by Ian O'Connor
Edwards assigned the backfield to the man he described as a hell of a back, and yet he didn’t sound terribly excited about it; he initially planned for Belichick to coach the freshmen. “I could have gotten several men for the job, but not the man I wanted,” Edwards was quoted as saying. “I want a southerner.” As a northerner replacing a popular North Carolina boy and Vanderbilt graduate, Edwards might’ve been playing to some of the locals who thought they were still fighting the Civil War. “I feel it would be better that Steve handle the backs this fall since he knows them,” he continued. “Then I think I can get the man I want after this season and have him here when we begin practice next spring.”
The Commodores went 4-4 in the SEC in 1949 and 5-5 overall, not the worst-case first-year scenario for a coaching staff that had a tough act to follow in Sanders. On August 18, 1950, before his second season at Vanderbilt opened, Belichick married Jeannette at the Memorial Presbyterian Church in West Palm Beach, Florida, where Munn’s parents, Leslie and Irene, lived on 33rd Street.
Some of Jeannette’s friends were less than thrilled with her choice of a life partner. “When we got married,” Steve said, “her friends went berserk. They couldn’t figure she’d marry a football coach. They figured maybe a concert pianist or a music teacher.”
Steve and Jeannette were married by Dr. H. Hansel Stembridge, according to the Belichicks’ certificate of marriage, dated August 22, 1950. Jeannette wore to her wedding a blue satin frock, a headdress of pink roses, and a shoulder-length veil. A black-and-white photo in the Palm Beach Post showed her carrying a bouquet of white roses and chrysanthemums as she left the church arm in arm with Steve, who looked every bit as rugged in his light-colored suit and dark tie as she looked stunning in her dress.
At the time, as a highly regarded scout and teacher of the game, Steve had every right to believe he was on track to become a big coaching star in the upper reaches of major-college football. So on the day he got married, Steve had no idea he had already worked his final game as a head coach—at Hiram, where he finished a combined 32-41-2 in football and basketball.
He would be a college assistant, an excellent one, for the next 40 years. But that didn’t mean Steve would spend the rest of his career making his bosses look smart and wondering what might’ve been, wondering what it would’ve felt like to run his own high-powered program. Steve would get to feel that feeling, and to live that life. A Belichick would become a head coach again, and he’d be responsible for moments on the football field, more than a few of them, that were a little bigger than snapping Thiel College’s 15-game winning streak.
William Stephen Belichick, named after Bill Edwards and his own father, was not yet four years old when Steve Belichick was hired by the United States Naval Academy, in February of 1956. Edwards and Belichick had been fired at Vanderbilt after four disappointing seasons, at least by their employer’s unrealistic standards. (Vanderbilt maintained the toughest admissions standards in the SEC, making it difficult to recruit top talent.) They were fired, essentially, Steve felt, because they couldn’t beat Tennessee.
Belichick landed at the University of North Carolina under George Barclay, and after three consecutive losing seasons he was thrown a life preserver by Navy coach Eddie Erdelatz, who had an opening and asked Belichick to fill it, for a salary of $7,000. Steve, Jeannette, and young Bill moved to Annapolis and started a love affair with the academy and the town that would carry on for decades.
Bill had already shown a great eagerness to do whatever his father was doing. He idolized Steve, loved following him into practice, into scouting meetings, or into the film room. By age six, Bill was a Baltimore Colts fan who watched their epic 1958 NFL title game victory over the Giants on his maternal grandparents’ black-and-white TV in Florida. But football was more than a source of joy and amusement to the boy. Steve said that his six-year-old son was already tracking down and distance and memorizing the Midshipmen’s plays. By the fourth grade, he said, Bill was already becoming proficient in working the projector and breaking down Navy’s game films.
“He wasn’t a pest,” Jeannette said of her son. “He was there to learn.”
