The Dynasty
(By Jeff Benedict)
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| Author | Jeff Benedict |
It’s easy to forget that the New England Patriots were once the laughingstock of the NFL, a nearly bankrupt team that had never won a championship and was on the brink of moving to St. Louis. Everything changed in 1994, when Robert Kraft acquired the franchise. Since then, the Patriots became a juggernaut, making ten trips to the Super Bowl, winning six of them, and emerging as one of the most valuable sports teams in the world with an estimated value of $4 billion. Led by Kraft, head coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady, the Patriots’ twenty-year reign atop the NFL was the longest in league history, surpassing previous dynasties by the Packers, the Steelers, and the 49ers. The sports world has wondered: How was the Patriots dynasty built? And how did it last for two decades?
In The Dynasty, acclaimed sportswriter Jeff Benedict provides richly reported answers to those questions. Beginning with training camp in 2018, he secured unprecedented exclusive access to the Patriots team and organization. Over the next two years he conducted interviews with more than 200 insiders, including team executives, coaches, players, players’ wives, team doctors and lawyers, league officials, network television executives, sports agents, politicians, and entertainers. He also had access to hundreds of hours of video and audio recordings, as well as thousands of pages of legal documents, business records, emails, text messages, and minutes from phone calls and meetings.
From his interviews and exhaustive research, Benedict uncovers surprising new details about the inner workings of a team notorious for its secrecy. Readers are in the room when Robert Kraft outmaneuvers a legion of lawyers and investors in his quest to buy the team. We observe the heated disagreements between Kraft and legendary coach Bill Parcells that led to their breakup. We listen in on the phone call when the greatest trade ever made—Bill Belichick for a first round draft choice—is negotiated. We are in the emergency room when doctors scramble to save franchise quarterback Drew Bledsoe as his chest is filling up with blood from a lacerated artery. And we look over the shoulder of forty-year-old Tom Brady as a surgeon performs a procedure on his throwing hand on the eve of the AFC Championship game in 2018.
What emerges is an intimate portrait that captures the human drama of the dynasty’s three key characters—Kraft, Belichick, and Brady. The result is perhaps the most compelling and illuminating book that will ever be written about the greatest professional sports team of our time.”
