The inside story of how, 25 years ago, Robert Kraft improbably bought the Patriots

June 06, 2024

The direction of the Patriots franchise, once lost and nearly broken, changed dramatically 25 years ago Monday when Robert Kraft successfully purchased the team from James Busch Orthwein.

When Kraft swooped in to save the Patriots from relocating to St. Louis, he became the head of an organization that had just limped through five consecutive losing seasons and posted a 19-61 record from 1989 to 1993. Since then, the Patriots have transformed into perhaps the model franchise of American professional sports, leading the NFL in Super Bowl victories (five) and appearances (10, after clinching a berth in Super Bowl LIII), conference championship appearances (14), playoff victories (32), playoff appearances (20), division titles (18) and regular-season wins (279) over that period. For most of that time, the NFL’s premier dynasty has experienced historic levels of stability with head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.

Kraft’s plan to purchase the Patriots was a complicated, multistage pursuit that spanned nearly a decade. The following is The Athletic’s oral history of that chain of events, which culminated Jan. 21, 1994, when Kraft took over the team at last.

The prelude

To understand and appreciate Kraft’s bold play to buy the Patriots, it’s helpful to recognize his background in the business world. Kraft, a native of Brookline, Mass., began his career with the Rand-Whitney Group, a packaging company in Worcester, Mass., before he took a major risk in the early 1970s to launch International Forest Products, his global trading company.

Robert Kraft: It all started by me taking a risk similar to what I did with the Patriots. I did something that a lot of people told me I shouldn’t do, and it was foolhardy, but my instincts told me it was the right thing. I took over a paper mill up in Newfoundland at a time when it was a negative market. The paper industry is dominated by big companies in Canada, Europe and the U.S. We had converting plants that made boxes, but 50 to 60 percent of our sales price was raw materials. So we’d buy this paper and then convert it and add value, but the biggest beneficiary was the mill owners who we’d buy the paper from. So I said at some point I’ve got to own the raw material.

Kraft made a creative play to successfully purchase the mill, and he eventually turned it into one of the largest privately owned paper companies in the world. He learned a valuable lesson — that when he believed in his plan and trusted his instinct, he could take a big risk and make it pay off.

A Patriots season-ticket holder since 1971, Kraft also cut his teeth as the owner of a sports franchise when he was part of a group that bought the Boston Lobsters of World Team Tennis in 1974. He learned a couple of valuable lessons that he carried over to the Patriots decades later.

Kraft: At the same time, I always loved sports. The sport that was my favorite to participate in was tennis. We became part of World Team Tennis and bought the Boston Lobsters out of bankruptcy. I eventually bought out all my partners but one. I learned a lot about how to run a sports team doing that. We played at Walter Brown Arena, which is part of Boston University. We would advertise in the paper and bring in players. The university would get the parking, the concessions and sponsorship revenue, and all I got was the ticket revenue. I realized if I ever had the privilege of owning a team that I would make sure I controlled the venue and all the different parts of it.

Long before Robert Kraft owned the Patriots, he was a season-ticket holder dreaming of running the franchise. (Chris Graythen / Getty Images)

The other thing I learned is our attendance and performance went up when we had a star. We had great coaches, and I learned the importance of a great coach. We had a very good coach in Ion Tiriac, but you need a coach who can relate to both men and women. When I got Roy Emerson, I learned the importance of coaching. I wanted a star, and I brought in Martina Navratilova. She defected to America, and I paid a $50,000 fee in 1976. That was a lot of money in World Team Tennis to get her rights. She made a big difference. When we switched to Roy Emerson as a coach, he knew how to bring out the best in her. She won a Wimbledon championship while she was part of the Boston Lobsters. To enhance our gate in the summertime, we used to play a few matches down in Cape Cod because our family was there. It was pretty cool. I remember her coming from Wimbledon on global TV to the Cape Cod Coliseum. I had a chance to get close to her, and I realized how important it is to have a marquee star. The combination of the business aspect, the coaching and the star, I learned from World Team Tennis.

The early steps

Kraft began daydreaming about buying the Patriots in the 1970s, and he put together a plan to purchase the team from the Sullivan family in the early 1980s. Billy Sullivan had owned the Patriots since their inception in the 1960 American Football League season, and his sons, Patrick and Chuck, held front-office positions with the organization.

Kraft: Football was always the sport I was passionate about. I loved it, my favorite sport. I used to look at the Sullivan family, and I liked Billy. I used to chat with him and say one day if he ever decided to sell the team, I hoped he would call me and give me a shot at it. Their finances got pretty complicated. I became a season-ticket holder in 1971 when they moved to Foxboro and Schaefer Stadium. E.M. Lowe gave them the land, and they built the stadium for $6 million. As I used to sit in the stands and look at how they ran the team and how things went, I learned that the 300 acres around the stadium were owned by a group of 12 people. The stadium was owned by a trust by the Sullivan family, and the team was owned by the Sullivan family. There was a racetrack, a trailer park and stables. There were a lot of cuckoo things going on there. I used to sit in the stands in the 1970s and early 1980s and think, “What could I do, how could I own the team?” I tried to cultivate a relationship with Billy.

