Berry Is Retooling Patriots

An outsider in the New England Patriots’ locker room would have trouble finding the mark Raymond Berry has made on the team. Everything is peaceful.

A fan in the stands would have trouble figuring out what Berry does on the field. He strolls quietly along the sidelines, shunning outbursts common to other National Football League coaches.

Berry has put his signature on the Patriots in invisible ink. It’s definitely there. He just doesn’t care if anybody sees it.

“You start talking about Raymond Berry’s New England Patriots, you’ve got the wrong definition,” he said. “I’m very privileged to be the coach of this football team. That’s my role. I fit into this just like everybody else. It’s a team operation.”

In his first full year as coach, he has brought about an amazing transformation. Early last season, dissension was ripping the team apart. Players disliked his predecessor.

Midway through the campaign, Ron Meyer was fired and replaced by Berry. The change in personalities could hardly have been more extreme or more timely.

“Setting a good environment is certainly more important” for a head coach to do than devising game plans, he said after his first game last year.

This year’s results proved him correct. New England (10-4) can make the playoffs for the fifth time in their 26-year history by beating the Miami Dolphins in the Orange Bowl Monday night or Cincinnati next Sunday.

For a change, the players and their coach are on the same side. But they dispute his claim that they are not Berry’s Patriots.

“His low-key approach keeps us calm,” defensive end Julius Adams said. “We never get upset. We try to stay calm because he stays calm. You watch the man, he never loses his cool. So that’s the way we try to play.”

Added cornerback Ronnie Lippett: “Coach is really a down-to-earth guy. “You can go in and talk to him about anything and he can relate to any type of problem that you have.”

Publicly, Berry rarely criticizes a player, but he is no pushover.

“If I mess up he says, ‘Don’t worry about it. We know what you can do . . . just don’t let it happen again,’ ” Lippett said.

And when running back Craig James said he wanted to carry the ball more, Berry told him that he shouldn’t have told reporters even though he may have been right.

“We’re just a reflection of him,” linebacker Don Blackmon said of Berry. “He’s an intense person once you get behind the meeting doors. You get to know what ticks him off and what excites him, and we understand him. Underneath it all, there’s a fire burning. Under all that calmness, there’s a storm raging and I think that carries over to us.”

That intensity exists side-by-side with a steadiness of purpose. If he feels the coaches and players planned and performed as well as they could, he doesn’t over-react to defeats.

“Our football team is geared to going straight ahead, regardless of the conditions, the distractions, the obstacles,” said Berry, who has kept winning despite serious injuries to quarterbacks Tony Eason and Steve Grogan and defensive end Kenneth Sims. “If you win, I don’t think it changes a darn thing what you’ve got to do the rest of the time and if you lose I don’t think it changes a darn thing either.”

Unlike Meyer, Berry avoids crowding into the spotlight. He leaves plenty of room for his players.

“The less ego you’ve got, the better off you are,” he said. “It is real positive, not only for you as an individual but everybody that you deal with . . . Your ego is probably your own worst enemy.”

He is almost oblivious to Monday night’s personal confrontation with Don Shula and his chance to match wits with Miami’s better known coach on national television.

“I really don’t pay that much attention to who is on the other side of the field,” Berry said. “You’re there to do your job to the best of your ability, regardless of who the other coach is.”

He said he took the same approach as a player, doing his job rather than trying to show up a defensive back.

“I had a drive inside of me that I really wasn’t all that aware of,” he said. “I still have it in a completely different sense, probably just as strong, though.”

Shula was a defensive back with the Baltimore Colts when Berry arrived there in 1954 as a 20th-round draft choice to begin his Hall of Fame career as a wide receiver.

“Raymond Berry is a great example of hard work, determination,” Shula said.