Holding onto the Football
(Long)Form Tackling America’s Game
Bill Belichick is gone and I can’t find his hoodie. Well, my hoodie; the replica of the football coach’s signature gray Reebok “New England Patriots Equipment” sweatshirt that my stepfather got me for Christmas about 20 years ago. It’s a prop. A costume. I’ve worn it more fall Sundays than not in the time since; I’ve taken it to games, I’ve taken it into work on days when my responsibilities at my newspaper job were primarily to watch how the team fared and post about it. It’s a special piece of my wardrobe, infused with memories—ones that made me feel like I’d participated in something. But I think I got rid of it. I think it’s lost.
Then again, losses are like half of sports. Take it from an obsessed fan with an absolutely unhealthy relationship with the game.
The Glory Days
Football wasn’t something I came to naturally. I had to learn the game, adapt to it. Getting the paper delivered to our house around the turn of middle school helped. So did video games. And of course there was no substitute for being on the team.
I’m not naturally a team player. I don’t take direction well and prefer challenging authority to submitting to it. I’m uncoordinated and weaker than my frame suggests. I struggle to repeat physical actions with precision (ask my college dance instructor ((yes I had one))). But jesus christ did I love being a football player. I got my ass kicked by upper classmen. I puked after running drills. I even chipped a front friggin’ tooth—but I did it. Not well, but pridefully nonetheless, I did it.
My unequal love story with football began in middle school. I learned the rules and ropes alongside classmates as we practiced and pranced across a field pocked with danger zones—pipes and storm drain grates and all manner of injurious obstacles. To build stamina we’d flap our arms while sidestepping and highstepping in a box formation. Coached by our goateed, Mighty Mighty Bosstones-loving health teacher, we got accustomed to wearing the hulking pads and looking the part. I was slotted at the tight end/tackle positions, not because I was agile or strong but because I had modest size. In the game, it’s all I’d ever really have.
A year earlier I had zero interest in any sport. Baseball had always been my dad’s game, so that was on a lot during weekend visits. But football didn’t quite hold his heart in the same way at that time. And he certainly wasn’t a fan of the hometown team—he’d grown up drawn to the horn-adorned helmets and regal purple uniforms of the Minnesota Vikings. That squad was actually good when he was a kid in the ‘70s, as opposed to the local New England Patriots, so the big games he most often tuned into featured the Purple People Eaters. They were the romantic choice, having lost back-to-back Super Bowls. Besides, my old man had always had an interest in historical barbarians, and in being a bit of a contrarian, so lending his loyalties to the exotic, faraway Midwest squad was a natural fit.
Maybe my dad being out of the house was not unrelated to me spending most of my childhood as something of an indoor kid. I got winded easily, was body conscious, and had been uncoordinated enough to qualify for occupational therapy.
Actually, that’s too clinical a name. We called it “Special Gym”—the times in elementary school when I was excused out of math lessons or what have you so that I could join other kids of varying degrees of special needs to do things like jump rope. My issue was fine motor function, which manifested in things like hilariously atrocious handwriting (which, trust me, was never adequately resolved). I really did suck at jumping rope, or throwing balls in a straight line, or, it felt, succeeding at anything requiring the physical use of my body. I wasn’t the smartest kid, but I still preferred the theater of the mind.
Physical limitation was something that lingered in my thoughts a lot. Both of my grandmothers were confined to chairs by early ages. I’d watch them both go from being self-reliant with the use of canes to needing help in and out of car passenger’s seats to requiring wheels of their own in a few short years. One had a neurological disease that eroded her ability to control muscle movement. The other’s condition severely weakened her muscles over time and limited her strength. Kind of sounds like the walls closing in on both sides, right?
I’d been told I had nothing to worry about by way of inheriting these illnesses but it wasn’t the kind of fear that was quieted by reason. Any time my physicality failed me, a doom set in. It was less that I thought I would become similarly afflicted than it was an overall hopelessness in the cause of attaining strength or control. It never felt like it would matter. I still struggle with believing myself physically capable.