So there I am sitting in the stands watching them. They were founded in 1960. Their first home playoff game was in 1978, the 19th season, against the Houston Oilers, which they lost. I was there in the stands for that. I used to sit in the stands, and the season would be over at Christmastime. It was a weird feeling. I started to put together a plan in the early 1980s.

Carmen Policy joined the San Francisco 49ers in 1983 and became president and CEO of the organization while also serving on the NFL’s finance committee, which handled matters such as expansion and relocation.

Carmen Policy: The Patriots, unfortunately, were really the weak link in the NFL chain of franchises. They were always problematic in terms of getting things done and smoothing out their operation and becoming financially viable.

Jonathan Kraft (Robert Kraft’s son, current president of the Kraft Group): My senior year of college, I’d come home in the fall of 1985 because the Sullivans had put up all three pieces of the team (for sale). You had the land, which they had a lease on. It was owned by a group of guys. The stadium was owned by Chuck Sullivan. The team was owned by Billy and family members. But the Sullivans as a family controlled all three pieces, and they marketed the whole thing as a team. My dad had put a group of people together that worked with us — lawyers, accountants and stuff to start to put (the purchase plan) together — and I had come home from school a couple times, and he had me sit in on the meetings. I was always interested in business but more observing. It was something my dad and brothers and I had talked about doing.

Billy Sullivan, greeting fans at the old stadium in Foxboro, owned the Patriots from 1960 to 1988. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)

The Sullivans ran into financial issues and their debt worsened, notably with the spectacular failure of the Jackson Family Victory Tour in 1984. Chuck Sullivan bankrolled the tour for $40 million and used Sullivan Stadium — one of three names, along with Schaefer and Foxboro, that the old stadium used — as collateral. The tour was a disaster from a financial perspective and sparked a chain of events that ultimately caused the Sullivans to sell the team in the coming years.

Jonathan Kraft: As the team started doing well that fall (of 1985), the Sullivans, who were selling all three pieces — and you really needed to sell all three pieces together because, as money had gotten tight for the Sullivans, they had rewritten the lease between the team and the stadium, basically because the team had a debt limit. The NFL, in those days, had a $45 million debt limit. It was $35 million on the team, and the general partner could have another $10 million, so it was $45 million. There was a debt ceiling, and they needed cash to pay off the obligations that had come from the limited partner lawsuits and the screwed-up Victory Tour of the Jacksons. I have two tickets from the Jackson Victory Tour sitting there (in a frame on the office wall). They were always short money, so they got around the league’s debt-ceiling rules by basically rewriting the lease from the team to the stadium where they gave virtually all of the revenues — like all of the signage, all of the concessions, a big percentage of ticket sales as rent to put a lot of leverage on the stadium and to get leverage debt on the stadium. So they had a lease that ran through 2001 that was a very strict lease because the banks who loaned the money on the stadium wanted to be sure the Sullivans didn’t pull the team out of the stadium to let the stadium go bankrupt.

Policy: All of a sudden, Michael Jackson and his Victory Tour enters the scene. The Sullivans become the premier and primary investors. As a matter of fact, they tried talking (49ers owner) Eddie DeBartolo into joining with them, and I strongly, strongly fought that. I’ll never forget, Eddie’s kids were really upset that he did not go forward with it because of the glamour and the glory of the Victory Tour, and Michael Jackson as big as he was, and probably the fun that would have connected to being part of it for teenage girls. I don’t blame them. Eddie, very non-ceremoniously, said, “OK, I’m going to take your advice, but if this tour is a big success, I think you’re going to be fired.” I’m laughing, but I’m not sure if he was serious or not. The long and short of it is it was a disaster for the Sullivan family, just a disaster.

Robert Kraft: In 1984, under Chuck Sullivan, Billy Sullivan’s son, they sponsored the Michael Jackson national tour. They guaranteed $40 million to Don King. They put $48 million in debt, which they gave to him for the tour, and they wound up losing money. They couldn’t get licenses in Foxboro to even do it there. They lost a lot of money.

Jonathan Kraft: So you had the team, and you had the stadium, then you had the parking lots, which they didn’t own but they had a lease on. That was important because the town of Foxboro in those days — they still do today, but now it’s not as big of a process — had to issue licenses every year to open the stadium to have the games. And if you didn’t control the parking — because in those days, they didn’t have all of the satellite (parking lots), it wouldn’t have been enough. You needed the parking lots that existed on site to open the stadium, and you had to have the stadium because all the revenues from the team basically went to the stadium. So basically, you’d be crazy to ever buy the team without owning the stadium because all of the revenue went from the team operations to the stadium to pay the debt. And you’d be crazy to buy the stadium if you didn’t control the land because you’d have no guarantee that you could actually open the stadium if the parking lots weren’t available. So you had those three pieces, and the Sullivans controlled all three in the fall of 1985. They put them up for sale as a unit.

