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Authors: Michael Holley

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His
prep school notebooks contained
Macbeth
study notes on one
page and an imagined play—the football kind—on the next. He had taken four
years of French in high school (Belichick attended Bates High School for one
year and graduated from Annapolis High), but he still struggled with the language at Andover. He was assigned to read
Les Misérables
in French. He found himself looking up forty
words per page. “It was unbelievable,” he says. “Jean Valjean—I hated that
fucker.”

He grew up some at Andover. He met students who amazed
him with their smarts. Whether they were writing, playing the saxophone, or
acting, they were astonishing at what they did. For the first time Belichick
asked for help in school. He went to teachers and other students when he came
across something that was unfamiliar to him. Andover expanded his mind—and
probably would have blown his parents’ minds if they had known what he was
experiencing.

“In all honesty, they probably didn’t know exactly
how liberal things were at Andover, and subsequently Wesleyan. You know, you
send your kid off to prep schools back then, and you think there’s some
structure, and there was. But there was a lot of drug use in the dorms. It
wasn’t any big secret. I mean, some dorms were stricter than others, but I
think there was quite a bit of drug use on campus from what I saw.”

There were academic changes and social changes, but there were no
athletic changes. He played football at Andover and knew he wanted to continue
at Wesleyan. He didn’t want to stop there. He and his friend Ernie Adams had
already thought about careers in either college or pro coaching. They both
graduated from college in 1975— Adams went to Northwestern—and decided to
pursue long-term passion over short-term prestige. Adams, who grew up in
Brookline, Massachusetts, took a job with the Patriots, the pro team down the
road. Belichick wanted to get a master’s degree in economics
and be a graduate assistant on some college’s staff.

He took what
turned out to be a perfect job with the Baltimore Colts: $25 a week and the
chance to absorb football every day from seven
A
.
M
. until midnight. He lived for
free at the Howard Johnson’s next to Baltimore-Washington International
Airport. His boss, Marchibroda, knew the owner of the hotel and traded Colts
tickets for four rooms. Marchibroda was in his first season with the Colts
after being on George Allen’s staff in Washington. He wasn’t going to move his
family from Washington to Baltimore, so he came up with the Howard Johnson’s
deal. Belichick, Marchibroda, and two other assistant coaches, George Boutselis
and Whitey Dovell, all lived there. They would meet in the lobby at seven, go
to breakfast—where Marchibroda would order the same thing every day—and talk
about football.

Belichick was their driver on the way to the
office. He was also in charge of film breakdowns, meticulously charting each
play by down, formation, motion, and field position. His father, Steve, an
assistant football coach for the U.S. Naval Academy Midshipmen, always believed
that to be the best way to learn football. Belichick helped run the scout team
and assisted with special teams. The only thing he didn’t do was game plans. He
was so good at what he did that his salary was doubled after training
camp.

So now he was up to $2,400 a year—before taxes. He didn’t
mind the scant salary. Anyway, watching his father had taught him how to handle
money. Steve Belichick didn’t believe in credit and never bought anything on
it. His philosophy was that you had the money or you didn’t. And when the elder Belichick had it, he bought a piece of Annapolis
land for $5,000 and built a $29,500 house on top of it. The Belichicks—Steve,
Jeanette, and Bill—moved into the house when Bill was six years old. Bill’s
money was fine during the Colts’ 10–4 regular season. But something had to
change after the play-offs, when Baltimore was eliminated by the dominant
Steelers, 28–10.

There would be no Howard Johnson’s in the
off-season. Which also meant that Marchibroda’s car wouldn’t be there to drive.
Belichick was going to need a local apartment, a car, or both to keep the job.
Marchibroda wanted him to stay, but general manager Joe Thomas said the team
couldn’t come up with an apartment, a car, or more money. These were the new
Colts, owned by a man Baltimoreans would come to despise. His name was Robert
Irsay. The Colts had traded Johnny Unitas and Mike Curtis, they had begun
lobbying for a new stadium, and they couldn’t find a way to keep a promising
twenty-three-year-old coach on staff. Thomas even told Belichick to wait tables
in the off-season because there wasn’t much else a coach could do all winter
until the first days of spring.

Thomas was wrong, of course, and a
head coach named Rick Forzano knew it. Belichick called the Detroit Lions
looking for a job, and Forzano offered this deal: $10,000 a year with a 1976
Thunderbird included. The kid needed a car? Well, the kid needed to work for
the team that was owned by the Fords. Belichick did some work as an advance
scout, coached tight ends, coached receivers, and spent a lot of time listening
to the Lions’ defensive coaches. Jerry Glanville was working with the
linebackers; Fritz Shurmur’s group was the defensive line; Jim Carr, “one of
the top defensive coordinators at that time,” was in the secondary; and Floyd Reese was assigned to the special-teamers.
The offense had Joe Bugel and Ken Shipp, who had coached Joe Namath and John
Riggins with the New York Jets.

