This is a story about one of the all-time greats in the history of the New England Patriots, a dogged, determined performer who year after year defies the aging process to a degree that mesmerizes fans and confounds the haters.
Yes, there was an injury once, so scary-looking that the first, panicky thought for those who were there, or watching at home, was that it could be career-ending.
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And yet here we are, all these years later, still seeing the greatness on a weekly basis.
We’re talking Tom Brady, right?
No. For the purposes of this discussion, the New England Patriots’ iconic, five-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback is just a little kid. For when it’s all over for ol’ No. 12, the betting here is that Janie Ritchie, 70 years old and on her way to welcoming her fifth grandchild to the world, will still be firing up the masses at Gillette Stadium — and in a way you can’t possibly ignore.
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps the boom of a facsimile Revolutionary War-era musket will do the trick. Janie Ritchie is a veteran member of the tried-and-true New England End Zone Militia, those rag-tag but proud Revolutionary War reenactors who’ve been a fixture at Patriots home games since 1998, which means the days of Foxboro Stadium, Pete Carroll and, egads, Chris Canty.
Janie Ritchie might be a woman who carries a musket, but she’s a pistol. If she’s even five feet tall, it’s because she’s standing on a stool, and yet she carries herself in such a way that you’d best think it over before posing any kind of challenge. She’s opinionated. She decorates those opinions with small-fry quality cuss words that roll easily off the lips. She’s retired and she’s divorced, which means she has time to do as she pleases, such as climbing into a pair of white breeches, grabbing a musket and running off to the next American Revolution reenactment, a passion that eventually led to a new passion: Serving as a loyal soldier in the New England End Zone Militia.
Janie Ritchie, 70, at her post with the Patriots End Zone Militia.I know what some of you are thinking: Big deal. These people don’t do much more than wear funny clothes and celebrate each Patriots touchdown by firing their muskets into the air. Cirque du Soleil they are not.
But suppose I told you Janie Ritchie knows more about the hard knocks of professional football than any sportswriter. Suppose I told you she knows more about playing in pain and overcoming adversity than all the beat writers and all the columnists in all the world.
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Suppose I told you that, at the end of every Patriots home game, veteran receiver Julian Edelman seeks her out and gives her a hug. Yes, he hugs the other female members of the End Zone Militia as well, but with Janie it’s different because . . . well, let’s say it again: Edelman’s been banged up on the football field more than a few times, and that’s something Janie Ritchie knows a thing or two about.
Julian Edelman embracing Janie Ritchie after a game in 2015. (Stew Milne-USA TODAY Sports)The injury that nearly ended Janie’s career took place on the night of Thursday, Aug. 11, 2011. The Patriots were hosting the Jacksonville Jaguars in their first preseason game, with Tom Brady wandering the sideline all night while stand-ins Brian Hoyer (first half) and Ryan Mallett (second half) did the quarterbacking. On the first drive of the third quarter, second-and-9 from the Jacksonville 26, Mallett, under pressure and rolling to his right, reared back and threw a pass into the end zone.
Ryan Mallett’s intended target: Wide receiver Darnell Jenkins.
Darnell Jenkins’ unintended target: Janie Ritchie.
The game was televised by WBZ-TV, with Don Criqui doing the play by play and Randy Cross and former Pats quarterback Scott Zolak handling the color analysis. We see the ball sail deep into the end zone over the outstretched arms of a leaping, hustling Jenkins, whose momentum carries him out of bounds and smack into territory occupied by the End Zone Militia.
Janie was standing between fellow militia members Mark Richardson on her right and Gene Grella to her left. She goes down so hard that it practically looks fake, as though Jenkins was tackling a militia uniform stuffed with straw.
“I was watching the Hail Mary, and then everything happened in slow motion,” she said (to Janie, all deep passes to the end zone are Hail Marys). “I looked to my right and I could see this look on Mark’s face, as though something was about to happen. And that’s when I saw the football player coming.
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“I go to move, and I’m between these two guys. I remember thinking this is so going to hurt. I actually thought that. He hit me straight on, and I was falling straight back and to the ground.
“When I’m on a battlefield, I plan on how I’m going to fall,” she said. “But there was no planning for what happened. I just went down.”
Darnell Jenkins, 28 at the time, played college football for his hometown Miami Hurricanes and in 2008 was signed as a rookie free agent by the Houston Texans. He appeared in one regular-season game for the Texans in ’08 — on special teams — which turned out to be his only career NFL experience. But he soldiered on for several more seasons as a practice squad player, working for the Cleveland Browns, Tampa Bay Bucs and Patriots. Though he showed some promise during the 2011 preseason — “Darnell Jenkins has really looked good in camp,” says Don Criqui, just after the receiver plowed into Janie — he was released a couple of weeks later. He wound up settling in nearby Lakeville. He works for Fitness Brokers USA, which sells reconditioned gym equipment, and is receivers/defensive backs coach at Franklin High School.
