Buddhas of Boston Sports: How Bill Belichick Ended The Opioid Crisis (eBook)

Introduction

2017. Holy shit, what a year. It began with Donald Trump replacing Barack Obama in the White House intending to make America great again. The New England Patriots had the greatest comeback in football history, let alone Super Bowl history, against the Atlanta Falcons with former Boston College quarterback Matt Ryan. They were down by 25 points; the actual score is hard to say without feeling like I’m running it into the ground. That was almost halfway through in the third quarter, a total of twenty-three minutes and thirty-one seconds left in regulation and this one, wait for it . . . was the first Super Bowl to go into overtime. It was the fifty-first Super Bowl, Roman numerals LI. Patriots CEO Robert Kraft, after the game, said that it was “unequivocally the sweetest.”

Why was this unequivocally the sweetest? For one, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was suspended for the first four games over “Deflategate,” the supposed scandal in 2015 that honestly was just a bullshit charge over two PSI in a football. A little karmic revenge because Brady—TB12—was thirty-nine at the time and had four fewer games on Ryan. Second was the probability of being down 25 points with a 0.3 per cent chance of winning in the third quarter and overcoming those odds. Third, this was Brady’s seventh appearance and the Patriots’ ninth appearance overall and fifth Super Bowl championship, effectively completing TB12’s very own Infinity Gauntlet. The Patriots had won two years prior in Super Bowl XLIX (49) against the Seattle Seahawks and former New England coach Pete Carroll.

What other big sporting event happened? The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking their 107-year drought. Their president of baseball operations was Theo Epstein, who greatly contributed to ending the Red Sox’ 86-year drought. The Cubs ace was former Red Sox pitcher John Lester, cancer survivor. The connections to Boston were via Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer, and players John Lester, John Lackey, David Ross. The “Hard Luck” playoff losses and a bullshit curse. In 2003 Cubs fans must have felt cursed when a fan interfered in game 6 of the National League Championship Series. The Red Sox curse hit them that year when Grady Little left Pedro in an inning too long and The Yankees crushed their souls in Game seven of the American League Championship Series. These strange coincidences, or karmic connections, are intriguing to me, and as a practicing Buddhist I find that nothing is “coincidence” but is the cosmic phenomenon of cause and effect.

Sports is a great training for life—a place to learn the value of teamwork, usually as a youth. In sports, you have a winner and a loser—cut and dried. There are multitudes of statistics to quantify any activity players do that is considered valuable. There is only one champion per league every year. To non–sports fans, winning a Super Bowl might not seem like much—just an overhyped sporting event. But it’s really beneficial for the whole region the team is in. The playoff run leading up to the event injects a certain energy into both teams’ hometowns. Then comes the elation of winning or the heartbreak of defeat. In Boston we have experienced all of it, but 2017 was something else. Buddhism is about winning and losing, and it’s up to YOU when and how much to compete. Now that you know you’re a Buddha, you can start making causes to experience the winning in your daily life.

In Do Your Job, Part 2, a film about the Patriots’ journey to Super Bowl LI, Pats general manager Bill Belichick emphasizes how they would put in over 120 practices, 120 causes. A major cause they made was the third two-point conversion play that the Patriots worked on during the playoffs. In the Super Bowl they needed that third two-point package because they needed every play to make history. You actually can see the direct causes the Patriots are putting in, and if they do lose, it’s Bill Belichick saying he needs to coach better, Tom Brady saying he needs to execute better; they take personal responsibility for what they can be responsible for. During Super Bowl LI, Julian Edelman says during halftime, “It’s going to be a great story,” with full confidence that they were going to win. It wasn’t just him—nobody on the Patriots’ side was panicking. They had a certain serenity about them; they tapped into their Buddha nature and played like they had turned on “God mode,” and they did their job and won the game. It took a ton of great plays, including our own miracle Edelman catch, to win the coin toss in overtime. The Patriots handled it with incredible patience, and Bill Belichick’s Buddhahood was beaming.

