Patriot games

A Connecticut native reflects on The Move

Sporting Eye by Michael Crowley

Like a child caught between bitterly divorcing parents, I find myself torn and anguished by the news that the New England Patriots will be moving to Hartford in 2001.

A Massachusetts resident and a Connecticut native, I have warily watched writers and pols from the two states volley insults back and forth as furiously as Agassi and Sampras. I haven't been sure which side to take.

Neither is very appealing. The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy opened fire with the proclamation last Thursday, as news of the proposed move was breaking, that Hartford is a "yahoo sports town" and "America's file cabinet." The Boston Herald's Michael Gee called Hartford "a city too bush for even the National Hockey League." The blowhards of talk radio carried on in even more juvenile and mean-spirited tones.

At first, opinion leaders in Connecticut seemed a little stunned -- the move had "unleashed some heretofore unsuspected negativism toward our city," the Hartford Courant observed in a wounded tone. Then they retaliated. The Courant's Jim Shea branded Boston "the Big Apple wannabe," "the underarm of urbanity," and "the irrefutable proof that size doesn't matter." Other writers weighed in with acidic jokes about the Globe itself and not-too-subtle cracks about the fall of Mike Barnicle. Even Hartford's mayor, Mike Peters, got into the act with the observation that "some of those Boston sportswriters are knuckleheads."

I grew up not in Hartford but in New Haven, about 40 miles farther south. Still, this derision of my home state's capital seems to represent a wider contempt for all Connecticut, which makes me more than a little indignant. At the same time, I do call Boston home. Am I really living in "the underarm of urbanity"? Does the rest of the region -- perhaps even the country -- see me as just another parochial, petty, possibly hateful resident of an ugly town with a bully complex?

I also watch all this with more than a touch of irony. One of the main reasons I grew up rooting for the Pats was because they were supposed to be a "New England" team. The Celtics and the Red Sox truly seemed to belong to their home city (the Celts especially, thanks to that Irish thing), and for me they were distant second choices to the Knicks and the Mets. But I saw the Patriots as heroic representatives of our entire small and often overshadowed corner of the country. The team seemed to belong to all those Yankees (in the geographic sense of the word) who live among the region's foliage and universities and Revolution-era landmarks.

Regional infighting is lamentable but, under the circumstances, not surprising. What's more deplorable is the move itself. Pro sports are cheapened by the decline of tradition and the erosion of loyalty among teams, players, and fans. When franchises hopscotch from city to city and players roam the country in search of the fattest contract, we all lose something. As a Boston-bred friend of mine plaintively e-mailed this week: "Yeah, the Garden had no air conditioning and Fenway has rats and Foxboro has bad plumbing and just generally sucks. But that's always seemed to say that the players and the management and the fans cared more about the games than about their surroundings, and were sort of all in it together."

But the Patriots' move is about more than the future of sports. It's also about the future of a city. Which is why I'm saving my real rooting for Hartford itself.

Hartford is no dinky 'burb. Its greater metro area has a population of 1.1 million -- higher, it should be noted, than the
sellout-producing NFL cities of Green Bay and Jacksonville. As it happens, Hartford has always been something of an explicit anti-Boston: the history-laden Almanac of American Politics explains that the city was home to "harsh Puritans who established Hartford as a haven from backsliding Bostonians." It grew into one of the world's leading insurance centers -- Mark Twain even came to direct a company there in 1871 -- and thrived on military contractors and a giant Colt gun factory.

But the post-Cold War defense cutbacks and recession that did so much damage to Massachusetts may have inflicted even greater pain on Connecticut, and Hartford in particular was pummeled in the early 1990s. Colt went bankrupt. The huge insurers -- Aetna, the Travelers Group, CIGNA -- consolidated and cut jobs. At the same time, Pentagon contracts that once provided work for thousands dried up.

Hartford became a case study in urban decay. Poverty spread through the city, chasing away middle-class families, which led to more poverty and social malaise. Today, a shining glass-and-steel skyline rises above some of the state's worst slums, home to gangs and drugs and unemployment. The city's schools fell into such chaos that they were placed under the control of a private firm.

But rather than roll over and die, the city is applying the defibrillator paddles to its stopped heart. This spring, Hartford's political and business leaders announced a $1 billion project designed to make its downtown capable of drawing visitors rather than terrifying them.

