Free Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches by Gary Myers

it, turned down $75 million, paid the highest price, a quarter of a billion dollars, your wife thinks you are absolutely nuts, the team has the worst record in the last five years, hadn’t sold out a season in thirty-four years, and played in an old dinky stadium,” he said.
    In this case, one man’s garbage was another man’s treasure. Kraft, from Brookline, Massachusetts, had been a Patriots season ticket holder since 1971, the year of the grand opening of not-so-grand Foxboro Stadium, the eyesore with the aluminum benches and lousy access roads in the middle of Nowhere, New England. The Patriots finally had their own home. The Boston Patriots were an American Football League original but were neglected orphans in a city infatuated with the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. They bounced from Nickerson Field, to Fenway Park, to Alumni Stadium, to Harvard Stadium.
    Kraft was a visionary when he purchased a ten-year option on the 300 acres of land next to Foxboro Stadium in 1985. In 1988, he paid $25 million to buy the stadium out of bankruptcy courtfrom Billy Sullivan, the original Patriots owner. The Sullivan family took a financial beating promoting Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour in 1984. The Patriots’ lease on the stadium ran through 2001. That was a smart acquisition and eventually put Kraft in a position of power because he owned the stadium while Sullivan and then Victor Kiam and then Orthwein owned the team.
    By 1994, New England was in danger of losing the Patriots. Did anybody really care? Kraft might have been the only one who got misty-eyed about the prospect of the bunch of misfits playing halfway between Beantown and Providence heading to St. Louis. Boston was the only city in America where the professional football team was fourth in popularity. Even when the Pats somehow became the first team to win three road playoff games to advance to the Super Bowl, they were humiliated by the Bears 46–10 in Super Bowl XX, and then were immediately embroiled in a drug controversy.
    Sullivan, along with nine partners, paid the $250,000 entry fee to the AFL in 1960 for the Patriots. He sold the team to Kiam in 1988 for $83 million. Kiam then sold it to Orthwein in 1992 for $110 million. Two years later, Orthwein offered Kraft $75 million to buy out the final seven years of the Patriots’ lease at Foxboro Stadium so that he could pack up the team and move it to St. Louis, which had lost the Cardinals to Phoenix in 1988. It would have been a nice return on Kraft’s $25 million investment, but he said no thanks. Orthwein was the great-grandson of Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch and at one time owned 1.6 million shares in the company. Considering that Kraft subsequently transformed the Patriots into a model franchise with three Super Bowl championships and the first 16–0 regular season in NFL history, it’s easy to forget how close they came to becoming the St. Louis Stallions.
    Kraft refused Orthwein’s offer on the stadium lease and then offered him $172 million to buy the Patriots, which at the timewas the most money ever spent on a sports franchise. Orthwein accepted, and Kraft had himself a bad football team to go along with a run-down stadium right off Route 1 in Foxborough.
    “I had to move fast, and I took on a lot of debt,” Kraft said. “I had a chance in the ’80s to buy it for a lot less money—half of what I paid for it. Then I took out the option on the land and controlled all the parking. I bought the stadium out of bankruptcy. I was working hard to get an edge to buy the team. Kiam had problems, and he brought in Orthwein. He was part of the Orthwein family, the Budweiser family, so he was moving it. Except he had to buy out my lease, and I wouldn’t let him do it. I decided to step up and pay a very high price.”
    It was hardly the deal of the century—just five years earlier, Jerry Jones had spent only $140 million to buy the Cowboys and the lease to Texas Stadium. That was America’s