At a recent service at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals stood in the pulpit, holding a football with a needle in it.
“Pressures in life can cause us to live in fear,” Jonathan L. Walton told the congregation. “And when we live in fear, like this football, we can be deflated.”
Chalk one up for the Atlanta Falcons in the heart of Patriots territory.
That bit of inspired preaching didn’t go over all that well, Walton concedes with a laugh.
But Walton is a Falcons fan in a hostile land, and he’s taking his stand.
You see, this is New England. They’ve had professional sports here for, like, 5,000 years. No place in America has more passionate and vocal sports fans.
Boston, which manages to maintain a small-town feel, has 35 championships dating to the early 1900s. The Bruins, six Stanley Cups; Celtics, 17 NBA championships; Red Sox, eight World Series championships; and with four Super Bowl rings since 2002, the Patriots are sports’ latest, and some say greatest, dynasty.
“It is passed down from fathers to sons. This isn’t an area with a lot of transplants,” Clayton Antonis told me. “Everybody has a team.
One of my colleagues asked Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed whether the ATL — which, courtesy of the 1995 Atlanta Braves, has only one professional championship — will ever have a shot at being a great sports city like Boston.
“Well, they have a 200-year advantage over us,” he said.
A Julio Jones jersey walks into a bar . . .
I had experienced all of this firsthand when I lived in Boston — well, technically Cambridge, a few years back. But I needed to come back as a Falcons fan — even if I had to wear a Falcons jersey.
Finding a place wouldn’t be hard. Boston has hundreds of neighborhood bars, and most have a sports theme. Sure, the Pats are playing Sunday, but the Celtics were playing the Garden on Monday, and the Bruins were on television Tuesday night — priorities.
My first stop on Monday was a 22-mile drive outside of Boston to Foxboro and Patriot Place, the magnificent Atlantic Station-type outdoor mall adjacent to Gillette Stadium. (I hope Arthur Blank and the developers around Mercedes-Benz Stadium took notes). The Patriots Museum was closed, but there were plenty of people in the pro shop looking for Tom Brady jerseys.
The only thing out of place in the whole spot was me. A 6’3 black dude rocking a red Julio Jones jersey just a few days before the Falcons play the Patriots in the Super Bowl.
I don’t even want to describe some of the menacing looks I got.
Like from Steven and Heather Cohen. The Norfolk, Mass., couple was shopping for swag to wear to Houston. It will be their first Super Bowl.
“We can finally afford it. We have won a lot, so it is almost like we are spoiled,” Steven said. “But it is any given Sunday. We can’t be too confident.”
Heather added: “We actually have a lot of respect for Atlanta — the team, at least.”
‘I thank God I am from Boston’
So I head to the TD Garden, where the Celtics are playing the Detroit Pistons.
At The Fours, a bar across the street from the Garden, John Quintal credits Boston’s passion to “our bad accents.”
“When I was young, it used to bother me when we didn’t win,” said Quintal, who lives in South Boston. “Now it doesn’t bother me as much, but I would like to see Brady win one.”
Win one? I remind him that Brady has already won four.
“He has a thumb doesn’t he?” he said.
Henry Eno is downing an order of steak tips at the bar, watching Isaiah Thomas torch the Pistons for 41 points. He won tickets to the game but sent his wife and son. They will meet him at the bar afterward.
“I thank God everyday that I am from Boston,” said Eno who, at 55, still plays pick up hockey once a week. He goes to 18 Bruins games a year. “This is the best sports town in the world. Every single one of my friends has some kind of sports collection from at least one of the teams.”
He pulls out his phone to show me pictures of his 14x26 garage in Walpole. It is a museum of items he has collected. There was a special spot for his father, who came by every night to watch the Bruins. When his father died last September, everybody at the funeral wore a Bruins jersey. You never saw Thrashers fans do that. Not even when the Thrashers left town.
‘Cover up that Falcons jersey’
On Tuesday — still wearing my Falcon’s jersey — I found myself in a museum of a bar in downtown Boston called McGreevy’s. Founded in 1894, it fancies itself America’s oldest sports bar. Every wall is plastered with the Celtics or the Red Sox or the Bruins or the Patriots. And yes, the Braves. (You remember the 1914 world champion Boston Braves, don’t you)?
