Bledsoe proved himself ultimate team player

In Pete Gent’s “The Franchise,” Taylor Rusk is a young quarterback preparing for life and a Super Bowl. The life part, he finds, is much harder to deal with than the game.

Drew Bledsoe is much like Mr. Rusk. He appears now to have many of the same characteristics as Gent’s fictional hero.

He is young (believe it or not youngsters, 30 is young). He is good lookin’, well spoken, possesses an arm that has no limitations, is married to a beautiful woman and is a millionaire.

Don’t you just hate him?

No. It would be impossible to hate the Drew Bledsoe we came to know this past year. Because we finally got to know the real Drew Bledsoe.

He is a much different person than we thought. When he arrived in Boston he was The Franchise. He was a 21-year-old millionaire. He was a coach’s son whose father made cross-country motorcycle trips to watch his son.

We knew the magic his arm could create. We saw it. Few quarterbacks in the league could throw the ball the way Bledsoe could.

In the magical 1996 season he threw for more than 4,000 yards for the second time in his career. After several years of dealing with the poor routes of Michael Timpson and Vincent Brisby (just to name two), Bledsoe had burners in Terry Glenn and Shawn Jefferson who not only ran routes, but were guys with such speed that the quarterback could not overthrow them.

Those guys, combined with Dave Meggett coming out of the backfield en route and Bledsoe’s favorite receiver, tight end Ben Coates, led to the Patriots’ second trip to a Super Bowl – Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans.

Still, we did not really know the quarterback. He answered his questions professionally, standard stock answers giving away little of himself.

His tough-love relationship with coach Bill Parcells could have led to some interesting newspaper battles between the two, but never did. Bledsoe never went after the bait when Parcells tossed it out.

That should have told us a lot about the man, but in retrospect we live in an age of information and the People magazine side of us wanted to know more about the man.

Bledsoe gave us a glimpse in 1999 when he and a couple of Patriot buddies were invited on the stage at The Paradise, a Boston nightclub, by Everclear frontman Art Alexakis.

While Alexakis was telling Bledsoe and his Patriot buddies that “everything will be wonderful someday,” the Patriots, no doubt caught up in the moment, dove off the stage into a mosh pit.

What normally would have been something mentioned in the Boston Herald’s gossip page (Hunky Drew was in Paradise last night. Trouble at home?) became front page news when a college student claimed she was injured when the players landed on her.

There was no trouble at home. Bledsoe’s wife had merely kicked him out of the house for a night on the town, giving the quarterback a night off from his duties of taking care of a newborn baby.

The more we learned about the man, the more likable he became. He and his wife, Maura, created the Drew Bledsoe Foundation, an organization that teaches parents how to become more effective in dealing with their children.

And we discovered the true measure of the man during this past season.

It was as unlikely a scenario as could have been imagined entering the season. Oh, we were grumbling about Bledsoe – not so much about his arm, but about his decision- making. About how long it took him to decide where to throw the ball and how that resulted in sacks or missed opportunities.

And then he went down in the second week of the season. The prognosis was for a slow recovery, but we naturally assumed he would be the starter when he returned.

Of course, he wasn’t. The decision to give the job to Tom Brady could have been disastrous for the team. It would only have taken one word from Drew Bledsoe to split the locker room down the middle. And there likely would have been no trip to New Orleans for the Super Bowl.

But Bledsoe didn’t say that word. He became the ultimate team player. Believing he was the better player and that he should have been on the field but never saying it. He did more for the Patriots’ drive to the Super Bowl by keeping his mouth shut than by throwing a pass.

And now he’s gone. As every headline writer and TV talking head across the country wrote or said Monday morning, Drew Bledsoe has finally been shuffled off to Buffalo.

It could be worse. The Franchise might not have been shuffled off at all, and he deserves better than that.

Don Perryman can be reached at 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or dperryman@bangordailynews.net.