FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Martellus Bennett had a branding problem.
The versatile tight end fielded a consistently great product for three seasons, but Chicago wasn’t buying in. The Bears whispered that he’d complained about his role and his contract. A stodgy media, eternally vexed by the self-described Black Unicorn, labeled him “me-first.” On pace to break Mike Ditka’s stone-carved franchise records, Bennett instead broke for his fourth team in six seasons. The Bears shipped him to the Patriots last spring, and thus began the successful reboot of Bennett’s career.
Less than a year later, Bennett has become a media favorite. His locker-room media sessions are a can’t-miss spectacle of free-verse comedy, football truisms and life lessons, including the second-most-memorable defense of bacon in recorded history (trailing only Jim Gaffigan’s). He launched a creative workshop, the Imagination Agency, started a clothing line and published his first children’s book. Winning nearly as many games this season (15) as he did in three years with the Bears (19), all Bennett needs is a win in tonight’s AFC championship to make his first trip to the Super Bowl, a game that will be played in his hometown of Houston.
Most importantly, the product has not been diluted. Despite playing with various injuries throughout the year, Bennett was New England’s No. 2 receiver (701 yards) and led the team in yards per catch (12.7). His relentless, blue-collar run blocking has helped to revive a ground game that became a liability last year.
“It’s always been a good product, but the user experience hasn’t always been as good as it is now,” Bennett said. “I think a lot of that has come with age. I know how to control the U.X. and whatnot. It’s a little bit of growth.”
To take control of the user experience, Bennett had to become a fully realized version of himself. For someone who is more self-conscious, soft-spoken and contemplative than his sound bites might suggest, that’s not easy. He got there with help from two unlikely sources: 1. The notoriously buttoned-down New England Patriots. 2. The notoriously combative Boston media.
“I think that there’s parts of my career,” Bennett said, “early in my career and then when you’ve got new coaches that didn’t really know me, I felt like I couldn’t really be who I was.”
That was especially true when John Fox took over as head coach of the Bears in 2015. Bennett said he “didn’t mesh” with that coaching staff, and never got comfortable.
“They just didn’t really get it,” he said. “They didn’t get me. When you’re being yourself and people don’t get you, you look like an outsider most of the time. They don’t understand your humor, your personality, because it takes time to get to know one another.”
In New England, however, he immediately found the chemistry he couldn’t develop in Chicago.
“We just went through that process a lot faster than in most places,” Bennett said. “I think the biggest thing when I came in here was that it was without any expectations. I don’t think they had any expectations for me. I think we both just took each other, accepted each other for what we are once we got there.”
Part of the Patriots’ success has been the ability to absorb varied personalities into the collective pursuit of winning.
“There are a lot of guys that have good rapport in the locker room,” Patriots head Coach Bill Belichick said. “There’s a lot of mutual respect in there. Guys are different, but that’s okay. They get along, they care for each other, they work with each other. They’re good teammates. That’s the bottom line.”
Bennett has apparently been a good teammate since childhood. He said at around age 10, he and his friends would rob an ice cream truck in the summer time, with him playing a key role in the heist. He would walk up to the window and make an order while his friends snuck around to the other side of truck, banging on the back wall to make a commotion. When the attendant turned to deal with the racket, Bennett would reach over the counter, scoop up whatever he could get his mitts on and then share the bounty with his friends.
When his current teammates speak of Bennett, their eyes light up as if he’d just handed them free, illicit ice cream.
“Marty’s one of most interesting people probably in whole city,” said veteran defensive end Chris Long, who also joined the Patriots this season. “I think it’s cool that he’s a great football player, but also a complete person off the field. He’s not going to change who he is and what he does.”
To hear Bennett describe it, the Bears operated with a philosophy nearly opposite of the Patriots’, stressing instead the concept of one franchise personality with little room for individualism.
“The team here, they promote you as an individual as well,” Bennett said. “In Chicago, they promote the Bears. Like, it’s all about the Bears. The history, tradition is what they sell. So anything new and different, it’s not what they put out there.”
This is a significant contrast to an organization whose franchise player is building a lifestyle brand with the blessing of the team.
“(In New England), every guy almost has like their own thing going on, who they are off the field,” Bennett said. “And (the Patriots) promote that and they sell that and that’s what the fans like about the players as individuals.”
Bennett had 55 catches for 701 yards and a career-high seven touchdowns in the regular season. He’s not Gronk, running up the seam to stretch the defense. He didn’t gain 1,000 yards. But he’s nonetheless been the best alternative New England has had in a playoff game without No. 87.
Let’s consider him in terms of Patriots tight ends who aren’t Gronkowski. Ben Coates averaged 54 catches, 605 yards and 5.6 touchdowns in nine seasons with the Pats. Benjamin Watson’s best year in New England: 49 catches, 643 yards, three touchdowns. Here’s the kicker. Watson had 91 targets in 2006. Coates averaged 96 per season. Patriots quarterbacks targeted Bennett 73 times.
Media, on the other hand, have targeted Bennett relentlessly. In a good way. His cold relationship with the Chicago press seemed to indicate it wouldn’t go that way.
In New England, however, he found a media corps starving for a thing he can provide with regularity – amusing quotes. Nearly the inverse of his head coach, Bennett finds ways to say quotable, memorable things while toeing the line and staying mum on the important stuff. It’s something of a departure from Chicago, where he always engaged and answered questions, but again, wasn’t himself. Partly, he says, he felt he had to be more serious in Chicago because the team wasn’t winning. But it’s helped that Boston media have been a ripe audience.
“A lot of times when I speak, it usually goes over a lot of people’s head,” he said. “But you guys get my puns, my dry humor. My humor is very dry. You guys get it and the fans here get it. It’s a good audience. Like, I can go in and perform and tell my jokes in front of a good audience. It’s much different than trying to perform in front of a bad audience with bad energy.”
(Follow Dave Brown on Twitter @ThatDaveBrown.)