“An all-star staff,” Belichick
says.

Some Detroit coaches would talk with Steve Belichick and
report, “Your kid is something special. He’s really unbelievable.” The father
would say then the same thing he says now: “Thanks. But he’s never been accused
of being a dummy.” Forzano didn’t get to witness the professional growth of
Belichick for long, though. The team started 1–3 in ’76, with all the losses to
NFC Central teams, and Tommy Hudspeth became the coach. The Lions finished with
back-to-back 6–8 seasons when Belichick was there. He was forced to leave his
job and his Thunderbird after the ’77 season.

He was four months
away from his twenty-sixth birthday. He was unemployed. And he had been
recently married to his friend from Annapolis High, an attractive young woman
named Debby Clarke. Bill and Debby were married under the golden dome of the
Naval Academy’s chapel. They had their reception on campus as well, in the same
hall where their prom had been held. They spent 1978 in Denver before moving
back to the East Coast in 1979.

“By the time I got through with
those four years, I felt I had been around the block on a lot of different
levels,” Belichick says. “I had seen a lot of different players and
head-coaching styles. I had been in the AFC and NFC. I felt I had four good
years studying special teams, two years studying offense, and two studying
defense.”

He had worked for four coaches in three cities. He was
beginning to acquire the education that he couldn’t get in school, no matter how prestigious those schools are. He was
twenty-six years old, almost twenty-seven, and now he knew what it meant to
take control of a meeting. He understood how dangerous it is to be surrounded
by yes men, sycophants who silently nod along with you even though your premise
or approach may be faulty. He saw how rapidly an employment status can change.
Sometimes it’s because the owners are cheap, sometimes it’s because the owners
want the teams to win more, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Belichick was headed to New York, a city where he would become idolized
as a prepared and visionary coach. In exactly twenty years he would go to court
for the right to leave New York. It wouldn’t be leaving New York as much as it
would be professionally separating himself from Bill Parcells, a boss with whom
he was tired of being associated. One day he would feel as if he were an
established country that some haughty explorer claimed to have discovered. One
day he would take exception to the notion that Parcells was his mentor.
Belichick had watched his father. He had watched Marchibroda, Shurmur,
Glanville, Reese, Red Miller, lots of people. However, he would be linked to
Parcells for many years. That link would gradually weaken in the late 1990s. It
would pop, dramatically, at the end of 1999 and in the first few weeks of the
new millennium.

But no one could have imagined that in ’79, when
New York Giants head coach Ray Perkins was looking for a special-teams coach.
The foreshadowing was there, but who could see it? Who would guess that Adams,
who also began working with the Giants in ’79, would still be a key member of
Belichick’s football Cabinet? A sergeant’s son, Romeo
Crennel, would arrive in New York two years after Belichick. Who would guess
that he would one day become the top coordinator in the NFL as part of
Belichick’s staff?

There was one clue that the
twenty-seven-year-old Belichick would be just as forceful as the fifty-year-old
Belichick. He made it known in the beginning that he was a coach, not one of
the guys. He looked young. He
was
young. He was in good shape
from his days of playing football and lacrosse. It would have been easy for
players to look at this assistant coach as a peer, not as someone charged with
giving and teaching them assignments.

“It was an awkward
relationship because in a lot of cases I was younger than the players,” he
says. “Each year I was older than a couple more guys. But for a lot of years
there were a bunch of players, certainly the higher-profile guys, who were
older than I was. You know, I was never one to go around with the players
anyway. I could relate to them because I was their age, but I was never gonna
hang out with them and do some of the shit that they did.

“And I
knew it wasn’t the right thing to do anyway. It would be great for a night, but
in the long run it could really deteriorate your relationship. Everybody that
I’d worked with told me that too. Ted told me, Rick told me, Red told
me.”

They told him because they knew there would be a point when
he would be challenged. Some player was going to step up, and the young coach
was going to have to prove that he was in authority. That happened in New York,
and it happened during one of Belichick’s first meetings in front of the entire
team. He was trying to explain how the Giants were going to handle a technique
when he noticed a conversation to his left. One of the players was laughing,
trying to get the attention of his buddy. Belichick called
the player out, and the player replied with a verbal jab of his own. Perkins
was watching the exchange, but he didn’t say anything. Belichick took over
then.

