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How fast did the apple turn for many Patriots fans? New England’s team went from from worst to contending for first in one season, and Pat’s fans were celebrating Mike Vrabel, Drake Maye and all. Then came their utter defeat in the Super Bowl, 29-13, and it wasn’t even that close.
Suddenly too many “fans” went from delight to dismay. The rookie left tackle, Will Campbell, and the quarterback he was supposed to protect, Maye, were thrown out in the trash of social media.
Maybe Cam Newton was correct when he called the mid-season, surging Pats “fools gold.” The Patriots did have an easy schedule of mostly other teams that had performed poorly in the previous season. Then each of their playoff opponents were weakened by injuries: the Chargers’ O-line, the Texans’ pass catchers, and the Broncos’ QB.
The Pats benefitted from their circumstances, but who could they play except for the team facing them? They went far, perhaps too far into the playoffs, and then their own weaknesses were exposed by the better team, the Seattle Seahawks.
If I could snap my fingers, I would wish that Denver hadn’t lost their first-string quarterback, Bo Nix, in a freak play at the end of their quarterfinal game. Imagine if the Pats had lost to the Nix-led Broncos in the AFC game by a respectable score, like 28-24. Most fans would have lauded the Pats for reversing their record, going from 4-13 to 14-3.
They would have worn their Pats’ hats and jerseys for another week or two, saying just wait to next year. Then their measured optimism would have been rock solid instead the New England “fools gold” — not of the team, but the support of some of their fans. After one crushing defeat, they went from gleaming gladness to sullen sadness.
The divide over Bad Bunny’s halftime show is another troubling issue. The indignation of some — and let me be clear, not all — MAGA critics reveals more than than an English-only language bias. What is the ultimate reason for their furor over his joyous display of Puerto Rican pride?
No one in New England objected to the Drop-Kick Murphys performing at a team send-off to the Super Bowl. Trump and his MAGA minions would never object to a St. Patrick’s Day parade, even though only one part of our American heritage is being foregrounded. Remember what Bad Bunny said at the Grammys: “We are human.”
Then his Super Bowl show was not against anything; not ICE, not tariffs, not high prices, not the hypocrisy of the Department of Justice and Epstein. His songs and scenes of island life were a celebration of Puerto Rican humanity: old men playing dominos, young women in a nail salon, a couple getting married and a child thrilled when his idol won a music award.
Why is an assertion of humanity by Bad Bunny deemed an insult by too many MAGA critics? I hate to say it, but their anger implies that in order to be considered “American” one must be “white,” a person of European descent.
At the heart of the matter is race, or should I say even more bluntly, racism in the hearts of too many Bad Bunny’s critics. They’re thinking: How dare you suggest that you too are human when my claim to humanity is “whites only” just like the signs on the segregated water fountains in the Jim Crow South.
After I spent some of my childhood in the pre-civil rights in South of the early 1960s, I used to believe that we had made some significant progress on racial equality in America. Now I am much less hopeful.
Yet I still want to believe that the Pats’ season was much more positive than negative, but the sky-is-falling, fair-weather fans of New England are making even that harder to believe.
These days, I wish it was easier to be my usual, the-glass-is-half-full self. Like Coach Belichick, should I say “On to Cincinnati,” but do I really mean on to the next NFL season, on to the next election?
_Don Jones, a retired teacher of writing, lives in Westfield._