Patriot Reign (22 page)

A
man had been caught in the stairwell of the Wyndham—on the players’ floor—and
he was in possession of shells. After a search of the stairwell, a gun was
found as well. When Belichick received all the information,
he relayed it to his players. He told them that the story was likely to break
and that they would be asked about it. He told them to be careful and also
emphasized that there had been no security problems where they were
staying.

The man with the gun was arrested, but surprisingly, the
story never surfaced. (The Houston police department denied a request for the
police report, claiming that the investigation is active.) Anyone who was
thinking of the possibilities could have been frightened by the story, and
anyone who was looking for a motive could have been confused by it. In the days
before the game, collectively, the Patriots did neither.

T
hey continued as they had in the
past, reciting the tendencies of the Panthers. They knew then that they were
not going to be switching to any sub defenses on third down, because they were
determined to take away Davis as a runner. And the Panthers were not afraid to
run with Davis or DeShaun Foster on any down. The receivers had been told, over
and over, that they were going to have to beat man-to-man coverage against the
Carolina corners, who liked to play physically. The defenders knew all about
Jake Delhomme, the quarterback who may have been more effective when the
original plays broke down and he was forced to freelance. He was a good
freelancer, but the guys on defense had been told to look for the ball because
Delhomme was also a fumbler. The Patriots were becoming experts on the
Panthers, and Belichick thought the process was happening at the right time.
With the extra week, he didn’t want the team to be ready
too soon and bored in the days before the game. Now they could have the buildup
they needed before pursuing the second championship in the franchise’s
44-season history.

O
n Saturday night at 9:45, one
hour and fifteen minutes before curfew, Tom Brady sat in the Houston Airport
Marriott. He was eating crab legs and talking with backup quarterback Damon
Huard. It was the best conversation they’d ever had. They didn’t talk much
football, even though the game was less than twenty-four hours away. It was
going to be Huard’s last game under contract with the Patriots, so they talked
about the future and the past.

“He was very much at
peace with himself, and that led to a philosophical discussion,” Brady says.
“We may have mentioned the game for two minutes, but the rest of it was just
b.s.-ing about life. I remember thinking,
What a great night, no matter
what happens tomorrow
.”

He said, “no matter what
happens,” but he had an idea of what was going to take place the next day. On
Friday he and Huard did have a football conversation. One of the comments he
made to Huard then was that, throughout his career, the final game of the
season had always come down to some last-minute or overtime situation. That’s
what happened when he directed the University of Michigan to an Orange Bowl win
over Alabama, 35–34 in overtime. At the end of the 2001 season he had the drive
in the Super Bowl against the Rams. In 2002 he tried to save the season at the
end, sore arm and all. The Patriots were down 10 to the Dolphins with five
minutes to play, and he led them to a win in overtime. Why
would this game on Sunday afternoon be any different?

That’s
really the way he looked at it too. It was the game on Sunday, and if anything,
he could handle a game in the literal sense. His “game” used to make him tense.
He is viewed as a sex symbol now, an image that makes him laugh when he thinks
of all the times he couldn’t get a date. He remembers being shy with a young
woman at Michigan, a woman he adored—and a woman who ignored him. He and his
friend Aaron Shea used to drive by her house and hope that she’d be outside.
Brady would see her at clubs, and she would barely talk to him. Sex symbol? He
thinks of incidents like that when he hears about the women who want to wear
his jersey, frame his picture, or be the ones who would never ignore him at
clubs.

“That’s the stuff that makes me most uncomfortable. I’m
very confident as a football player; I have no problems. I’m not natural with
cameras and pictures. Put me in a room with my family, and I’m the one cracking
jokes. Put me in a room with people I don’t know, I’ll be a little shy for a
while until I can figure out what to say. What it comes down to is that I just
want to be a great football player.”