A sign in the middle of the place reads “1,200 steps to Fenway.”
The front window — facing Boylston Street, and only about 100 steps from the finish line of the Boston Marathon – was emblazoned with the simplest of messages: Go Pats.
I met two mattress salesmen at McGreevy’s sharing a huge plate of wings and nachos.
Nice guys. Mark Newman was born and raised in Boston and remembers skipping school in the fall of 1978 to go to Fenway to see the Sox lose a one-game playoff to the hated Yankees.
Mihaly Harvath is actually from Foley, Ala., and went to the University of Alabama. He has lived between Alabama and Boston all his life and “kinda likes” the Dirty Birds and “loves” Julio Jones.
“I hope Atlanta plays well and Julio goes off, but I don’t want them to beat us,” Harvath said. “Go Pats.”
It was starting to snow, a dusting actually, but enough to shut Atlanta down for a week, so I bid adieu to my two hosts.
As I got ready to brave the Boston cold, Harvath, with a mix of Southern concern and New England pragmatism, looked me in the eyes and said: “Cover up that Falcons’ jersey. You don’t want nobody to see you wearing it.”
I walked the 1,200 steps to Fenway, to visit the Cask ‘n Flagon, whose front door is at the base of the Green Monster. I ran into Jim Lorentz and Corey Smith, boyhood friends from Buffalo. They are Bills fans, but can’t help but appreciate the Boston sports culture.
Lorentz’ company licenses those t-shirts that championship teams wear immediately after the game. He has 24,000 Patriots championship shirts on order. His colleague in Atlanta, with the Falcons’ account, has 4,000.
“When I was working in Atlanta, I couldn’t give away Falcons stuff. Here (Patriots merchandise) is always in demand,” Lorentz said. “A lot of people here are already thinking that this is a done deal. That the Patriots are going to win and all of this is just a formality.”
A lot of people, maybe, but not everybody.
A preacher in a Falcons hoodie
Before I leave frigid Boston on Wednesday, I swing over to Cambridge to find Jonathan Walton, he of the deflated football and one of the most important and high-profile figures on campus.
In 2012, Walton was appointed to his professorship at the School of Divinity and named Pusey minister of Memorial Church, a nondenominational center of Christian life on campus.
But most people know him as Harvard’s resident Falcons fan.
The first thing I notice in the office of the Lithonia native and Morehouse graduate is a “Rise Up,” hand towel. When he walks in, the man who replaced the always-proper Peter Gomes is wearing a grey suit jacket over a black Falcons hoodie. He sees my Julio Jones jersey and we do the brother handshake.
“When I took this job, my wife gave me two conditions. She said, ‘Don’t expect me to come to church every Sunday and if you start talking in a British accent, I’m leaving you,’” Walton said. “I took that to mean that we are who we are, that we come from a rich community, and that we have our own styles and loves that we can incorporate into the Harvard culture.”
So he talks about the Falcons almost as much as he talks about the Bible. He replaced Gomes’ weekly teas with tailgate parties — catered by Chick-fil-A. He still has Falcons season tickets and plans his preaching schedule accordingly.
We walk over to the Sparks House, the 178-year-old home where Walton lives with his three children and wife, Cecily, a UGA graduate.
Cecily breaks the bad news that the Falcons’ flag they ordered hasn’t been raised yet, as the New England wind snaps at the huge crimson Harvard flag still above the door.
A table in the foyer of the house is empty except for a lit candle and a tiny figurine of Walton’s favorite player — Michael Vick. Upstairs in his oldest son’s room, a giant Fathead of Julio Jones dominates a wall.
Walton didn’t try to get Super Bowl tickets. Instead, he and Cecily are preparing the house for a gathering Sunday.
“Actually, this is going to be the biggest Super Bowl party that Harvard has ever seen,” Walton said. “And we are going to win.”
Postscript: Walking across campus to lunch, Cecily calls Rev. Walton to tell him that workers had lifted the Falcons flag. But on Thursday morning, I got an urgent text message from Rev. Walton: "Dudes from the construction team vandalized my office this morning." He sent pictures. They had taped fliers reading "Go Patriots," all over his office.
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