NFL legend Matt Light spent his whole career with the New England Patriots. Playing offensive tackle, Light protected Tom Brady’s blindside, and he helped lead the team to 11 straight winning seasons and three Super Bowl rings. During the offseason, however, Light would pursue a different kind of sport at Gillette Stadium. For years, Light confessed in a recent podcast, the Patriots Hall-of-Famer would hunt wild turkeys with a bow behind the stadium.
“I hunted that property forever,” Light said in a podcast hosted by another former Patriot, Julian Edelman. “I would hunt right behind the stadium, close to where Lawton’s farm was.”
He explained in the interview that he’d often hunt the early morning hours before practice during the offseason each spring. (Massachusetts’s spring turkey season typically runs from late April to late May.) Light said the team’s owner Robert Kraft had given him the proverbial “green light” to hunt the property by saying he “didn’t know anything” about what Light was doing.
Light confessed to Edelman that, one morning, he’d gotten to Gillette around 3 a.m. to try and kill a gobbler before practice started. He had his bow with him, and he was getting ready to set up when a security guard approached him in the dark and told him he couldn’t hunt there. Light told the guard in no uncertain terms that he was going hunting regardless. He told the guard he’d roosted a bird there the previous night and planned to kill it.
“I walk right in and set my tent up, and I wait for it to get light,” Light said of that morning’s hunt. “Bird gobbles, flies down, and sits right next to my decoy. I shoot him. I breast him out. And I take him [inside] — I’d always put them in the fridge in the meal room.
“And as I’m eating breakfast, Bill [Belichick] walks in.”
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Apparently, Belichick had heard from the boss of the security guard who’d busted Light that morning, and the head coach gave his starting lineman an earful for bringing a weapon onto stadium property.
Light told Edelman that he tried to argue with Belichick at first, claiming that a bow-and-arrow was different from a firearm, and that he’d been hunting on the property legally for years. But he quickly gave up in that debate.
“Bill was like, ‘Hey, look, I don’t wanna hear about it. Don’t bring anything on here ever again,’ And then he walked away,” Light said.” But yeah, I had a little hunt that morning. And that may have been the last time I did that.”
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