Pat-anoia!

Are they moving? Are they making the playoffs? How's Drew's finger? Tuning in to Patriots Nation on sports radio.

by Jason Gay

For the past several months, I have tried very hard not to care about the New England Patriots. It's harder than I imagined. These days, the Boston media seem to be staging a pompon-waving 24-hour-a-day pep rally for the home team; wherever I go, I am blindsided by a torrent of Patriots images and information that fills my brain with all sorts of generally useless information. In a quiet moment, I'm frightened to find myself thinking about Drew Bledsoe's broken finger. I yearn for a playoff berth. I worry about the team bailing out of Foxborough.

Indeed, the Patriots are Boston's most unshakable news story. Though they are one of the better teams in the National Football League -- they reached the Super Bowl two seasons ago and have qualified for the playoffs three of the past four years -- the club's impact often transcends mere sport, crossing into political, entrepreneurial, and sociological landscapes as well. Over the past few years, in fact, the Patriots have tantalized this region with an almost Shakespearean plot line of great victories, depth-plumbing losses, and off-the-field controversies, the zenith of which was last month's announcement by the team's owner, businessman Robert Kraft, that he intends to take the club to Hartford, Connecticut, where desperate state leaders have pledged to build him a state-of-the-art stadium.

The Patriots' pending departure (the deal still requires the approval of the Connecticut legislature) has invested the 1998 season with a heightened sense of urgency -- since Kraft's announcement, the exploits of the team have been savored like time spent with an only child who's about to leave for war. Already a regular feature on the front pages of the Globe and the Herald, Patriots news is now headlined in point sizes usually reserved for foreign invasions; night after night, television sportscasters are breathlessly gaga over even the most tepid tidbits of Pats trivia.

On Sundays, it's possible to listen to or watch 17 straight hours of football-related radio and television programming in Boston, beginning at 7 a.m. and concluding at midnight. And on the field, the Patriots have only fueled the hype, rebounding from an ugly midseason slump to post three straight victories -- two of which occurred in the closing seconds, thanks to heroics by Bledsoe, the sleepy-eyed quarterback with the busted index finger.

What makes this even more remarkable is that Boston is not a football town. This is not Green Bay or Pittsburgh or Dallas or Miami; apart from a few select seasons, the football history of this region can be neatly arranged on the head of a pin. The devotion to this team is also surprising in that the Patriots themselves are a rather faceless bunch; other than Bledsoe, few of the players can be considered household names outside their own households. The team's coach, Pete Carroll, is an affable but uninspiring leader whose personality is dwarfed by that of Bill Parcells, the irascible ex-coach who bailed after the '97 Super Bowl to helm the rival New York Jets. But with the Red Sox drifting backward into obscurity, the Celtics frozen in the NBA lockout, and the improving Bruins still recovering from a moribund decade, the Pats are pretty much the only game in town.

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To gauge the temperature of Patriots Nation, we headed to Boston's WBZ Radio (AM 1030) to hang out with the people of Sunday Sports Page, a three-hour sports-talk show that, because of its 5 to 8 p.m. time slot, usually airs after Patriots games.

Sports radio, of course, represents the obstreperous front lines of sports partisanship; the people who listen to it tend to be the loudest, craziest, most rabid members of the general fandom. As a result, sports radio won't give you a perfect sample of the Patriots' audience. But it surely provides a snapshot you can't find elsewhere. As a wise man once said, if you want to see elephants dance on their hind legs, you have to buy yourself a ticket to the circus.

The ringmaster of this particular circus is Dan Roche, WBZ Radio's weekend sports director. Roche is 34 years old, and his career is cut from the standard radio-biz cloth. A childhood jock who loved all things sports, he studied communications in college; upon graduation, he embarked on a lengthy tour of obscure, low-paying broadcasting jobs before surfacing at WBZ, one of the biggest stations in Boston. Though his workload suffered a significant blow this spring when WBZ sacked much of its weekend sports programming, citing its emphasis on news, Roche prefers to point out the pleasingly obvious: he gets a paycheck to blab about sports. "I'd be the first to admit that I have a blast," he says.

