Enjoying the Ride : Drew Bledsoe Is the Hottest Thing in the NFL Since Dan Marino, but Don’t Forget: He’s Still a Kid

FOXBORO, Mass. —  Sunday night in November. A freezing wind whips down the cobblestone streets past the tightly packed storefronts of downtown Boston.

The best young quarterback in the NFL, sitting in a bar with a hometown buddy at closing time, has an idea.

He has just won his second consecutive game. He is two weeks from completing more passes in one afternoon than anyone else in NFL history.

He is 22, rich beyond his comprehension, his home is 3,000 miles away in rural Washington state, and he has an idea.

A limousine. Why not ride home in a limo?

The bartender gives him the number of a service. He calls it. Thirty minutes later, up pulls a limo.

Bledsoe and his buddy walk to the door, then Bledsoe turns to several other people milling around his table.

You too, he tells them. All of you. Even if you’re just going a block. Get in. It’ll be fun.

His bemused acquaintances pile in. The limo begins a slow crawl through the winding streets of Boston. Bledsoe notices a switch on the back seat.

Look, he says, a sunroof. Let’s see if it works.

He flips the switch. The roof opens. A chill whips through the car. His friends are begging him to close it. Bledsoe has another idea.

Watch this, he says.

Bledsoe unfurls his 6-foot-5 frame, stands up in the back seat and sticks his head through the roof.

And begins screaming.

Drivers stare, pedestrians stop, and yet he screams, and laughs, and hollers some more. For no other reason than that he is 22 years old and he can.

*

Just before the news conference this summer in which Drew Bledsoe was introduced as the highest-paid player in the NFL with a new $42-million contract, his agent, Leigh Steinberg, cornered him with some bad news.

“This contract contains one clause,” Steinberg told Bledsoe. “When you meet the media to discuss it, you have to turn your cap around so the bill is facing forward.”

Bledsoe was so caught up in the spirit of the moment, he did more than that.

“I actually ran to our pro shop and bought some Patriot stuff,” Bledsoe said. “Actually put it on.”

On an afternoon earlier this week, those false fronts had long since been put away. In preparation for a showdown here Sunday with quarterback Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins, Bledsoe has put on his game face.

Golf cap on backward. Wearing sandals. T-shirt and shorts hanging loosely from his lean frame.

Sub sandwich at his side. Playbook at his . . . now, where is that playbook again?

“We can be certain that Drew has not yet left the facility,” one Patriot employee said this week when asked about the elusive quarterback.

The employee patted a large black folder on a desk: “He left his playbook here.”

Bledsoe has made few other mistakes these days.

It is the legendary Marino who has thrown more interceptions, two, than Bledsoe, none, this one-game season.

It is Bledsoe who last year became the youngest player in NFL history to pass for 7,000 yards, beating Marino by more than a year.

It is Bledsoe who holds the record for most pass completions in one game, 45 against the Minnesota Vikings last year.

Of course, Marino figures to break most of Fran Tarkenton’s major passing records this season while Bledsoe has yet to throw more touchdowns than interceptions in either of his two full seasons.

Marino is a Picasso. Bledsoe is still a sidewalk chalk sketching.

“Marino is a competitor , like all the great ones are competitors,” Patriot Coach Bill Parcells said.

And Bledsoe?

“He’s, uh, OK,” Parcells said.

To compare them in any fashion would be like comparing Cambridge and Coconut Grove.

Bledsoe, who loves Seattle street music and has already mastered a shrug at 23, is Generation X.

Marino, who loves the dramatic and wears his emotions on his sweatband, is Generation Ohhhhh.

Bledsoe never shows anger, stress or displeasure with any of his less-talented teammates.

Marino yells so much, and so colorfully, that cable companies could offer an optional cut-out service to tender-eared viewers between Dolphin offensive plays.

“I’m an emotional player, I can’t play any other way,” Marino said. “Most of the time I’m mad. I’m mad at myself.”

Just a guess, but those teammates who have indentations in their chests from Marino’s angry finger-pointing probably would not agree.

Jeff Dellenbach, the Patriot center who has worked with both Marino and Bledsoe, was asked which one was cockier.

The questioners were Miami writers, who did not know Bledsoe.

“You know the answer to that one,” he told them.

That is both Bledsoe’s curse and his charm.

