THEY WERE WINNERS AT HEART
Sunday means a lot for former players
Well, Patriots diehards, here we are on the threshold of yet another Super Bowl appearance, our ninth, which is more than any other team has ever amassed in pro football history, including the legendary likes of the Packers, Steelers, Bears and Giants.
If you’re a Patriots buff, doesn’t it feel good to know they and every other NFL franchise will be eating your dust tomorrow morning?
All they can see are our taillights.
And it’s not that you want to project arrogance or flaunt a sense of entitlement, but as country crooner Mac Davis noted, “It’s hard to be humble when you’re perfect in every way.”
Besides, if you’re of a certain age, having known nothing but Patriots supremacy, who can fault you for taking all this for granted because you have no other frame of reference?
It just seems normal to have your guys included in every discussion of NFL heavyweights.
But you’re surrounded by legions of old-timers with painful memories who can assure you it wasn’t always this way, that there really was a time when outsiders mocked your team as the Patsies.
In fact the franchise was forlorn for so long that two erstwhile Herald colleagues, Michael Gee and the late George Kimball, once toyed with cranking out a book on the club’s star-crossed history.
Its working title was “Fourth and Forever.”
Now we’re winners in a world that makes snap judgments on who its winners are, which is why former Buffalo coach Marv Levy is still remembered for having lost the Super Bowl four years in a row, rather than revered for having gotten there four years in a row.
But it’s the story of Lenny St. Jean that always comes to mind here.
Lenny was a Patriots offensive lineman for 10 seasons (1964-73), including those lean years when home games were played at BC, Harvard and Fenway Park.
In 1969, Clive Rush, who’d been an assistant on the Joe Namath Jets who shocked the Colts in Super Bowl III, was hired to run the Patriots, who’d finished 4-10.
“Clive brought four guys from that team to our training camp,” Lenny remembered. “They all had championship rings and went out of their way to flash them in front of us. But by the time that camp ended they’d all been cut. Imagine that? They were champions and we were bums, yet they couldn’t make our team.”
No, Patriots history hasn’t always been about winning, but it’s certainly been enriched by winners like Lenny St. Jean.
Wherever they’re watching tomorrow, this one’s for them, too.