All of which is to say, it was uncharacteristic when in middle school I told my mother I’d like to join the football team. Part of it was that 7th grade was the first time the sport would be offered to any and all of my classmates, which promised an even starting ground. Part of it was the high school horizon, with its prospects of letterman’s jackets and Friday night game plans and hell maybe even cheerleaders beckoning on my success. And part of it was the simple desire to prove to myself that I could do something I didn’t think I could—a sacramental fuel that lived somewhere between confidence and doubt.
It wasn’t long before I learned how difficult this sport would be for me. And I learned in a quite painful fashion—by nearly castrating my best friend.
We were in the midst of an agility drill, where three of you, from a hands-and-knees position, roll and leap under and over one another in a chain fashion. One up, one down, one over, start again. It didn’t take long until I was fatigued—we hadn’t practiced this in special gym—but I was giving it my all. My all, however, was insufficient, as one of my leaps leapt too little, and as my buddy rolled beneath me I came down hard, knee first, into his adolescent (and thereby, hopefully, resilient) groin.
It was enough of an ordeal that the entire practice came to a halt. Sure, he was in considerable pain, but my embarrassment was crushing, infinite. We’ve been close for over 30 years at this point and I think it’s the closest he’s ever come to not being able to forgive me. He has a kid now, though, so mercifully the damage proved not to be too lasting.
Perhaps it is no surprise, given this mishap, that I was not a standout player in middle school. Even as 8th grade rolled around and I had a second year of experience and practice, technique and body control did not come easily to me. Part of it was that I was considerably younger and less developed than my classmates, though I’d never catch up when it came to upper body strength. Still, I was committed. I showed up and stuck with it. Which would not always be the case.
Armchair QB
No sport is more tailored to television than American professional football. Frequent breaks in the action accommodate never-ending three-minute advertising interludes, sponsorship shout-outs, and promotions of upcoming matches. The mechanics of the game require an amount of angles only a host of cameras can capture and convey. Close-ups give the personal emotion, wide shots display the greater battle field. Like most TV programming, it’s got familiar episodic and season-long story arcs. It’s commercial. And it’s serialized.
There’s one element of serialized television that most professional football lacks—continuity of characters. Long-running shows leverage their stars to maintain their audience’s interest. To borrow a pop psychology term de jour, viewers establish parasocial relationships with their favorite characters and develop attachments over time. When shows reach their finales, it’s like the audience is bidding forever farewells to longtime friends.
Football is too brutal a game for that, by and large. The average NFL playing career is a little over 3 years, and the average coaching career is a tick over 4, which means there isn’t much opportunity to grow overly familiar with a given personality. And the NFL likes it this way—the less worried you are about a particular person in the game the less concerned you’ll be with issues like their lack of lifetime health insurance, limitations on their free speech, or the fact that coaches’ salaries are guaranteed but players are not. “Root for the laundry,” as the saying goes, and you won’t be distracted by the fact that most of these gridiron heroes will be needing a new line of work within a decade, no matter how much glory they bring home.
For a game that more than anything serves as a vehicle to sell beer (it must be 45 minutes out of every 3-hour game that’s dedicated to the beverage’s promotion), there is still a difficult-to-deny aesthetic beauty to football’s complexities. Counting coaches and trainers there are about 70 people to a side, each with a specific but encompassing range of responsibilities. Strength, skill, quick-thinking, longer-term planning, trust, instinct, teamwork—it all comes into play. Schemes and approaches evolve constantly yet there are 100-year-old truisms that continue to hold.
No player and coach have ever been better at turning the game into a reliable entertainment product than were Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. (Though Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid may yet have their day.) Over their decades on the screen, Brady and Belichick were as reliable as a sitcom, morphing into archetypes along the way. Dour, Bill Belichick is like the authority figure you can never get to like you. Chipper, Tom Brady is your best friend who hit it big and got weirder and weirder as the years went on.
With 9 Super Bowl appearances together over their 19 years, Brady and Belichick made for great television. Brady was the heartthrob, his looks and romantic life evolving as his skill, successes, and fame grew. Belichick deepened in his persona as an asocial technician. For years and years, they turned out more than wins. Week after week, year after year, they made for must-see-TV.