When I arrive at WBZ on a Sunday afternoon, Roche is sequestered in a small room adjacent to the main studio, where he is delivering regular sports updates for the station's news programming. A man with graying black hair and the compact frame of a second baseman (he played a season of college baseball at Nasson, a now-defunct college in Maine), Roche is dressed in an Oxford shirt and khakis and sitting amid a cluster of computer monitors feeding him information for his updates. Among them is a sports ticker, which provides lightning-fast, better-than-the-Internet updates of every single NFL game in progress -- in short, porno for sportsphiles. "I have one at my house," Roche says, grinning.

Above our heads, a ceiling television broadcasts the Patriots-Steelers game. It's early in the fourth quarter, and the Pats are winning, 16-9. In the ensuing minutes, running back Robert Edwards will emerge from a goal-line scrum to score a touchdown that increases the margin to 23-9, which proves to be the final score. It's a satisfying victory -- the Pats' third in a row -- on the road against a tough opponent.

But it's not necessarily good news for Dan Roche. One of the maxims of the sports-radio business is that on-field failure is better than on-field success; adversity, it seems, breeds a better show. Though Roche appears happy that the Patriots have won -- and substantially improved their playoff hopes -- he says this recent sunburst of success is taking a bit of the edge off Sunday Sports Page.

"That's one of the amazing things about this [work]," he laments. "When they win, you don't get as many phone calls."

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Not tha Sunday Sports Page is particularly venomous. While many sports-radio shows embrace the angry and the juvenile -- the fare on the all-sports station WEEI, for example, generally has all the sophistication of a towel-snapping fight in a junior-high locker room -- Roche's program has a reputation for being pretty tame. (In fact, the previous host in this time slot, Bob Lobel, reportedly quit after differences with a station producer about on-air language.) Absent the potty talk, Sunday Sports Page can be an almost cerebral breath of fresh air amid the typical sports chatter. At its worst, it's just dull.

Roche's Sports Page "sidekick" (he hates the term) is Steve DeOssie, a former NFL player who retired from the Patriots after being released by the team prior to the 1996 season. A star at Don Bosco High School and at Boston College, DeOssie spent 12 seasons in the NFL -- an accomplishment in itself, considering that the average career of a professional football player is less than four years. He spent time with the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Giants, and the Jets -- often as a backup lineman and special-teams player -- before rounding out his career with two seasons for the Pats. In New England, DeOssie specialized as a deep-snapper, hiking the ball on plays that involved punts and kicks. (A deep-snapper ranks among the most specialized of football positions and is regarded by many clubs as too extravagant -- like a Chinese restaurant hiring a chef to cook only Peking ravioli.)

DeOssie has just been rousted from a pre-show nap inside the WBZ studio when I am introduced to him. He's a big fella, six-foot-two and several belt notches past his 248-pound 1995 playing weight. His face, which is framed by thinning tufts of corn-colored hair, is round and rosy. But what I can't stop looking at are his fingers -- DeOssie's pink, chunky digits are the size of the cucumbers at my neighborhood Market Basket. His fingers are so large, in fact, that the oversize, custom-fitted Super Bowl XXV ring he's wearing on his right hand (an 18-diamond beauty, courtesy of the Giants' 1991 victory over the Buffalo Bills) seems about as big as a Volkswagen.

Given DeOssie's status as an ex-Patriot (expatriate?), you might think he would be fired up about all the activity surrounding the team, especially the announcement of the move to Hartford. But he's remained on an even keel. DeOssie acknowledges that the Hartford move is "dramatic" but says that apart from the media frenzy, the announcement isn't grabbing the public the way some expected it would.

"For all the [stuff] in newspapers, sports radio, and TV, the public's response has been very little," DeOssie says, adding: "You can't blame the Krafts for doing what they are doing."

But DeOssie agrees that for sheer story-generating drama, it's tough to beat the Patriots' '98 campaign. You have The Move, he says. You have the fact that the team began its season with high expectations (many pro-football pundits favored the Patriots to win their AFC East division) and flew out of the gate with an impressive 4-1 start. You also have the fact that the team then proceeded to go into the tank, losing four of its next five games to fall to 5-5 -- and to the precipice of elimination from the playoffs.