Foxboro Stadium and the adjacent track, on the site where Gillette Stadium and Patriot Place now sit, lacked the frills of modern NFL facilities. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)

The Krafts nearly bought all three pieces in 1985, as the Patriots began a run to Super Bowl XX, for approximately $100 million.

Jonathan Kraft: It was early at the start of this process. We came close that fall to buy all three pieces at once, but then the team started doing well, and I can’t speak for (the Sullivans). We weren’t here, but my sense was Billy Sullivan was like, “Hey, this is pretty good. We’re making the run I always hoped we would make.” So as the team started doing better, they pulled back from selling all three pieces. So later — end of 1985, beginning of 1986 — the first thing they did was default on the lease of the land. So Robert was like, “That would have been the last thing I would have ever done. I want to control the parking lots.” Because without the parking lots, you can’t open the stadium, and it’s a domino effect.

Robert Kraft: In 1985, I approached the owners of the land and gave them a 10-year option at $17 million. I paid them $1 million a year for 10 years to have that option.

The 10-year lease to buy the land ultimately cost Robert Kraft a total of $27 million with the $1 million annual lease and $17 million purchase price. The unconventional strategy was paramount to the purchase of the team in the next decade.

Robert Kraft: What revenue was I getting from the land? I was getting parking revenue from concerts and games. That was between $600,000 and $700,000, so I made a strategic decision to try to control the land in 1985 as a way to one day, going back to my Boston Lobster days, I would now control the parking revenue. The guys who owned the land just cared about the racetrack because they owned horses and that’s where they were involved.

Billy Sullivan managed to stay afloat through various means until 1988, when he sold the Patriots to Victor Kiam for $83 million, and Sullivan Stadium went into bankruptcy auction. Surprisingly, after purchasing the team, Kiam went low on his bid for the stadium.

Jonathan Kraft: Right after the stadium goes bankrupt and we start doing work, I had just started Harvard Business School. I was in business school but had worked a little bit with the team of guys that my dad had put together. We’re like, OK, no one else is going to bid for this thing in bankruptcy. The Sullivans don’t have the money. They’re barely staying afloat. So we’ll get it. While it was in bankruptcy and we thought the team was on the cusp of going bankrupt, too, out of the blue, Victor Kiam buys the team. And it turns out, he did literally 48 hours of due diligence. He was riding high. He did no diligence and bought the team. So we owned the land. He buys the team. The stadium is in bankruptcy. You can sort of think of it as a tug of war, almost.

Kiam primarily resided in New York and never established a reputation as one of the NFL’s most prepared owners. Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner in 1989-2006, recalled one particular example.

Paul Tagliabue: I had come to Boston right after I became commissioner. Victor Kiam asked me to come up and talk to the business community about a new stadium. I had to introduce him to the mayor, Ray Flynn. That’s unusual. Normally, you’re introducing the new commissioner to the mayor. I had to introduce Victor to the mayor. The idea of absentee ownership was pretty stark with Victor. He had virtually no roots in the Boston area.

Robert Kraft: (Kiam) wanted to move the team and get a new stadium. So he bid $17 million. I bid $25 million. The bankruptcy judge awarded it to me because we were paying 50 cents on the dollar. My banking friend wouldn’t loan me the money because he thought it would be a white elephant, that the team would move. So we had to go to a private bank to get the money to do this deal. Once again, it was a big amount to put out, but it was all part of the strategic plan. By 1988, we controlled all of the revenues. It was sort of the Boston Lobsters in reverse.

Carmen Policy: Robert Kraft successfully captured the stadium. Now he basically controlled the whole situation with the lease signed by the Patriots.

Robert Kraft: When we bought the stadium out of bankruptcy, there was an operating covenant that meant the team had to stay in Foxboro through the balance of their lease, which coincidentally went to the 2001 season.

Jonathan Kraft: The lease between the team and the stadium had this operating covenant that went through 2001 and said you can’t leave and just pay your rent. You have to operate your business out of there. And if you break that in Massachusetts, there are criminal implications, not just civil. It’s a real offense. If you go lease some office space in Boston and it’s a five-year lease, but you move in two years and keep paying your rent, they don’t care. But the team was the anchor tenant of the stadium. Without the team’s business, you couldn’t keep the stadium viable for the concerts or the soccer or whatever else. It was critical. That operating covenant, it wasn’t just about the money. It was about having the anchor tenant there. So that’s effectively what an operating covenant is.

As a result of the operating covenant, the only way for the owner of the Patriots to relocate the franchise would have been through Robert Kraft’s approval.

Jonathan Kraft: Then (Kiam) was angry when he lost (in bankruptcy court). I remember my dad telling me the story. Kiam met with him and said, “The lease is a piece of blank. You’ve got to renegotiate.” It’s like, well, did you look at it when you bought the team? Did you understand when you bought the team? That didn’t happen. He’s running the team, and he’s complaining. We knew he was looking at how to move it to Jacksonville. I think his lawyers told him he couldn’t do it.