The remarkable thing is how predictable Brady and Belichick made Sunday TV. They’d win about 77 percent of the time, totally disregarding the NFL’s aim of league-wide competitive parity. Every so often, a new co-star would enter the picture, say a Wes Welker or Rob Gronkowski, or a new rival, like the foot-sniffing Rex Ryan, as if it were sweeps week stunt casting, a Brad Pitt appearance on Friends. But all the guest would end up doing was reinforcing the indispensability of the two stars. And the show just went on, and on, and on, and on.
For Patriots fans, it was more than just the wins—it was the “Big Games.” It was always having something to look forward to, ever week, all autumn and half of winter. Days when ours was the NFL’s marquee matchup. The weeks talking heads spent discussing our probability to win the season’s final game. And, for me, most of all, the number of times they gave my friends and I the excuse to gather, eat, drink, tune in, and root. Those days, the games were our warm hearth. We weren’t following along; we were a part of the reality show. Over the two decades, that was worth at least as much as the six parades. On balance, maybe more.
Glory Days II
My freshman year of high school I went out for the team once again. At our school, we were the Patriots, just like the big boys. Given the investment I’d already made, I was optimistic that I’d show improvement this time and maybe even give myself a chance to be an impact player at some point in the pending junior varsity/varsity years. The freshman team was a preview of those later ones and as such it brought with it its own version of the dreaded summer two-a-day practice sessions, broadly known as “Hell Weeks.”
Hell Weeks would involve sprints, laps around the athletic fields, scarce water breaks, and intense coaching. The running really killed me—I’ve just never been able to keep up. Something to do with fortitude, I always figured. But, generally, I made it through the gauntlet (including the training contraption of the same name). I really wanted to make this commitment work.
I had other commitments, though. In the midst of training camp, and to the annoyance of my coaches, I had a short vacation to San Francisco planned, to see my beloved uncle who’d just moved out there that year, to my great dismay. He was the cool one—he’d left the East coast to take a job at a markedly ahead of its time music technology startup, where he’d help categorize their library with pithy one-line explainers of musical relics, as well as to generally escape the pains of what his life had become here. His mother had just died, only in her fifties.
Visiting him would mark my first trip to California. Besides a trek to Alcatraz, what I remember most about my time there was being shown American History X, with its curbstomp scene making a particularly visceral impression. Correctional violence comprised the meal of the day.
After the quick stay I returned to football camp hoping to be able to pick up where I’d left off. My interruption had proved costly, however, and without upkeep my already shaky conditioning had worsened. Even more than before, I was laboring to complete drills and runs. I felt like the coaches were out to get me, furious that I’d taken time away from the training sessions. If they only knew how important it was that I saw my uncle, I thought, they’d shut the fuck up.
For whatever reason, we as a team were ordered to make another punishing lap around the high school’s large athletic field. Halfway through the circuit, my will to participate in this militaristic regimen faltered. I just didn’t think I could do it—and it felt like no one else thought I could, either. Given my somewhat clichéd single parent home life, I was growing increasingly comfortable being combative with authority figures, but the way I was being challenged here only led me to shut down. So, I broke ranks with my jogging prospective teammates, took off my helmet, and walked up to the coach to tell him I quit. He didn’t try to stop me.
The Game within the Game
NFL football is a sport that men play, but it’s also a game. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one that comes with two primary minigames: fantasy football and Madden.
They’re both simulators of a sort. In the former, you capitalize on the real-world goings-on of Sunday gridiron action by tabulating individual performers’ achievements and counting them as your own. In the latter, you’re at the controls, steering the action in an arcade that replicates the thousands of NFL players in a given season, with their skill sets expertly calculated to the hundredth degree, while your strategy is dictated by the specific play styles of all 32 franchises.
For me, at least, one is a group activity and one is largely a solo one. But they’re both immensely additive to following the league.
I’ve been part of the same fantasy football league since about 1998. It’s a collection of high school friends who have all proven demonstrably better at using past performances to project future outcomes than me. Because I played (okay, “played”), and because I play so much Madden, I always trap myself into thinking I know more about football than them. But I always, always, always lose in the league, generally finishing near to the bottom of the standings. And then I tell myself it’s going to be different.