Plus, you have the delicious fact that one of those horrid losses was meted out by the Buffalo Bills, an upstart squad quarterbacked by Doug Flutie, the five-foot-nine local legend who is more beloved in Boston than the swan boats and the Pops on the Esplanade combined. And that another loss was against the Jets, a perennially suckhouse team turned into raging pit bulls by the departed Parcells, who continues to hover over Boston's collective sports consciousness like the blimp in the movie Black Sunday.

Over the course of the evening, in fact, Parcells's name will come up repeatedly on Sunday Sports Page. Roche will play excerpts from his Jets-Seahawks press conference -- including an outburst where he barks at a reporter, "How can I see the replays? You think they got TVs in the middle of the goddamned field?" (The goddamned, sadly, gets bleeped out.) The number of times current Patriots coach Pete Carroll's name comes up over the course of three hours? Zero.

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The recent winning streak has temporarily soothed the savages, but Patriots Nation is at a fever pitch. Neither Roche nor DeOssie expects the callers to have much on their minds besides the Pats. There might be a few random calls about Mo Vaughn leaving the Red Sox for the Angels, or from a few weirdoes who want to talk college football, but for the most part, it's going to be Pats, Pats, Pats.

Roche comes into the studio and shuffles some papers at his seat. DeOssie grabs his headphones. It's five o'clock. Time to take some calls.

A bit of disclosure: I used to hold several prejudices about sports radio, the most prominent being that anyone who called a sports-talk show must be some kind of freak. However, after listening to many hours of sports radio in preparation for visiting Sunday Sports Page, I am pleased to report that I was wrong. Not everyone who calls up a sports program is a freak. Just most of them.

The hosts of Sunday Sports Page, I was reassured to find, are aware of this problem. Roche and DeOssie, in fact, don't consider their show to be "caller driven." That is, though they take a bunch of calls over the course of the program, they also do interviews with various sports-media types and athletes -- and sometimes just talk between themselves -- in order to keep the freaks from dragging down the show.

"We want callers, we want them to elucidate what's going on, but we don't want the show to be dictated by them," says DeOssie. "The callers are a very small percentage of the audience."

I ask what kind of sports-radio caller is the worst. I expect them to talk about dingbats, but Roche responds that for some time, Sunday Sports Page has been tormented by one particular caller, who disguises his voice and the location he's calling from in order to get past the preliminary screening by the show's producer, Jamie Garvin. Once on the air, this caller launches into vitriolic, inflammatory rants about the local sports scene.

"He hates the media, and he's racist," says Roche.

Roche straightens in his seat and adjusts his headset; tonight's show is about to begin. The Sunday Sports Page jingle plays (it's a dorky rejiggering of Joe Jackson's song "Sunday Papers"), and after Roche rhapsodizes about the Patriots' win and other NFL contests, he announces that the first caller this evening will be "Jay from Cambridge."

A quiet voice pipes up on the other end. "Is it okay to disagree without getting cut off?" the caller asks, cryptically.

Without saying anything, Roche alertly spins his head toward the producer's window and slashes a finger across his neck -- the universal sign to cut off. He recognizes the voice. It's the bad caller he was talking about just moments ago.

(Later, during a break, Roche teases Garvin about letting the caller pass through once again. "That guy's a man of thousand voices," Garvin shoots back. "He should work for the CIA. You ever see that movie with Val Kilmer, The Saint?")

The next caller, Robert from Sharon, is more pleasant. He's pleased with the Patriots' win, but he's irked by the continued spate of referee mistakes that have plagued the NFL this season. Such blunders allowed the Pats to sneak a win past the Bills last week, but they also gave the Jets a last-second gift over the Seahawks. In fact, Robert thinks there's one particular referee who has thrown more yellow penalty flags than any official in recent history, and who may single-handedly be undermining the integrity of the game. "They've got to be prompted to do something about it," he says.

