How the Patriots morphed from a Cape house into an NFL titan
By Sean Leahy, USA TODAYFirst in a series exploring the histories of all 10 AFL franchises as the NFL celebrates the league's 50th anniversary.If Mary Sullivan had had her way, the New England Patriots might never have become a reality.

The wife of Patriots founder Billy Sullivan had a dream — and a savings account to match — for a summer home on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. But her husband persuaded Mary to wait on the Cape home as he and nine partners invested $25,000 to purchase the start-up American Football League's final franchise charter in 1959.



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It was a humble beginning to a team that would, more than four decades later, become one of the NFL's titans. But it made Sullivan, who died in 1998, the godfather of professional football in New England.

"I can't help but think if he just drove around Boston to see how many cars have Patriots stickers on the back," says Sullivan's son, Patrick, the team's general manager from 1983 to 1991.

"He knew there was an interest in football in the region. It just needed a little nurturing, cultivation and excitement."

The Boston Patriots were competitive in their formative years. They won 35 games from 1961 to 1964 and reached the 1963 AFL title game. Still, the team's logistics were very challenging, and the Patriots started off homeless.

The team used four sites — Fenway Park, Harvard Stadium and fields at Boston College and Boston University — for home games during the AFL's 10-year run. Gino Cappelletti, the star wideout and kicker who won the 1964 league MVP, said being nomads didn't faze the players. "It was all part of the adversity that the league and players were going through," he says. "No one really gave a damn. Let's buckle up those helmets and go out and play."

Many of the players wouldn't have been playing professionally if not for the upstart league. So Cappelletti said it was easy for the Patriots, who also didn't have a permanent practice field, to accept watching game film while sitting on milk crates in the bowels of a high school stadium.

"We hung bed sheets over water pipes," Cappelletti says, "and we'd show the film against those sheets."

Initially, drawing fans was a struggle. When the Patriots launched, the Boston Celtics were two years into a string of eight consecutive NBA titles, and the Boston Bruins and Boston Red Sox were well established.

"The (NFL's New York) Giants were the big favorites" former Patriots quarterback Babe Parilli says, "and we were infringing on them."

Adds Cappelletti, "The Giants players were household names all around New England. … We had to just hold our own."

The AFL's pass-happy style helped the Patriots make inroads. In 1960, they averaged 16,894 fans a game. By 1964, their average attendance rose to 28,522. The Patriots boasted stars in Cappelletti, 1966 AFL MVP Jim Nance, who led the league in rushing in 1966 and 1967, and Parilli, whose 31 touchdown passes in 1964 set a team record that stood until [color="#00529b"]Tom Brady's 50 surpassed it in 2007.

In 1964, Cappelletti kicked off a five-game winning streak by drilling a game-winning field goal to beat the Houston Oilers 25-24 at home, and Parilli said that made fans take notice. "They called us the cardiac kids," Parilli says, "and we started to draw after that."

Offense — and lots of it — was the game plan for the league. Teams recruited innovative coaches who would make AFL action distinct from the NFL's methodical, in-the-trenches style. "The way we were going to survive was by playing a brand of football that was exciting," Cappelletti recalls.

It was more fun playing in the wide-open AFL, says Parilli, who spent five years in the NFL. Back-and-forth AFL contests that ended 40-38 enthralled fans, who suddenly saw that not every game needed to end in a 7-3 defensive battle. "I think that's what the NFL finally realized, that they needed to get more scoring," Parilli says. "The fans wanted to see some offense."

Cappelletti's celebrity was enhanced by his job as a sports anchor on a local TV station — while he was a player. For a league and a team trying to emerge from the NFL's shadow, getting free advertising every night was enough to allow Cappelletti to break curfew at training camp.

The AFL was not a rich man's game in its infancy. Many Patriots players worked second jobs. "The football pay was really not going to do it for you," says Cappelletti, who earned $7,500 in his first season.

In the league's early days, some players worried that their clubs couldn't afford to pay them.

But by the mid-1960s, lucrative television deals and rising acceptance from fans helped to pump money and confidence into the start-up league. "I never really got the sense that this was some sort of second-rate, novelty thing," Patrick Sullivan says. "Once we developed our own stars and they became fixtures in the community, then people said we'd stand up against any teams in the NFL."

But for the Patriots, less well-heeled than their AFL competitors, administrative challenges remained.

"We really didn't know whether we'd play at Fenway, BC or Harvard," Sullivan says. "So we printed tickets for all three venues to send to season ticketholders."

But the struggles of the AFL founders paid off. The fans won, with pro football entrenched in cities that the NFL had been underserving. The players won, with new life for those who would otherwise have seen their football dreams die. And the "Foolish Club" — the moniker given to the AFL owners — won by disproving doubters when the once-fledgling league won acceptance from the NFL.

"We were all struggling and trying to buck the establishment and trying to survive another day and another season," Cappelletti says. "It's something that we probably look back on and realize the difficulties we had that we just didn't know about at the time. When you're pioneering, you don't really know it because everything is exploring."

And Mary Sullivan won when she finally got the summer house on Cape Cod. She still lives there, with a keepsake of the AFL's rise cherished by her late husband: A photo of Billy Sullivan and his fellow owners taken 45 years ago as the league began to turn the corner. The inscription on the frame around the AFL logo reads: "The Foolish Club, Age 5."

Mary Sullivan can relish that this year as the NFL again toasts the Foolish Club, age 50.