My dad loves video games, too, and there’s no game we’ve shared more than Madden. When I was a teenager, we’d spend hours drafting our own teams and then play seasons with and against each other. The games’ annual soundtracks would become the score to our weekends together. We had different strengths, he was a better runner and I was better with the short passing game, and we had our franchises, his Vikings and my Patriots. We even had our own create-a-player avatars: “Pops” McGuirk and “Herc” McGuirk, which was (apocryphally) nearly my given name. He was in his 30s then, the youngest dad we knew, and the video game provided a perfect intersection for our interests.
Each year would bring a new volume of the franchise, with the gameplay becoming increasingly individualized as it got more complex. It became harder to find the time to play one-on-one. But for a good few years, Madden was our version of having a weekly catch.
Fantasy keeps you connected. My longstanding league is no exception. It exploits the fact that people (okay, largely men) are paying attention to the same events every Sunday. It turns the games into something to relate to one another about. Bragging rights, petty bickering—it’s all just an excuse to pretend that time doesn’t stretch old friendships increasingly far apart. For me, the game is most enjoyable as a springboard for hunches and feelings. An irrational arena in which to gamble on trust.
(This year, I finally came oh-so-close to finishing the season in the winner’s circle. It came down to one 3-yard catch that failed to materialize. Not that you care—that’s the other thing about fantasy: it’s like reliving dreams; yours are never quite so interesting to others as you’d hope.)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the best football video game to play with your friends, NFL Blitz. A raucous cartoonish amplification of the violence of the gridiron, it’s essentially a mindless fighting game with a ball. Huddled around a Nintendo 64 high school Friday nights, it was hands-down the most fun I ever had gaming with friends. But personally, it hasn’t withstood the test of time the time the way Madden has, and its pronounced lack of realism grows tiresome, thereby dinging its ultimate grade.
If the best thing to do with Madden play idyllically with your dad, the next best is to preview your team’s matchup on real-life gamedays.
The sports talk industrial complex feeds us endless hours of chatter ahead of games, storylines about players and predictions about what will happen, but using the ornate simulator to take the helm on the game you’re about to watch, perhaps while listening to those prognostications, is a uniquely satisfying method to while away the hours as you await kickoff. And the best part is you win either way: if you are victorious in your efforts, it proves that yours is the superior team; and if not, you’ve merely gotten that bad karma of losing out of the way, so that real-life can be more rewarding.
Fantasy and Madden turn the NFL into a kind of toy. What you watch on your TV becomes a plaything in your hands, fostering a unique sense of involvement. When the ball is snapped, you want to feel in on the action.
Glory Days III
Feeling like a quitter hung heavy on me throughout my freshman year. I’d go to the games and watch my friends play and lament the fact that I’d made it through the hardest part of the training, only to falter. I wanted to undo the impulsive decision I’d made. I wouldn’t get the chance ‘til the next year.
I was no better suited to the sport my sophomore year than I’d been my freshman. It wasn’t as though I’d embraced training or anything ahead of tryouts. But there I was, lined up next to and across from the upperclassmen, sprinting and chasing and hitting. It felt good to try. Even though it was hard. Even though I sucked. Even though I was regularly humiliated. No matter—this time I wouldn’t be broken. I wouldn’t stand out, either, but sometimes the team just needed a warm body in a spot and I was very willing to be that body. I took hits from kids twice my size. I became the object of certain teammates’ ire. And, ceremonial plays aside, I never played in the games—even the junior varsity ones. But I had a jersey with my name on it. I had a role in a group. I was not on the outside, as I’d made myself the year before.
(Actually my name was misspelled on my away jersey, but still.)
I played football for three years. I moved from tackle to linebacker and guard, cerebral, less brawny positions, though I could never muster the explosiveness it took to make disruptive impacts to the other side. Varsity and junior varsity practiced together, and in time, I’d carve out a role as the play caller for the scout team, which meant little beyond helping those fellow warm bodies arrange ourselves in appropriate formation as the real players prepped for the coming week’s opponent. It was a blend of leadership and losership, but I embraced it.