Victor Kiam’s ownership of the Patriots was a short one. (John Tlumacki / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

In September 1990, Boston Herald sportswriter Lisa Olson accused several Patriots of sexual harassment in the locker room. The NFL fined three players and the organization, and Kiam got in trouble for subsequently mocking Olson. Kiam’s other company, Remington Products, took a hit as a result.

Jonathan Kraft: So the Patriots are losing money and Remington, which was his lifeblood. When the Lisa Olson thing happened that fall, that Christmas he got killed because the National Organization for Women boycotted Remington. The image around the Patriots, which was never very good, was now worse. His main business was being hurt, so he got into financial trouble.

Kiam’s financial troubles included a debt to James Orthwein, of the Busch family in St. Louis. Kiam sold the Patriots to Orthwein in April 1992 to clear his debt, but Orthwein had grander ideas. At the time, the NFL was setting the stage for expansion in time for the 1995 season. As that process evolved, the NFL chose Charlotte, and St. Louis and Jacksonville were in the running for the second slot.

Policy: I think Victor wanted to move the Patriots to Jacksonville, but Victor ran into problems of his own and had to sell. Jim Orthwein bought the Patriots, and he had designs of moving them to St. Louis. We’re dealing with all of these moving parts at the league level, and it is a nightmare and a mess. I’m sitting back there, and I don’t know Robert Kraft (at the time). I just know he’s this business guy who somehow finessed his way into a controlling situation that seemed to have a death hold on anything that happened there in Foxboro and at the Patriots.

Robert Kraft: (Orthwein) was in the position that I was in with the Lobsters. He got all the ticket revenue, but I got sponsorship, parking, concessions. I actually learned how to run a stadium as an operator. They couldn’t find a way to get a good stadium here, so there was a publicly built stadium in St. Louis. So Orthwein wanted to move the team in 1994. Their lawyers spoke to my lawyers, and I refused to let them do it.

Tagliabue: It was pretty clear the team was struggling, to put it mildly, under the prior ownership. It was pretty clear once Orthwein came in that the stability of the franchise in New England was an issue.

Policy: (The NFL) was trying to expand to the Carolinas. We always knew that was going to be one of the two teams. We thought we were going to expand to St. Louis, very frank with you. As we sat there, it was not predestined, but it was presupposed that we would expand to North Carolina first then we would expand to the St. Louis market. But St. Louis kept shooting itself in the foot and couldn’t get itself straightened out. If Orthwein had gotten that situation straight, I think we would have had a hard time stopping him from moving to St. Louis. Then Orthwein losing out on that proposition and selling the team facilitated expansion to Jacksonville.

They were getting frustrated with the expansion process because there was no opportunity or unification in St. Louis to get a stadium deal completed and to get the things put in place that were necessary for us to hand them an expansion franchise. I think Orthwein said, “Look, if I do it my way, I can move this team and I don’t have to go through this long, involved process with all these other people who have to be involved. I’ll handle it myself.” So I think he was seeing himself as the savior of the St. Louis issue. When he couldn’t buy the stadium and get out of the lease, I think he just gave up and said, “OK, I’m done.” And they still couldn’t put their act together there (in St. Louis). And when he said that, they all fell apart. I think he was the final moving piece that was trying to enable them to possibly put together a St. Louis venue. It just didn’t work.

Jonathan Kraft: Carolina got the first, and they really wanted it to be St. Louis because it was the biggest market and they had lost the Cardinals (in 1988 to Phoenix), and the stadium was sitting there. It was built. It was great. It was perfect. But there was no lead owner. The Murrays (Fran Murray, a former minority owner with Victor Kiam) and the other people were fighting around it. There was no lead owner. There was a bunch of guys but nobody could really do the deal, so they gave them extra time. So instead of awarding two teams at once, they gave it to Carolina (in October 1993) then went another month, and the whole plan was to have St. Louis get their shit together. But when St. Louis didn’t get their shit together, the league went to Jacksonville.

Policy: Orthwein didn’t want to stay in Massachusetts. He wanted to be in St. Louis. That prompted the sale of the team again. I was of the opinion this was going to be now where Robert Kraft comes in with his left and right hand around the neck of the Patriots and try to get a major deal out of this forced sale. He had all the leverage.

Robert Kraft: They decided to sell the team, and I wanted to buy it.

While the time James Orthwein, left, spent owning the Patriots was short, he made a big impact when he hired Bill Parcells as head coach and drafted Drew Bledsoe in 1993. (Sporting News via Getty Images)

The purchase

The Patriots struggled to sustain even a level of mediocrity on the field for the majority of their existence, but Orthwein was in charge during a key transition in the direction of the football product. The Patriots hired head coach Bill Parcells and selected quarterback Drew Bledsoe with the No. 1 pick in the 1993 draft.

Around the same time, Orthwein also hired Goldman Sachs to handle the sale of the Patriots, much like a player would hire an agent to negotiate a contract. Eric Grubman led the project team.

