<< Back to Tailgate menu

Reminiscing on 3 Years of GoPats.com
by Mike Maddaloni (3/13/1999)

As Clint does all the writing and I do the Web development (primarily because Clint says people wouldn't want to read what I would have to say!), I thought I would take the opportunity to look back on three years of making GoPats.com what it is today.

March 13, 1996 – I remember the day well. It was a Wednesday, and I was in Louisville, Kentucky, miles away from Foxboro Stadium and pro football for that matter. It was March Madness, and I was smack dab in the middle of Kentucky Wildcats and Louisville Cardinals country. What a better time to start a Patriots Web site!

I had actually stared the Web site a month or so earlier, on free Web space I had from a local Internet provider through whom I was able to keep in touch with friends back home in Boston. I was intrigued by the Web, had done a presentation on it for my current employer, and wanted to work in it. What better way to learn the Web than by doing, so I created a Web site with cheesy graphics. And as content is king, I put up a Patriots animation my friend AJ from Australia made for me (it’s still here for downloading, though AJ probably would prefer I take it down).

The Web site was there, and all my friends knew about it, but there wasn’t much to it. Of everyone I knew, the most vocal about it was one Clint Mills. He didn’t care about the rest, mostly the Patriots section. He told me I needed to put up more to make it worthy of the NFL franchise located several miles from Boston. So I simply told Clint to put his money where his mouth was, and his pen in hand and write something for it. Clint was always recalling games from the past that most of couldn’t remember to win free beer. What better person to write a column on the Pats? He wrote it, and I couldn’t come up with a better title than Clint’s Corner, so that was the name that has stuck to today.

Thus began Clint’s Corner, and the shaping of a Web site. It roared strong for three weeks, when my Internet provider in Louisville went belly-up. As it timed almost perfectly with the end of my consulting assignment there, I decided to hold off until I returned to Boston to find a new home for Clint’s new journalistic inklings. I found the best deal I could, and set-up a Web site on UltraNet and named it "Patriots Unofficial", as I had this fear in the back of my head that the Patriots would sue me for trademark infringement. Around the beginning of May Clint resumed writing articles, and has been going strong for now 3 years.

A lot has changed since those early days. The Web tools were primitive at most, cutting and pasting the text from Word to the HotDog Web editor, and creating cheesy graphics in Windows Paint. Today each column is converted into HTML from Word97, much of the content is dynamically generated using Cold Fusion from a database, and now I use more advanced tools to create the cheesy graphics. And don’t forget our new name – GoPats.com. It was Clint’s idea to register a specific domain name for the Web site, and I helped come up with the short list of names. I still don’t know what’s wrong with my own domain name - monehp.com, but I don’t want to rehash that ugly argument!

So how did this dynamic duo of the Web come to be? It started back in 1992 when, on a whim and by suggestion of some then co-workers, I bought season tickets to the Patriots. Keep in mind I had never been to a Patriots game, let alone Foxboro Stadium. And prior to that I had only been to 2 NFL games – a Miami/Buffalo game in 1989 and the 1990 Pro Bowl. And the first time I went to Foxboro was for a U2 concert! All I knew is I had 2 seats with Chuck, Brian, Tim and family and friends. And seven years we’re still a tailgating machine!

Oh yeah – Clint. Shortly after buying my season tickets, I was at a company meeting where I heard this guy – whom I originally thought was older than me – talking about the Patriots. Turns out he just started with the firm from a college recruiting class, and we talked about the Pats. Ok, Clint did all the talking, but we decided to tailgate together. We ended up working on the same project, and became good friends. A couple of years back I was honored to stand up for Clint and his lovely, patient and tolerating wife Karen at their wedding. And don’t forget when I accompanied Clint on his tour de force of Foxboro when he won the 1998 Patriots Fan of the Year Award!

So three years down, and hopefully many more to come. Years, and Super Bowls that is.