by Ian O'Connor
In 1919, Stephen Nickolas became the youngest of five children born to Mary and John Belichick of Monessen, Pennsylvania, 21 miles south of Pittsburgh. The 1920 census reported that John was the 41-year-old head of the household who had immigrated to the United States in 1901 (though his petition for naturalization said he sailed from France to New York in 1900), and that his wife, Mary, had immigrated in 1905 (though the 1930 census said she arrived in 1907). The great author David Halberstam wrote in his 2005 book The Education of a Coach that Mary arrived in America with no idea of her husband’s whereabouts—John didn’t know how to write; he’d never gone to school—and with her brother Nick Barkovic went on a hunt of Croatian communities in western Pennsylvania until she found John, working for Pittsburgh Steel.
The census reported that John and Mary had become American citizens in 1914, that neither could read or write, and that they lived on Grant Avenue, in the third ward of Monessen. The census listed the four sons in descending age—Frank, Joseph, John, and Steve—but seemed to have omitted the oldest Belichick child and only daughter, Anna. Four Croatian men aged 25 to 36 were listed as boarders and laborers in a steel mill; John was listed as a wire drawer, a thankless metalworking job that involved the use of die to make wire.
The family moved to another smokestack town, Struthers, Ohio, when Steve was a young boy. Every day, John walked more than five miles each way to his Youngstown factory job, and Steve later pitched in with his siblings to help pay the bills after their old man lost that job. Frank, the oldest boy, was a meter reader for the gas company. Among other things, Steve would become a golf caddie who made a dollar (tip included) for an 18-hole loop and a mill worker whose athletic talents gave him options not available to fellow teenage sons of undereducated Eastern European immigrants in the region.
Though he was a modest 5´10¾˝ (Steve later scoffed at his listed NFL height of 5´9˝) and about 165 pounds, Belichick was strong enough and swift enough out of Struthers High to play football and basketball at Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, where he was a fullback in Bill Edwards’s fullback-friendly single wing. Steve was on partial scholarship; he held down various jobs, including one delivering ice over the summer, to help defray costs. Later in his college career, he worked as a janitor with a $500 income, according to census records that said his father was earning $1,300 in the steel mill, his brother Joe was earning $1,215 in the mill, and his brother Frank was earning $1,800 with the gas company.
For Steve, it was clear early on that the school was offering more than a kid who once appeared destined for a laborer’s life could have dreamed of. His older brothers Frank and Joseph would spend all their working years in blue-collar jobs. Ohio records showed that before Frank died, in 1985, at age 75, he had last been employed as a supervisor of mechanics and repairers in the electric-and-light industry, and that Joseph—who died the same year, at 73—had last been employed as a crane and tower operator in the blast-furnace-and-steelwork industry. The third brother, John, who went by John Joseph Bell, cleared a path for Steve by playing football at Pennsylvania’s Geneva College, earning a master’s degree at Ohio State, and becoming a successful executive with the Columbia Gas System and the York (Pennsylvania) County Industrial Development Authority, where he reportedly created more than 23,000 jobs and completed $349 million worth of projects. (John lived until 2006, dying at age 91.)
College would be the same kind of gateway for Steve. He was a three-year letterman at Western Reserve in football and basketball and a member of the Warion Society, for upperclassmen prominent in extracurricular activities. He ran for enough touchdowns to ultimately earn a place in the school’s Hall of Fame. His coach, Edwards, was just starting a head coaching career that would land him in the College Football Hall of Fame; his Red Cats were that era’s equivalent of a wildly successful mid-major Division I program. They went undefeated in 1938, beating the likes of Ohio Wesleyan, West Virginia, and John Carroll before crowds ranging from 10,000 to 20,000. Two years later, in Belichick’s final season, Steve took a short carry over the goal line to help Western Reserve beat Arizona State in the Sun Bowl.
