pnArt

We went to dinner for Rosh Hashanah at our friend Naomi’s last night.    We supplied some of the the dessert - an apple crisp made by my wife and our very reliable ginger pear crisp that I make every year - all the apples and pears were from our trees.    Many of the people were from our usual music crowd and it was a great pleasure as always, but I was disappointed that we missed one tradition - usually when we get together on Jewish holidays the musicians play Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, but it needs a clarinet and Peter, our outstanding clarinetist, had to leave early.

I was also disappointed that I sat at the wrong end of the table to take part in a lively discussion on the other end about  the Patriots’ scandal.

I know this isn’t a sports blog, but I’m so incredibly pissed about this.    I’ve been a Patriots fan since the third grade back at the Warren School in Wellesley, when I was a classmate of Patrick Sullivan, whose father owned the team.  We used to hang out at his house on Bay State Road  and play tag football in a small field on Orchard St across from our friend Cynthia’s, house.    It was the Boston Patriots, in the AFL, in those days, and they used to play on some obscure college field, I think.  I attended one game and I remember nothing about it except rain from gray skies and mud and half-empty stands.

Being a Pats fan, lo these many years, has meant enduring a lot, but the new era of Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli and Tom Brady made it all worthwhile.   The Patriots were the cream of the crop, the team to emulate, the team to beat, and if there were murmurs of dissent and intimations of Pat’s classlessness from around the NFL, well, that  was probably just sore losers and sour grapes.

But the murmers have become harder to ignore with an unseemly victory display after the San Diego game last year, Belichick knocking over a cameraman, Rodney Harrison’s HGH admission (but I give him credit for manning up to admitting it), and now “videogate”.

I don’t care whether “everybody does it” or whether the Jets ratted out New England as part of some feud between Belichick and Mangini.   None of that changes the fact that it was still an incredibly stupid thing for the “smartest coach in the league” to do.    Already, all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated and reporter phone conferences with NFL players, and a thousand sports forums and blogs on the web, people are asking one question.  How much of the Patriots’ success in recent years and their three Super Bowl Wins was due to cheating?   Personally I don’t think it was a factor.  But that’s irrelevant.  In many people’s minds, now, the stats, the accomplishments, the Super Bowl rings and everything else achieved by six years of hard working, well-prepared, self-sacrificing Patriots players will appear next to little asterisks.

And that’s the other damnable thing about this.   The Patriots don’t need to resort to subterfuge.  They have so much talent, and they are so well prepared and coached that for them to cheat is like Bill Gates holding up a liquor store.  There is nothing to be gained and everything to lose.