Kraft Turns Laughter Into Cheers

In New England, where sports is religion, the Olde Town Team still rules.

But the New England Patriots, under the quiet leadership of owner Bob Kraft, have a postseason record that should turn the Boston Red Sox green with envy. After all, the Patriots are the only franchise in New England that doesn’t have people chuckling, crying or running for the record books when someone wants to talk championships.

“We’ve got a pretty good run going,” said Kraft, 62, who has reached three Super Bowls in the 10 years he has owned the team.

Once ridiculed as an overzealous fan who paid far too much for a foundering team -- he spent an unprecedented $176 million to buy the franchise in 1994 -- Kraft is now lauded for his business savvy and is one of the few sports owners who has ever been embraced by the New England community.

It wasn’t always that way. He was criticized after his falling-out with successful coach Bill Parcells, then loathed by many people in two states in 1997 when he flirted with the idea of moving the Patriots to Providence, R.I., where he believed he could get a stadium built. He took heat for parting with a first-round pick to hire Bill Belichick, who had failed miserably as coach of the Cleveland Browns. And Kraft was heartsick over the decision to let go of popular quarterback Drew Bledsoe, whom he viewed almost as a fifth son.

So what happened? Kraft, a lifelong Bostonian, kept the team in Massachusetts, and replaced decrepit Foxboro Stadium with Gillette Stadium, a $325-million, state-of-the-art venue next door that was almost entirely privately financed. In a valuation of NFL franchises by Forbes magazine last year, the Patriots were fourth among NFL teams at $756 million.

Belichick directed the 2001 Patriots to the first Super Bowl title and was this season’s coach of the year. And Tom Brady, who replaced Bledsoe, has rounded into one of the league’s best quarterbacks, a kid with a toothpaste-ad smile and a 39-12 record as a starter.

All those choices that seemed so wrong at the time turned out so right.

“Going outside the box is necessary in any business if you want to differentiate yourself and be excellent,” Kraft said. “Any business we go into, we try to figure out how do we get the edge, and how do we do a better job with our customers? That usually means we don’t do things in a routine manner. You try to see things other people don’t see before they do. Sometimes you’re wrong. Hopefully, you’re right more than you’re wrong.”

Had Kraft not bought the team, the Patriots almost certainly would be gone from New England. He purchased the shaky franchise from James Busch Orthwein, who wanted to move it to St. Louis.

Kraft already owned the stadium the Patriots played in -- he acquired that in bankruptcy court in 1988 -- and, the day before he closed the deal on the team, turned down a $75-million offer from a St. Louis group to buy out the remaining eight years of the lease.

The next day, when the surprise announcement came that the Patriots were staying, the Boston Globe headline read: “Local boy makes good on promise.”

Born in the Boston suburb of Brookline in 1941, Kraft, the son of a dressmaker, had good enough grades to earn a scholarship to Columbia University. There, he was elected class president as a freshman and sophomore, ceded the seat as a junior because Columbia does not allow someone to be class president three years in a row, then reclaimed it as a senior.

Too small to play varsity football, he was a standout running back and defensive back in a program called the Intercollegiate 150-pound Football League, which was designed to allow midsized athletes to play.

He later married Myra Hiatt, the member of a prominent Worcester, Mass., family whose father owned the Rand-Whitney Group, a paper and cardboard company. In 1972, at age 31, Kraft acquired the company in a leveraged buyout and founded International Forest Products, which became one of the nation’s largest privately owned paper and packaging companies.

At the same time he was growing his fledgling business, Kraft was fostering a love of football in his sons. When Foxboro Stadium opened in 1971, he bought six tickets on the goal line and faithfully took his sons to every game.

“It was a zoo,” recalled his eldest son, Jonathan, now vice chairman of the Patriots. “Sometimes he let us bring friends, and we’d get two of them in with one ticket. It was benches, everyone was sitting on top of everybody anyhow.

“When we bought the team, he said we know what it’s like to be fans. Everything is geared toward the fans.... We’re going to treat you with a lot of respect.”

Part of that entails policing fan behavior. According to the younger Kraft, there was an average of 300 fan arrests per game, and that number has dwindled to almost nothing.

“I think we averaged four arrests a game this year,” Jonathan said. “We had a couple games where it was zero.”

That said, the Patriots rescind the tickets of about 300 season-ticket holders a year because of misconduct.

The franchise, which rarely sold out games before Kraft came on the scene, now has a season-ticket waiting list of 50,000 that requires fans put down a deposit to keep their place in line.

“My dream was to buy the franchise and create a venue worthy of the fan support, and then to bring a championship here,” Kraft said.

Then, he motioned to a crystal paperweight, a present from his brother, that sits on the desk of his stadium office. Etched in the glass are four words that have come to define his decade-long tenure as an owner: It can be done.