“Shut the fuck up, all right? If you don’t want to sit here,
then just get the fuck out of here. But this is important. Everybody else is
listening.”

No more words were necessary. The talking and laughing
stopped, and the new special-teams coach in New York was able to make his
point. Perkins approached him afterward and told him the performance was great.
It’s what the head coach had wanted to see. Perkins was a tough coach who saw
no problem with starters playing on special teams. When Belichick needed to be
backed because players were late for special-teams meetings, Perkins was there
to give him support.

“If they’re late, you just have to fine ’em,”
he would say.

And it wasn’t hard to figure out why some players
were late. They didn’t want to be there. Since the rosters were smaller in ’79,
special-teamers were closer to being starters then than they are now. There
weren’t as many players on teams then who were known purely as great “gunners,”
for example. They were backups in many cases, third receivers and third
corners, who would have much rather been on the field for three downs than for
one. They were among the first group to hear what Belichick tells all his
players now. He tells them about the importance of teams, being attentive on
teams, and being in position to turn the game on teams. He said it in ’79. He
said it in ’02.

Appropriately, his words have always had a
resounding economy to them. When he speaks to his team, no one is murky about
where he stands. He has an opinion. It is always direct, and
depending on the subject, it is sometimes rimmed with the obscene. He has been
speaking to professional football audiences for more than half of his life. All
he requires is for you to be alert, listen, and do what’s supposed to be done.
Trust him. There’s an art to playing this game.

CHAPTER 2
THE FOXBORO TRIANGLE:
THE KRAFTS, PARCELLS,
AND BELICHICK

It was a
Tuesday morning, just after ten o’clock, when Bill Belichick was having a
meeting with his trusted adviser and friend, Ernie Adams. They were exchanging
ideas about the Tennessee Titans, whom they would play six days later in
Nashville. Belichick and Adams were talking about ways to stop quarterback
Steve McNair when they were interrupted by a soft knock on the office
door.

A few seconds later a man who is also in the
football business joined them. It was Robert Kraft. He was just stopping in to
hear the experts analyze pro football, a sport he obsesses over as much as they
do.

He listened to their comments on quarterbacks who can run. “We
are so slow on defense,” Belichick said, “that scrambles
bother us a lot more than other teams. I’ll bet Daunte Culpepper scrambled for
more yards against us than he did anyone all year. Or close to it.” Kraft
listened to them talk about McNair—“You almost have to treat him like a running
back”—and watched them dig into their archives for any plan of theirs that had
once slowed the 235-pound quarterback. They came up with a New York Jets game
plan from November 1998, when the Jets beat the Tennessee Oilers, 24–3. McNair
was so bad that day that Dave Krieg replaced him. Expecting anything close to
that same outcome was a reach, but at least they were holding proof that it
could be done.

Kraft listened to them promise to fix an aspect of
their defense: “We’re going to get this ‘mirror’ straightened out if we don’t
do anything else this week.” An effective mirror would put them in position to
limit a quarterback’s scrambling. Kraft listened to a few more minutes of
planning before he quietly slid out the door.

Kraft, the team
owner, would probably return later and listen to Belichick’s thoughts. Or he
might call from his office and try to understand a part of the game the way his
head coach understood it. He knew he could talk to Belichick without any
charges of being a meddlesome owner. And Belichick knew that when he was in
conversations with Kraft he was talking to both a curious football fan and an
exceptional businessman. Each man was receiving something—an implicit
understanding between coach and owner—that had eluded him in the past.

After Bill Parcells left New England in 1997, Kraft and his family had to
fight the perception that their constant hovering and tinkering had driven
Parcells away to New York. On the September night Parcells returned to Foxboro
with his new love, the Jets, a one-liner by former
Boston Globe
columnist Mike Barnicle captured a local
sentiment that was gaining popularity. “I did not realize,” Barnicle wrote,
“that Amos Alonzo Kraft was the true architect of this team.”

The
reference to the football coaching legend and the suggestion that the owner was
some type of intrusive football demigod annoyed Kraft, then and now. “Look,
we’re going to pay attention. I think fans should want owners who are going to
pay attention,” Robert Kraft says. “It’s our financial net worth on the line.
In Parcells, we had a guy who was coaching year to year. And the issue of his
contract was supposed to be irrelevant to us? That’s preposterous.”