Eric Grubman: The leader of the project was a colleague of mine. I really didn’t know anything about the project, didn’t know of its existence, wasn’t paying any attention and didn’t have anything to do with sports at that point in time. I was a generalist in the mergers-and-acquisitions department at Goldman Sachs. One evening, the fellow who did the assignments walked out on the floor and asked who could go to a meeting tomorrow. Of course, nobody volunteers for an extra assignment because you work pretty hard and you’re already fully staffed. No one volunteered.

He said, “Look, I’m in a bind. Who can make a meeting tomorrow?” So I said, “I can make a meeting. I’ll help you out.” So he called me into his office and said, “Look, our colleague has cancer. We’ve got to get him off all of his assignments. Can you do this meeting for me?” I said, “Sure, what it is?” He said, “It’s up in Boston. It’s the sale of the New England Patriots.” I said, “Oh, no, don’t do that to me.” The reason I had that reaction is it was difficult to sell sports teams back then. The notion of the leagues and franchises being this wonderful business opportunity, that wasn’t the case. Goldman, in particular, generally only got involved in franchise sales if it was for people who were otherwise clients of the firm. In that cast, James Orthwein was a good and longstanding client of the firm, and he asked the firm to handle it and the firm said yes. By dint of that, I got assigned to sell the New England Patriots. The project was already underway, and I took over the stewardship of that project.

Orthwein’s lawyer, Walter Metcalfe, acted as a roadblock in the transaction process because he ultimately wanted the Patriots to move to St. Louis. That led to some obstacles on the Kraft side of the negotiations. For starters, Robert Kraft initially expressed interest in buying the Patriots in July 1993 but didn’t hear back until November.

Jonathan Kraft: We had done everything to put ourselves in a position to buy the team. But now there were bigger forces trying to move it. The one saving grace was Robert had clearly seen this early on, he couldn’t believe when the parking lots became available. The parking lots were the key to the whole thing. And relatively speaking, they were the least expensive part of the whole thing.

So in 1993, there was still the eight years to run on (the operating covenant). They said we’ll let you into the (buying) process, but you basically have to do away with the operating covenant. You have to put a dollar value on it. Once you do that, they’re not calculable, but by putting a dollar figure on it, you’ve removed your legal claim to the fact that the operations is more important than just the dollar value. That’s the legal concept. So they kept saying, “Yeah, we’ll let you in, but not until you put a dollar figure (on the operating covenant).” We just wouldn’t do it because we knew that was our value. We fought throughout the fall, and we kept reading and hearing about the other people being let into the process. We knew the people in St. Louis were interested.

We had a meeting the weekend after Thanksgiving in New York. They wouldn’t let us into the data room to start doing the work (on the Patriots’ finances). They knew we were interested, but they kept refusing to let us have access. It’s just two sides staring at each other. They said to come down to breakfast, and we’ll have a meeting and let you in. We went to this breakfast at The Pierre Hotel where Goldman Sachs was in New York. We sat down expecting to be let into the deal. We weren’t, and we got up and left the breakfast and came home. That whole period was very frustrating.

Robert Kraft remained busy on multiple fronts. He won over the NFL’s finance committee, secured a complex loan from Bank of Boston president Chad Gifford and expressed to Goldman Sachs the significance of the power of the Foxboro Stadium operating covenant, a notion Kraft wanted to be relayed to every competing bidder.

Policy: He came in and met with our committee, and that was the first time I’d ever met him. He said he had always been a fan. He’s a New Englander. He really, really wants to be both a member of the NFL and a good partner for all of the other owners. He says, “I want to come in, and I want to show you that I’m there for the long term, that I’m there to help the NFL grow.” He indicated that he was going to be very fair and respectful of the value of an NFL franchise.

Grubman: Robert very much wanted to be taken seriously as a bidder, even though he expected he might be competing against people who were far better known than he was and far wealthier than he was. He was right about that. There were people who were better known and wealthier. It was very important to Robert that his relationship, as it related to the ownership of the stadium and the land, that was very important that it be disclosed to prospective buyers who would be bidding against him. He didn’t make any threats or anything like that. He composed himself in a way in which was very professional, but the point that was made to be — I don’t think he made it directly to me, but someone working with him made it directly to me — he didn’t want to have to try to pick up the pieces of a difficult scenario of someone who bought it and didn’t fully understand the obligations and what rights he had as it related to the stadium and the land. I actually agreed with him, and we disclosed that in the selling materials so that people weren’t blindsided by it.

Chad Gifford: We had a commercial banking relationship with Robert’s paper company for some time. Because he was a good customer of the bank, we got together a couple times. In the briefest language, we kind of hit it off in terms of the banking relationship and as people. I think he trusted me as a source of banking services, and I trusted him as a very good customer.

At that point, the paper company was a solid company, but I wouldn’t call it with hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidity by any means. He made it clear, and it was clear to me from understanding the finances, if this was going to work — of course you never know early on what it was going to take to buy it — the bank was going to have to step up. At that point, I was president of the bank. I wasn’t a lending officer or anything like that. I couldn’t make a loan, but I could approve any loan. It was clear to me — as far as the bank is concerned, as far as the region is concerned — even though the Patriots were a basket case, the NFL at that time, pre-Kraft ownership, was a very important asset. If we were going to lose the team — and as the months went by, it was clearer and clearer that some of the Orthwein associates would love to see the team move to St. Louis — it would be a real blow to the region. If there’s something that’s really good for the region but also a good asset for the bank, this could make a lot of sense. Then what it came down to was: Did I believe in Robert Kraft? It was a very, very leveraged loan.

