Raymond Berry, 93.

Raymond Berry is carried off the field in Miami after winning the 1985 AFC title game.

Some called him "laconic." Some called him a figurehead, a stop-gap measure, or even a hands-off coach that let a core group of savvy veterans take the wheel and direct themselves to a Super Bowl.

Those would be incorrect or incomplete descriptions of Raymond Berry, the ninth head coach in the history of the New England Patriots, who passed away at his home in Murfreesboro, Tenn., on May 25 at the age of 93. 

Berry was a Hall of Fame wide receiver.

Maybe he was a little bit of all of those things as he undertook the daunting job of replacing Ron Meyer in the midst of the 1984 season. But looking back through the mists of time, it has become clear to me that Berry was absolutely the right man for the job at that exact point in time.

People chuckled as, throughout the second half of that tumultuous '84 season, Berry stood stoically along the sidelines and meticulously jotted notes into a small notepad during every game. It almost seemed as if he was doing little else, but the Patriots did win four of those last eight games -- and Berry did have a huge impact in the locker room that was not seen immediately by the reporters that covered the team.

There was almost a stereotypical quality to Berry, the coach, as opposed to Berry, the Hall of Fame wide receiver that had spent 13 years achieving at the highest possible level for the Baltimore Colts, retiring from the NFL in 1967 as the league's leader in career receptions and receiving yardage. But there was a carryover from one Berry iteration to the other -- a meticulous, almost fanatical attention to detail that enabled him to overcome perceived physical shortcomings as a player and become one of the most sure-handed receivers in history.

What's more, Berry didn't enter the job looking for glory -- as opposed to his predecessor. Ron Meyer was hired straight out of Southern Methodist University at a time in which pro teams still shied away from hiring college coaches for the top jobs without meaningful time on pro staffs. Meyer, a native Ohioan, valued style over substance and tried to pass himself off as a prairie-wise Texan by regularly adding regional colloquialisms to his press conference answers, but he came off as insincere and artificial. 

Berry was strong and silent on the sideline.

Berry, however, was the genuine article. Born on Feb. 27, 1933, in Corpus Christi, Texas, he could have been plucked out of Central Casting to be Gary Cooper's stand-in in "High Noon." Today, Taylor Sheridan would be casting him in "Yellowstone" and its many spin-offs as a weather-beaten, no-nonsense cowboy that had spent most of his life on the range.

Players on the 1984 Patriots immediately sensed that. Running back Tony Collins was quoted as saying, "Raymond Berry earned more respect in one day than Ron Meyer earned in three years."  

Sometimes Berry's laid-back style seemed alien to the Eastern-effete snobs in the media corps that covered the Patriots -- even me, as I was a relatively young pup on the beat in 1984, with just eight years under my belt, and I believed I had to be just as cynical as my older colleagues to survive in the pro-sports environment. But I remember one day that changed my opinion of Raymond Berry for all time.

It was an impromptu gathering of Berry and a few reporters during one of the NFL drafts during his tenure. It took place within one of the "super boxes" in the administration building of then-Sullivan Stadium, which doubled as the media workroom.

Only a few hardy souls (myself, the Herald's Kevin Mannix, The Patriot Ledger's Ron Hobson and a few others) were pounding out our stories at the time, and Berry just sauntered in to chat -- something that would never happen in later years under coaches that held the media in utter contempt. Wearing a flannel shirt, blue jeans and Western boots and looking as if he had just finished breaking a bucking bronco out in the corral, Berry pulled up a seat, put his feet up on a table and told us to fire away with our questions.

Mannix took the lead, asking Berry if he could break down the decision-making process in regard to his first-round selection (I don't recall who it was). Berry smiled and turned to a portable whiteboard that was nearby. 

"You like pie?" he asked. "I like pie. Let's have some pie." And with that, he started to draw a pie chart on the board, his intent being to illustrate to us the percentage of each reason why he picked the individual in question. It all turned out to be a bit of performative nonsense; basically, he was telling us that research accounted for a lesser percentage of the reason behind the pick than his gut feeling. But it was an entertaining moment of whimsy in front of veteran reporters he trusted to understand that the draft was indeed an imprecise science.

Berry was not a coaching neophyte when he came to the Patriots. In fact, it was his fifth stop as an assistant coach after retiring as a player. He was on the staffs of Chuck Fairbanks and Ron Erhardt until Erhardt and his entire staff was fired in 1981, after which he settled in Medfield and was selling real estate when he got the call to replace Meyer.

If any team needed the strong, silent type to take the helm, it was those Patriots. 

The locker room seemed to be always teetering on the verge of revolt against Meyer. Early in his tenure, offensive tackle John Hannah (universally regarded at the time at the NFL's best at his position) refused to come to training camp in a dispute with Meyer, forcing then-GM Patrick Sullivan to hurriedly travel to Hannah's Alabama home and plead for his return. The final straw came when Meyer tried to fire his defensive coordinator, Rod Rust, after a 44-24 loss to the Dolphins at home on Oct. 21, 1984. Not long after, Meyer was canned, Berry was summoned, and his first act was to re-hire Rust.

Patrick Sullivan introduces Berry as head coach.