Edwards left the school to coach the Lions, and with Belichick fully expecting to get drafted into the military, Edwards gave him a job handling the team’s equipment until his number was called. Only the coach called Steve’s number before the Navy did. Edwards was trying to navigate his way around some injuries, and he wasn’t happy with his fullbacks early in Detroit’s season. So after watching Belichick more than hold his own while helping out in practice, the coach decided his former Western Reserve star should be added to the roster. The Associated Press reported that the move was the first of its kind in pro football “since Arnie Herber graduated from clubhouse boy into a vital role with the Green Bay Packers” in 1930.
On the afternoon of October 26, 1941, with the Packers holding a 24–0 lead in the fourth quarter at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium, Belichick fielded Hal Van Every’s bouncing punt on the run and made like Red Grange as he knifed through the Green Bay coverage team. The equipment manager, who was actually being paid by the players—one dollar per man every week—scored a touchdown on a 77-yard return, providing a much-needed diversion for a 1-4-1 team.
Two weeks later, after a victory over Cleveland, Belichick scored on a pair of eight-yard runs in a 20–13 loss to the New York Giants. “What I like about Steve,” Edwards said at the time, “is that he tries hard every minute. We need more like him.”
Detroit won two of its final three games, and Belichick completed his one and only season of pro football as a $115-a-week fullback (about an $80 increase over his previous wage) who had proven more efficient in Edwards’s system than his teammates. Belichick averaged 4.2 yards on 28 rushing attempts; no other Lion was good for even 3.0 per attempt. (Byron “Whizzer” White, Detroit’s biggest star and a future Supreme Court justice, averaged 2.7 on 89 carries, matching Belichick only with his two rushing touchdowns.)
The Lions ended their season on November 30. Seven days later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Before serving in the Navy overseas, Belichick played on an all-star team at the Great Lakes Naval Station, in Illinois, where he blocked for Bruce “Boo” Smith, the Heisman winner out of Minnesota, and still took his fair share of handoffs. “Smith, Belichick Lead Massacre” read one United Press headline over a story recounting Great Lakes’ 42–0 victory over Purdue in 1942. One of Belichick’s two touchdowns in that game came on a 35-yard interception return.
The following year, Steve ended up on the coaching staff at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, and then left for the war in Europe. He was reportedly commander of a merchant marine gun crew before being transferred to the Pacific. Belichick was discharged on March 5, 1946, according to records, some six months after the formal surrender of Japan. Okinawa, where Belichick was based with Sam Barnes, was scheduled for use as a staging area for an invasion of Japan that likely would have caused more than a million American casualties.
Upon his return to the States, Belichick had thoughts of picking up his NFL career where he left off in Detroit. He figured he might have a shot to play for Paul Brown, who had won a national championship at Ohio State after building a powerhouse team at Washington High School, in Massillon, Ohio. Brown was now running the startup Cleveland Browns of the startup All-America Football Conference, designed to rival the NFL, and his friend Edwards thought Belichick was the best fullback he’d ever had.
“However, I got messed up when one of Coach Brown’s assistants misunderstood me,” Steve would say. “Coach Brown was still in the Navy at the time when this assistant asked me at Great Lakes whether I wanted to play [pro] ball. I told him that I did, but he told Coach Brown that I was undecided, and Coach Brown doesn’t operate that way—you either do or you don’t. Anyway, this coaching job opened up for me at Hiram College and I took it.”
Hiram was a small liberal arts school in northeast Ohio, better known as the former home of the 20th president of the Un
ited States, James Garfield, than as a place to chase athletic glory. Steve’s teams were an odd mix of battle-scarred men, in college thanks to the GI Bill, and undeveloped boys, none on football scholarships. Hiram wasn’t Notre Dame or Michigan. The players were generally too small and too slow to play major-college football, but the servicemen—some in their late twenties—had a distinct physical and mental advantage over the 160-pound teenagers, who were in awe of them.
The ex-servicemen made up more than half the team. Some were married, some were close to 30 years old. They were often housed in the de facto barracks near the field, and one player said it wasn’t uncommon for a rowdy poker game among the older crowd to end with someone’s fist or head coming through one of the rooms’ paper-thin walls. “The war veterans were generally wonderful to be around,” said a younger teammate. “But in those barracks, if things got out of hand, you might hear one of them say, ‘You high school guys had better shut your fucking mouths or I’m going to put my fist down your throats.’ And those servicemen had all the girls. They ran the campus. We had no chance against them.”