He is intrigued by complex
minds. He goes out of his way to applaud a good piece of literature, a
provocative film—he was amazed that Mel Gibson could even conceptualize a movie
about the Passion of Jesus Christ—or an act of courage. He wants to be a great
football player, but he says the greatness of football doesn’t compare to other
things he has seen. He mentions his oldest sister, Maureen. “She’s tough,” he
says. “I admire what she’s able to do.” What she’s able to do, Brady says, is
be a single mother who takes care of her children. He recognizes the difficulty
in that, and it’s more likely to get his praise than
something
he
does at the back end of a game.

But
he does play football, and he plays it well. His teammates listen to him,
believe in him, trust him. He is the one looking over the game plan on Tuesday
nights and saying to himself,
How in the hell am I ever going to get
this down by Sunday?
He always gets it, though. He’ll be away from the
office and call Charlie Weis, wanting to talk about plays. There are some he
likes and there are some he would like to tweak. Weis knows Brady so well and
trusts him so much that he never forces any plays on him. Once Brady is able to
practice the plays and let them run through his mind in practice, he feels like
his team can beat anybody’s.

“Tom is a cocky sonofabitch,” Damien
Woody says. “He knows he’s going to win, and he makes you believe it. You know
what? I’d die for the man. I think you know what I mean. He’s the kind of guy
who makes you want to bust your ass. He’s a great quarterback, a great leader.
He’s so good that he’ll go up to the other team and tell them what he’s going
to do. I can’t say enough about him.”

Brady knew on that Saturday
night that he could handle the Panthers. He knew what he was supposed to do,
and he knew what the team had to do. He had been ready to play for a week. He
was certainly ready when Crennel began his curfew checks at eleven
o’clock.

When he awoke early Sunday morning, Brady immediately
went into his routine. He had an iPod programmed for the special day. He had
thirty-eight songs for Super Bowl XXXVIII. Jay-Z was on there, along with
Aerosmith, Kid Rock, and 50 Cent. He had already grasped, from his first Super
Bowl trip to New Orleans, that there wasn’t any reason to
be nervous. The early bus would be leaving for Reliant at 1:15, a little more
than four hours before the start of the game.

Belichick had been
as confident as Brady on Saturday night. He kept looking at the things Carolina
did well, and he feared the potential of those things. He did fight his
overconfidence a bit, though, because he saw some weaknesses on the Panthers.
He saw those weaknesses and visualized his team pouncing on them. He never
thought that once more tilting the game the way he wanted it would almost force
Delhomme to win it, or that he would watch the quarterback nearly pull it
off.

All the players were there on Sunday, the first day of
February, at noon. They reviewed what they were going to do. They viewed the
trophy some of them had worked for in New Orleans. Others had recognized it
from television, pictures, the Gillette trophy case, or long reminiscences on
the team plane. They wanted to get their own so the team could be united in its
philosophy as well as its hardware.

T
hey arrived at the stadium with
the retractable roof, and the question at that time was simple: open or closed?
It was cloudy and cool—for Houston—so playing in 60-degree weather was going to
be a game-time decision. The roof would be closed, but aesthetically it wasn’t
going to matter. The stadium was beautiful. This was a Texas building,
super-sized in every category, from price—$449 million—to length of the video
boards—360 feet.

Most players agreed that it was hot
on the field, so it was easy to get warmed up. As those warm-ups took place and
then came to an end, there was a different kind of heat on
the field. Belichick was standing next to defensive tackle Richard Seymour, and
they both noticed it.

“Did you see that shit?” Belichick said to
Seymour.

“Yeah, I did,” he answered.

What they saw
was a group of Panthers—“Deon Grant and a couple of other assholes” is the way
Belichick put it—trying to stare them down. The tone would be set for both
Belichick’s pregame speech and the first several minutes of the game. Belichick
had wanted to say something anyway after hearing the Panthers compared to the
Patriots. He had asked his team all season not to give opponents any material
to use against the Patriots. But he wasn’t holding back now. He told the team
that he was tired of hearing about the great Carolina defensive line, the great
receivers, and the tough corners. He said he was tired of hearing that the
Panthers were the ’01 Patriots.

“It’s a bunch of bullshit,” he
said, his voice rising. “They’re not what we are. They can’t be what we are.
We
are what we are.”

