The Dark Days

The Dark Days

Today, the New England Patriots are the model American sports franchise. They have been to eight Super Bowls in the past 17 years and have won five of them. They have not been the team to sign all the best players to big contracts, but have instead trained players who were undervalued and overlooked and turned them into some of the stars of today. In last years Super Bowl 40 percent of the Patriots Roster was picked outside the first three rounds of the NFL draft. One of these players is quarterback Tom Brady who was drafted 199th overall and became the greatest football player ever. These players usually don’t make a roster, nevermind play a big role on the best team in football. This is largely due to the brilliance of owner Robert Kraft and Coach Bill Belichick. They have done everything in their power to see that the patriots went from the joke of the league, to a first class franchise and name brand. However the organization was not always lucky enough to have the greatest quarterback and coach combination of all time in Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. As a matter of fact, the organization had such a dark cloud over it the light tower in present day Gillette Stadium would struggle to shine through it.

Today every kid in New England is a patriots fan, whether it be because of their love for the sport of football, or purely based on the fact that the Patriots are Super Bowl contenders every year, however in the 1960’s this wasn’t the case. Author Jerry Thornton had been a Patriots fan as long as he could remember and stuck with the team through thick and thin. He often remembers, “going to the stadium to find two dumpster fires, the ones that would ignite in the trash every so often due to the abundance of cigarettes, and the product on the field.” (27) He talks about how the first coach of the team Lou Saban was a mentally unstable maniac, who would cut the teams best players simply to send a message to the other players that he was in charge. The Author uses a slippery slope technique and dramatic irony as just when the reader thinks the story of this team couldn’t get any worse he tells the reader that many of the team’s players were homeless people who had tried out in order to get a free meal. He recalls one time Saban had, “seen a player who had been cut in the weeks prior stick around to get the meal at the practice facility in Amherst.” (73) Throughout the novel there is a slight change in mood with every chapter as Thornton begins to become more optimistic of the team and to see this develop over the novel was a beautiful writing technique to me. By the time the novel reaches the end, the author leaves us with one simple sentence, “and once the slow, skinny kid from Michigan got the starting job, the franchise became the greatest American sports dynasty we have ever seen.” (281)

I would recommend this book to not only fans of the New England Patriots, but to fans of sports in general. This tale of rags to riches is good enough to give any fan a hope that their own team may to one day join their league’s elite and become a dynasty. However one critique I have of this novel, is that it is not a very well written book. When reading it I felt as if any fan from the Boston area had picked up pen and paper and had told the story. I for one liked this as it made the story seem more real and satisfying, but many people would be turned off by the writing style. Overall I enjoyed this book as it is one of the few novels that I have read and felt a real personal connection to the author.