Patriot Reign (2 page)

Bill
Belichick has moments that few people see or imagine, moments when he is no
longer the premier strategist of his profession. These are the times when he
could be the guy in the next cubicle, any other father, husband, or son. These
breaks from brilliance make him a stronger coach. They remind him that briefly
stepping away from his football vision can actually allow him to see more of
it.

There are times when the diagrammed plays on the
erasable board in his office are for an audience of two—his sons, Stephen and
Brian. There are times when the brainteasers he attempts to solve are provided
by members of his family, not by other coaches. “Do you know what ‘discrete’
means?” he said one day after a conversation with Brian. His
younger son—who attends Brookline’s Dexter School, John F. Kennedy’s alma
mater—was studying vocabulary words. “Discrete” was one of them. “It’s not the
same as ‘discreet,’ ” Belichick said. “Brian’s class is going over words that
have similar sounds with different meanings. That’s a good one.”

There was the time he tried to put on one of his favorite sweaters and
could barely get it over his shoulders. Laundry mistake. He called his wife,
Debby, to talk about it. He heard a lot of laughter coming from the phone.
“It’s not funny,” he said with a smirk, even though he knew it was.

What most surprises people who don’t know him is how much he enjoys a
good laugh, usually when he’s away from work and sometimes when he’s at it. He
earned a reputation for giving bland descriptions during his press conferences,
where his personality is the sacrifice to protecting the goods. Press
conferences are part of his game plans— he prepares for them at least fifteen
to twenty minutes per day—so he is especially conscious of saying or implying
anything that will give an opponent an edge. By the time he walks into his
morning briefings with the New England media, he has already broken them down.
He has predicted the incendiary topics of the day, sketched an outline of how
he will respond to those topics, and offered suggestions to his players on how
they should respond too. He has mastered an indifferent
look
during these conferences, yet when they are over he can easily recall details
about late-arriving reporters, opinion-makers he hasn’t seen in a while, and
questioners he didn’t recognize. When his conversation is no longer on the
record, it’s as if some hidden masseuse has suddenly relieved him of tension
points.

He can be relaxed during television production meet ings, depending on the broadcast crew for the game. He’s
been extremely loose with Phil Simms, Greg Gumbel, and Armen Keteyian of CBS.
He trusts them enough to joke with them. Once he went into a meeting seeing if
he could needle Simms. “Phil, I’ve heard you’ve been ripping the shit out of
me,” he said to the former Giants quarterback. “That’s all I hear from people:
‘Simms is ripping your ass during the broadcast.’ ” Simms didn’t fall for it.
He knew that Belichick wouldn’t leave anything to hearsay and that if he had
indeed ripped Belichick, the coach would know exactly when it happened, down
and distance included. “Bullshit,” Simms said. “All I do is talk about how
smart you are. We call you the smartest coach ever every week.” Belichick
laughed, leaned back in his chair, and acted as if he were getting ready for a
card game with his friends.

It helps that Simms has known
Belichick since 1979, but that’s not the only reason Belichick respects him and
his crew. He is even more impressed with their preparation. They are often
dressed casually in these meetings— T-shirts, baseball caps, flip-flops—but
they always have a plan for what is going to be discussed. Simms is indeed
their quarterback, so they all watch film and jot down observations to present
to Belichick. Their hard work makes him so comfortable that he often sits in
the meetings, feet propped up, telling stories. He once told them that he ran a
marathon and was spotted by Giants fans. “They saw me, and one fan says, ‘Look,
there’s Belichick of the Giants. They still don’t have a running game!’
”

On some days when things are quiet at Gillette Stadium—after the
Saturday morning walk-through and before the Saturday evening coaches’
meeting—Belichick is visited by one of his three dogs. Sometimes he entertains Tom Brady—a sports fan with an appreciation of sports
history—by telling tales about the old Giants. He once called defensive lineman
Richard Seymour into his office so they could watch tape and talk about some of
the dominant players of the NFC East in the 1980s.