I got my letterman’s jacket as soon as I could. Too soon, it turned out, as on its breast, under my name, I listed those first tackle positions I initially thought I’d play, instead of what I went on to practice the most. That jacket was recently gifted back to me, restored from the cat hair damage it had taken over basemented decades. Those coded letters on the jacket continue to serve as a reminder not of the football career I had but the one I yearned for. The jacket should make me proud, nostalgic even. But it frustrates me. In football, I couldn’t even get the tailoring right.
Losing Sucks
The hoodie shouldn’t matter, I know. It’s just an article. I shouldn’t be upset, even though I know I discarded it when I was in one of the fits I’ve had to combat in recent years, where rationality flies out the door in favor of a haze of impulse.
It shouldn’t bother me that I’ll never see it again. Sometimes you lose things. Sometimes I lose my mind. The team gear is lost, after all, because there are times, if I am not vigilant, when I become captive to thoughts. Racing, irrational, furious thoughts. And then, when those spells pass, I am similarly left to reckon with the consequence of those mind heats. I seek to excise myself of them. And so, I suspect, that in the aftermath of one of my bouts with mania, I decided to bid farewell to one of my most cherished pieces of cloth. Probably out of a sense of self-punishment.
I know, I should reframe my thinking. You can’t really lose something you remember, right? And football’s given me plenty of memories. Sports shit shouldn’t really bum you out. Whether your team wins or loses, you’re more or less equally entertained, involved. After all, it’s not like happy movies are better than sad ones. And it’s just a goddamn hoodie.
It’s just complicating for me. Football is a game of discipline, and that’s never been my strength. Oh, I dedicate. I’m devoted, even to things. I keep everything—loyal to the object and to the giver of it. But as I’ve grown through things, as I’ve struggled to tackle life’s real issues, I’ve tried to get better at the parts that aren’t a game. I’ve tried to reconcile my emotional investment, balance it, reckon with my obsession.
Even if the specifics elude me, I know I got rid of the football hoodie because I felt I needed to purge. My wardrobe, sure, but that was only one among the many arenas in need of exorcism. Every summer, each pro football team has the darkest day of the year—cut-down day, where like 30 percent of rostered employees lose their jobs, told they’re not quite enough. I know in that moment I must have been trying to make my own kind of a hard decision about what parts of myself needed be left in the past, and what I had room for as I grow into the future. It was a purposeful cut.
Still, I can’t help but wish I’d held onto the fucking thing.
Glory Days IV
I made precisely one play in my varsity football career. It came in a road game under the lights. It was one of the only times I took the field—during a kick return. I was near the front of the blocking attack, safely furthest from where the ball would be going. But the opposing coaching staff must have noticed me and sniffed out my vulnerability, because instead of sending the kickoff deep towards the endzone per the usual, his kicker targeted me and hoofed the football bouncing straight in my direction.
There are two kinds of onsides kicks: the ones where a team is down and desperate for a recovery to make up a point deficit, and the ones where they think a fake-out will give them a sudden advantage in the game. For the former, both teams are prepared, lined up in perfect preparation with the receiving team summoning their players with the surest hands to secure the recovery. The latter, at the high school level particularly, aims to exploit the clumsy, low-skill end-of-roster players being given a rare shot to play in the special teams scenario. It’s a surprise attack.
Which is of course the only way in the world that I’d have gotten my hands on a live game ball.
I remember the football bouncing and I remember the fear that I’d fuck it up. All I had to do was fall on it. Nice and easy. Still, I fumbled with the oblong pigskin. The ball had come right to me and still, from the ground, I grasped at it more than once. Then, as quick as it had begun, the opposing team laid their hands on me, the whistle blew, the play was over. And I’d made it.
It was hardly a game-winning development, but my teammates cheered my mini miracle some nonetheless. Up ‘til then, I was strictly a glorified cheerleader on the team, if I’m being honest. The only impact I made during games was enthusiastically hollering on the sidelines, rah-rahing my friends as I called out what I saw: “Run!” “Pass!” “Fake!” “Great play!” Here, though, I’d had a moment to call my own. Obviously, one I clutch to today, as tightly as I did that ball.
