A few years ago, Kraft had the chance to make one of the great financial killings in NFL history. Make that in corporate history. All he had to was move his football team a few Drew Bledsoe bombs, or about 75 miles, west to Hartford, where Connecticut had promised a new state-of-the-game stadium, 10 years of sellouts and enough financial incentives to make a grown man weep. Kraft almost took the deal. When he finally said no to Connecticut, Kraft now says with a slight and understandable shudder, “My family walked away from $1 billion.”
But Kraft and his family have very deep roots in Boston. He wasn’t prepared to leave town with his football team–however great the incentives–and risk becoming a pariah in his hometown a la Art Modell in Cleveland. And he didn’t want his family’s legacy to be one of betrayal. Instead, Kraft opted to build a brand new stadium right next door to the old one and to let that stand as his legacy. “I put my heart and soul into it,” he said as he ushered me on a personal tour of the facility where cranes and other heavy construction equipment still outnumber the seats. “It’s my family’s contribution to this community.”
There are a many unique things about the new stadium, which will officially open with the Patriots first home game of the 2002 season. (Kraft’s soccer franchise, the New England Revolution, will play there next spring, before the stadium is fully completed.) The most notable aspect of the stadium is this: in this season of civic blackmail in which team owners routinely threaten municipalities with a Hobson’s choice–build a stadium or lose your sports team–Kraft is actually risking his own money. Lots of his own money. The stadium alone, not counting any land or peripheral costs, will come in somewhere in the neighborhood of $325 million. (Kraft did, however, use the Connecticut leverage to coax about $70 million in badly needed road improvements out of the state coffers. Foxboro’s game-day traffic is so legendarily bad that Kraft has turned it into a selling tool. Fans who pop for the premium “club” seats, at $3,750 to $6,000 per season ticket, will get private access roads in and out of the stadium.)
Though such a huge financial commitment is obviously nervous-making, Kraft doesn’t appear to have skimped anywhere. Not in the 120,000 square feet of private club space that encircles the stadium. Not in the huge corporate suites that are about double the size of those in most new stadiums. Not in the 1,300-square-foot video screens that will sit at each end of the field. Kraft spent $8.6 million on the bathrooms alone, which is almost $2 million more than it cost to build Foxboro Stadium in its entirety 30 years ago. The outside walls will be studded with lovely Jerusalem stone. It will cost $1.5 million to “daylight” the Neponset River, which has been buried so long under the racetrack that used to occupy the land that few new it even existed. “I may be crazy, but I figure I’m only ever going to do this once,” says Kraft. “So I wanted to get everything right.”
The players too will benefit from Kraft’s largesse. The new training room will be 4,000 square feet. That’s more than five times the current facility that players complain wouldn’t pass muster in any decent high-school program. The current team meeting area, a bunch of loose chairs jammed into a space smaller than the average motel room, wouldn’t be acceptable for your weekly poker game. The new one will be an amphitheater, rivaling the comfort of the best of the modern movie palaces. Kraft regards these luxuries as pragmatic measures. With each NFL team now governed by a firm salary cap, there is very little dollar fluctuation in what teams can offer free agents. State-of-the art facilities are key tiebreakers in enticing top players.
Kraft came at this task from an unusual perspective. He knows a great deal about being a football fan, having been a season-ticket holder for many years before he ever had a stake in the team. And he knows a great deal about football stadiums, having owned Foxboro for more than a decade, several years before he purchased the Pats. Before finalizing his plans for the new facility, Kraft visited other new stadiums and ballparks across the country to try to adopt the best from each. “I really believe this is going to be the most fan-friendly stadium in the country,” he says.
The stadium is steep rather than deep. The upper deck is not for anyone the least bit jittery about heights. But the reward is that feeling of being right on top of the action, rather than feeling like the team stayed in Massachusetts but you got seated in Connecticut. (Kraft himself has climbed to the summit in the most distant corner of the stadium, plopped himself down the seat and pronounced, “It’s high, but it isn’t bad.”) All the seats are actual seats, compared to the old stadium where almost 90 percent are benches. And every seat is angled toward the 50-yard line, eliminating the dreaded neck-crane. The concourses and entryways are spacious. And by elevating the second tier of stands just eight feet, the entire concessions concourse is open to the field. At this field, you’ll be able to slip out for a dog and a brew without ever having to take your eyes off the action. There are also picnicking areas and abundant spaces for the public to congregate, including one area designed to allow fans to flank the team as it charges onto the field for the opening kickoff.
Kraft believes-indeed he has to believe it to stay sane these days-that if you build it, they will come. The current waiting list for season tickets numbers 40,000. But New England is not Texas, where football is a religion. Traditionally, the Pats, even while well-supported, have stood last in the affections of the community behind the Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics. A few too many lackluster seasons like the last several, even in the newest and shiniest of pleasure palaces, and the fans begin to slip away. And that’s what keeps Bob Kraft awake at night, the one thing that he really can’t control. “My family put it on the line here,” he says. “Now we’ve just got to win some football games.”
