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?
