I am a New England Patriots fan. That's not the easiest thing to say this week.
While it may seem an odd comparison, I can't shake the feeling that Deflategate is like Watergate. The illegally deflated footballs now dominating our national discussion were as unnecessary to the Pats' 45-7 pasting of the Indianapolis Colts as the Watergate break-in was to Richard Nixon's 49-state landslide over George McGovern. In that sense, being in the Patriots' corner this week has given me a small inkling of what Pat Buchanan — the founding editor of the first magazine I worked for — must have felt like during the darkest days of the Watergate scandal.
The stakes are obviously higher in a presidential election than a game, and my relationship with the Patriots wasn't anything like being the first staffer on Nixon's 1968 campaign. Still, the Pats mean a lot to me. Their stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, is less than 10 miles from the house I grew up in. I went to games with my father when the team was terrible, before I even really liked football. The old stadium had metal bleachers to which your posterior would freeze as you sat watching the Patriots lose in the freezing cold. The team's owners were so financially inept that they lost money on a Michael Jackson tour in 1984, when Thriller was still tearing up the charts. The Patriots' one trip to the Super Bowl during my childhood was an epic beatdown at the hands of the 1985 Chicago Bears, one of the most fearsome defenses in NFL history.
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Today people think of the Patriots as a juggernaut, and rightfully so. But for oh so many years, the Patriots were losers — our losers.
That began to change with Robert Kraft, who bought the team in 1994. I watched the Patriots rise from the laughingstock of the NFL to a hardscrabble group of overachievers quarterbacked by Drew Bledsoe, and then finally a dynasty under Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. The Patriots' track record of sustained success was the sports equivalent of the greatest political comeback in American history.
An undefeated regular season. Nine AFC Championship games in 13 years with Brady as the full-time starter (not counting the seasons he was a backup or on injured reserve). Six Super Bowl appearances. Three rings, and maybe a fourth to come.
The counterculture and the Eastern establishment hated Nixon. Much of America hates the Patriots. Belichick is too dour. Brady is too good-looking. The team benefited from things like the "tuck rule" game, and sometimes beat opponents in too convincing a fashion.
Then came the 2007 Spygate scandal, involving illegal videotaping of opponents, and now "Deflategate." The Patriots are cheaters, the detractors say. All their accomplishments come with asterisks.
So what does this have to do with Nixon? When Buchanan testified before the Senate's Watergate committee, he argued that the "dirty tricks" he was accused of committing on behalf of Nixon included nothing that was "illicit, unethical, improper — or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns." The third-rate burglary shouldn't have happened, but otherwise "none of the stratagems, overt or covert, had exceeded the limits of time-honored tradition in politics."
Buchanan biographer Timothy Stanley summarized the Nixon speechwriter's views of Watergate as "part of the American game of hardball politics. The only reason Nixon was on trial was because the Democrats were sore at having lost."
I don't condone cheating, or the Patriots' real and alleged infractions. They should not happen. But I can't help feeling that the main reason they are on trial is because the rest of the league is sore at having lost.
Spygate-touting critics say the Patriots haven't won a Super Bowl in 10 years because they haven't been videotaping defensive signals. But by any objective measure, the Patriots' offense has improved since then, while it is the defense that has declined.
The part of the AFC Championship game played with deflated footballs was the only competitive portion of the game. The Patriots scored 28 unanswered points with the properly inflated footballs.
It isn't cheating that makes team players out of malcontents like Corey Dillon, Randy Moss, and LeGarrette Blount. It isn't rule-breaking that makes them the model for what other teams do, especially offensively.
Only Nixon could go to China. Only Tom Brady could go to six Super Bowls.
On Thursday, Brady and Belichick both came out with their version of "I am not a crook." In this case, the refrain is, "I am not a cheater." I am part of the minority that wants to believe them. But most people won't, and Brady in particular didn't make any compelling arguments to change a skeptic's mind.
The faces of the NFL's most successful franchise of the past 15 years have made statements that in time will likely prove true or false. If refuted, a moment that could have cemented their status as the greatest of all time will instead prove a Pyrrhic victory.
"It's like Sisyphus," wrote Buchanan. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain... and it rolled right back down on us."
He was talking about Nixon. He could have been talking about my Patriots, too.
