Which Kraft?

NEW ORLEANS — It has been a quarter of a century since his father walked in, quietly shut the door and tantalizingly opened the briefcase as if it held some rare treasure, but the excitement of that moment still courses through Jonathan Kraft whenever he thinks of it.

Jonathan was 7 at the time. Like many Boston kids, he loved sports. He loved the Patriots and the Celtics and the Red Sox.

But like most middle-class kids whose parents can’t come up with the money to attend games regularly, Jonathan had to follow his teams on TV and in the newspaper.

Until that day.

Because in his father Bob’s briefcase were season tickets to the Patriots.

“Don’t tell your mother because we really can’t afford it,” the senior Kraft, a businessman trying to get started in paper commodities, told Jonathan and his two younger brothers, Danny and Josh. A fourth son, David, followed later.

Cost of the six season tickets was more than $400.

Twenty-three years go by.

Bob Kraft has struck it rich in manufacturing and money management, having amassed a fortune estimated at $500 million.

He and his eldest son, Jonathan, still close, are sharing another moment that sends tremors coursing through Jonathan.

They are on a flight from St. Louis to Boston. They look across the aisle at each other with matching smiles and exchange a high five that echoes around the cabin.

The joy is again over the Patriots. The guy who couldn’t really afford $400 for season tickets has just spent $173 million to buy the team.

The senior Kraft may be a high-profile business figure who rubs elbows with heads of state, his Fortune 500 peers and some of the best-known sports figures in the country, but he still thinks and acts like Joe Fan, the role he has played his entire life.

When Kraft was a youngster himself, he sold programs at Boston Brave baseball games. When he had exhausted his supply, he would sneak into the stadium. It was the way he spent his summers until the Braves deserted Boston for Milwaukee in 1953.

Kraft was 12 when they left, but the feelings of disappointment and desertion lingered into adulthood.

He briefly enjoyed an athletic career of his own, playing scatback at Columbia University.

He had no illusions, however, about his own course to success. After Columbia, Kraft attended Harvard Business School, where he earned a master’s degree.

But no matter how many businesses he owned, no matter how many worlds he conquered, his greatest triumphs, simple though they may have been, revolved around his beloved Patriots.

In 1973, Kraft met Marty Domres, who was going to be the starting quarterback the following week at Foxboro Stadium against the Patriots for the Baltimore Colts.

Kraft asked Domres what the Colts’ first offensive play would be. Domres scribbled it on a napkin.

One would have thought he had scribbled the name of a stock that would make Kraft a billionaire.

He clutched that napkin, kept it close to him and whipped it out just before the game, proudly showing it to the other season-ticket holders around him.

When Domres ran the play, Kraft beamed.

There weren’t quite as many smiles when Kraft set out to buy the Patriots. The process was long, involved and intricate. It involved so many plots and subplots that a professor at the Harvard Business School is planning to use it in a course on negotiations.

Kraft began the process in 1986. He would have to buy Foxboro Stadium, gain control of the surrounding parking lot and fight forces that wanted to move the team to St. Louis.

The low point occurred at the end of 1993. Kraft was convinced that his long negotiations were going to result in failure and the Patriots were going to end up in St. Louis.

“I’m very frustrated,” he told his sons. “This hasn’t been a fair process. We made the fairest offer.”

Shortly after that, the Patriots played their final game of the season at Foxboro. When the game ended, many of the fans, fearful that St. Louis had won the tug of war for the club, stayed in their seats chanting, “Don’t take our team.”

Jonathan watched his father’s reaction.

“It was an electric moment,” Jonathan said. “That gave my dad a second wind.”

A month later, he and his son were high-fiving on the plane, even though a third party had surfaced at the last moment with an offer of $75 million to $100 million if Kraft would get out.

But, he told the Boston Globe, the old, painful memories of the Braves’ defection was one of the factors that kept him from capitulating.

“That was 40 years ago,” he said. “No other National League team ever came back. A team left Baltimore and didn’t come back. . . . If I took the money, we would never get another NFL franchise.”

With an owner like Kraft, who has been sitting in the stands all these years, exchanging opinions with fellow fans on whom to start and when to punt, it would seem logical that he would be a meddler, a George Steinbrenner type who loves to get his hands on the product.

Not so with Kraft.

The creed he has tried to live by is, “The way to be successful is to know what you don’t know.”

And Kraft doesn’t know football.

So he went out and got one of the best coaches in the game in Bill Parcells. And when Kraft was convinced by football people he respects that Parcells was not a great evaluator of talent, the owner put the power to make player personnel decisions solely in the hands of Bobby Grier, who began in the Patriot organization as an assistant coach 15 years ago and has just completed his sixth year in the front office.

The people Kraft trusts most are his sons. Jonathan is his right-hand man on financial matters. Daniel handles marketing and broadcast sales.

But most of all, Kraft trusts himself.

“He is obsessed with the team,” Jonathan said. “He’ll get up at 3 a.m., get on the treadmill and watch one of our games.”

The purchase of the Patriots didn’t end Kraft’s struggles. Saddled with an antiquated stadium, filled with uncomfortable bench seats and plumbing problems that sometimes result in cold-water showers for the players, Kraft has offered to put up $200 million to build a new stadium in south Boston. But he has run into opposition from politicians.

His other problem is his coach. As the football world knows all too well, Kraft may lose Parcells after Sunday’s Super Bowl. Parcells is expected to go to the New York Jets, where he will regain the power that Kraft stripped him of.

But Kraft has no complaints.

“Three years after we bought the team, we’re in the Super Bowl,” he said. “There are 28 other owners who would like to be in our position. Something we’ve done must have worked out right.”