Too, the Krafts had dealt with Parcells every day. They knew how he had
made them feel. Robert is careful and diplomatic when talking about Parcells
today, but you can sense that there is a vast network of emotions lingering
beneath each safe sentence. Jonathan Kraft, the team’s vice chairman, is more
candid on the subject. “I hated the man with a passion,” he says. “He is
someone who tried to make my father look bad. He tried to make him look
foolish. And as a son, I hated him for it.”

Belichick had arrived
in New England as an assistant head coach during the height of Kraft-Parcells
in 1996: “Obviously a lot of things had happened before I had gotten there. My
sense of it was there wasn’t a lot of communication.” Once in New England,
assistant coach Belichick and owner Kraft became friendly, and Belichick found
himself much more comfortable speaking with him than he had been with Art
Modell in Cleveland. They would converse several times a week, talking about
football and the business of football. At times people
overhearing their conversations would have thought,
Listen to these
eggheads.

There was the brainy Wesleyan graduate, with
credentials in economics and Super Bowl defenses, talking with the
multimillionaire Columbia University and Harvard Business School grad who had
spent his entire forties and early fifties planning to buy the Patriots. And
when Jonathan was part of their talks, another voice from Harvard Business
School—via Williams College—was being heard. Belichick never found the
discussions with Kraft to be taxing. “To me, what stood out was his smarts. He
instinctively had good thoughts on football, and he understood why something
would or would not be a good idea. Whereas Art had that same curiosity, and he
had no idea of why things might be happening. None.”

Kraft’s
thoughts on the game were so good because he had loved it and tried to live it
since his youth in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brookline High
in 1959, one year before the Patriots were born. He was small, no more than
five-foot-eight, but he always wanted to play. He knew it wasn’t possible in
high school. He had to attend Hebrew classes every day after school, and
Brookline played its games on the Saturday Sabbath. When he arrived at Columbia
on an academic scholarship, the urge to play hadn’t left him. His parents
didn’t know it, but he played on an intramural football team at school. That
is, they didn’t know it at first. They found out after a game against Penn in
which Robert injured his knee and needed surgery. Before operating, the school
tried to contact the Krafts, but they didn’t answer the phone until after
sundown on the Sabbath. When representatives from Columbia finally got through,
the news broke:

 

SCHOOL
:
“We need permission to operate on your son.”

HARRY
KRAFT
: “What happened?”

SCHOOL
:
“He was hurt in today’s game.”

HARRY KRAFT
:
“What game? A football game? What?”

 

He
was just a kid, not even twenty-one. But it was clear then that, somehow,
football was going to be a part of his life. When he was twenty-nine and the
father of a young family, he arrived at his Newton home and was greeted at the
front door. That was part of the routine. The house at 60 Graylynn Road had a
foyer on its right side, and that’s where Kraft would meet his wife and sons.
It was 1971, so his oldest, Jonathan, was seven years old.

“Come
on, I want to show you something,” he said to the boy.

He opened
his briefcase and showed him season tickets for the Patriots, who were playing
at a new stadium in Foxboro. Jonathan was excited, although the tickets had
caused a household problem. Myra Kraft was not happy with her husband, and
Jonathan could hear her raised voice—his bedroom was next to his parents’—as
she asked Robert what exactly he was doing. The tickets were not a good
investment for a family that had just begun to build its wealth.

Myra could have won her argument strictly on the performance of the team:
it was bad. The team won 24 games and lost 46 between 1971 and 1975. The best
thing about the games was the time Kraft was able to spend with his sons. He’d
pick up roast beef sandwiches from Proviser’s Deli on Commonwealth Avenue and
drive to the stadium. He’d slip a $10 bill to one of the parking guys so he
could get a good spot and avoid the postgame traffic gridlock. Sometimes he would have rolls of toilet paper with him. That
was the local tradition at Patriots games. When the team scored, the people up
high would throw their rolls and watch them unfurl into the crowd.

It was fun, even if the teams were no good. Through the years the family
grew, and so did its dreams. Kraft began his career with a paper products
company, Rand-Whitney, which was owned by his father-in-law, philanthropist
Jacob Hiatt. Kraft displayed a velvet business touch by the time he was in his
midtwenties: he analyzed the stock market, hit for about $40,000, and made
strong investments. By the early 1980s Kraft had gone beyond simply owning a
business. By that time he had long since founded International Forest Products
and amassed enough capital to acquire Rand-Whitney. Now he was looking for more
than season tickets in section 217. He wanted to buy the team. He wanted the
team to play in a stadium that was more appealing than the low-budget bowl that
sat on a hill just off Route 1. He was a Boston kid who in his lifetime had
seen frequent championships from the Celtics. He saw a couple of titles from
the Bruins and none from the Red Sox, the most heartbreaking bridesmaids of
all. What he had really wanted to see was the Patriots win a Super Bowl. That
way, he could point to them and proudly say it was his team.

