Happy 25th Anniversary to Mr. Kraft and the Patriots
Jan 21, 1994
Robert K. Kraft becomes the Patriots fourth owner in the club’s 35-year history with an agreement to purchase the team from James Orthwein.
Feb 25, 1994
The sale of the Patriots from James Orthwein to Robert K. Kraft becomes official.
Feb 26, 1994
Patriots fans respond to the sale by purchasing 5,968 season tickets, a Patriots single-day sales record.
So how’s that for a 25th anniversary for my close, personal, pretty much best friend, Mr. Kraft? My 25th wedding anniversary was last September and we got a trip to Italy. The Patriots are taking Mr. Kraft to the Super Bowl for theirs. Wish is way more appropriate given that for the 25th you’re supposed to give silver:
So anyway, like I said over a glass of inexpensive wine in Tuscany, “Has it really been 25 years?” Only now I’m saying it way more wistfully and with a lot more romance in my voice. I mean, the Irish Rose is great. I’m well aware we are so disproportionately attractive that strangers assume she’s my caregiver. (They’re not really wrong.) But she’s never come close to saving my favorite public institution.
This day 25 years ago started out as the worst day I’ve ever had as a sports fan, and it’s not even close. On January 21st, 1994, I went into my old crappy, dead end day job and put on the radio as always to get my mind off the bleak hopelessness of my professional life. On this particular day instead of Stern I put on Imus, and he had on Will McDonough, the most plugged in and informed football reporter of his time. Basically a Bronze Age Adam Schefter. And he announced that it was done. The Patriots were being moved to St. Louis by their owner, James Orthwein of the Anheiser-Busch family.
And make no mistake, if pro football was leaving New England, it was not coming back. After 35 years of struggling with the crippling debt of the earlier owners, dysfunctional management, the worst facility in all of pro sports that was essentially a big, poured concrete toilet seat cover in the middle of a dirt parking lot that looked like the area Matt Damon lived in in The Martian and having already lost the Redskins decades earlier, this region was going to be declared unfit and unworthy of having an NFL team. And probably considered the home region of the Giants like they were before the AFL was founded in 1960. Trust me, the thought of raising my two sons in Eli Manning jerseys is an alternate timeline I call “The Hell Dimension.”
Well later that day the story took a complete 180. Instead of moving, Orthwein was selling. To the man who owned the lease on the stadium and wasn’t willing to be bought out. A fairly obscure cardboard box mogul who wasn’t known to too many people other than the ones who read the business section of the paper, go to a lot of charity events or who were such Patriots geeks they paid attention to who owned the lease on that garbage stadium (I timidly raise my hand) was buying Orthwein out like he was Moe Green. For a then-preposterous 175 million bucks. That man’s name is Robert Kraft.
We found out later he’d made that $175 million impulse purchase without clearing it with his wife. I spoke to Mr. Kraft about it and he said the only way the deal was going through was if absolutely no one but he, Orthwein and their lawyers knew. By way of perspective, last June I bought myself a golf bag for Father’s Day and within five minutes my Darling Lass texted asking if I’d just charged a hundred bucks on our card at the sporting goods place.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “The very rich are different than you and me.” And as Hemingway clapped back, “Yes. They have more money.
Anyway, you know the rest. A few years later, at personal expense without taxpayers dollars or making fans pony up for Personal Seat Licenses, he built a state of the art stadium. And opened it by hanging the franchise’s first championship banner. That dirt lot with its axle-snapping pot holes is paved over and is a mecca of luxury hotel, bars, restaurants and a Bass Pro Shop. And last year they had to make major renovations inside the stadium to fit their fifth banner. And smartly left room for more. All because a quarter century ago a man of singular vision rolled a very expensive pair of dice and hit it big.
Then we became buddies for life and lived happily ever after. The end. Happy Anniversary, my man.
