The Patriots Hall of Infamy
News Item: The New England Patriots have announced plans for “The Hall at Patriot Place,” a $15 million, state-of-the-art Hall of Fame and museum that will feature a variety of interactive exhibits, Patriots’ memorabilia, a 150-seat theater, and three-story high, six-foot wide pylons that will display video highlights of each of the team’s Hall of Fame inductees. The Hall will be built next to Gillette Stadium on the current site of the Patriots Pro Shop and is expected to open in the Fall of 2008.
There can be no better sign that Patriots’ fans are witnessing a dynasty than the fact that the Kraft family is willing to fork over 15 large just to build a museum to commemorate the team’s accomplishments. Only the truly great franchises can get away with that. No one wants to throw the wife and kids into the RV and drive four hours to go see an LA Clippers museum.
The idea makes perfect sense now, but if seven years ago Bob Kraft told you he’d be shelling out 60% of ARod’s annual salary to build a monument to the glory of this team, we’d all be calling for Randall P. McMurphying the loony bastard. But after three Super Bowl titles, and with dozens more on the way, it seems like a good idea.
Still it’s easy, if terrifying, to imagine how easily the last six years could’ve never happened. What if late QB Coach Dick Rehbein decided to recommend Todd Husak instead of the skinny kid from Michigan? What if Bill Belichick decided he really would be happy as the HC of the NYJs? If Bledsoe didn’t get filleted by Mo Lewis? What if Walt Coleman blew the call in the Snow Bowl? What if the Pats drafted a WR instead of Richard Seymour the way Ron Borges and the talk show douches wanted? What if Tedy Bruschi or Rodney Harrison or Troy Brown or any of a dozen guys chased the money to some other team?
Then assuming Kraft still wanted to build a museum to the dog’s breakfast that the New England Patriots used to be over their first 40 years of existence, it would be filled with stuff like this:
The Golden Shower Entrance Pavilion.
This grand hall greets the patrons as they enter the museum. It’s done in a motif that recreates the first game in Schaefer Stadium on August 15, 1971. Stadium engineers has woefully underestimated the water pressure and the urinals and toilets overflowed raw sewage. In the entrance hall, animatronic characters recreate the scene where ticket holders were led down to a windowless concrete room under the stands to pee against the walls and defecate in cardboard boxes.
The Water Ballet of Larry Eisenhauer
Just past the Golden Shower Pavilion, patrons will pass a huge water tank. Inside the tank some of the museum staff re-enact the scene at the Stardust Hotel bar in San Diego, 1963. The Pats were there to play the Chargers in the AFL Championship Game and the players were all getting hammered. Next to the bar was a swimming pool where they staged underwater ballets for the bar patrons. Insane Patriot LB Larry Eisenhauer was there, knee-walking drunk, until he got up and left the bar with his dad in tow. A couple of minutes later, to the horror of everyone, Larry was in the ballet pool with his dad, swimming around bare-assed. Allegedly. Within a minute there were a dozen teammates in with him. Arrests were made. And to no one’s surprise, they gave up 610 yards of total offense and got beat 51-10.
Inductee: Trenchcoat Guy
The Pats first sellout was at BU in 1961 against the Dallas Texans. Dallas was driving late in the game, down 7. A Dallas WR was knocked out at the Pats 1 with time running out, and the fans stormed the field thinking the game was over. The refs said there was time for one more play, and as the Texans threw for the end zone, a fan on the sidelines, sporting a gray trenchcoat, ran out onto the field, committed a flagrant pass interference penalty, and ran back into the crowd. Game over, Pats win.
The Immaculate Hotel Room
This is a walk through exhibit where fans can see first hand how the early Pats players got to live. The highlight of the room is seeing how the beds are still made because owner Billy Sullivan made a deal with the hotel that a room would cost $10, but they’d charge him 15 bucks if they didn’t use the beds. So he ordered the players only to lie on top of the beds and fined them their $10 per diem if they pulled the covers down. Eisenhauer would later say that getting money out of Sullivan was “like pulling teeth from a hen.”
Inductee: Bob Gladieux
Gladieux was a backup RB who was cut by the Pats just before their season opener at Harvard Stadium. He took it like any real man would: he went on a bender. Nevertheless, the day of the game he went with a buddy to get drunk and cheer his former teammates on. As Gladieux’s buddy went to grab beers and hot dogs for the opening kick, Gladieux heard his name paged to the Pats locker room. Still hammered, he reported and they told him to suit up. As his friend got back to the seat to find him missing, he hears over the PA system, “Here’s the opening kickoff... tackle by Gladieux....” Bob later admitted he was just trying to avoid contact, but ran into the return guy by accident.
The Lost Film Footage of Steve Kiner
Kiner was a Pats LB in the early 70s out of Tennessee. Legend has it that deep in the bowels of the Gillette offices, stored away like the Ark of the Covenant in “Raiders,” is coaches film of Kiner, so drugged out on a cocktail of stimulants, depressants, uppers, downers and sidewaysers, that he gets into his stance and as the ball is snapped, stands there frozen in a catatonic trance as the play, and the ball carrier, goes right by him. Without moving a muscle.
Clive Rush’s Microphone of Terror
Sullivan was in his semi-annual coaching search. He made up his mind that his choice would be one of the coordinators from the Super Bowl teams. That was the year the Jets shocked the Colts, so he made the logical PR decision to hire the Jets offensive coordinator Clive Rush over the Colts defensive coach. Too bad, because the Colts guy happened to be Chuck Noll, who went onto win four Super Bowls. Rush meanwhile was a day-drinking, chain-smoking crackpot and more paranoid than Howard Hughes in a rest area toilet. But you can understand why. At his opening press conference, he touched the mic and got an electrical shock...his hair standing on end, smoke coming out of his ears, while everyone watched in horror. The first thing he said was “Geez, I heard the Boston press was tough...” the sum total of every funny thing he ever uttered.
Inductees: The Black Power Defense
It was the height of the Civil Rights movement, and Rush had an idea. Like most of his, it was borne of drunkenness and stupidity. To motivate his troops, he would field a defense made up entirely of black players. He even switched guys over from offense to defense just so he’d have enough black players on D to follow this idea to its illogical end. Ronnie Loudd, the Pats personnel director, who was black, told Sullivan “I think this guy has completely lost his marbles.” He was wrong. Rush lost his marbles the next year, when he had a nervous breakdown and was fired mid-season.
I naively thought I could fit a respectable amount of the bizarre, insane, unstable, inexplicable Hall of Infamy-worthy Patriots figures into one article, and we’ve only barely made it up the 1970s. I guess this calls for a sequel. Or maybe two, just to make room for Irving Fryar.