The interests behind the project are selfish. Several giant companies, including the Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Company, the Travelers Group, and Connecticut Natural Gas, are headquartered downtown and no doubt feel as if the barbarians are at their gates. But the plan has true civic potential, especially because Hartford isn't pinning its hopes on a stadium alone.

Hartford has been ridiculed as a metropolitan sucker for giving Patriots owner Bob Kraft a dazzling deal, including a new $350 million, 68,000-seat stadium and a slew of guarantees that insulate him from financial risk. Detractors cite studies showing that sports teams bring little or no economic benefit to their cities, and they point out the bizarre irony of using tax dollars to subsidize millionaire owners who commonly pay their star players $10 million or more per year.

But the city's downtown revitalization project, to be known as Adriaen's Landing, isn't based on the simplistic hope that one football team can rescue Hartford. It will include a convention center, a giant hotel, an entertainment complex, and 200 new apartments -- all aimed at keeping the city alive and bustling at night and on weekends, times when it now resembles the Manhattan of Escape from New York.

Of course, urban America is filled with huge empty buildings that stand as monuments to the failure of attempts to "revitalize" downtown areas. In New Haven, two giant department stores once designed to anchor the downtown are rotting hulks. A new indoor mall, opened with much fanfare in the 1980s, is a mostly vacant promenade that at times feels less safe than its surrounding neighborhood.

New Haven's downtown hasn't really rebounded because nobody has found solutions for the intractable problems that stand in the way: an entrenched "underclass" that can't find work, dismal schools, and the continuing middle-class exodus these conditions propel. If only those problems could be made as dramatic, as television-friendly, as a Bledsoe-to-Glenn touchdown bomb or an artist's rendition of a new development project, then state politicians would be more willing to spend needed dollars on education, housing, job-training, and child-care programs that can pull welfare recipients out of poverty and improve ghettoized neighborhoods.

That said, the Patriots will bring Hartford an intangible -- but significant -- boost in morale. Boston can wring its hands about whether it's a "world-class" or "major-league" city, but either way it's not going down the toilet. Hartford is fighting not for some sense of parochial pride but for its very survival. Boston, although its schools are still a dangerous liability, is robust.

Which makes the team's departure a lot easier for Massachusetts politicians. Right now the state is in a Prozac moment: we're rich, comfortable, and growing. The team's departure doesn't portend anything particularly ominous. Apart from some rants from the barstool-fixture crowd, the general attitude is: whatever.

"This is a sports media-driven frenzy, and it is localized among a relatively minor percent of the population and it has never gotten beyond that," says UMass pollster and political analyst Lou DiNatale. "The fact that the Connecticut deal was so good really exonerates the Massachusetts political leadership. It's like [the free-agency departures of] Mo Vaughn or Roger Clemens: no matter how much you were offering, the other guy was offering more. The sheer magnitude of the Connecticut offer eliminates the idea that Massachusetts could have done something reasonable."

Thus, Governor Paul Cellucci will probably escape criticism that he carelessly lollygagged at a governors' conference in New Orleans while Connecticut governor John Rowland rushed back home to ink a deal with Kraft. But the fact that Cellucci couldn't overcome House Speaker Tom Finneran's dealbreaking opposition to Kraft's demands doesn't do much to combat the perception that it's Finneran, not Cellucci, calling the shots at the State House.

The political stakes are higher, of course, for Connecticut politicians. But Rowland and the state's legislative leaders are unlikely ever to suffer real blame even if, three or five or ten years down the road, it becomes clear that the team wasn't worth the investment. For now, they can bask in the glow of a major publicity coup.

No, the highest stakes of all are for Hartford, one of dozens of American cities struggling to survive in the face of devastating political, social, and economic trends. To root for the transplanted Patriots to fail is to root for Hartford to fail, and that's rooting for tragedy.

Not that there aren't other good reasons to cheer the Patriots once they arrive at the other end of the Interstate. In Friday's Hartford Courant, columnist Tom Condon may have articulated the best reason of all for hoping the Patriots flourish in Connecticut. "It . . . would be fun," Condon wrote, "to stick it to the insufferable twits in the Boston sports media." And how.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.