Policy: When he started talking about numbers that would amount to — especially when you consider the quality of the facilities that the franchise owned, which were deplorable, and financially a wreck — the highest number paid for an NFL franchise. That said, to me, this guy is for real. This guy really wants to become not only an owner in the NFL but a truly productive, positive partner. He’s putting his number, in effect, where he’s telling us his heart is. He is literally not using his leverage. That certainly impressed me, and it also impressed many on the finance committee. And some of the guys on the finance committee are not easily impressible. They don’t like anybody.

Tagliabue: (Robert Kraft) was clearly rabid about football. He was rabid about being an owner for the long term, including with his family with Jonathan. This was very clearly an investment for the long term. I would say the most important thing was his understanding that a league is an equal partnership, that a rising tide raises all boats, including the Patriots. The TV and labor stuff was important to them in terms of his interest. But also his business experience, his interest in being innovative, his international business experience, his interest in technology, which was becoming very important with the explosion of new forms of television distribution, satellite, cable and eventually the internet. He seemed like he was broad-gauged, experienced, genuinely interested and financially stable with deep roots in the community.

Jonathan Kraft: Toward the end of December when (Orthwein’s group) finally caved, they finally realized they had to let us in or they were going to have a lawsuit on their hands effectively for antitrust for excluding us from the process. When they let us into the data room from New York, I’m told from other people who bid on the team, they were in this big conference room with beautiful windows, lots of paper, lots of help. They let us into like a closet in the middle of a floor. It’s like the size of my bathroom. There was a round table in the middle with things stacked this high, no windows. There were early, early mobile phones but obviously no smartphones. They wouldn’t let us copy anything.

So it was me and a guy named Richard McGinnis, who was our outside tax guy from Coopers & Lybrand, and Richard Karelitz, who was our general counsel at the time for the Kraft Group. It was the three of us in this room, and we would just start looking at documents because they wouldn’t let us photocopy any of it. There were two hard-line phones in the room and one mobile phone. We just started reading documents and information into voicemail back at our office, literally reading documents into voicemails and then assistants back in Boston transcribed it for us. That’s how we did our due diligence. It was odd. They just wanted to keep us out. We were trying to get our financing put in place. Bank of Boston, which is Bank of America today, and Chad Gifford was the president and took a huge leap of faith because he knew we didn’t have access to the data but wanted to see the team stay here, obviously. We were just frustrated because it was clear to us they really wanted this thing to get to St. Louis.

A week before Christmas 1993, Kraft was told to submit a bid by Jan. 10, and all bids would be revealed Jan. 15, when the winning bidder would earn the opportunity to negotiate the final contract to purchase the team. But soon thereafter, Orthwein’s group changed the rules, saying all bids must be complete by Jan. 1, which put Kraft at a disadvantage because they had less time to sort through the Patriots’ finances from their less-than-ideal setup in the data room. Kraft’s team worked overnight sessions to comply with the Jan. 1 deadline, and he submitted a bid of $158 million. Then he still wasn’t getting any answers in the ensuing days.

At the same time, the Patriots wrapped up their 1993 season with a 33-27 overtime victory against the Dolphins on Jan. 2. So the day after Kraft placed his bid to buy the Patriots, he attended the season finale at Foxboro Stadium. The Pats finished with a 5-11 record after a fourth consecutive win, and the Dolphins missed the playoffs due to the loss. Despite the constant threat of relocation, the Patriots finally had hope on the field after Parcells and Bledsoe completed their first season together.

Jonathan Kraft: People thought it was the last game in Foxboro. As we were riding down the old elevator at Foxboro Stadium — it was my dad and my brother Danny and I — you could hear the fans. In that elevator, you were at the back of the 300 level of the west side of the old stadium, and you could hear the fans chanting, “Don’t take our team.” I remember my father just looked at me and goes, “There’s no fucking way we’re not buying this thing.” I know it sounds corny and cliché, but it was energizing because we loved it, too. It was so exciting.

Now, it felt like it was all coming together and it was going to be ripped away. We had been fans. We had been there. You heard the fans. My father didn’t say this to me, but I’m sure he flashed back to, “Why didn’t an adult do something when the Braves were leaving town?” Robert grew up as a kid in Boston who loved the Boston Braves, who grew up hustling newspapers outside of the stadium. When they left (for Milwaukee in 1952), it bothered him. I’ve heard him say he always wondered why some grown-up didn’t save the team. In his head, you’re a kid, “How did this happen? How did the grown-ups let this happen?”