He may have
been born in Tennessee and raised in Maryland, but he’s got a lot of Northeast
humor in him. He can be clever, sarcastic, and profane. Coming from his office it’s not unusual to hear the voices of Frank Rizzo and Sol Rosenberg, the
characters dreamed up by the Jerky Boys, the notorious telephone pranksters
from Queens. When he isn’t listening to their funny stories, he tells a few of
his own. He tells one about a family vacation in Europe in the mid-1990s. No
matter where they went, the Belichicks saw dozens of Europe’s aged churches.
They saw landmarks and a certain recurring icon. At one point Brian turned to
his parents and said, “Who is this guy? We’re seeing him everywhere.”

The “guy” was Jesus Christ.

“I don’t know if I should tell
that story,” Belichick says, shaking his head. “People are going to think we’re
bad parents.”

He has gone from twenty-six-year-old coach-peer to
fifty-two-year-old coach-teacher. He has learned to be more of a negotiator
with his own team, making compromises in some areas—or at least being able to
listen—without selling out his core beliefs. He no longer has to worry about
the potential conflicts of interest that he encountered in Baltimore, Detroit,
Denver, and the early days of New York. He was a young coach then, either the
same age or just a couple of years older than the players who reported to him.
He has an understanding and respect for issues now that he
didn’t after the 1989 season, when he had his first head-coaching interview.
The Phoenix Cardinals were interested in talking to him then. The team had
moved from St. Louis one year earlier, and ownership wanted someone who would
go from city to city in Arizona, helping to promote the team.

“I
didn’t realize how much they were looking for that,” Belichick says. “You know,
I figured winning would generate the interest as opposed to going out and doing
little rallies.” It’s not what the Cardinals wanted to hear. They gave the job
to Joe Bugel. It would be years before Belichick would develop a head coach’s
scope of vision, years before he would see that planning the issues around the
game is as important as planning the game itself.

“Let’s put it
this way: when you’re the head coach, you’re the head coach twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week. No matter what happens, it’s on your watch and, to a
degree, it’s your problem,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what. Some guy can run
a stop sign and get pulled over by the police, and they’re calling you. If the
fertilizer doesn’t come and the grass is going to be brown, you might get a
call, ‘What are we going to do?’ It’s everything.”

Early in his
head-coaching career he couldn’t resist obsessing over minutiae. He would sit
in on the Cleveland Browns’ defensive meetings and talk about how a pattern
should be covered. He would pop into special-teams meetings and talk about
punt-protection techniques. He would map out the offensive game plan because,
for two seasons, he was also his team’s offensive coordinator. He was a
coaching phenom, a young fastballer who didn’t know how to change speeds. The
joy to him then, at thirty-nine, was the pure rush of coaching. It was the
ideal of coaching in a vacuum, having a vision with no
periphery required. But it really was an ideal. Thinking like a football CEO is
part of the job. Allowing the media glimpses of the team and being cooperative
in the daily dance with them is part of the job. He underestimated the
importance of that in Cleveland, and he was generally resented for it.

“When I got there, there had been a very open media policy from previous
regimes. They had open practices, open locker rooms, pretty much whatever they
wanted, to the point where the players really had no privacy. You know, a guy
would play a joke on somebody or say something and it would be in the paper the
next day. There was no real opportunity for the team to build much of its own
personality or chemistry because that stuff was reported on a daily
basis.

“I clamped down on them. It could have been done in a more
positive or gracious way. I could have made some concessions so that it
wouldn’t have come off as being so harsh. I take responsibility for it. But the
bottom line was we just didn’t win quickly enough. The media logic was ‘Okay,
you want to come in and close practices and limit our access and give us some
short answers? You had better start putting up some wins.’ And when that didn’t
happen, with three consecutive losing seasons, there wasn’t a great defense
mechanism built up there.

“But I was kind of oblivious to that
too. Because I really was more concerned about coaching the team than trying to
be a PR machine.”

