The Weekly Screed (#720)

Da Pats
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — It’s one of the ugliest scenes in the history of professional football. On 12 August 1978, in a desultory pre-season National Football League game between the Oakland Raiders and New England Patriots, Pats quarterback Steve Grogan threw an off-target pass in the direction of receiver Darryl Stingley. Stingley leapt and stretched toward the ball but barely got a finger on it. While he was airborne, Oakland safety Jack Tatum dug in his cleats, lowered his helmet and launched himself toward Stingley’s exposed head and shoulders. The impact was like a Greyhound bus hitting a mourning dove in flight.

Stingley dropped to the turf in a motionless heap. Tatum, known to fans as “The Assassin” for his blindside hits on vulnerable opponents, shrugged his pads into place and strolled away. Stingley never got up. Nor was he ever able to get up again. Tatum’s blow had shattered two vertebrae. Stingley spent the rest of his life — which ended in 2007 — as a quadriplegic in a wheelchair.

Jack Tatum never really apologized for that gratuitous practice-game blow, not did he ever reconcile with Stingley. To have shown remorse would have clashed with the image of Tatum as an on-field rogue and with the reputation of the Oakland franchise — Da Raidas — as the outlaws of the NFL.

That brutal moment was all the more poignant because the Patriots in those days were more a victim, among NFL teams, than an aggressor. Their front office was a comic opera and the team fluctuated between bare competence and absurdity. Their popular nickname, Patsies, was painfully appropriate. The Tatum vs. Stingley collision was a microcosm of both teams’ personalities, a officeful of likable milquetoasts mugged by the gangbangers from the East Bay.

At the moment Da Raidas entered the NFL from the renegade American Football League, they were the Hell’s Angels of the league. In fact, the Angels were Raiders fans, and half the non-bikers in the Oakland Coliseum every Sunday dressed up as Hell’s Angels — or vampires, zombies, cannibals, ax-murderers. Raiders owner Al Davis took sniggering joy in thumbing his nose at the NFL brass. His coach was a hulking slob, John Madden, whose slouched-grizzly appearance belied one of the best minds in the history of the game. While his thuggish players outslugged their opponents, Madden out-thought them. Meanwhile, Al Davis blew his bankroll on speed merchants and Neanderthal sociopaths.

The list of dangerous or delinquent misfits who played for Da Raidas, beyond Davis, Madden and Tatum, included Kenny “The Snake” Stabler, Howie Long, Ted “The Mad Stork” Hendricks, Otis Sistrunk, Lyle Alzado, Bubba Smith, Lester Hayes. No other team could match the Oakland roster’s lunatic quotient. But the secret of the Raiders’ perennial success was that they always operated on the fringe of the rules, downing every drug, seeking every tiny edge and risking a penalty on each play on the theory that the refs would eventually tire of blowing their whistles. Da Raidas’ every soiled victory was a thorn in the ass of the NFL establishment. Al Davis’ motto, “Just win, baby!” whispered loudly an unspoken, unsportsmanlike, incorrigible addendum: “By any means necessary.”

Today, the tables are turned. The Raiders, even before Davis’ demise in 2011, had become a laughingstock. In their place, sitting atop the NFL both as champions and renegades — and despised the league over — are the former Patsies. We have to start thinking of them as Da Pats, flouting the rules, picking their noses, gaming the refs and flipping the bird at the suits in New York City.

And talk about tough? The Patriots are the only team in the NFL with an All-Pro tight end serving a life sentence for murder. And the guy was just indicted again — for shooting his “right-hand man” in the face. Roll in your grave, Al.

It all started when Bill Belichick took over as head coach. Under Belichick, the Pats have gone a little more rogue every year. Next to Bill, the once fearsome John Madden is Winnie the Pooh. He even dresses worse. He never smiles, he talks in grunts, he regularly urges the voracious Boston sports press to shove their pencils up their ass. And he cheats every way he can think of — from substitution patterns to secret videotapes of opponents’ practices to shorting out other teams’ headsets during games to — yes, Deflategate. Plus, he drafts future murderers.

And New England loves him, blindly and unconditionally, because he has made the Patsies into Da Pats, the meanest mofos in the valley. The Belichick style has even infected Da Pats’ once-courtly owner Robert Kraft. Deflategate completed Bob’s metamorphosis into Tommy De Vito, Joe Pesci’s hair-trigger sadist in Goodfellas. I can picture Bob Kraft in a bar, encountering his former buddy, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He looks Goodell ominously up and down, curls a lip and says, “Where are da shovels?”

Unfortunately, Tom Brady, the chronically small-handed Patriot hero who loves a squishy grip, is appealing his four-game suspension for letting the air out of his balls. Say it ain’t so, Tom. You’re one of Da Pats. This is out of character, man! Youse guys don’t “appeal.” You stand your ground and shoot somebody in the face. Your role model is Whitey Bulger.

Now that the former Patsies are the bad boys of the NFL, Tom Terrific can’t afford to back down, apologize or keep a team of candy-ass lawyers on speed-dial. The Brady bunch are Da Raidas of the 21st century, the inheritors of “Just Win, Baby!” In every way, they have to embrace their persona. Ignore Goodell’s penny-ante punishments and keep playing as if there are no refs on the field. Hit to kill and cheat like speakeasy croupiers in a Bogart flick.

If he were around today, Al Davis would know what to tell today’s New Age hardboiled Tom Brady. Actually, it’s the same thing Bill Belichick would say, if only he had the power of speech: “Kid, never give a Packer an even break.”