In mid-January, Robert Kraft was done with the back and forth, and he was ready to make his move. Orthwein’s team kept trying to persuade Kraft to put a financial value on the stadium and operating covenant, at one point even slyly trying to convince Kraft to include the plans for a new megaplex stadium upon the sale, which could have compromised the leverage behind the operating covenant. There was also an offer to surrender the operating covenant for $75 million.

Robert Kraft: They offered me $75 million to get out of the lease, so three times what I paid. My sweet wife (Myra) said, “You’ll take it. You’ll still own the stadium. You’ll get another team.” I remembered what happened with the Boston Braves when they moved to Milwaukee. I knew what that meant to the fans. Even though the Patriots hadn’t done that well, there was a very loyal following, of which I was one, so I refused.

Jonathan Kraft: Goldman Sachs was still trying to get us to break because the money was clearly bigger in St. Louis. The first week of January, Robert got this call. We’re in his office. The banker from Goldman, Eric Grubman, was the deal guy. Robert basically just said, “I’m not doing anything more for you. I want to see Orthwein, and I want to look him face to face and we’re either getting this done or we’re not. I’m sick of dealing through bankers.” I’m paraphrasing.

Grubman: I remember (that phone call) being in the evening. I remember there had been several rounds of bidding, and the competition was real. I remember that every bidder was trying to get me to tell them what the rest of the bids were. Every bidder was trying to tell me at what price would they win it. We just didn’t do it that way. We didn’t shop Party A’s bid to Party B. We didn’t presume that we could pick the magic price that was the best price that somebody would pay. I remember the conversation quite well. I can’t remember the specific words, but words to the effect of, “I need your best shot.” His response was, “Why should I raise my price now? I put in a good price.” My response was something along the lines of, “I can’t tell you what to do. I can only ask you to put your best price forward. If you’ve done that, then fine. But if not, now is the time.” He said he was going to think about it.

Chad Gifford: At the 99th hour, I think they threw a curveball to the extent that we had agreed upon a number that was very significant, and they had to come up with an additional pot of money. Robert came over to my office a few days before closing, an hour before D-hour and said, “I need more.” And we figured out a way to do it. People ask me, “Why did you do that?” I had support in the bank, and I had some very smart people working with me. But Robert came into my office that last time and looked me in the eye and said, “I’ll never let you down.” Ultimately, bricks and mortar and balance sheets don’t pay you back. People pay you back. And I believed him.

What you worry about then was the liquidity because the franchise was losing money, had a crappy stadium and a lousy team. We spent hours talking about how he was going to do it. If I’d known since then they were going to be in the last eight AFC Championship Games, I think I would have felt a little better about the loan. It was a hairy loan, no question about it. But if you believe in people, you do it.

Robert Kraft: The right number to buy it was $115 million, and I told my wife I might go to 120, 122. … It was sort of back to Newfoundland. In life, you don’t get second chances sometimes. When you believe in something — and I believed in the value of the franchise and thought it was under-managed — I agreed to pay the price, which was not my normal way of doing things. We wound up paying the highest price for any sports franchise for anywhere in the world. And it happened to be the worst team in the NFL. My wife really thought I had gone insane.

Grubman: We had another conversation not long after that, and he improved his price (to $172 million). And that won it. He was very shrewd, never telegraphed his bidding moves ahead of time and never took it for granted. I don’t think he went into it thinking that there was no way that he could lose. In fact, I think he thought he could lose and he had to step up and win it. I think, at the end of the day, it was hard for him to pay the price he paid, but he did. He stepped up and won it.

It’s funny. Robert, to this day, thinks if he hadn’t raised his price, he might have gotten it anyway. To this day, I still won’t tell Robert whether or not that’s true. All that I will say, and all that I’ve told Robert and Jonathan through the years is, “The competition was very heated, and I don’t know what some other party might or might not have done. All I know is what you did got you the team.”

I don’t believe it’s quite as simple as saying there was more money on the table or anything like that. I know what happened. There’s a difference. Somebody who wants to sell an asset wanted to know that the buyer can close, and Robert won it based on his ability to close at the price he nominated.

Jonathan Kraft: (Grubman) said why don’t you get on a plane and come out to St. Louis to meet with Orthwein tomorrow morning and his lawyers Metcalfe and Michael O’Halloran. So we went out that night to St. Louis. We stayed at the Adam’s Mark Hotel by the Arch. It was my dad, me, the tax guy Richard McGinnis from Coopers and a lawyer named David Engel from a firm called, in those days, Bingham, Dana & Gould. The next morning, we went over to Walter Metcalfe’s law office. It was called Bryan Cave, and we met in this conference room originally, then we left the room to go meet with Orthwein.

My dad and Orthwein looked each other in the eye and agreed to the $172 million. We went back into the conference room and everyone buttoned up. They said, here’s the deal. The lawyer and accountant, Engel and McGinnis, stayed to button up the details. They said we’re going to announce this in Boston. They wanted to get Orthwein out of St. Louis because everyone thought the team was going there. They said to us, if this gets public, the deal is off. So we were very worried Walter Metcalfe was going to leak it himself just to blow up the deal.