Back then he didn’t have someone taping the
Sunday night wrap-up shows on local TV, as he does now. Unlike today, he didn’t
have a thick pack of local and national newspaper clips that he would read as
he worked out on a treadmill. He didn’t have someone to not
only monitor the discussions on sports-talk radio but also filter the volume
and give him any items of significance. He didn’t have radio personalities and
columnists freely saying “In Bill We Trust,” as is the case in New England. He
had more to prove then, in an organization that would prove to be less
competent and unified than the one he’s in now.

For Belichick,
there was always the game. But with each addition to his personal and
professional timeline, he began to see it from new angles. A lot happened in
the twenty years between his ambitious start in Baltimore in 1975 and his
employer’s shocking announcement that it was moving to Baltimore—he guessed
that the moving trucks would take off without him—in 1995. One day in his early
twenties he is living at Howard Johnson’s and driving Baltimore Colts head
coach Ted Marchibroda to work. Then one day in his late thirties he is flying
into Cleveland and being shuttled to the Ritz Carlton, where Browns hats and
sweatshirts are lying on his bed. He and Debby join Art Modell and his wife,
Pat, at the Modells’ home for dinner. Bill and Art go into the den, shape a
contract, and agree to terms that will make him the coach of the Browns. Then
one day in his early forties, one of the strangest days he’s ever had, he
learns midseason that his team is moving and finds himself calling a member of
the media for insight.

He looked in the
Boston
Globe
on November 4, 1995, and saw an article headlined “Browns Look
to Baltimore.” Will McDonough broke the story and began it by writing, “The
Baltimore Browns. Get used to it.” McDonough wrote that an announcement would
be made in two days, on Monday, the day before the NFL owners were scheduled to
meet in Dallas. “I saw the article and I’m thinking,
Wow.
I talked to Will, and Will said, ‘Yeah, there’s no doubt about
it. This is what’s going to happen.’ Will had some good inside information. So
that really kind of sent the antennas up.” The lame-duck Browns had a home game
the next day against Houston and were crushed, 37–10. They lost seven of their
final eight games. “Modell” became a six-letter obscenity in Cleveland.

Four months after the announcement, Belichick was dismayed, though not
surprised, when news of his job status was finally delivered. He knew he was
going to be fired. It was the delivery of his firing that was problematic. “I’m
sure there were things that I did that Art wasn’t thrilled with, but I worked
hard for him. I spent a lot of hours there, and I tried to do what was best for
the team. And in typical Art fashion, five years later, it was just a phone
call.” During that call Belichick debated Modell on the wording of the proposed
firing statement to the media. Belichick didn’t like the way the document was
phrased. He thought the statement was one-sided, a piece of propaganda that
attempted to place all the organization’s problems at his feet. He looked over
the announcement and warned Modell, “If you release this statement, I’m going
to release one and you’re not going to like it. So let’s try to come up with
something that we can both live with.”

The statement was changed.
Both the Browns and Belichick would be moving. Marchibroda was going to
return to Baltimore as coach of the new Ravens. And Belichick was going to pack
his van and drive to New England. Miami Dolphins head coach Jimmy Johnson had
talked with him about becoming defensive coordinator of the Dolphins, but
Belichick had loved New England since prep school and college. He had homes on
Nantucket, he had friends from high school and college in
the area, and Bill Parcells had promised him a job as one of his Patriots
assistants. Over the course of the next four years he would follow Parcells to
the New York Jets as his defensive coordinator and assistant head coach, then
return to New England, this time as head coach.

M
aybe some people in Andover,
Massachusetts, would have found this ironic in 1971. Maybe they would have been
surprised to know that the long-haired center on the undefeated football team
would one day be forty miles south, in Foxboro, the man with final say in
football operations. But it wouldn’t have seemed unusual to a nineteen-year-old Bill Belichick. Even at Andover he was a little different from the
other students.

He listened to the Dead, James
Taylor, Bob Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel, as many of them did. He took
similar classes and got similar grades—As and Bs—although it didn’t come
naturally to him. “When I walked into Andover, I was surrounded by a lot of
people who were a whole lot smarter than I was,” he says. “And they knew a lot
more than I did on top of that. They had more experience than I did in terms of
traveling and being exposed to a lot of different things. Academically, it was
the hardest year I had in school. Way harder than college.”