The unfolding criminal case surrounding New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez, who, it appears, is at the very least closely connected to the murder of an acquaintance, has inspired a lot of introspection among fans of the team and in the sports world in general. Naturally, when it comes to any story that transcends sports, it's become impossible to talk about without wading through heaping piles of steaming sanctimony. The chief narrative that has taken hold today among the city's bullshit artists is that this latest episode represents the last chapter in the Patriot Dynasty. Ron Borges of the Boston Herald, the single-minded, poor pegging lubber of a Belichikian spite-monger, aimed to pull back the veil on the illusion today, calling out the Patriot Way as a hypocritical construct:
Bob Kraft and his New England Patriots have for the past dozen years foisted upon a gullible public the idea that they go about their football business differently than their peers. They claimed to covet character guys who play hard, smart football and otherwise represent Kraft family values.
BREAKING: Billion dollar corporation markets itself.
I share Borges, and his counterpart at the Globe Dan Shaughnessy's skepticism about the idea that the Patriots were ever exceptional in any way besides winning football games, not because the Hernandez affair has somehow lifted the fog and shown us all the way the world really works, but because I'm an adult man who doesn't believe in fairy tales. The era of the Patriot Way may be over, but only because it never existed in the first place, and anyone who ever thought otherwise is a child comforting themselves with super hero stories before bed time. The idea that a professional football team would employ the occasional, or even a lot of ethically questionable people is obvious on its face, and you would have had to have had your head stuck in the sand for the past decade not to see it that it also applies to our hometown team here.
This gets to the heart of why sports fandom, in the sense of fanaticism, from which the word is derived, is an embarrassing, and juvenile pursuit. I'm as big a fan of the Patriots as anyone I know, but it's because, and this is crazy, they're really good at playing the game of football, not because of some mythology about hard work and grittiness and selflessness that I've been fed by the marketing department. What sort of hapless simpleton, no matter how big a fan of any team, actually buys into the laudatory folklore that surrounds it?
I know this might sound like anathema around here, but Tom Brady is just a man. Bill Belichick is just a man. Aaron Hernandez? Just a man. Sometimes men do horrible things. That's not Batman in shoulder pads out there we're cheering for every Sunday, it's a flawed human being who happens to be able to run fast. There's nothing wrong with thrilling in displays of physical domination, or the dogged pursuit of excellence in one's specific craft, but just make sure that's what you're doing when you say you're a fan of a team. Anything else and your essentially investing your emotions in a marketing slogan. I occasionally purchase fuel for my automobile from BP, but not because they aired a few commercials about how they care about the environment.
So while I'm disappointed that a person whose physical gifts I admire seems to be involved in criminal behavior from all reports, there's no big picture lesson to be learned here about the identity of a team. What Borges and company are doing is simply reinforcing the mythologizing by attempting to tear it down. You can't rail against a fictional construct without admitting that it holds power over you.
This is the that I was railing against around the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. There is no such thing as the character of a collective city based on something so serious as its reaction to disaster, and it certainly doesn't come filtered down through something so frivolous as the inflated personality traits of the people who work at the ball-moving-around factory that happens to have been erected within a certain mile radius of the place we accidented into living. In other words, stop looking for stories to tell yourself about yourself based on things out of your control, it's a fool's errand, and, what's worse, what does it say about you and your friends and family when your favored team ends up falling apart? That you're a big loser.
