A Patriot for a Day

Read more from Greg Sheehan at www.turningtwo.com

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A perfect time for a camera would have been in the Summer of 1990, when I looked above the red and white checkered counter top at a Pizza Hut in Lowell, Massachusetts and saw a drawing to be, “The Official Tee Boy of the New England Patriots.”

I’m sure my eyes popped out of my head. Could this have been the precise moment that I became a fan of the Patriots?

No, because their Playoff run and appearance in Super Bowl XX in early 1986 against Chicago was quite memorable. I wanted the Patriots to win desperately and I felt embarrassed that a team with a music video and household appliances filling in at running back could make us look so bad.

Where was our Super Bowl Shuffle? Why didn’t we have a Washer/Dryer combination stand up unit at defensive line/running back?

After 1986 we would still wear our “Squish the Fish” T-shirts and if you took good care of your “Berry the Bears” T-shirt you would later be rewarded with stares, hugs and enormous props (Raymond Berry was the Head Coach at the time).  I “borrowed” one of these rare vintage t-shirts from one of my close friends and he took great exception, as you can imagine…I gave it back, that’s how close a friend he is.

If it wasn’t wearing T-shirts from 1986, there were still lingering effects and notable flashes to the team that kids could love, some more painful than others. My personally painful example came when I was playing football in my front yard on a chilly, fall New England evening, 2 on 2 of course, no pads…like 11 years old. When it came time for the extra point I tried to show off and I kicked the almost frozen ball barefooted like Tony Franklin.

Lets just say that was a mistake I never made again. For a while I was timid to kick a halfway inflated soccer ball barefooted, even on a mild summer afternoon.

By the time 1990 came around I was a seasoned fan—although Sundays were pretty tame for me in those days, and Patriots games weren’t always the feature of the networks like they are today. Author Ken Knight points out that “From 1988 through 1990, the New England Patriots were mired in a seventeen consecutive home game blackout streak.”

If you are going to like your local team even when you can only see half their games on television, you really have to want to like the team. I’m happy to say, looking back on that drawing in 1990, my actions proved that something really excited me about the New England Patriots. The team had just gone 5 and 11 and the upcoming season they would go 1 and 15.

I stayed at that Pizza Hut in Lowell for hours with my aunt filling out these forms; name, address, home number—they didn’t ask for email or cell back then—until my hand was sore and there was no pizza left.

A couple days later, I went back with my mother and we filled out more slips.

The entry deadline passed and what felt like an eternity was probably only a couple of months later when I found out that my name had been drawn. Week 8 against the Buffalo Bills was MINE.

As part of the prize, I could bring four more people, I would get a tour of the erstwhile Foxoboro Stadium, I would get a team autographed ball, some media and other press materials, five tickets to the game, passes to watch the game from the sidelines, a T-shirt that announced my role as the Pizza Hut Tee Boy, and of course, after the Patriots kicked off to Buffalo I would run out on the field and pick up the Tee.

We got to the Stadium pretty early in the day, there was no tailgating for us, it was all business. Standing tall, I led my guests into the Patriots offices after declaring our presence to security and before long we were on a tour of the brick and mortar team headquarters.

After making it down to the locker rooms we took the team’s well traveled route to the playing field, and my friends and I sprinted immediately.

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