Robert Kraft turned the New England Patriots, once the whipping boys of the National Football League, into champions and built a gleaming football palace where pathetic Foxboro stadium once squatted.

Now, as we struggle to kick a vicious recession, Kraft is pushing plans to build a giant office and retail campus on Route 1 in Foxborough, once again with his own money.

But when the guy asks for a few million dollars in public money for a pedestrian footbridge over dangerous Route 1 to connect this new development with Gillette Stadium, he’s portrayed in the local media as a greedy billionaire dipping into the public till.

It’s an easy and cheap story to write – and I plead guilty to writing a few of them myself in past media lives.

But maybe it’s time to lay off on beating the Krafts, and instead give them the credit they are due.

In fact, given the true rapacity of the average sports team owner, what’s remarkable here is how little Robert and his son Jonathan Kraft have asked for – and how much grief they have gotten over it.

“My first reaction when I saw that story is that you have got to be kidding me,” said Patrick Moscaritolo, chief executive of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, who has worked closely with the Krafts over the years promoting major sporting events. “This is a safety project, and it will bring in more tax revenue.”

On Background

For anyone who has not been following this saga line by line, here’s the controversy in a nutshell.

With state and federal officials holding out a pot of hundreds of millions in stimulus cash, supposedly to spur job creating projects, the Krafts applied for $9 million to build a long-delayed pedestrian footbridge over Route 1.

The bridge proposal had been kicking around since the late 1990s, when plans for the new Gillette Stadium were laid.

The original idea was simply to help fans safely cross Route 1 from parking lots across the road from the stadium.

But plans for a skywalk over deadly and traffic-jammed Route 1 have since gained added urgency, with the Krafts pushing plans for a large office or commercial park on the site.

Obviously, there needs to be a safe and easy way of crossing the highway from the new development to the stadium, as well as the shops and restaurants of Patriot Place, or you can kiss goodbye any hopes of luring a corporate headquarters or some hot biotech firm.

And the Krafts’ great crime? Well, basically, they’re rich, having made lots of money in businesses well beyond football, so somehow there’s this idea they should just foot the bill for everything. Of course, that’s a standard no one is held to in this country.

Secondly, a more recent round of stories notes lots of e-mails between the Krafts and state officials over the project and thousands in campaign contributions to Gov. Deval Patrick and state Democratic Party officials.

Of course, when you get to be a billionaire, you give to everyone out there, including the politicians. Give me a major business leader in the state, and, after 10 minutes scrolling around online, I will give you a laundry list of campaign contributions.

Clearing The Air

Anyway, let’s now set the record straight.

Far from greedy team owners looking for a free ride from the public, the Krafts are known throughout professional sports for having built the largest privately financed stadium project in history.

You see, out in the hinterlands beyond Greater Boston, from the Big Apple down to Dallas, state and city officials routinely pump hundreds of millions in taxpayer money into stadium projects.

Through a sales tax increase and extra ticket and parking charges, Texas taxpayers and sports fans picked up roughly half the cost of the Dallas Cowboys’ new $1.1 billion stadium.

By contrast, Robert Kraft has reached into his own wallet instead of picking the public’s pocketbook.

If you add in the Patriot Place mall, the Krafts have invested more than $800 million in both Gillette Stadium and its adjacent retail and restaurant bazaar.

Just to be clear, the state did put millions into Route 1 improvements to help smooth out the rough traffic situation around the new stadium, but this was a loan, not a giveaway.

Incredibly, this is one of the first significant state subsidies for which the Krafts have applied in all these years, not counting their brief flirtation with building a stadium in Hartford.

“The Krafts have gone way past the halfway mark to put their own money in,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor and sports industry expert. “I think the Krafts have done a remarkable job investing their own money and not going to the public purse.”

But even more absurd than the media outcry has been the sanctimonious reaction of the federal officials overseeing the stimulus boondoggle.

We read that Vice President Joe Biden’s office even intervened to prevent any money from making it into the Krafts hands, concerned that using public money to connect two private properties would create a bad image for the stimulus program.

Sorry, but isn’t this exactly the kind of project the federal government is supposed to be stimulating? Fostering private investment as opposed to Depression-style, make-work programs?

The Krafts plan to put in hundreds of millions of their own money to build a 1.5 million-square-foot commercial and retail complex just across Route 1 from Gillette Stadium.

The project will create 4,000 permanent jobs and another 4,500 construction jobs, the Krafts estimate.

But I guess the federal government would rather pour all its money into filling potholes. Brilliant. Now that’s sure-fire way of fueling the economy.