“This is going to sound
weird since it was a lot of expletives,” Woody says, “but it was touching. We
saw a different side of him. We had never seen him that emotional before. He
got me ready. I felt like going out there, strapping it up, and playing on one
leg.”

Woody left the playing to Hochstein and the rest of the
Patriots, who decided to come out as a team. The Panthers decided to do the
same thing. So there they both were, standing in Texas, minutes away from
playing one of the oddest and most exciting of all the Super Bowls. They were
about to walk the line between boxing and ballet, pounding each other on one series and floating by one another on the
next. “It was as physical a game as I have ever seen,” says Armen Keteyian, who
watched from the sideline. “It was an all-time Texas steel cage match.”

There was just one sweet thing between the Patriots and Panthers, and it
was the voice of Houston native Beyonce Knowles. She sang “The Star-Spangled
Banner” angelically. But it was an evening when the sounds—well, the
appearance
—of pop musicians could not be innocent, and the
nation would debate that on Monday morning more than the game. As for the game,
all indications were that it would be a low-scoring one. It just made sense
when you put the teams side by side. Neither one had a head coach or an
offensive coordinator with a drop-backand-let-it-fly mentality. The Panthers
liked to run, and the Patriots had allowed just one 100-yard rusher all season.
The Patriots were going to try running as well, and there was that line that
everyone had heard about.

So when the teams nearly went the first
twenty-seven minutes without scoring, it seemed to be turning into a game that
was on its way to a 14–10 finish. Patriots receiver Troy Brown had his nose
broken early and still went back in the game. Adam Vinatieri, with a portfolio
of winning kicks, already had missed two field goals in the first half.

The first one he described as a simple miss, from 31 yards away. Shane
Burton blocked the next attempt, which was a 36-yarder. Belichick didn’t like
this. He had said earlier that Scott O’Brien, the Carolina special-teams coach,
knew some of the Patriots specialists better than he did. O’Brien had coached
long snapper Brian Kinchen and holder Ken Walter. With an injury to regular
snapper Lonie Paxton and a fitful season of punting by
Walter—he had already been released and re-signed during the season—part of the
Patriots’ kicking game was damaged.

Vinatieri wanted to be
accepted as a football player, not the temperamental kicker-in-residence, so he
didn’t complain about a couple of things that were bothering him. He was
hurting, with constant pain in his back. And with the injury to Paxton, his
timing on his kicks was thrown off. He, Paxton, and Walter had practiced so
much together that they never had to think about the technical aspects of their
jobs. It was part of their muscle memory: straight snaps by Paxton, clean
catches and quick placements by Walter, stress-free kicks by Vinatieri.

Finally, with just over five minutes left in the half, the Patriots got
what they wanted and expected. Mike Vrabel, the defense’s quick-witted scholar,
sacked Delhomme at the Carolina 19. He jarred the ball loose, and Seymour
recovered it. Four plays and two minutes later, Brady threw a short touchdown
pass to Deion Branch.

Game over, some must have thought. It was
that kind of game. Except it really wasn’t what it appeared to be. Fans were
going to love it for its unpredictability. Coaches were going to look back,
reluctantly, and see all the mistakes that made it so dramatic. It was one of
those mistakes that led to a tie with seventy-four seconds left in the
half.

Patriots corner Tyrone Poole was supposed to jam Steve Smith
at the line, and rookie safety Eugene Wilson was supposed to be helping with
over-the-top coverage. Neither happened. Poole missed Smith at the line, and
Wilson went to cover for Ty Law. Law had told him that he had an idea of what
Carolina was trying to do, and he needed Wilson to get his back. Geno, as the
rookie was called, didn’t go where he was needed. So Poole
was left alone on a 39-yard touchdown pass.

As halftime
approached, the energy changed again. The Patriots were able to squeeze in a
Brady-to-Givens touch- down, and the Panthers were able to get a 50-yard field
goal from John Kasay—set up by a 21-yard Davis run—as time expired.