He plays for a coach who expects him to be a tough, Phil Simms-type leader, yet Bledsoe has no idea how good he is.

Nor, it seems, does he even wonder about it.

“The NFL is always something I dreamed about,” he said. “But now that it’s happened so fast . . . I wish I could just go out there and play and have everybody forget who I was. Just 11 on 11. You win, you go home. No big deal.”

Sort of like those games he plays on the lawn of his home in a quiet New England village near here.

He rounds up the neighborhood kids and arranges games of two-on-two football with one rule.

“I get to be all-time quarterback,” Bledsoe says, smiling. “You remember that, don’t you?”

*

When Steinberg met Bledsoe’s parents three years ago, before their son was the overall No. 1 pick in the NFL, he was told to wait outside a hotel room in Yakima, Wash.

Mac Bledsoe, Drew’s father, would pick him up.

Steinberg waited and waited and soon became uncomfortable when what appeared to be an aging biker roared up on a huge motorcycle. They stared at each other for a few seconds before the man on the motorcycle spoke.

“Leigh?” he said. “I’m Mac Bledsoe. Let’s roll.”

Drew’s father is not only a biker, but a football coach and a nationally recognized teacher of parenting classes.

His mother, Barbara, raised Drew and younger brother Adam--a star high school quarterback this season--on small-town Washington values.

“In our family, you value your grandparents,” she said. “In our family, you speak in respectful tones. In our family, you care about the other person.”

And in their family, that person is not measured by the size of his paycheck.

During Bledsoe’s first training camp, Mac drove his motorcycle cross-country to watch his son play, stopping only to sleep by the side of the road.

When Drew chided him about not spending money for hotels, Mac looked around Drew’s first apartment, which had virtually no furniture, not even a bed.

“And where do you sleep, son?” he asked his young millionaire.

Bledsoe was so amazed at making more than $1 million in bonus money before he played in a game, that he and brother Adam would phone his bank to giggle at the computerized voice that updated his account.

“It was my college bank, and I was used to having them say, ‘Your balance is $5 and 45 cents,” Bledsoe recalled. “Suddenly it was like, one-point-five million. It was crazy. It was hilarious.”

Bledsoe even thought it was funny when he received a phone call from a worker at the shop where his car stereo was being installed. A months-old check had fallen on the guy from underneath the sun visor.

A check for $100,000.

“I told the guy, ‘No big deal. Just put it back, I’ll fool with it later,’ ” Bledsoe said. “I mean, I didn’t need it or anything.”

He paused.

“Then my mom found out,” he said.

Barbara likes her exceptional children to remain grounded, but this was ridiculous.

“I said, ‘Drew, you did not leave that check in that visor for that long, did you?’ ” she recalled. “I could not believe it.”

Drew’s response?

“He kept telling me, ‘Mom, I’m just a kid, I’m just a kid,’ ” she said.

It is that kid who owns a house down the road from the college he attended, Washington State in Pullman, and fills that house with friends needing a place to sleep.

It is that kid who flies those friends to Boston every year so he can have someone to share his wide-eyed amazement.

“Drew will take me all over town, and we’ll talk about what a thrill it is for us to do what we are doing,” said close friend Spike Matau, one of the people living in Bledsoe’s Pullman house. “I remember once last summer, he got us a suite on a lake out here. He looked around and said, ‘Isn’t this cool?’

“It’s really neat to enjoy something with somebody like him.”

Matau, who also stuck his head out of the limousine sunroof that November night in Boston, said Drew once turned to him during a late-night conversation and shook his head.

“He said, ‘Spiker, do you know how much money I’ll make next year, just wearing a certain cap on the sidelines? Do you know I’ll make $17 million in just salary? Isn’t that sick?’ ” Matau recalled. “What could I say? Yeah, what has happened is wild.”

It is also that kid who has learned to take constant criticism from Parcells in sideline episodes that appear in highlight films. It bothered him at first--”In our family, you speak in respectful tones”--but he has since learned that Parcells is merely trying to toughen him up.

“Half the time, Coach Parcells yells just to yell,” Bledsoe said. “I’ve got no problem with it now. You listen to everything, then you decide what is valuable.”

He shrugged again. It was time to go home. To eat tacos. To watch videos such as “Dumb and Dumber.” To play with the kids in the street.

All-time quarterback. It does have a ring to it, huh dude?