High school football kicked my ass. My memories of it are lonely—it did not love me back. But I did it with my friends, who did. Those days in sweat and suffering bound us. And we’d wear our jerseys to school every gameday Friday. And we’d hang out after. And today, we remember each other’s highlights. And they know they can count on me to scream bloody murder when the game is on the line.
Football, they say, is a game of inches, and in that critical moment, I’d measured up. An inch in another direction and it’d have been a disaster—but the scoreboard doesn’t measure “almost.” And when you wind up on top, football can be hard not to love.
The Hoodie
Lucky for me, my stepdad’s favorite thing is to leverage big events into shared personal memories and it’s for that reason that for a little over a decade we’ve made a tradition of going to a Patriots game every year or so.
We started at home, trekking to Gillette Stadium for big prime-time matchups. As years passed by, we raised the stakes by traveling to see the team in faraway cities, where we’d tailgate with the locals and be shocked by the number of people from our neck of the woods who’d had the same away game notion. Each time we’d go there would be a new wrinkle—new sets of compatriots by our side, a new noteworthy opponent, a heretofore unvisited city. For my 30th birthday, we even traveled with my dad and the friend I’d once nearly rendered a castrato to historic Lambeau Field in Green Bay in what was chief among our most memorable excursions.
We won some of the games, lost the rest, but more than anything we’d capitalized on the opportunities the matchups presented. We took something that other men were doing and made out of it something for ourselves—memories that we could keep.
This year, he decided the two of us would go to see Bill Belichick’s likely last game as coach of the New England Patriots, which is why I’d wanted to don his iconic cloak. In the early part of his career, Belichick became known as “The Hoodie” for the Reebok sweatshirt he was known to wear, not unsloppily, personalized by the way he would hack off the sleeves so his arms were free to more readily scribble down notes on his opponent’s methods and weaknesses. It was like a private game of dress-up every time I wore his outfit.
I’m almost 40 and Belichick’s been at the helm of my team for nearly as long as I’ve paid attention to football, the entirety of the 21st century, more than half my life. He’s not the easiest sports figure to love, giving very little to the public by way of public statements, but watch anyone for 24 years and you’ll come to appreciate them in fondness.
Bill reminds me of tough teachers and bosses I’ve had whose approval was difficult to win but all the more rewarding for it. I don’t know much about Croatia or having Croatian parents but from what I came to understand by reading David Halberstam’s The Education of a Coach, that heritage looms large in the way he composes himself. He’s stiff but funny. I don’t know what it is to be a genius at coaching football but his memory for the game is impeccable—he’s able to summon tiny details from matchups long since passed. His memory extends elsewhere as well, best evidenced by the time he made an oblique My Cousin Vinny reference during the middle of a league controversy surrounding partially deflated footballs.
Belichick is a football nepo-baby who was raised by the US Naval Academy, where his father, a lifer of the sport, worked as a scout. In the NFL, Belichick’s nearly 50 years of coaching has been characterized by some strategic tics, including his embrace of once-novel approaches to anticipating opponents’ tactics and habits as well as for underpaying high-profile positions and putting greater-than-usual value on traditionally lower-prestige ones like the guys that make the tackles on kicking plays.
Beyond winning a grand total of 8 Super Bowl rings as a head coach and assistant, he’s best known for being mercurial with the media, treating his press conferences as combative affairs faced against know-nothings who exist solely to interfere with the important business of football (plainly silly, given that what gives football its importance is the attention it garners, which the press is there to amplify).
Belichick is perceived as equal parts grouch and genius. Both are up for contention, though. His players and certain members of the media say that behind closed doors he’s affable and gregarious, blunt but not without warmth. And his reputation as an exceptional football mind is tied up with his success alongside quarterback Tom Brady, merely the winningest player in the sport’s history, as well as his willingness to skirt league rules in his scouting efforts.
For a long time their legacies were tethered inexorably, but after Brady got sick of Belichick’s hardass shit he skipped town and won another title in Tampa Bay, while Belichick, who was always presumed to be the one whose winning ways would outlast any one player, has become somewhat mired in mediocrity.
