wondering about the step
his family would take next. Belichick, the coaches, and the players left with
the understanding that Parcells would be officially off the clock. “Not flying
back after the Super Bowl kind of—it sent a message to the team that probably
wasn’t a good one,” Belichick says. “It was clear there were big issues
brewing.” Given his relationship with Kraft, Belichick was an early candidate.
The Patriots wanted to hire him, and everything they saw told them that they should have hired him. Belichick would have been the perfect
choice for the Patriots in February 1997. How many examples did Robert and
Jonathan need to convince them?

The team’s defensive backs would
come up to Robert, unsolicited, telling him how talented their position coach
was. Kraft would press them for specifics, and they would shake their heads and
answer, simply, that he had a knack for telling them what would happen before
it happened. He was a good teacher, someone who could teach you the proper way
to jam at the line without being overwhelmed yourself. He was a craftsman, deft
with small touches that you didn’t notice until you had seen someone else try
the same thing with less care.

Robert remembered the
conversations. He remembered Belichick talking about the new NFL that the 1994
collective bargaining agreement had created. Under the system, Belichick
theorized, a smartly managed team would be able to compete for playoff
positions and, ultimately, championships each season. Jonathan remembered their
conversations outside of fitness centers on the road and the weight room at
home. It would be five or six in the morning. “And we’d sit and we’d talk for
an hour. And he just— he clearly got it. It was certainly different than
talking to Bill Parcells and Pete Carroll. It was on another plane, another
dimension.”

And it was Belichick who would say of Robert, “He has
outstanding business sense. In today’s game it helps the coach so much to have
a resource like that. By virtue of someone with a business mind like his being
around us, it helps the coaches coach, helps people manage others, and that
translates to results on the field.”

But they didn’t hire him.
They couldn’t. How do you experience what they had with
Parcells and then hire someone who has known him and been associated with him
for more than a decade? The question held no weight instinctively, because
Belichick’s candidacy felt right. Logically, though, they kept coming back to
this: they had known Belichick for several months, and Belichick had known
Parcells for several years.

There was also bitterness.
Jets-Patriots was a nasty rivalry on its own. Now it had elements of
Auburn-Alabama and Michigan–Ohio State. They were competing in the same
division, for the same ring, with some of the same players and coaches. The
Patriots would have to compete without Belichick. After the whir of
compensation, hiring, and organizational reordering, this is how everything
looked:

  • Belichick and Parcells (along with Weis
    and Romeo Crennel) were in New York
  • Former Jets coach Pete
    Carroll, who had been the defensive coordinator with the 49ers, was the new man
    in Foxboro
  • Bobby Grier was in charge of New England’s
    personnel department
  • The Patriots, a young team fresh from
    a Super Bowl loss, were stocked with extra draft picks from a division
    rival.

The atmosphere may have seemed calm, but
the Patriots had already begun declining. They didn’t have unity in their
management team, and that set the fractious tone for what would happen on the
field. Carroll was a fine defensive coach, one who would eventually turn the
University of Southern California program into one of the
best in college football. But he was not the right hire for the Patriots. He
was a nice man. He played the piano. He believed in the power of positive
thinking and often talked about mind over matter. He was smart and decent. Yet
his players could see the ceiling on his power. With Parcells, there was no
compassion committee anywhere else in football operations. You had a problem?
You dealt with him or you didn’t play. In the new Patriot hierarchy, Grier
found the players and Carroll coached them.

“I never heard people
complain about his Xs and Os. I think people thought he actually knew the game
of football,” Jonathan says. “But beyond that, you know, as a manager of
people—which is what a coach has to be too— he didn’t know how to manage
people. He would have been a good schoolteacher. He is a good teacher. A good
teacher, not a good manager.”

Carroll was the face of the
post-Parcells Foxboro, even though he had just a fraction of Parcells’s
influence. He went 10–6 in his first season. He saved his job in his second
year by going 9–7 and making the play-offs, despite a late-season injury to
quarterback Drew Bledsoe. After Carroll went 8–8 in 1999, he lost his job, and
so did Grier.

The organization was going to have to start over,
but not over in the sense of the days before Robert Kraft. Technologically, the
Krafts had an advanced organization. They had a vibrant website and a
full-color weekly newspaper. They had good contracts—and contacts—with local
television and radio stations. They were clever and conscientious marketers.
They didn’t have their new stadium yet, but they did have plans to build a
privately financed facility for $325 million.

They also did not have the economist, the coach they should have hired in
1997. They knew they had to hire Belichick this time, and they knew they were
the ones who were going to have to come up with the compensation. Coming up
with the right package was just as difficult as talking about what the package
would be; the Jets and Patriots were hostile neighbors. In the early stages of
the talks to bring Belichick to New England, Steve Gutman of the Jets and Andy
Wasynczuk of the Patriots did the negotiating. Jonathan Kraft was not going to
speak to Parcells, and Robert talked with him only when the compensation
package had been agreed to and approved by the league. Once they hired
Belichick, the Krafts knew they could get what they had dreamed of back in
1988, when Robert Kraft outbid Victor Kiam by $6 million and plucked Foxboro
Stadium out of bankruptcy court. Kiam had called the stadium a “pig” in ’89,
and he was probably right—aesthetically. But Kraft had outbid him because he
knew the stadium was the key to Patriot survival: you couldn’t, as Kiam did,
buy the team without the stadium and do well. Kraft knew that when things were
right, his organization would not have repulsive scandals, as it did in ’86 and
’90. He knew that one day a disappointing season would be defined strictly in
football terms.

“This used to be a laughingstock,” Jonathan says
now in his stadium office. There is a flat-screen television turned to a
financial channel. There are photos of recent exuberance just around the
corner. In another room there is a Lombardi Trophy. “We had to prove to people
you could give us your confidence, your trust, your money. No one ever wanted
to invest confidence, passion, trust, time, money in the Patriots because they
were going to be let down. Someone was going to do something
stupid. The organization wasn’t going to commit the resources. It wouldn’t have
been worth it. Well, we wanted to make it worth our resources to the general
public. And that’s what we did externally, and that’s what we told our
marketing department. And we said to the football side: ‘We want to compete
every year. How do we go about creating a system to do that?’ ”

BOOK: Patriot Reign
8.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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