The Belichicks had white walls and blue curtains in their home—“very conducive to watching film on the wall,” Bill would say years later. Only Jeannette, the language teacher who spoke seven languages, wasn’t about to let her only child completely lose himself in a mind-numbing blur of 16-millimeter clips of opposing formations. She read books to Bill at the kitchen table. Sometimes Bill would read a chapter out loud and then his mother would read the next one. If the boy didn’t understand a word or a scene, Jeannette stopped and explained it to him.
“A lot of what I learned from her was how to be a teacher,” Bill said years later. “And how to, you know, explain things, or try to boil it down so that I could understand it . . . So when I started breaking down film, that a lot of the little things became important to me. And it was always instilled in me that it was important to write neatly, to do things the right way, the way they were supposed to be done.”
Bill’s favorite childhood read was Winnie-the-Pooh. He liked it so much, he said, “I almost read the cover right off the book.” Bill liked the Hardy Boys mysteries and one of the first sports books he read, Pennant Race, Jim Brosnan’s diary of the long-shot 1961 Cincinnati Reds. He later read and adored Jerry Kramer’s diary of the 1967 Green Bay Packers, Instant Replay, and any other chronology of a sports season he could get his hands on.
Football was his narrative of choice, and for obvious reasons. “He wanted to be with me,” Steve said, “and I wanted to be with him.” Joe Bellino, the Navy running back from Winchester, Massachusetts, who won the 1960 Heisman Trophy, remembered a six-year-old Bill hanging around the practice field and the field house, where his father ran weekly night sessions dissecting the upcoming opponent he’d just finished scouting.
Bill sat in the back and watched his old man diagram formations for the players—many of whom played offense and defense and some special teams, too—and lay out the best available plan. Here’s what they’re going to do . . . This is a key . . . Here’s this backfield set . . . Here’s this guy’s stance. Steve Belichick might not have been a part of many winning coaching staffs early in his career, but he was already developing a reputation as an advanced scout without peer.
Sometimes, when Navy was facing an overmatched opponent, Steve would say, “The turning point in this game is going to be the coin flip.” It was his way of keeping his players and colleagues as loose as possible.
“Steve introduced the offensive and defensive game plans, and he was very meticulous,” Bellino said. “I can remember him saying quite clearly on a number of occasions, ‘Guys, we can beat this team. All you have to do is play the game as I plan it.’ Steve picked out the opponent’s weakness and attacked it, and we won many games on the minute details that he introduced on Mondays . . . He’d notice the opposing team’s offensive linemen, how they lined up, whether a guy’s right foot was back or parallel with his left foot and how that could determine whether it was a run or pass play or a run play to the right or left. That’s how he game-planned for every team.”
Early in the 1960 season, Navy played a game it appeared destined to lose at Washington, the nation’s third-ranked team and a 44–8 winner over Wisconsin in the previous season’s Rose Bowl. Belichick scouted the Huskies and thought they were vulnerable to swing passes to the left side. After Washington botched an attempted punt late in the fourth quarter while holding a 14–12 lead, and after the Huskies sacked Navy quarterback Hal Spooner for an 11-yard loss, Spooner threw one of those Belichick swing passes to Bellino, who took it 19 yards to the Washington 16 and ultimately set up the winning field goal in the closing seconds. The Huskies wouldn’t lose another game the rest of the season.
“Steve was like a general,” said Bellino, who would serve in Vietnam. “He was a guy you wanted to lead you into battle . . . For us, what Steve Belichick said was
gospel.”
As it turned out, young Bill Belichick felt the same way about Joe Bellino. A nine-year-old Billy attended Bellino’s graduation ceremony, Steve said, “and when the cadets all threw their caps into the air, he just walked over and picked up one without looking. There must’ve been 700 caps on the ground, and he picked up his idol’s, Joe Bellino’s.”
Bill cherished life around the academy as a boy, even as his father and the other coaches put in endless workdays. Roger Staubach, the 1963 Heisman Trophy winner at Navy, played catch with Bill after practices ended and the receivers had left for the night. Every week, Ernie Jorge, a Navy assistant, sent young Belichick the team’s plays in a package labeled “Bill’s Ready List,” which the boy took into his room and studied and studied and studied some more.
