THE REAL THING : Patriot Coach Raymond Berry, Unlike Predecessor, Comes Across With Players

The New England territories have always been leery of their leadership (see: original patriots, 1776), but skepticism of command in those parts has been nowhere so pronounced as in football.

You could ask Ron Meyer. You could ask Ron Erhardt. You could even ask Chuck Fairbanks. None of them enjoyed what you might call unquestioned authority.

The folks in Foxboro, Mass., home of the New England Patriots, are pretty hard to please when it comes to their whistle-wearing autocrats. For example, the players didn’t think Erhardt disciplined enough, so he was let go. On the other hand, they thought successor Ron Meyer was too heavily into discipline. So he was let go, too.

As a consequence, what happened in New England, 1984, was pretty much what happened in New England, 1776. These Patriots finally obtained the equivalent of voting rights and, with the benign observance of ownership, more or less chose their own coach.

He’s Raymond Berry, Hall of Famer and world-class good guy, although, as we shall see, he can be a little picky when it comes to the details.

The Raiders will observe the workings of this little democracy first hand when they visit Foxboro Sunday to play a team that is 2-1 and pretty pleased about it.

For the moment, these are happy Patriots and are not likely to dump so much as a tea bag, let alone a football coach, into the bay. And maybe finally their long-remarked potential, through one mediocre season after another, will be realized.

In any event there is happiness. Everybody is Berry, Berry happy here.

Of course, it could be that anybody would please after the disastrous reign of Ron Meyer, fresh from SMU, where Eric Dickerson had made him famous if not exactly smarter. Meyer’s mission, so he felt, was to tighten up one loose ship.

Fine, but what he did was turn the Love Boat into the HMS Bounty. Worse, he lost football games.

Meyer, who the players tended to think was in way over his head--bringing a college staff with him didn’t help--might have lost player respect as early as the first game in 1982, when he hit upon the idea of offensive and defensive buses to and from the airport.

It was orderly, of course, but also on the dumb side. Did one bus yield at stop signs, the other not?

That idea was one of a series.

Once a TV reporter was setting up for interviews before practice, unknowingly cutting into the players’ stretching time. The players complained mildly so Meyer made one of his flash decisions and closed practice, thenceforth, to the media.

“Now, who actually wants to go to practices?” asked a club spokesman. “Nobody wants to go to practices, or didn’t until he closed them. We had come off a big win, and all of a sudden all anybody is writing about is closed practices.”

Meyer made mistakes with personnel, too. The Patriots had spent a lot of money, time and trouble to get Craig James out of the United States Football League and into their backfield. He had been part of the Pony Express at SMU, where Meyer teamed him with Dickerson.

But did James get to carry the football? He did not.

Meyer tried to observe some kind of order, working through his depth chart one at a time. Two running backs--one from the special teams--and nine games later, James finally got the starting job and went on to gain 790 yards to lead the team.

Of course, Meyer was gone by then, and the players no longer had to joke about a pseudo-Texan coach. Here was a guy who drove to workouts in a Lincoln, who wore enough jewelry to make Mr. T envious and who talked in a Texas accent deep enough to evoke memories of the Alamo.

“For goodness sakes,” said somebody in the organization, “he’s from Westerville, Ohio.”

So Berry, who played professional football at a high level and who coached wide receivers at New England as well, came across as the real thing.

He showed up at his press conference in denim jeans and a denim shirt, no tie and not so much as a watch to reflect the TV lights. This was in some contrast, it was observed, to his predecessor, who was believed to have begun planning his game-day wardrobe four days in advance.

Berry is the real thing, the original blue-collar football player. You may know the story from his 13 years with the Baltimore Colts where he became the NFL’s leading pass receiver despite decidedly subsonic speed. He did a 4.8 40-yard dash in his day, which is today’s walk in the park.

He didn’t compensate with much either. Not only was he slow but he was myopic and had to wear glasses. Because of a bad back, one leg was actually longer than another. He was small, too.

But, boy, did he work hard. He’d outwork you going downfield, that was all there was to it. Or he’d outsmart you. There wasn’t a minute he wasn’t thinking football.

So it is today, not a minute he isn’t outworking you or outthinking you.

Raider cornerback Mike Haynes, who spent some unhappy time either playing for the Patriots or negotiating with them, is no fan of New England leadership. “I don’t know if anybody’s right for that organization,” he said.

On the other hand, there is Berry. “Now he’s a winner, a hard worker,” Haynes said. “I remember as a kid, hearing how he’d work out after practice with Johnny Unitas. Even as a coach, how he’d stay after, working with the receivers. He would even do the drills himself. I often wondered whether he wasn’t thinking, in the back of his mind, about coming back.

“But he was always thinking of football, drawing up plays on napkins on the plane, thinking of some way to beat the defense. He’s the kind of guy, he’ll be the last guy up, looking for a way to win.”

Patriot quarterback Tony Eason is also taken with Berry’s dedication to the job. “He’s a hard worker, no question,” said Eason. “And he really pays attention to details, all the little things.”

This attention to detail tends to come up in any discussion of Berry. Just what does attention to detail mean?

“Well, there’s having the team squeeze Silly Putty during meetings to strengthen their hands,” said Ron Borges, who covers the team for the Boston Globe. “There’s practicing fumble recoveries. Also, there’s practicing running out of the tunnel.”

Say what?

“He thought they looked sloppy coming out of the tunnel the week before.”

That is attention to detail.

But Capt. Queeg paid attention to detail, too. The difference is that Berry performs those little tasks that engender loyalty as well as suspicion. The first day of camp, for instance, he had a team picture taken and memorized the names of everybody, not just John Hannah but the ball boys. The team nearly dropped the Silly Putty the day he addressed one of the ball boys by name.

Sometime this attention to detail is just downright good preparation. He spent a week of the off-season at Champaign, Ill., looking at college films of Eason with Eason’s old college coach, Mike White. Sometimes his attention to detail--he has a schedule for each day, starting at 6:30, marked off in 15-minute blocks--seems silly. But sometimes it makes sense.

For the moment, it’s all working.