That’s what troubled him when part of his dream came true. He already
owned sorry Foxboro Stadium, the team that played in it, and the land that
surrounded it. In January 1994 he bought the team from James Busch Orthwein for
a then-record sum of nearly $200 million. But by 1996 he had not worked out a
deal for a new stadium, and he didn’t have a championship. It mystified him
that the team could be on the verge of winning a Super Bowl—XXXI—but that pursuit was running equal, or even secondary, to
the imminent departure of Parcells. It bothered and hurt him that opinions were
split on the departure and that, in some precincts, he received the blame. It
was hard to find an emotion for what happened to his team after Parcells left
and before Belichick arrived, because it happened so quickly. The play was
poor, the drafts were bad, and the middle management was second-rate. It was
upsetting to him because this was happening to the Patriots. And the Patriots,
in heart and deed, were his team.

“My father—I think people have
always, throughout his life, underestimated him,” Jonathan says. “He didn’t
come from a lot financially, and he was always underestimated. You can look at
his business career, either how he started International Forest Products or
even our ownership of [Boston television station] Channel 7. He would be told
that he didn’t have the resources, or the smarts, or whatever it was. People
would think he was crazy. But he would see things, map them out in his head,
and once he committed, he’d stick with something. He’d be tenacious as hell and
stick with it.”

Toward the end of the 1996 season Robert Kraft
began to realize that he might have to use his tenacity in an unusual way. He
might have to use it to clear up the contract issues of his own head coach.
Kraft was hearing rumors that Parcells was looking to move on to another team,
even though he was still under contract with the Patriots. If this was true, it
was going to be a problem. As Kraft understood Parcells’s contract, the options
were limited: Parcells could coach the Patriots in 1997; he could leave
coaching altogether for a year and then return in 1998; or he could accept a deal with another team in 1997, which would result in
a compensation windfall for New England.

Clearly there was
discomfort between Kraft and Parcells, and the discomfort became intensely
personal. It may have begun as a simple personality clash, a predictable
occupational hazard given the profiles of both men. Parcells, after all, was
recognized as one of the best coaches in modern football history and an owner
of things—championship rings—that Kraft coveted. His charisma was difficult to
match too. Parcells’s daily press conferences were reality TV shows before the
term even existed. Members of the media would show up for updates from the solo
character just to see what kind of colorful verbal frames he would place on
ordinary football pictures. No one in the NFL was better at entertaining you
for thirty minutes without revealing an ounce of substantive news. He’d waddle
into the room, sit at a table, and begin with a familiar line, “Fire away,
fellas.” On the days he really had it going, Parcells would grant a backstage
pass to the media members. After the press conference he’d chat for an
additional ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes. Parcells was good at
detecting the pulse of the media, and he should have been: he demanded that
clips from the New York and Boston newspapers be placed on his desk by seven
A
.
M
., and sports-talk radio was
often the soundtrack in his office. He had a lot of caricature in him, the
Jersey wiseguy who was always on the verge of telling you that he knew a lot
more than you did.

Not only was Kraft a new owner, but he was an
owner who had inherited Parcells’s contract. The coach was actually signed by
Orthwein, Kraft’s predecessor. Orthwein stayed out of
Parcells’s way and let him run football operations as he saw fit. Kraft wasn’t
going to do that. He believed in giving managers their space, but he did not
believe in giving any manager carte blanche. He wasn’t going to let Parcells
wall himself off in football operations while “the suits” did their jobs
elsewhere. As an owner, he was going to ask business questions. And as a
football fan who had paid more for a team than anyone before him, he believed
he was entitled to have his football questions answered. It was his
team.

There was no compatibility between the two. While Belichick
and Kraft would talk for hours about the game as well as the mathematical
principles that are applied to the salary cap–driven NFL, Kraft had no such
bond with Parcells. In a way, the differences between Kraft and Parcells helped
expose the growing differences between Belichick and Parcells. One man was
uncomfortable with the owner’s style. One man was eventually impressed by it.
“Everyone has dreams, but the Krafts take it up a notch or three,” Belichick
once said. “Hey, a lot of people dream of meeting a rock star one day; Robert
brings in Elton John for his anniversary party. When you and I receive a box or
a package in the mail, we want to know what’s inside. So does Robert, but
before he gets to all that, he’s figuring out whether he manufactured the box.
And if not, why not? It’s probably a different way of thinking from most
people, but I think it’s one of the things that draws us together.”

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