Steve Belichick was sure never to force football or coaching onto his son, but Bill, even at age five, had wanted to ride along with his father to scout William & Mary in Virginia. He later wanted to draw up schemes in his bedroom at night. He wanted to analyze plays on film by down and distance and to absorb everything from Steve’s coaching friends when they gathered at the house. He wanted to take snaps from Tom Lynch, team center and captain and the future academy superintendent.
Bill wanted advice from Wayne Hardin, who had played college ball at Pacific for Amos Alonzo Stagg and had become Navy’s 32-year-old head coach in 1958. When Bill was about 12 and starting to play organized football, he asked Hardin what position he thought suited him. “Tell you what,” the coach told the boy. “Turn around, bend over, and snap the ball to me.”
Bill’s first snap was a bit soft. His second attempt was firm, delivered with purpose. “Don’t change it,” Hardin told him. He advised Bill to keep watching Lynch and to copy everything he did.
Hardin had a son, Gary, who tagged along to practice with his friend Bill. To pass the time while their fathers worked, sometimes Gary and Bill wrestled on the field-house mats or played on the basketball court or ran around the track. Wayne Hardin laughed when he observed Gary and Bill watching his players run through drills. Steve’s boy was so focused on what the coaches were saying and how the units were responding to them. “Billy was eating it up,” Hardin said, “while my son was looking in the sky and waiting for the golf course to clear out.”
Gary Hardin would grow up to become a professional golfer, good enough to play on tour, and he could see as a grade-schooler that Bill had other designs. They did golf together as kids on the Navy course (Bill ended up caddying for Spiro Agnew, the Maryland governor and future vice president of the United States), with limited success. “We used to hit into the water a lot,” Gary said. They both played some YMCA-level football, Gary said, and there was no doubting who was more serious about the game.
“Bill was already looking at football as a career, even at that age,” Gary said. “We spent a lot of time together and stayed at each other’s houses. We’d play chess and other strategy-type games. Bill was very into the strategy aspect, and we’d draw up football plays and defenses that we watched our dads come up with . . . Bill knew where he was going much quicker than most. He didn’t waste any time. Every practice and film, he was putting stuff away in his memory.”
Bill’s father was too nervous to watch the Midshipmen play in person, so he was more than happy to spend his Saturday afternoons on another campus, searching for any game-day minutiae that might give Navy a competitive advantage the following week. He effectively scouted Army every week, as Army–Navy was everything to his bosses, peers, and subordinates in Annapolis. But when he wasn’t gathering intel on West Point, Steve Belichick was identifying vulnerabilities in every opponent on the schedule.
“He always came up with something,” said Wayne Hardin, who said Belichick made a difference—the difference—in a 1958 game against Michigan when they were both assistants under Erdelatz. The Wolverines had a talented two-way halfback who, when playing defense, raced aggressively toward the line of scrimmage if he saw a running back coming his way. Belichick told the other Navy coaches that if they ran a play-action pass toward this defender, he could be beaten over the top.
The targeted Michigan player had been hurt, but up in the press box Hardin saw him suddenly enter the game on defense and told his Navy staffmate, Jorge, to relay Belichick’s play to another assistant, Dick Duden, down on the sideline. “We need that play right now,” Hardin barked to Jorge. “He may not be in there after this play.” But in the fog of competition, Duden didn’t get the message. Hardin angrily reached for the phone. “I went nuts,” he said. “I told Duden, ‘Don’t say anything. Just tell the quarterback that’s the play.’ And he did. Touchdown—we won the game.”
Joe Tranchini had completed the 85-yard scoring drive by throwing a 36-yard pass to Dick Zembrzuski with 5:05 left. “No Michigan defender was within 15 yards of him,” read the United Press International dispatch. Instead of walking into the winning locker room with a bounce in his step, Hardin was terrified. He tried to hide as the celebration broke out around him. He thought he might’ve overstepped his bounds by forcing the call that had just toppled Michigan. Word had gotten around that Hardin had delivered the order from the press box, and had done some yelling and screaming in the process, but the players and coaches only thanked him for coming up with the decisive play. “I didn’t call it,” Hardin told them. “Steve called this play last Monday.”