Given a half-season of research and a full offseason to implement what he saw, Berry reached an accord with the many talented veterans on the 1985 team, assuring them that micromanaging would not be his approach to them.

This was a good team. Quarterbacks Tony Eason and Steve Grogan, running backs Collins, Craig James and Mosi Tatupu, wideouts Irving Fryar and Stanley Morgan, tight ends Lin Dawson and Derrick Ramsey, offensive linemen Hannah, Pete Brock, Brian Holloway and Steve Moore, defensive linemen Julius Adams, Lester Williams and Garin Veris, linebackers Steve Nelson, Andre Tippett, Don Blackmon and Larry McGrew, and defensive backs Raymond Clayborn, Roland James and Fred Marion were all at the top of their games, just looking for guidance that respected their tenure and proficiency in a fully professional manner.

It didn't all come together at once. The Patriots started 2-3, and it took a fiery post-game locker-room speech by Tippett in the cramped confines of the visitors' locker room at Cleveland Municipal Stadium following a 24-20 loss to the Browns to ignite what was to follow. The Patriots won nine of their last 11 regular-season games, and entered the playoffs as a wild-card team. Then they beat the Jets, the Raiders and Dolphins (all on the road) to advance to Super Bowl XX in New Orleans against possibly the most fearsome team of the decade, the Chicago Bears.

Things didn't go well there, of course. The Patriots held a brief 3-0 lead on a Tony Franklin field goal, but it didn't take long for the Bears to achieve dominance. Berry had no choice but to pull a shellshocked Eason out of the game and replace him with Grogan, who had suffered a knee injury late in the regular season after engineering most of the winning streak. But it was all to no avail. Grogan and Eason were sacked seven times in the rout, and that was essentially that.

The final score was 46-10, and it still amazes me to this day that those Bears did not go on to create a dynasty of their own. Meanwhile, despite the crushing defeat, fans still flocked to T.F. Green Airport to greet the Patriots upon their return home. For the first time in their history, the Patriots had generated enough excitement among the provincial New England fan base to elevate them out of fourth place in the Boston pro sports pecking order. In fact, I know people that still cherish their "Berry the Bears" T-shirts.

Doug Flutie hastened Berry's downfall.

The Patriots remained contenders through much of Berry's coaching tenure, but as the longest-tenured veterans started to fall off the roster, it became evident that younger players required a different approach. And the fans soured on Berry as it became clear that he did not have confidence in former Boston College great Doug Flutie after the Bears traded the hometown hero from Natick to the Patriots in 1987. Flutie won six games that year as the Patriots' quarterback, but Berry benched him in favor of Eason, the more traditional drop-back QB that had returned from injury.

Berry was fired after the 1989 season, having compiled a 48-39 regular-season record and 3-2 in the playoffs. Rust was elevated to head coach and the Patriots melted down spectacularly in 1990 both on and off the field. It was a time of great turmoil in Foxboro as financially-challenged owner Billy Sullivan had lost control of the club and sold it to Victor Kiam, the nouveau-riche electric razor magnate that practically ruined the franchise over the next three seasons. Indeed, it was the darkest of times -- cloaked in chaos until a fellow named Bill Parcells was given the opportunity to run it as a professional franchise should be run.

Many years later, I received a letter at my office at The Sun Chronicle. It was from Raymond Berry. 

He had the occasion to read something I had written about the Patriots, who were in one of their dynastic eras at the time, and it struck him as being a thoughtful and knowledgeable piece of writing. In his letter, he mentioned that he read much of what I wrote when he was coaching the Patriots as part of the daily package of clippings produced for him by the team's media relations department, and he had always considered me to be fair and unbiased in my approach to covering the team. He closed by wishing me continued success.

I was genuinely moved by that letter. I wish I could have quoted it verbatim here, but it's probably at the bottom of a bin somewhere in my house -- one that contains the contents of my desk that was cleaned out in a hurry after the paper laid me off on Aug. 28, 2018. 

Berry gets a fill-up in a 1960 gasoline commercial.

More recently, in my newer incarnation as a podcaster, I was searching YouTube for ancient TV commercials that I liked to insert into my "The Owner's Box ... After Dark" series as comic relief between segments. I was overjoyed to find a commercial for Phillips 66 gasoline that featured Berry driving a 1960 Ford convertible into a station for a fill-up. It had been filmed near the end of his career with the Colts, and I don't think he spoke at all during the commercial. He just smiled at the camera as the announcer touted the merits of Phillips 66 "Flite-Fuel" gas.

"That's so Raymond," I thought.

I copied it and later inserted the spot into one of the "After Dark" episodes. Unfortunately, the spot was not yet in the public domain, and the copyright holder was alerted to my use of it and demanded that I remove it. I did, grudgingly -- otherwise I would have attached more than just a still photo to this missive as an example of Berry at his best as the strong, silent Texan whose frontier stoicism could convince you to buy his brand of gasoline just as well as he convinced a roomful of football players to ignore the chaos around them and to reach the Super Bowl.

My most sincere condolences are offered to Raymond Berry's family and friends, and to everyone whose life he touched in his own unique way. I hope his ride into the sunset was a glorious one.

MARK FARINELLA covered the New England Patriots from 1977 to 2019 for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass., and various other news organizations. Share your memories of Raymond Berry with him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.