Kir Karouna, a bench player from New York City, pointed out that age sometimes worked against the soldiers and sailors on Belichick’s team. “We were running around the track to warm up once,” Karouna said, “and the fellow next to me was in the invasion of Normandy and Utah Beach. I said to him, ‘How come you’re huffing and puffing?’ And he said, ‘Look, wait until you get to be 26.’”
Belichick was around the same age as a number of his athletes, and yet he commanded nearly universal respect. The players remembered him as big-chested and broad-shouldered, with a boxer’s nose that had been broken too many times to count while he played football in leather helmets with no facemasks. Steve usually wore baseball pants that looked like knickers, a T-shirt or sweatshirt, and a ball cap. He didn’t like socks worn from the knee down, and he told his players they would never wear them. “And we never did,” one said.
The coach wasn’t what anyone would call a screamer, but he knew how to get his team’s attention. “Steve was very thorough in watching film and pointing out what should’ve been done,” Karouna said. “It wasn’t a shouting session even when we lost a game, which wasn’t a rarity. He’d say, ‘If you did this or did that, the outcome would’ve been different.’ I think most players liked him.”
At least until his emotions bubbled over at the sight of sloppy execution. Upset one afternoon over his players’ inability to properly run a play in practice, Belichick took the ball himself and asked a linebacker to try to tackle him. Belichick ran at full speed, without pads, and sure enough, the linebacker, in full pads, did as he was told. “I don’t remember much about the collision,” said Jack Kerr, an end from Pittsburgh. “I only remember that there was one.”
The way another of Belichick’s players, Richard Dean, remembered it, the coach was mostly angry at the defensive line. “Steve was one tough cookie,” Dean said. “No one dared tackle him. He got the ball from the quarterback and ran it himself and . . . went through the line like greased lightning.”
Nobody was allowed to drop a forward pass in one of Steve Belichick’s practices; that would really draw his ire. But, by and large, the relationship between the tough-love coach and his undermanned student athletes was an exceedingly healthy one. In fact, Belichick was well liked across the entire campus. He was a physical education instructor who was made an honorary member of Phi Gamma Epsilon, Hiram’s oldest Greek social club. He was a coach who inspired his teams with the depth of his knowledge. Kerr, who doubled as a punter, said Belichick “taught me more about kicking a football than I ever knew.”
Hiram played home games before crowds of a few hundred people and almost always lined up against bigger, superior opponents. To toughen up the Terriers, Belichick sometimes had them run or push a blocking sled up the hill that led to the locker room. Don Nunnelly, a lineman from Alabama, said the coach had a drill known as “Murderers’ Row,” a term borrowed from the 1927 Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig. The drill was lacking in subtleties. A ballcarrier and a defender stood about five yards apart, with tackling dummies on the ground marking their tight boundaries. “A lineman had to tackle the guy going full speed,” Nunnelly said, “and if you didn’t tackle him, you had to stay there until you made the tackle.”
Belichick understood when he took the Hiram job that he would be unlikely to duplicate the success his mentor, Edwards, had at Western Reserve. Playing mostly against small Ohio and Pennsylvania schools, the Terriers had produced only six winning seasons between 1904 and the temporary wartime suspension of football in 1943, and yet in his first year Belichick managed a record of 5-3 and consecutive victories over Kenyon, Grove City, and Ashland.
He wasn’t afforded much off-season time to focus on improving the football program: Belichick also coached basketball and track and field and just about everything else at Hiram—often without the help of any assistants—if only because that’s what coaches at small schools back then were expected to do. Belichick traveled with his basketball team in three packed station wagons and was no less dedicated to that sport than he was to football. He even watched Hiram’s intramural competitions in his perpetual search for talent, and he pulled out of that rec league a 5´11˝ guard from Cleveland with some leaping ability, Robert Ingram, who called Belichick “the best coach I ever played for.”
