Read as part of CBR13Bingo: sportsball
On February 3, 2002, I sat on my dad’s couch in Maryland to watch the Super Bowl. Usually, we had a party but this year, no one really felt like partying. We had just gotten back from a weekend trip to Columbus, Ohio and we were both tired. We tuned into the game, promising to root for the underdog Patriots against the highly favored, turbocharged St. Louis Rams even though we anticipated it’d be a rout.
On February 3, 2019, I sat on my own couch in New York to watch the Super Bowl. Usually, I liked parties but my wife was working so I was going at it alone with our kid in bed. I wasn’t tired but I had to work the next day. I tuned into the game, promising to root for the Los Angeles Rams against the mighty New England Patriots, who bored with their dominance.
In between that time, I had lived half my life. I had gotten married, started a family, moved to multiple states, got two degrees, worked my first full-time job, watched America elect it’s first Black President and follow him with a dunderheaded white supremacist. The one constant was sports. And when it came to the NFL, the one constant there was Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the dominance of the New England Patriots.
The longevity of the Patriots run is really unparalleled in NFL history. While San Francisco had a great go of it from 1981-1998, four of their five Super Bowls were clustered in an eight year stretch. The Patriots won six over seventeen, spread out in two groups of three. They rarely missed the playoffs. They changed from a dull, defensively-minded competent team, to an offensive powerhouse, to a mix of the two and finally, for their last run, reverted back to the defensively-minded competence, lacking playmakers to surround a quarterback whose steady play helped the team and whose dominant play eventually carried it.
Seth Wickersham had a front row seat to it all and gets in as good of a detail as any could, particularly the dynamics around Brady, Belichick and team owner Robert Kraft, which make up the balance of the book. He goes season-by-season more or less but it’s not just recounting box scores or big wins. Rather, it’s about the narratives that guided New England through the twists and turns of building and trying to keep an unlikely football dynasty.
The Kraft stuff is interesting but at the heart, this is the tale of Brady and Belichick, two relentlessly driven individuals and the work they had to do in order to get their team to perform at such a high level. I don’t know that there are any major revelations here but what Wickersham does well is document how things changed for better and worse and why. He keeps the story moving along, knowing when to prune inessential details.
I think the book falls just shy of greatness because, while I liked its focus, I would have liked to have known more about the ancillary players. The book barely mentions Corey Dillon, one of the best running backs of all time who without him, the 2004 team likely wouldn’t have won the Super Bowl. Or the fallout with Randy Moss. Or what Belichick’s relationship was like with guys like Romeo Crennel and Charlie Weis before they left (we know a lot about what it was with Eric Mangini and Josh McDaniels).
Still, it’s an excellent book. Love or hate the Patriots, you need to read it if you’re an NFL fan.