FOXBOROUGH – If you didn’t think Robert Kraft’s public declaration about making Christian Gonzalez an offer to make him the highest paid at his position and in team history was a negotiation ploy, you haven’t been paying attention too well.
This owner doesn’t like to be viewed as the bad guy. In fact, it’s an impossibility for him, at least publicly. Behind closed doors is a different story, but that’s not where the Patriots ownership took this conversation. He put that out there for the whole football watching/listen world to know, thereby increasing the pressure on Gonzalez and his representatives to make a deal that, as of yet, hasn’t come.
Of course, Kraft left out the details: was the offer the most guaranteed money or the highest average annual salary? Both? When and how the team would disperse that cash (signing bonuses, incentives, new money versus the money he’s already owed on his rookie deal)? But hey, when you want to paint a good picture of yourself, that’s one way to go about it.
Speaking to the media for the first time since camp opened, Gonzalez took a different tack than Kraft. After praising the owner for all he’s accomplished, the talented cornerback said of that proclamation by Kraft, “It’s something we don’t want to handle to the media. We want to keep that with the team and my team and go on about that.”
Are you surprised? That public volley couldn’t have gone over well for the Gonzalez camp, especially when what got lost that day was Kraft being unable or unwilling to say that he thought that deal would get done soon. Gonzalez found himself in a similar spot.
“I hope,” he said. “I hope so,” and left it at that.
There were several other attempts to get Gonzalez to shed some light on how he is feeling about the negotiations, or how advanced they are. But those forays were met with this response, or something close to it.
“I assumed there would be a lot of this,” he said of the number of questions about the contract. “But anything with that, you know, I want to keep that between my team – my agents – and the team in the front office, and let them deal with that.”
Gonzalez, though, has his own marketing campaign going on. On the opening day of training camp, the reserved fourth-year pro ran over to the crowd pre-practice (almost at the time Kraft was making his statement), throwing a football with fans up and down the sideline. I don’t recall seeing him do that before (doesn’t mean he hasn’t, but in talking to other media members, they couldn’t recall an instance like that either). The pop he got from the masses was arguably as loud as any we heard that day.
There’s also been an overwhelmingly positive response from