Bakataro

There is a diehard fan, a somewhat fictionalized character representation called Bakataro. It means “foolish idiot” in Japanese and is loosely based on this author. We will call him Bakatari—“asshole” in Japanese—when he’s doing some especially dumb shit. Some of the people he meets and interacts with in this work are real, and some have had their names changed twice. All names have been generated by a random name generator that’s why some may not fit the character, some are named after fruits and vegetables, if I could use emoji’s I would. Nothing is fabricated, but Bakataro is a fictionalized representation of me. Got it? Cool. There is I, the author, and Bakataro/Bakatari, my foolish alter ego. I’m not trying to get anyone indicted, and I’m not trying to shame anyone. If anything, it’s Bakatari who is a shameless fucking animal but has something to tell you all. Bakataro’s mom, Mamasan, is from Japan, and his father, Brownie, is from Carver, Massachusetts. Brownie’s family has four relatives who came to North America on the Mayflower. Mamasan’s uncle Masao Koga was a very famous composer in Japan. Bakataro feels like he should be dead and has only survived to tell you this story and change the Karma of America and the world like his family has done since the beginning.

Shameful honesty: Bakataro was at home freaking out. He’d sent his guest home in the third quarter, he was so pissed off. He was also high AF speedballing fentanyl and cocaine at the time, and this game was killing his buzz. His friend from high school, Robert “Bobby” Perry—we’ll call him BP—had been hanging out for the Super Bowl, and they had a gram and a half of coke and three grams of fentanyl—not even heroin mixed with fentanyl but fentanyl with just some kind of cut on it. Baka didn’t really like shooting up; it was too much work and the risk too great. At the time, February 2017, he was a raging drug addict, having snorted coke for more than twenty years and indulged an opiate addiction on and off—more on than off—for the last decade. Why is he revealing this? Wasn’t this supposed to be about Buddhism and Boston? This guy’s a fucking mess. Well, no doubt he was at the time, and he had no idea of the train wreck to come. He didn’t care about the causes he was instigating and was not paying attention to the effects that were manifesting. It was great to see the Patriots win such a great game. That was the joy in his life, week to week, chasing drugs and watching sports while Boston was winning games. Like any other drug addict or alcoholic, he had to hit the proverbial rock bottom before anything would change.

The high of winning a Super Bowl wears off after the parade, right? Things were looking good for Boston sports after the SB. The Red Sox traded for Chris Sale, a top-of-the-rotation ace pitcher, so the prospect of baseball was looking good, and the Celtics were winning too. Bakatari was a high-functioning drug addict, so he thought. February 28th, he fell asleep at the wheel and split a telephone pole and crashed into a tree. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was saved by his airbag. He only got a couple stitches above is eyebrow. He was driving a 2007 Ford F150. The Wareham Fire Department used the jaws of life to cut him out. The truck was totaled, and he is still thankful he didn’t hurt anyone else. If he ever gets into acting and needs to cry on demand, he’ll just think about this and what might have happened. Dangerous shit look at all the people getting run over and hit and runs. You will learn the specifics of how fucked up he is as we go on—this is about Buddhism, I promise, and how to turn bad actions—bad causes—into something positive. I am certainly not minimizing what causes he was making; that was a bad situation. The very next day he totaled his roommate’s car by putting her 2009 Toyota Matrix on top of a guardrail.

Yes, he totaled her car the very next day. He was on his way to Taunton to meet his buddy BP to hook up because he couldn’t the day before. He remembers Sunshine, the roommate, talking on the phone and reminding him to buckle up. A minute later, getting on route 495 off Route 28 in Wareham, he was on top of a guardrail screaming what the fuck happened. Massachusetts State Police showed up, and he couldn’t explain why he hit the guardrail. He had no recollection. They took his driver’s license for being an immediate threat. The police brought him home instead of the hospital. He didn’t feel like he was injured, but he was angry. He yelled to Sunshine, “I’m sorry, I did it again and ruined your car.” Then he tried killing himself by taping a plastic bag over his head. It sounds like a weak attempt, but he probably would have hung himself if Sunshine hadn’t called the police. He had practiced tying nooses and had one in his closet.

The Wareham police responded quickly, and one of the policemen was officer Chris Conner, a former classmate whom Baka played...