Bona fide star may be about to fall

On the evening of July 26th, police were summoned to the Franklin, Massachusetts home of Ben Coates and took into custody the New England Patriots' tightend, who was charged with assaulting a 27-year-old woman named Jennifer Marshall. Coates was freed on $1,000 bail the following morning, and, subject to a no-abuse order, awaits a court appearance on August 25th.

During the brief exchange in court it developed that Marshall was also the mother of Coates' young daughter Destiny, although the player has a wife and three other children living in North Carolina. The dispute had been initiated when Marshall discovered Coates entertaining a third woman at his home, barely an hour before he was due to report for an 11:30 curfew at the team's pre-season training camp a state away in Smithfield, Rhode Island.

National Football League players, circa 1998, are unlikely to be confused with seminarians, and had Coates been, say, a Dallas Cowboy, no one would have batted an eyelash. Although the odds appear good that Coates' adventure could ultimately go unpunished by the courts, the episode has placed team owner Robert Kraft in a most unenviable position as the defending AFC East champions prepare for the 1998-99 season.

As the Patriots prepared for the 1995 NFL draft, Kraft had been one of a handful of NFL owners to declare that his team would not select Nebraska running-back Lawrence Phillips, even were he available when its turn arose. Phillips, by most accounts the most promising prospect in that year's collegiate crop, had been suspended by his Nebraska team after a history of domestic abuse which culminated in him dragging a girlfriend, by the hair, down several flights of stairs.

Imagine, then, the embarrassment of Kraft when it developed that another Nebraska player named Christian Peter, who had been selected by the Patriots later in that same draft, had a rap sheet even more unsavoury than Phillips'.

Peter, it turned out, had been implicated in the sexual assault of at least one female classmate, and charged with gross and lewd behaviour on other occasions.

Kraft, with, some say, a bit of prodding from his wife Myra, ordered the player released, against the vociferous objections of then-coach Bill Parcells, and Peter became the first player in NFL history to have been drafted one day and undrafted the next.

Peter was subsequently signed by the New York Giants, and although he has kept his nose clean since, Kraft's judgement was vindicated on another count: Peter didn't turn out to be a very good football player.

But if the message - that New England players would be held accountable to a higher moral standard than their counterparts around the league - wasn't clear enough then, it became so this February when Dave Meggett, the team's star kick returner and back-up running back, was arrested under rather sordid circumstances in Toronto, where he was charged with sexual assault and robbery.

With Meggett placed under the glare of the media spotlight, it also emerged that his history included at least one similar incident, and that, moreover, he had fathered five out-of-wedlock children by four different women - none of whom he bothered to support until ordered to do so by the courts.

Although the Canadian case has yet to come to trial, it surprised no one when the Patriots released Meggett on May 29th of this year.

For the record, the Patriots did not officially link Meggett's release to the battering his off-field image had taken, but coach Pete Carroll, charged with administering Kraft's moral code, tellingly said: "We've told them time and time again. Everything counts".

Even though it was pointed out at the time that Phillips and Peter were untried rookies, 34-year-old Meggett had probably outlived his usefulness, and the team saved itself almost $2 million by cashiering him when it did. What, the pundits wondered, would have happened had any one of them been a truly indispensable player at the prime of his career?

The answer may not be long in forthcoming, depending on how the Patriots handle l'affaire Coates. Coates is a bona fide star, the holder of the NFL record for receptions by a tightend, and has been selected to play in the last four Pro Bowls. They don't get much more indispensable than that.

On the other hand, it would seem clear that if the Patriots are to retain a shred of credibility in their public policy of no-tolerance when it comes to domestic abuse, Kraft must treat the situation as if Coates were just another player.

"He threatened to knock me out and I was screaming at him and he grabbed me and threw me on top of my car," charged Marshall in her report to the Franklin police.

Kraft, for the moment, safely able to adopt a hands-off policy as he awaits the court's disposition, has reserved a no-comment posture, but he is clearly caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place.

"It really isn't my place at this time, from what I know, to comment on it," said Carroll. "Obviously, this can be a distraction for us, but we'll deal with it as it comes."