As years after that divorce went on, and as the team struggled through its losingest season in 30 years, it was understood by the local media and fanbase that change was coming to the franchise. Still, the Patriots’ Belichick era wasn’t officially dead as my stepfather and I headed for Foxboro to see the final game in the most disappointing season in memory, a tilt against the rival New York Jets, who Belichick had rejected when he first took the job here. If that symmetry wasn’t enough, the winter weather conditions promised to be brutal, unforgiving. This would be no event for the weak. And if it was the series finale, we couldn’t miss it.
Mike, my stepfather, and I arrived to the scene a night early. Still beside myself that I’d “lost” my hoodie before what would have been its most symbolic game, he was very sympathetic to my childish woes, so we headed to the pro shop to see what we might find by way of replacement. (I wasn’t optimistic, until I saw the clearance rack. There it was—the exact replica. There were three, in fact. Except… the moment of victory was short lived, as I realized each was sized medium or small. Of course it had been picked over. I tried one on all the same, but that proved a laughable exercise in constriction. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. I hadn’t wanted a replacement. I wanted the one I wore for all those Big Games.
After nothing else struck my fancy, we went about our evening, checking into our onsite hotel, treating ourselves to an extravagant steak dinner, taking in a movie. We talked about the stakes of the game throughout. We reminisced over the many tilts we’d made our own over the years; the comebacks and near misses, the drama we’d felt, and in some ways had lived. Looking backwards, we enjoyed what we’d made of the game.
I didn’t sleep that night. Something to do with my medications, or my post-meal espresso. Instead, I spent those hours in bed, thinking.
By the morning, Patriot Place and Gillette Stadium were a snow globe, at least from the inside, offering a pastoral feel for what promised to be an ignominious game. Mike and I suited up, debating what winter equipment the conditions would demand, and made our way, canned light beers and tiny cinnamon whiskey shooters in gloved hand. The wind and snow were driving. Those in attendance were hardy, of course. Mike had gotten us great seats, right at midfield, behind the Patriots bench, only a few rows back. The benefits of the team sucking, he said.
It's probably no surprise that the first thing we did upon reaching our seats was snap a selfie with Belichick in the background. He was who we came to see. Not the players—and certainly, this time around, not the quarterback.
The defense played alright, as both teams combatted the wild, ugly weather, which only escalated as the afternoon went on. The four quarters were a test of mettle, but as they concluded with the away team making snow angels it was apparent who’d had more to prove.
Over the course of the game, Belichick got harder and harder to spot. He’d been under the weather that week, and subsequently donned a ski mask that gave him warmth and anonymity. And so, when the game ended and the future was both known and uncertain, there came no moment, no opportunity to bid the old man farewell. Perhaps we should have chanted harder (though we in our section did try). Perhaps the big screen operator should have given him a moment of camera time (though they must have been instructed not to).
But maybe it was fitting for the man that coined “Do Your Job” as a catchphrase to go out with no more fanfare than would accompany another day at the office.
Mike and I would continue to debate the future on our ride home, refusing to relinquish the hope of fools, no doubt. But later in the week the deed was done; Belichick was out. The old goat did seem to get choked up acknowledging the fans during his farewell presser, but in the stadium, in the moment, he’d left us hanging. Maybe he was still holding on. Either way, I missed my hoodie.
Winning Rocks
My high school football career ended Thanksgiving of my senior year, 2001, but around that same time something interesting began to happen. The Patriots, the real ones, started looking better and better. Ever mediocre, New England suddenly, in fact, looked like contenders, to those looking close enough. When they lost a game to the vaunted St. Louis Rams in prime time that I watched on the 14-inch TVCR in my room, it was the Pats that looked like the better team. And from that point forth, I took my talents as an active, fanatical viewer of the game, which I’d honed so many Fridays, to the professional level.
You might imagine how it went from there.
That Christmas, I got a Patriots jersey from my dad. It featured my favorite player, who was of course relatively obscure, Bryan Cox. Cox was a middle linebacker like I was and he was known throughout the game as a tough guy leader. The kind I’d aspired to be. I was bullish on the Pats’ postseason potential, and very glad for my gift, so I decided I’d wear the jersey to school every day until the hometown team lost. They were an upstart, so this wasn’t likely to extend all that long. Except it did. They won and won and won. And every day that their streak continued unabated I’d drape that jersey over a fresh tee shirt and go into school.