Steve ran a balance of half-court and fast-break basketball, and he was not opposed to working the officials in an attempt to get a call. “He had a presence,” Ingram said. “When he spoke, you listened. He wasn’t a massive man, but he was a big man with plenty of muscle. You wouldn’t want to tangle with him, and I never saw anyone challenge him.”
At least one athlete did challenge his judgment, if not directly. Wally Kosinski arrived on campus in 1948, Belichick’s final football season, with a rocket arm that would later catch the eye of none other than Paul Brown. Kosinski was about 6´2˝ and 205 pounds, which was big for a quarterback in those days, and Belichick favored the smaller, quicker Jerry Hess.
Jack Kerr, the punter and end, said Kosinski could cover 70 yards in the air with a pass. The would-be quarterback came in with a slightly lower estimate. “I could throw the ball sixty yards through the air and through a rubber tire,” Kosinski said. “I had an arm and accuracy second to none.”
Belichick didn’t agree with that scouting report; he wanted Kosinski to play halfback. “And I couldn’t run my way out of a paper bag,” Kosinski said. “I thought he was so wrong on his assessment of me . . . I think Steve Belichick was a tremendous football guy, and I have nothing untoward to say about him that way. I don’t want to get into politics, but Croatia culturally is very close to Poland and I was a Polish kid, and we Eastern Europeans usually look out for each other. But that didn’t work with Steve Belichick. He was a tough hombre. He was tougher than nails.”
Kosinski would be installed as the starting quarterback by Belichick’s replacement, Al Pesek, and later signed a $5,000 option contract with the Cleveland Browns while doing intelligence work for the Air Force that included a trip to Germany and an assignment to spy on the Russians. When Kosinski returned to Hiram (the Browns were training there) to tell Brown the Air Force needed him longer than expected and that he was no longer interested in pro football, he said the legendary coach “had his glasses down on his nose while he was looking at something on his desk. He hardly ever looked up at me. The whole meeting took a total of four minutes, and then he looked up at me and said, ‘Well, that’s your decision. Goodbye.’ That was my encounter with Paul Brown.”
In the late 1940s, Belichick had more pleasant and meaningful interactions with the Cleveland coach. Steve was proud of his association with Brown, through Edwards. Life at Hiram was good for Belichick, even if his winning percentage in football wasn’t to his liking. He followed that 5-3 opening year with a most promising start to the 1947 season, an 8–7 road victory over Thiel College of Pennsylvania. The Terriers tackled p
unter Sam Scava in the end zone in the fourth quarter, snapping Thiel’s 15-game winning streak before a stunned and dismayed crowd of 2,000. But Hiram won only one more game that year, then went 1-5-1 in ’48, when the Terriers were outscored by a 126–39 margin. Belichick had better luck on the basketball court, starting with a 5-11 record in ’46 before improving to 7-10 the next year and then going 12-8 in the ’48–49 season, with Hess as his best player.
But Steve’s greatest day at Hiram was, without question, the day he met Jeannette Ruth Munn, a 1942 Hiram graduate who taught Spanish and French at the school. Munn was vibrant, Belichick was gruff. By all accounts Jeannette was a looker, and at least a couple of Belichick’s players thought she was a bit out of Steve’s league. “She was a very beautiful, petite lady,” said one. Many of Belichick’s players actually didn’t know their coach was seeing Munn, and one who did know thought the couple might’ve been keeping it quiet because of a written or unwritten policy discouraging intra-faculty relationships.
Richard Dean, who played football and basketball at Hiram, said he didn’t think anyone on either team knew that Steve was dating Jeannette. Dean had Munn as his Spanish teacher and described her as “very good, very pretty, and very nice . . . She got along with everyone.”
And then one day, Jeannette Munn was gone. She took off with Steve for Nashville, Tennessee, after Edwards left Brown’s side as an assistant in Cleveland and accepted the head job at Vanderbilt University, where he’d give Belichick his first shot at the big time. The Commodores competed with heavyweights in the Southeastern Conference—they’d won their last eight games the previous season and outscored those eight opponents by a margin of 307–26 before their coach, Red Sanders, left for UCLA.