The story of Randy Moss, shown after catching a TD pass in the Patriots’ season-opener against the Chiefs, is a good read in Blitz magazine.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

Here are the best Randy Moss stories I know.

And they come from a football magazine called Blitz.

You say you’ve never heard of it?

Neither had I.

But you take good stories where you can get them, right?

And this is what is in Blitz, some of which we knew was in Moss’ unofficial football biography, and some of which we might have overlooked.

Like how he grew up in a small West Virginia town that was beset by crime and poverty and played on the same high school basketball team as NBA player Jason Williams, ol’ “White Chocolate” himself. How he was a flat-out prodigy as a kid, able to dunk a basketball in the seventh grade, so gifted as a high school senior that he was chosen the football and basketball player of the year in West Virginia.

How he then got into trouble in high school, which got him into the court system, causing Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz to take away his scholarship offer, the same Lou Holtz who had called Moss the best high school football player he had ever seen. How he first went to Florida State, until he got in trouble for marijuana use and ended up back in West Virginia at Marshall, a Division I-AA school.

Then how he became a huge star in the NFL, along with the reputation that he was a problem child, someone whose passion could drift when he found himself on teams going nowhere.

That was the baggage he brought with him to Foxboro, right there with his wondrous athleticism and unquestioned talent. And since he’s come here, we’ve heard Bill Belichick say that Moss is one of the smartest football players he’s ever been around, and that by all accounts he’s been a great teammate.

But how did he get to the Patriots?

It’s all there in Blitz, this new football magazine based in Philadelphia.

The stuff you probably don’t know about.

At least I didn’t.

The stuff that gives us a little peek inside the palace gates of the Patriots, the kind we don’t often see.

It seems that in April 2007, Moss’ name came up in trade rumors, and he and his agent were in a nightclub in Houston when his phone rang. It seems it was Tom Brady, and Brady wanted to talk to Moss about becoming a New England Patriot.

Talk about serendipity.

It seems like Moss thought that the best quarterback he could play with was Brady, and as he says in Blitz, “I’m a big Tom Brady fan. When Tom Brady came into the league, he was an underdog, and I love underdogs. It wasn’t the Super Bowls that made me a believer in Brady; it was everything he had overcome to get to the Super Bowl.”

Moss tells Brady on the phone that night that he can conform to the Patriots’ way of doing things, Brady gets on the phone to Belichick, the deal gets talked out, Brady says he needs to get Robert Kraft to agree, and then Brady tells Moss to get to Boston as quickly as he can, and the rest is history.

In his heart, though, he wasn’t totally sure he could deal with Belichick’s no-nonsense way of doing things.

Listen to it in his words, as told to Blitz.

“I’m in there at one of the first meetings, chilling. See, I don’t really say much off the field. I have my fun, but I don’t really say too much.

“I’m sitting there and Belichick says to the team, ‘Let me tell ya’ll something,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care what you’ve accomplished in your career,’ looking right at me. ‘I don’t care where you come from, what you’ve done, what teams you’ve been on in the past. Here, we do it my way.’ So after the meeting, a bunch of guys were ribbing me, ‘Yeah, Moss, he’s talking to you.’ ”

It was a few days later, in practice, that Moss knew he’d fit in with the Patriots.

“Coach will cut anyone up. He’ll cut Junior Seau. Man, when he cut Tom Brady up I knew it was cool. Tommy had a play where the DB had jumped the route, I ran an out route, but Tom hitched on the throw and threw it a little late. He tried to lead me a little bit further, but I couldn’t catch it ’cause I was already at the sidelines.

“So the next morning in practice, we knew something was coming. Coach says, ‘Hey, I’m supposed to have one of the best quarterbacks to ever play the game and you’re sitting here trying to tell me you can’t throw a ……five-yard out? If I want to complete a five-yard pass, I’ll go down the street and get the local high school team’s quarterback, and see if he can do it.’

“So, I’m thinking, if he gets at Tommy like that, then I’m straight with it. He gets every single person. When he ripped Brady, I was ready to get mine.”

The article was written by Jim Cormick, one of the publishers of Blitz, and the other insight it offers into Moss is how hard he works in the offseason, his belief that he stays a great player not in the season, but in the offseason. It shows him at a nondescript field in the middle of nowhere, an hour north of Miami. It shows him going through the private hell he goes through to be able to be Randy Moss on Sunday afternoons.

“It’s the offseason stuff that will make me give it up one day,” Moss says about the NFL.

Until then, he’s as good a wide receiver as there is in the game, even if McCormick writes, “He’s long been an enigma and a recluse to the media and the public.”

No more.

Not after the story in Blitz.

The best Randy Moss stories I know.

breynold@projo.com