I wore the jersey to my friend’s house as a gang of us watched a wintry miracle against the Oakland Raiders, which culminated with my pal Alex making snow angels. I wore it during the victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers I watched at my dad’s, growing weepy at the poetry of deposed quarterback Drew Bledsoe coming through with a clutch relief performance. And I had my trusty blue and silver #51 on my back when, against John Madden’s advice, Tom Brady wrote the first chapter in a legend one February night in New Orleans. Luck was real—and I’d done my part, outfitted in magic cloth every day for over a month.
I can’t imagine anyone having a better Senior Skip Day than we did. Boarding the train that I took from the suburbs to the city every weekend, my friends and I headed into Boston’s City Hall for the Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots’ victory party. None of us had been to a championship celebration like that and we quickly learned that 17 was the perfect age to get your feet wet. With over a million in attendance, the affair was so densely packed that in the years to come the city would pivot to “rolling rally” parades instead of congested single-destination gatherings. It was a frigid day, but the warmth of the hordes of fellow fans kept us comfortable. I remember thinking it was so strange that my friends were so awestruck to be in the city by ourselves, unsupervised, but I’d been coming in with my sister to visit my father for years. Finally, there was something where I was the veteran and they the rookies.
Amid measureless excitement, the victorious Patriots took the stage that had been erected in front of City Hall. There was dancing, there were speeches, there were shiny baubles passed around. Brady and Belichick weren’t the known quantities they’d become, but they each had a bearing. Years later, Belichick’d say things like “Do your job,” and “No days off,” but that first time it was as new to him as it was to the throng of Boston-area fans. All I remember is the smile across his oft-terse face. It must have been good, being king for a day. And I’m sure I felt some envy of the emperor’s clothes.
Running Out the Clock
There’s more I could tell you about. The time my friends and I got to see Ty Law pick off Peyton Manning thrice—for free, because we finessed our way into the stadium to sell beer. The first time Tom Brady lost to Peyton Manning in the playoffs, which I took so poorly that I got belligerently thrown out of a bar for the first time (or, was I already leaving??). When we saw Kansas City, and I was gagging the whole time. I was sure I’d inherited my grandmother’s illness, which wasn’t true but the fear of which kept my throat constricted, as Rob Gronkowski made it look easy to land on your neck. That time we saw the Texans, when I had my ugliest encounter with absolute hateful racism (that one I’ll share another time—but know that it was a Patriots fan). Or the time Peyton Manning’s Broncos almost had us beat, up 24-0, before Tom and Bill led us to glory once more.
Then there’s the countless Sundays at home or at a pal’s, gathered around the boob tube rooting our hearts out.
I have all these memories because football takes days of your life gives them the sensation of something greater. The participation, the thrill and anguish, the camaraderie, the anticipation and reconciliation, the concussive conclusion, all of it—it comes together to heighten dates on life’s calendar. There’s meaning and consequence associated with that scoreboard. There’s an axiom, “The injury rate of football is 100%,” and the longer my life marches on the more I realize that’s just true of everything. And so the running clock, the winnowing schedule, it runs in parallels our own.
For what a confused and intricate matrix life can be, the game offers order.
4th and Sorry We Went So Long
It sucks that we lose things, but it’s good to learn how to move on. Endings beget beginnings and so forth. Football seasons end in winter and begin to blossom in summer. For the Patriots, a leadership successor has been named, former linebacker Jerod Mayo, and the team will soon select the franchise’s next generation of quarterback. Belichick himself has been left in the cold, the winningest coach in a generation jobless, spurned by the entire league. Brady is set to become an announcer, triumphantly reclaiming his stake in our Sundays. For the fans, the era will be new. And it’s funny, Mayo wore the very same #51 jersey that Cox had. That one I held onto. So I’m already equipped to venerate him, should things go well. My fixation lives on.
You can’t go back to high school, though. You never forget your first bite of the apple. I’ll miss the old cast of characters, but the never-ending entertainment product that is football marches on. And let’s be honest—I’ll watch. It’s what I do. I’m a football player—even on the sideline, even if you take the shirt off my back…
But I’ll always hope that hoodie turns up.