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KINGS OF SPORT
Kraft’s in, Harrington’s out
BY SETH GITELL

With the New England Patriots getting ready for their second Super Bowl in six years, a bit of reordering is taking place within Boston’s parochial political establishment.

Robert Kraft, the sometimes prideful owner of the New England Patriots, is in. John Harrington, the head of the Yawkey Trust, is out. The transition marks something of a reversal of fortune in these parts. For years, Harrington, an Irish-Catholic member of the Boston College mafia, has been a fixture of the insider set. Kraft, on the other hand, has been disdained as an outsider despite his strong local roots — a fact that may have more to do with ethnicity and religion (Kraft is Jewish) than geography. Raised in Brookline, Kraft grew up a mere two miles from Harrington, a native of Jamaica Plain.

As the Pats prepare for Sunday’s game of games, it’s fair to contrast the current Patriots owner with the outgoing head of the Boston Red Sox. For the record, the Patriots have won two conference championships in the past decade; the Red Sox have not appeared in the World Series since 1986. Kraft is putting the finishing touches on a new state-of-the-art football stadium in Foxborough; the Red Sox are back to square one stadium-wise. After being vilified by local politicians, such as former state senator Stephen Lynch, for wanting to put a stadium in South Boston, Kraft eventually built his new football field in Foxborough with a little more than $70 million in state money, most of which was given for infrastructure improvements. Harrington convinced state legislators to fork over a whopping $200 million for a new Red Sox ballpark, but still couldn’t get the job done. And his mishandling of the team’s sale to a group of out-of-towners — a transaction now under the scrutiny of Attorney General Tom Reilly — has left Bostonians with a bad taste in their mouths.

"Kraft is the golden boy right now," says one business and political insider. "The whole take on him is somebody who is a local business success and philanthropist who wanted to buy a sports team. He’s survived the South Boston fiasco, and now he’s built a stadium, [which] the national media is commenting is the most beautiful ever seen. The other guy is just a two-bit accountant."

A few weeks back, Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi remarked that the "city’s homegrown corporate base [has been] pared down to a bank, an insurance company, and a tabloid newspaper." If the political establishment — specifically former South Boston state senator Stephen Lynch, House Speaker Tom Finneran, and Boston mayor Tom Menino — had dealt more kindly with Kraft’s South Boston stadium plans, Vennochi might have been able to add the words "a successful football team" to that list. Too bad Kraft’s golden-boy transformation didn’t happen earlier.

Issue Date: January 31 - February 7, 2002
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