Jenkins can recall the play instantly.
“I was wide open, but Mallett, he has a strong arm, but he was kind of on the run,” he said of his chance run-in with Janie Ritchie. “I look up, and I see that he had thrown the ball, but I didn’t know how deep I was in the end zone because I was focused on making the catch.
“I heard the crowd. And when the crowd roars either you’re about to get hit or they’re thinking you’re gonna make a play. But then, I ran into what I first thought was a player. Next thing I knew, I’m with the people who shoot the guns when we score a touchdown.”
Jenkins can be seen doing a pirouette and then speaking momentarily with a security guard. He looks back at the gathering of militia folks as he returns to the huddle.
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“I was absolutely worried I might have hurt her,” he said. “We have on equipment. She didn’t. But then I found that everything was OK. Everybody was kind of laughing. And I guess I was laughing myself, but at the same time it was in the back of my mind she was gonna be sore.”
Militia Captain Geoffrey Campbell was not at his post that night — these people do have real jobs, after all — but he heard the news as soon as he got home.
“One of our fellow reenactor friends sent me a message on Facebook asking if Janie is all right,” he said. “I said, ‘What?’ and he said, “Well, Janie got run over by one of the receivers in the end zone.’ I immediately called her, and she told me, ‘Oh, my God. I’m hurting in places I don’t even want to talk about, but I’m OK.’”
She never missed a game.
“I wasn’t surprised. Not at all,” said Campbell. “She’s a gamer. She was out there complaining the next week, ‘This hurts, that hurts,’ said she took a whole bottle of Ibuprofen, but you knew she’d be out there.”
That she was back at her post for the Pats’ next preseason home game — Thursday, Sept. 1 against the New York Giants — is a testament to Janie Ritchie’s heart, her soul, her passion … her chiropractor.
As Janie tells the story, she limped into the office and the chiropractor said, “What happened? Did you get hit by a car?”
“No,” she said. “Football player.”
Not unlike the Beatles, who evolved from the Flintstones-sounding Quarrymen, the New England End Zone Militia was not always called the New England End Zone Militia.
And in their early years, they weren’t connected to the Patriots.
It all began in 1996, when the Kraft family, owners of the Patriots, added a professional soccer team to its portfolio. That’s when it occurred to the aforementioned Geoffrey Campbell, a longtime Revolutionary War reenactor, that his group could further serve the public by supporting a soccer team called the Revolution. Call it the Spirit of ’96.
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The Revolution liked the idea, though at first the fledgling group consisted of Campbell and his own reenactment group, the Massachusetts Ninth Regiment. And in those early days, Campbell’s fellow reenactors weren’t exactly lining up for the honor of firing their muskets in support of the new soccer team; for some Revs games, it was just Campbell out there by himself.
Janie Ritchie, left, was part of the End Zone Militia crew to post for a photo with LeGarrette Blount after his touchdown in a 2016 game (Winslow Townson-USA TODAY Sports)But word got around. It became … a thing. More and more reenactors began showing up, lugging their muskets, drums, fifes and canteens into old Foxboro Stadium for Revs games. In 1998, the militia was invited to do football games. As for their unique name, the New England End Zone Militia, that kind of happened by accident: Around 2003, former Patriots center Pete Brock, by then working as a radio analyst, put his God-given marketing skills to use when some group members told him they were thinking about getting their own tee-shirts made up.
“I was doing pre- and postgame shows on WBCN back then, and whenever I was on the field I’d be talking to those guys and got to know them pretty well,” said Brock, 64, now president of The New England Patriots Alumni Club. “Whenever I’d see them before a game, I’d say, ‘Remember to have lots of ammo and keep the powder dry.’”
And then one day …
“They were talking to me about having these tee-shirts made and asked if I had any ideas about what to put on them,” Brock said. “I said, ‘Well, you’re a militia and you stand in the end zone, so put End Zone Militia on those shirts.’”
The group now boasts about 32 members, and on Any Given Sunday some 20-24 of them — including four women — are standing at their post in the Gillette Stadium end zone. For the first decade of their existence, they were the football equivalent of a volunteer army — patriots who served the Patriots without compensation. That changed in 2011, when the Pats put the militia on the company payroll.
