My wife Vickie has an inscrutable process for
choosing her favorite Patriots player. In the case of her first favorite
player, Willie McGinest, it came down to one play, a sack of Peyton Manning in
which Willie made an incredibly athletic move to get to the quarterback. “Did
you see that?” Of course I did; I’m watching the game. “Who is that guy? He’s sung,” she said,
using a Tai Chi term that I was familiar with but hadn’t really understood
until that moment. Willie was so in tune with the game of football that there
wasn’t an ounce of tension in his body. He moved like water in a river. “Yeah,”
I said. “That’s Willie McGinest.”
Her latest favorite player does not move like
water in a river unless that river just burst through a dam. Before his
record-setting Sunday against the Bills, we watched LeGarrette Blount on the
Patriots pregame show on WBZ and my wife said, “Who is that guy?” And that was
before we got a look at his custom
wheels. LeGarrette Blount, I suddenly realized, is Tom
Hanks in “Big.” Who couldn’t
like this guy?
Watching LeGarrette
Blount before and after the Patriots’ 34-20 win over the
Bills it was hard to picture the troubled young man who wasn’t even drafted after
the infamous punch-up following Oregon’s upset loss to Boise State. His pro
career began inauspiciously with more fisticuffs, this time with a teammate on
the Tennessee Titans. The Titans had signed Blount as a free agent and it
looked like he might stick but he was released as the Titans finalized their 53-man
roster. He wound up with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers where he had some early
success, rushing for just over 1,000 yards his rookie season. The Bucs would then
draft Doug Martin who supplanted Blount as the lead back for Tampa Bay. Blount
became something of a forgotten man – except for still being known as something
of a knucklehead; one of those guys you thought had legally changed their first
name to “Troubled Running Back.”
When the Patriots traded for Blount it seemed
something of a head-scratcher. They had Stevan Ridley, Brandon Bolden and Shane
Vereen on the roster already. Their recent history of signing free agent
knuckleheads – Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson and Albert Haynesworth – argued against
trading for a knucklehead. Blount didn’t do PEDs or drive while under the
influence but he did punch people. Major uncool. The fact Tampa Bay had Doug
Martin playing ahead of him told me he’d probably lost a step.
On that pregame show last Sunday I met a man who
was nothing like the moody, sullen, hair-trigger violent man I expected to meet
based on the obviously unfair image that preceded him. He was open and silly
and endearing and perhaps the happiest man on the planet given his new address
and the opportunity ahead of him. I thought, ‘This is a good boy!’
I didn’t expect Blount to make the roster, even
after he flashed in the preseason. I thought it was insane that Bill Belichick had
Blount returning kickoffs. None of it made sense. Until last Sunday.
I think it was after the second big kick-off
return that Vickie asked, “Is that that guy? We saw before?”
Yes it was. LeGarrette Blount. Happy go lucky custom
car enthusiast and NFL running back LeGarrette Blount. Proving once again that
Bill Belichick knows more about football than me or anybody else for that
matter.
Vickie is absolutely right about this guy. That little move he made at the end of the
83-yard kickoff return was brilliant in its simplicity. Just a step inside and
there’s ten more yards. The little things win championships.
A lot of guys just run it out or bounds. They’re
boxed in. They’ve got 70. The play is over.
Some guys don’t think the play is over. They
change the angles at just the right moment. Maybe a touchdown is a million to
one but they take that one chance and cut back, slipping a tackle, still
running.
So it’s not a touchdown this time.
It was still ten extra yards that other guy wasn’t
going to get.
Maybe LeGarrette Blount is sung after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment