Seth Wickersham on cracking the Patriots’ code of silence
Bob Woodward had Deep Throat, the source that met him in a parking garage with top-secret information that would topple a president. Seth Wickersham had “staffers,” employees of the New England Patriots who met him everywhere from coffee shops to cars in the parking lot outside Gillette Stadium. The consequences of Wickersham’s report haven’t toppled any world leaders, yet, but both reporters were working to break similar codes of silence.
Wickersham, a senior writer at ESPN the Magazine who wrote the blistering story detailing a power struggle in Foxborough, learned the trade firsthand from the Washington Post luminary. He did an internship with the Post in college, and over lunch one day asked Woodward how he managed to write entire books full of off-the-record Oval Office secrets.
Anonymous sources and short, simple questions was the answer. Where did you sit? Where did this person sit? What was this person wearing? Woodward could recreate a moment he wasn’t witness to, a crucial skill in a cloak and dagger industry.
“In the NFL and in politics, there can be a code of silence,” Wickersham told a group of journalism students at UMass Amherst on Thursday. “It’s not ideal to have anonymous sources and you don’t want to rely on them too much, or at least one of them too much. You want to have enough to the point where you feel comfortable. But you simply can’t do it interviewing people on the record sometimes, because these people could lose their jobs for talking to you.”
The Patriots have managed to create a web of paranoia the Nixon administration would be proud of. Wickersham was loath to even admit the name of the restaurant where he met some of the sources, just in case the establishment’s security footage would be rolling at the team’s next film study. He talked to over a dozen people inside the New England organization, but had to be careful when it came to labeling his sources in the final product.
“Because there’s so few people in the building, and especially people who would know what was going on, I had to be very vague about how I quoted people and just list them as ‘staffers,'” Wickersham said. “I couldn’t say ‘high-ranking’ Patriots officials because there’s only two of them.”
The writer who would eventually face a wave of backlash from Patriots Nation first heard rumblings about tension inside the building in August. He didn’t think much of the whispers initially, shrugging them off as the strained relations you’ll find in any locker room. That is, until the shocking news that Jimmy Garoppolo had been traded to the 49ers broke in October.
“My reportorial flag went flying up when that happened because Belichick wanted to coach Jimmy Garoppolo,” Wickersham said. “He had told people in the building, anyone who would listen, that he was not going to trade him. He saw him as an integral piece to his legacy. He wanted to transition him to Patriots quarterback whenever Tom Brady walked away. So this just made no sense to me.”
The Brady-Belichick-Kraft story that landed in January was an attempt to answer the question of why Garoppolo was traded. The backlash to the the piece was swift as readers pored over every punctuation mark looking for holes in Wickersham’s reporting. He said he didn’t pay too much heed to the criticism. It wasn’t the first time he’d received death threats for reporting on the Patriots.
Wickersham was confident the story would age well as more truths came out about the locker room dynamics, and he felt grateful to Kraft when the owner adressed the situation ahead of the AFC Championship. Kraft acknowledged the split and said Belichick and Brady had to put their egos aside. It also helped that the story came out during New England’s bye week, not in the days before the divisional round.
“I was really glad about that. I didn’t want it to come out the week of the playoff game,” Wickersham said. “If they had lost that game, I would’ve had to move.”
The Anchorage, Alaska native built the story over a series of months, talking to sources when it fit their schedule. That usually meant early in the morning or late at night, and Wickersham tried to hold the meetings face-to-face whenever possible. The goal, he said, was to collect varied accounts of the same events until he felt he had a bulletproof case.
Wickersham never really knows why people talk to him, and doesn’t ask in case they second-guess the decision. He compared it to staying well away from a pitcher when they’re throwing a no-hitter. But he speculated that some talk to try and shape the reporting, others to get the full truth out, and still others that are just disenchanted with the organization. He works to present himself as interested but not annoying, someone they’ll want to be around and be themselves around.
And how does an investigative reporter cultivate these sources?
“Alcohol helps,” Wickersham laughed. “I’m not kidding. If you get hammered with somebody and you don’t write about it the next day, you’re gold for life.”
