Thanks, Michael Jackson, for the Lombardi Trophies.

[Mark Farinella]

I'm on vacation and enjoying the time off from the blog, but I would be remiss if I did not make note of the passing of pop icon/whack job Michael Jackson of an apparent heart attack on Thursday. I wasn't a big fan of Jacko's music ("Billie Jean" was easy to dance to and I gave it an 85; the rest was just a lot of noise to me) and I certainly had no love whatsoever for the bizarre behavoir that characterized his later years. But I do want to give credit where credit is due, and that involves Jackson's role in the evolution of the New England Patriots as a sports dynasty.

You may remember that when Jackson was at the top of his popularity, the ownership of the Patriots wanted him to play a series of concerts at then-Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro as part of Jackson's 1984 "Victory" tour, which was expected to be a blockbuster of a tour the likes of which the entertainment world had never seen. But when the Sullivan family applied for dates, the Foxboro Board of Selectmen said "no." Fearful of what was termed "the unknown element" the concerts would bring to town, the selectmen steadfastly refused to grant multiple dates to the Sullivans for the concerts.

To this day, the debate still rages over what the selectmen meant by "the unknown element." It's easy to presume that racism was at the root of their fears, but Jackson, an African-American performer, was as mainstream as one could possibly be in 1984, and his most ardent fans were the legions of teen and pre-teen suburban girls who would have pestered their daddies unmercifully for the money to buy tickets to the Victory Tour concerts in Foxboro.

Let's also remember that at the time, Sullivan Stadium was not a friendly place. Football crowds were often unruly, drunk and disorderly. Security was lax and high arrest totals were often posted either at the games, or at the other big-ticket concerts that were staged there. So it would appear that there were legitimate fears over crowd-control issues on the part of the selectmen, although it was still a highly unusual decision on their part not to approve the concerts.

What made the rejection of the Foxboro concert dates so amazing was the fact that the tour was being bankrolled and promoted by Billy Sullivan's No. 1 son, Chuck, the executive vice president of the Patriots and the man who did most of the day-to-day business for the club. Sensing the town fathers' reluctance in bringing the Jackson concerts to Foxboro, the younger Sullivan managed to talk his way into the role of the tour's primary promoter -- and he produced the cash that made the Jacksons blink by using the Patriots and their home stadium as collateral for Sullivan's involvement.

There were some benefits. Sullivan's NFL connections made it possible for the Victory Tour to be booked into NFL stadiums for 26 of the planned 55 concerts in the U.S. and Canada. He also hoped to apply what he had learned from the NFL Properties marketing wing of the league to spur concert-related memorabilia sales throughout the country.

But when it came time for the Foxboro selectmen to make their decision, Chuck Sullivan's clout as the promoter of the tour meant absolutely nothing to them -- and that was the whole point of getting involved, for Sullivan to make sure that his family got as big a piece of the pie as was humanly possible.

Sullivan, of course, knew even less about running a concert tour than he and his family knew about running a football team. Starting with the tour's first stop in July at Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, he made a fool of himself by demanding discount hotel rates and free newspaper advertising. He bickered constantly with the Jackson family over every little detail and every little expense. He even forgot his pass to the concert at RFK Stadium in Washington and was denied access.

Another unanticipated factor was the sheer size of the stage used for the concert, which reduced the number of concert-viewable seats in each of the NFL-sized venues by anywhere from 25 to 33 percent. So venues that had 60,000 seats could sell only 40,000 to 45,000.

Midway through the tour, the Jacksons had had enough of Chuck Sullivan, and boxing promoter Don King (who called Sullivan "Charley the Tuna" in their first meeting) took over the primary promoting position. Reports differ about how much Sullivan lost for his trouble, but most agree that it was at least $22 million -- at that time, practically all of the Sullivan family's net worth. The concert series was said to have grossed $75 million, a record for its time, but expenses and the failure of merchandising resulted in the Victory Tour being regarded as a colossal defeat.

That began a spiraling plunge toward bankruptcy for the Sullivans. Broke and in the midst of a divorce, Chuck Sullivan was forced to turn one of the stadium's luxury boxes into his personal bedroom -- which became a spectacular embarrassment to the team when yours truly stumbled into the room in the fall of 1984, still thinking it was being used as the stadium's media workroom.

Even though the Patriots defied all of the odds and advanced to Super Bowl XX in the 1985 season, their resources had been drained by the debts incurred by the Victory Tour. Piece by piece, the parts of the Sullivan empire crumbled away. After a failed attempt to attract Reebok CEO Paul Fireman as a major investor, the Sullivans were forced to sell the Patriots in July 1988 to a partnership group headed by Remington Products Corp. CEO Victor Kiam. Four months later, the stadium and its surrounding properties were sold in a sealed-bid auction under the auspices of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, and a partnership consisting of paper products magnate Robert Kraft and shopping mall developmer Steve Karp submitted the winning bid of $25 million over Kiam's low-ball offer of approximately $18 million.

Kraft would eventually buy out Karp and gain full control over the stadium's iron-clad lease to keep the Patriots in place until the 21st century. That lease had made it impossible for both Billy Sullivan and Kiam to sell the team to interests in Jacksonville, Fla., and as Kiam teetered on the brink of bankruptcy himself in 1992, he sold the team to a group of St. Louis investors headed by James Busch Orthwein.

Orthwein, too, was restrained by the terms of the lease from moving the team to St. Louis after that city was denied an expansion franchise by the NFL. So, in January 1994, he sold the team to Kraft for a reported $168 million -- a sum that Kraft still likes to say was "overpaying" for the franchise.

If you generously suggest that Kraft paid a total of $200 million for the old stadium, the team and surrounding properties, it's fair to suggest that he made out quite well in the end. The new stadium, the team and the Patriot Place development are said to be worth more than $1.2 billion today. And if the Sullivans' bankruptcy hadn't paved the way for Kraft's initial involvement in the franchise, who's to say if the team would have ever won three Super Bowls, or would have even been located in New England?

In one of the great ironies of this entire story, it's said that Jackson ignored several letters from Chuck Sullivan begging the singer to bail the Patriots and the owning family out of their financial woes, even long after the team and stadium were no longer theirs. Sullivan was said to have written on one of his letters that Jackson promised to stand by the Sullivan family for having put up all of its assets as collateral to promote the Victory Tour. A quarter-century later, the bizarre recluse that Jackson had become was himself on the brink of bankruptcy when he died at the age of 50.