“It’s basically minimum wage,” said Campbell. “It’s enough to cover our gasoline to and from, our black powder for the people who are shooting muskets, which costs about 25 dollars a pound. And they’ll each go through a pound on a good day.”
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Campbell, who turns 63 in February, is a busy man. In addition to his job at the Target in Kingston, he does Freedom Trail tours as well as logging time with Plymouth Night Tours.
The militia does more than provide patriotic window dressing during home games. Its best-known chore is to fire a musket salute following each New England touchdown. However, an alteration was made following the Pats’ 12-0 victory over the Dallas Cowboys on Nov. 16, 2003. In a game billed as the “Battle of the Bills” (the Pats’ Bill Belichick and the Cowboys’ Bill Parcells), there were concerns that the musket smoke following a 2-yard touchdown run by New England’s Antowain Smith caused some players’ eyes to burn for a moment. The musket-firing policy was changed to this: If a Pats touchdown is scored in the other end zone, the muskets are fired immediately; if a touchdown is scored on the militia’s side of the field, the muskets don’t go off until the PAT business has been addressed.
And then there’s weather. Experience has taught the militia that the smoke is slow to dissipate on particularly wet and moist days; under those circumstances, the muskets don’t get fired at all.
For Janie Ritchie, being a member of the New England End Zone Militia is even more surprising when one considers that she hated football during her days at St. Mary’s High School of Lawrence. But she always was a history buff, which led to her getting involved in the quirky world of Revolutionary War reenactments. After a while, she had heard so much jabbering about groups of reenactors going to Pats and Revs games that she finally asked if she could tag along.
“She came up to me at a Revolutionary War reenactment, and we talked about it,” Campbell said. “It was just going to be a lark.”
What began as a lark quickly became a passion.
“To be in the militia, it takes more than putting on the uniform,” Campbell said. “If Joe Schmo walked in off the street and all he had was a nice, pretty uniform but he didn’t know anything about a musket, I’d be, ‘Well, no!‘ Go find a reenactment unit, reenact for five years, I’ll talk to your commanding officer, I’m gonna find out whether you’re safe and you’re good and you know how to follow orders.
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“With Janie,” Campbell said, “I knew she could do this. She had been reenacting for years. She fit right in.”
By early 2015, all that marching finally took a toll on her.
“It was after Super Bowl XLIX, the one where the Patriots beat Seattle,” she said. “I was hurting a little, but I really wanted to be part of the parade. And I figured if I take part in that thing, it’s going to be a kick in the butt. But if I didn’t do it, that would be a kick in the butt.”
She participated in the rolling rally.
And then she had hip replacement surgery.
“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “If I thought about everything that’s happened to me over the years, I’d be nuts. I’m a tough old broad.”
Is she among the most respected members of the New England End Zone Militia? Yep.
Is she nonetheless ripe pickin’s for a practical joke? Of course.
About an hour before the Pats’ Dec. 23 game this season against the Buffalo Bills, Captain Campbell called the militia together for what he said was an important announcement.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘What’s going on here,’ ” Janie said. “Geoff said, ‘This is about you,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. What have I done now?’ I was sure something was wrong. He said, ‘This son of yours has something he wants to tell you.’ “
Did we mention that Janie’s son, 42-year-old Chris Ritchie, also is a member of the New England End Zone Militia?
“And I look at my son, and he’s smiling,” Janie said, “and he’s holding up a cell phone and, of course, I don’t have my glasses on and my nose is inching closer and closer and, well, there’s nothing like seeing an ultrasound on a cell phone.’”
Janie Ritchie, right, with her son, Chris, after he told her about his new baby. (Courtesy photo)That’s how the game began: Janie Ritchie being delivered the news that grandchild No. 5 is on the way.
This is how the game ended: Patriots 24, Bills 12, and the obligatory postgame hug from Julian Edelman.
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“She makes my day,” Edelman said. “She comes out, she has a smile on her face, and they’re a big part of what we are, and the whole history of the Patriots.
“We’ve all shared a lot of special moments.”
Edelman embracing Janie Ritchie after a game this season. (Courtesy photo)It was an unfair question, but one that had to be asked: Who’s more durable, the 41-year-old Tom Brady or the 70-year-old Janie Ritchie?
“I think her,” said Edelman.
Darnell Jenkins, the now 36-year-old former pro football player who nearly ended Janie’s career, agreed.
“Tom Brady’s been doing it for years, and she’s been doing it for years as well. But to be 70 and still doing that and be able to deal with that weather … my God,” he said. “I know how I feel after having surgeries from aches and pains. I can’t imagine being 70 and being able to do what she does. That’s amazing.”
No, that’s Janie Ritchie.
(Top photo of Patriots militia: Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
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