Steve Belichick lived for these moments, and so did his son. Bill traveled with his old man on scouting trips, and he never forgot the way Steve outworked the four or five other scouts in the press box with him. Steve was up there with his pencils, his charts and binoculars, and he wrote down the substitutions in his book, wrote down the play, and then immediately moved on to the next play. Bill was mesmerized. “To go to a game and watch him scout a game was an unforgettable experience,” he would say years later.
“You would have other scouts asking, ‘What happened on that play?’ He was just so good at it. When the game would be over and we would be driving home, we would talk about the game, but he saw every play. The scheme and the defense, the pattern that they ran, the coverage they were in, who blitzed. He had a great vision. He taught me what he watched for.”
Steve decided to write a book on his strategy and philosophy in analyzing teams and players, and his wife played the role of editor. Jeannette repeatedly instructed her husband to better explain his points, to avoid jumping from A to D while skipping the B and C that the average fan and reader needed. “If I can understand it, I’ll type it,” Jeannette told Steve. “And somebody else could get it. And if I don’t understand it, then we gotta rewrite it.”
The result was the 1962 book Football Scouting Methods, which became a manual for those who wanted a doctorate in game-day reconnaissance. Steve spoke to the importance of in-person observation, even though he wrote, “In this day of modern science and transportation, it is possible for a scout to come back to his school with the movies of the game he saw some twenty-four hours before.”
Steve ran a summer camp with Jack Cloud, a Navy coach and former NFL player, that revolved around discipline and conditioning, and his off-season workouts were known to bring even the sturdiest young Middies to their knees. Bill was there with his father for as many drills as possible. He did everything with Steve, at home and on the road, including shop for bargain books at used-book stores or at the Salvation Army. “If they were over a buck,” Bill said, “then we’d pretty much write ’em off.” Steve was known around the academy for his frugality. He was an immigrant steelworker’s boy and a son of the Depression, after all.
Steve Belichick taught his only child much about life, about family, and about football—he was a leading scholar in all three fields. But the truth was, on the subject of how to be a head coach, Steve realized over time that it wasn’t his thing. His boy would need another strong role model on that front, and as he prepared for the rite of red-white-and-blue passage that was high school football, Bill Belichick was a
bout to meet him.
2
Big Al
Al Laramore, head football coach at Annapolis High School, went undefeated in 1966, the year desegregation sent some black students from Wiley H. Bates High School to Annapolis and sent some white students to Bates. The schools were separated by only a couple of blocks. They shared the same football field and nothing else.
In this separate and unequal environment, Bates didn’t have the funding to fully equip its players. Alan Pastrana, star quarterback of the 1962 Annapolis team and a future member of the Denver Broncos, attended a Bates game in 1962 and watched three of its players leave the field and hand their helmets to incoming teammates. “It was so strange,” Pastrana said. “They were there, and we were here. There was no interaction at that point, and that’s just the way it was.”
Desegregation finally started to tear down the walls between the two worlds, and in 1968, after Bates had transitioned into a junior high school, one of its white students showed up at Annapolis High to play center for Laramore’s football team. His name was Bill Belichick.
Bill had done some growing up since his days as a child in the back seat of his parents’ car, proudly identifying the Fords, Chevys, and Buicks on the highway before his dad could. His boyhood in a beautiful waterfront town was all but borrowed from a Rockwell painting. He was a Baltimore Colts fan who met Johnny Unitas at his dad’s football camp and snapped a ball to him, and who also met the coach, Don Shula, a friend of his father’s. Bill went to a Colts game or two every December, after his old man’s season ended at the academy, especially if the Browns or the Bears were the opponents. He hung out with Navy’s Heisman winners, Joe Bellino and Roger Staubach. He sat on the family’s porch with his dad and fellow assistant Ernie Jorge while the men drank beer and talked football. He listened attentively to the Navy coaches who visited his home and absorbed their lessons on handling adversity, and he marveled at the players’ discipline, selflessness, and respect for authority.