Patriots Nation, and sports radio in general, seems prone to this kind of conspiracy theorizing and brainless speculation. A sports columnist I know shakes his head when he recalls predictions this summer that Robert Edwards, the rookie running back, wouldn't be able to find holes because he played in a different kind of offensive scheme in college -- before Edwards had even put on his pads for the first time. Two weeks ago, none other than former Patriots great John Hannah went on local television and promulgated the crackpot theory that the NFL instructed referees to award close calls to teams with troubled franchises. ("I'm a conspiracy guy," Hannah explained.) And one of tonight's Sports Page callers postulates that the reason Bledsoe is so adept under pressure is that he was a fighter pilot in his college ROTC. (This is butt-naked wrong.)

It could get worse. There's a ticking time bomb on the outskirts of Patriots Nation tonight, and both Roche and DeOssie know it. Earlier in the afternoon, WBCN radio, WBZ's FM sister station that broadcasts the Patriots' games, reported a bit of sensational gossip that had been circulating for several days about the personal life of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Kordell Stewart. Although no major news organization had confirmed the rumor, 'BCN's talking heads, citing an unnamed source, babbled on about it for several minutes on their pregame show, even asking Patriots VP Jonathan Kraft for his opinion on the matter. (Kraft, wisely, declined comment.)

I ask Roche off-air what he'll do if a caller pushes the Kordell Stewart gossip. Cut him off? Roche says that "as long as it's still a rumor, you have to treat it as a rumor," but it's clear that the official procedure for handling the situation is, well, to wing it.

Thankfully, no one's bringing it up. The vast majority of callers to Sunday Sports Page are merely phoning in to ruminate over the Pats' victory. Just as Roche predicted, the callers aren't angry or provocative. In fact, most of them are pretty boring. While Roche and DeOssie have that breathless, mile-a-minute, punctuation-free delivery that is a prerequisite for talk-show hosts, tonight's callers do little more than deliver an entry statement before slipping into a verbal coma. One guy, Chris in Quincy, calls back three times -- three times! -- after being disconnected; he tries to kibitz with DeOssie about the Don Bosco days, and then peters out midsentence with some comment about (who else?) Parcells.

Making things even fuzzier, a majority of tonight's callers are in cars. We hear from Fred in a car, Steve in a car, Mike in a car, Scott in a car, Jim in a car, Marty in a car, and Mike II in a car. (We also hear from Danny at a pay phone, who apparently thought his point about the Patriots was so important it merited stopping what he was doing and plunking a few quarters into a machine. And that was just to hold.) Though Roche and DeOssie say they don't mind the car-phoners -- except when they call, drunk and behind the wheel, while leaving Foxboro Stadium -- it definitely makes for a number of static-filled observations. For a moment I think sadly of all the astute sports insights that have been lost over the years to highway underpasses and tunnels.

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It's like therapy, sports radio. Men such as Roche and DeOssie are the shrinks, the airwaves are their couch, and Patriots Nation is their patient. Right now, the sessions are going pretty well -- the home team is winning, and Patriots Nation, for the moment, is pleased. No one's talking about terminating the therapeutic relationship, however. One false move -- a Pats loss in St. Louis this weekend? -- and everyone's back on the couch again, depressed.

Football, of course, is well suited to this kind of passionate interplay between a team and its followers. Games last roughly three hours and are played only once a week, and unless a team reaches the Super Bowl, there are fewer than 20 contests over the course of a season. This means that the average person can follow a football team with only a modest time sacrifice -- unlike in baseball, which requires fans to keep up with 162 regular-season games. This accounts at least partly for why football is the most prosperous of all American professional sports today, and why newspapers and television and radio stations devote so much time and space to it.

But the short season divides a football team's life into a relatively small number of pieces. Each win and loss is magnified and looms even larger as games are dissected and discussed over the course of the week. For the Patriots, this means that a big last-second win over Miami or Buffalo is enough to propel the fans through six whole days of their life. But it also means that a dreary loss to the Jets -- or news of a move to Hartford -- can linger too, like the smell of a dead mouse lodged behind the refrigerator.

And for the time being, that's what Patriots Nation is coming to. These are intolerant, inflexible days in the world of sport. Either you're going to get a champion, or you're going to get a dead mouse.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.