My dad and I went to the airport, and the only seats on the TWA back to Boston were middle seats in coach. He used some cash to get people to move seats so we could sit next to each other. The thing I always remember about the flight home was we’re sitting there and you couldn’t really talk about it because we were really worried about it getting out. We’re excited. He leaned over to me and said, “The coolest thing, the best thing about this deal is what we’re going to be able to do with those 53 players and that logo to make an impact in the community.” What he meant by that was, yeah, football was a part of it, but really what it would do beyond that. That’s what he was thinking about. And in my head, I was just thinking about, “We just way overpaid for this thing.”

Robert Kraft completed the deal Jan. 21, 1994, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. The incoming challenges were many, from building a winner, to investing in a new stadium, to paying off the loan and stabilizing the franchise in other ways. Kraft quickly found out there were so many lawsuits against the Patriots and the Sullivans that it was a challenge to even find lawyers to finalize various transactions for the team, as many area-based attorneys had to recuse themselves due to prior suits. Of course, Kraft made it work.

Robert Kraft embraces James Orthwein when the two met with reporters to discuss the sale. (John Mottern / AFP / Getty Images)

Policy: I saw Robert Kraft riding in on a white horse. Thank goodness, he lived up to his word, and he exceeded our expectations. I just thought he was a phenomenal addition. When you think about the mess we were in as a league, with that franchise in the condition it was in, with movement being talked about, as we’re trying to totally control our expansion process and stop the movement of teams from their marketplace to a new marketplace and at the same time keep this (Patriots) franchise afloat, we had our hands full. The kind of domino effect — that somehow the Patriots and that commitment to New England, falling apart (without Kraft) — might have had on everything else we were trying to do was troubling beyond words. I’ll go so far as to say scary.

God only knows what would have happened if all this had not been stabilized by Kraft. He literally stabilized it. I’ve got to tell you, the minute he bought the team, it’s like somebody snapped some fingers, the lights went on and things got better. He started selling tickets. He started getting fan interest back. He started getting people to believe again, and you know the rest of the story.

Jonathan Kraft: We had a financing structure that gave us the flexibility to get our sea legs under us, but we had to perform and we knew it would be a while before we would see a financial return. We didn’t do it for a financial return. I know people say that. Look, we thought if we did a good job long term, the team could be worth more, but that wasn’t the motivation going in. The motivation going in was, “Can we make it work? And we’ll overpay.” If it was strictly about IRR, the internal rate of return on the investment, it didn’t make sense. But it was about more than that.

When Robert Kraft arrived as the Patriots owner, he inherited Bill Parcells as his coach. (Yunghi Kim / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Drew Bledsoe: When I was drafted and Jim Orthwein owned the team, all the news was that we were moving to St. Louis. I had just gotten to New England, was starting to find my way and figure that out, thinking about all of a sudden then getting uprooted to St. Louis, it seemed kind of crazy. First and foremost, it was great news that we were going to stay. Mr. Orthwein was an absentee owner. We didn’t really see him. He wasn’t involved, saw him every now and then but really wasn’t around. When Mr. Kraft bought the team, he was immediately a constant presence. He was at practice. I got to know him very well immediately. It immediately was apparent that he really cared about the direction of the team. This wasn’t just an expensive toy. This was something he was really, really serious about from the very start.

As a player, I was young. I was 22 when he bought the team. But at a young age, it became pretty obvious that this thing was going to head in a different direction and we had somebody at the very top that, No. 1, cared about the success of the team. And equally as important, he actually cared about us as players. We all developed a relationship with him, got to know him. For Maura and I, they really took us in and treated us like we were family. They invited us over to their house for dinner. It wasn’t a big production. It was more of like we were a couple of their kids who were having dinner in their kitchen and really got to know them on a personal level. It became a meaningful relationship right away on a personal level.

One of the most important things that he ever said to me, and this was after I left football and was in business, I asked him at one point, “What’s the one thing that’s allowed you to be so much better than everybody else?” And his answer has really been formative in the way I try to run our business. He said, “Everything. Everything we do, we’re trying to be better than everybody else in everything. From the way we analyze players, to the way we practice and coach, to the way that we eat, to the way that we travel, to the way that we take care of our players, to the way we take care of our retired players.” Every single thing they do, he’s trying to be the best in the world at it. And if he’s not the best in the world, he’s going to figure out how to be the best in the world at it.

Tagliabue: I think he’s been one of the most positive of a very small handful of owners over my 40 years of involvement in the league.

Jonathan Kraft: It’s been 25 years, and we were very fortunate because it’s been filled with a lot of the highs that we hoped to achieve. It had a lot of bumps along the road that make life interesting. But most importantly, we really hoped that we would be able to make football beloved in this region the way we loved it and the way we saw going on in other parts of the country when we would go to away games and see how big of a deal NFL football was. And you grow up here, and you just didn’t see it. That was a big part of what we hoped to achieve. Looking back on it, it’s been 25 years really filled with most of the highs that we wanted to achieve and a lot of bumps, but also football is in a different place than when we bought the team, and that was our hope and our goal.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

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