The New England Patriots Restore My Faith In America
The values that make us strong yet persevere.
(Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)
With another soul-crushing, officiating driven victory, the New England Patriots will have the gall to publicly bitch that no one ever believed in them and tout their “underdog” status despite being an “underdog” precisely once in since 2016, while their fans, from Donald Trump on down, will obnoxiously flock to social media to claim that the “haters” just can’t stand their success.
It’s hard to find joy in times like these, but surveying the metaphysical carnage wrought upon the sporting world last night, I find hope — if only a sliver — in knowing that, by and large, America is still a place where the commitment to an abstract sense of justice, even just a promise of justice that goes routinely unrealized, still holds sway.
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The New England Patriots are not universally reviled because they have won six championships. America doesn’t viscerally reject champions. America only rejects champions when it has a deep and abiding sense that their success is ill-gotten. Whether the fault one finds is based on a belief that the team has broken the rules of an otherwise fair and just system or the conviction that all this champion has done is expose the rotten that lies at the heart of the whole institution, it’s the revulsion to the concept of foul play that agitates America to come together over its hatred of this loathsome franchise.
Root for him or against him, LeBron was never hated in Cleveland — a team that was consistently a power in the East. He earned disdain when he did an end-run around the league’s salary cap to assemble a super team in Miami. At this point most people who hated that Miami team would gladly give LeBron a hug rather than let him suffer another second playing for this moribund Lakers team. The Golden State Warriors were generally beloved until they managed to add KD to one of the best teams in the modern era. The New York Yankees were reviled when a whole range of factors kept them in a position to outspend every other club — a feature that’s no longer unique to the Yankees — and maybe if baseball’s around in another generation we’ll find people who can’t even grasp why the team had been so despised before.
The Patriots aren’t a team that people hate for their success, they’re a team people hate because they’ve been stone cold caught cheating… twice. And that’s not counting the way they were the most aggressive and greedy cheaters of a whole league of cheaters in bilking the American taxpayers out of money for the team’s own publicity stunts.
They are truly the Lance Armstrong of football and yet somehow no one gets away with saying, “yah just hate Lance Armstrong because he was a champion!”
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This brings us full circle to the foundational legal issue here. The rule of law is under siege in America. The Trump administration is now openly declaring they plan to abuse the “acting” tag — a convention it’s been defiling from the Sally Yates dismissal through the Matthew Whitaker regime — by just refusing to even bother with constitutionally required Senate confirmation, which is somehow below the fold because this same White House is about to declare a national emergency to get a boondoggle appropriation it can’t get legally. George Conway’s over here becoming a Twitter phenomenon complaining about the erosion of the rule of law. It’s easy to convince yourself that the underpinning of American democracy is poised on the brink of collapse out of the public’s general apathy in the face of a bargain basement Larry Rhodes.
But things aren’t that bad yet. The Patriots, and more accurately the true patriots who want this franchise to be nuked into oblivion for decades to come, give us hope. There’s still an appetite in America for the old-fashioned idea that rules are rules and cheaters shouldn’t win. Perhaps someday we’ll see an America that lives up to that ideal.
Unfortunately that ideal is probably the Bills, so we’re screwed.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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