by Ian O'Connor
Bill had good, sports-mad friends like Mark Fredland, son of a Navy professor, and Gary Hardin, and he had a father with manageable ambitions and a secure job (Steve became a tenured associate professor in physical education) and a mother who was happy to feed his insatiable appetite for football knowledge. When Jeannette wasn’t reading her cherished copies of The New Yorker, she was doing her own breakdowns of opponents. “She had as much football knowledge as little Bill did at one point,” Bellino said. “I think she might’ve coordinated all of Steve’s notes. She probably viewed the game films as much as Steve did.”
Steve had already confirmed Bellino’s suspicions. “I don’t think there’s a woman in the country who knows more about football,” he said of his wife. “She can tell you the second-string quarterback with the Rams or who coaches at Texas–El Paso.”
This was Bill’s charmed life on Aberdeen Road, at least until his experience at Bates High turned turbulent. As the only child of a man who had helped integrate a wartime officers’ club by welcoming Sam Barnes, Bill came out of a household built around respect for all colors and creeds. But as a student at Bates, Bill often witnessed conflict along racial lines. He would later say that because the white and black neighborhoods were so different, “there was a lot of beating up of kids and that kind of thing. I was young. It was all over my head.”
Gary Hardin had moved with his family to Philadelphia, and he’d call Bill to get updates on what was happening at school. “I’d get reports from him that one of our friends had gotten beaten up,” Hardin said. “It was a violent, awful time . . . I was a new guy in a new atmosphere, and Bill was in a town he knew that was changing all around him.”
The integration of the Annapolis and Bates student bodies initially didn’t solve much of anything. The 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led to rioting in Baltimore, a little more than 30 miles away, and eventually to the presence of a Black Panther Party office in Annapolis. Alan Pastrana’s younger brother, Ron, a running back, said there was often trouble brewing between whites and blacks on school grounds. “Oh, my God,” he said, “there was rioting, arrests, bottles flying across the parking lot, and the police didn’t want to do anything. On the football field, there was no color line, but in the parking lot there was.”
Against this distressing backdrop, Laramore, a former star tackle in college, believed his team was a symbol for what black and white could achieve when working together. The coach was proudest when his best player, Archie Pearmon, a black defensive end, was named winner of the Jim Rhodes Memorial Trophy, awarded annually to the most outstanding player in Anne Arundel County, beating out a number of accomplished white candidates. At a January 1969 banquet, Laramore said that it was a privilege to coach Pearmon, and that his classmates at Annapolis High looked up to him.
One white teammate who became a lifelong friend of Pearmon’s, Bob Bounelis, confirmed Laramore’s contention that there was no racial discord between white and black football players in the locker room or on the field. But there would be severe racial disturbances at the school in 1970, when some black students—a number of them moved by The Autobiography of Malcolm X—decided they should make a statement on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. The students had boycotted classes the previous month and gathered in the school cafeteria to voice their complaints about a white power structure that didn’t make enough room for African American educators in the administration, or for African American studies in the curriculum.
The high school protesters wanted to model their actions after the college protesters raging against the war in Vietnam, and when they were confronted by administrators, trouble ensued. A UPI report quoted police describing Annapolis High as being left in “shambles” and said that “students went on a rampage, tearing down bulletin boards and smashing windows, desks and other furniture.” At least 20 students were reportedly expelled as a result, including Carl Snowden, later a civil rights and community leader who successfully sued the FBI for illegally monitoring him from the time he was a teenager at Annapolis.
If the school’s athletes needed a sanctuary from the escalating tensions, they found one in Al Laramore’s locker room. Back at Annapolis High for his junior and senior years, Bill Belichick saw in Laramore a unifying, no-nonsense force who didn’t tolerate divisions of any sort among his players. Big Al, as Laramore came to be known, was an important role model for young Belichick, who watched as his high school coach discriminated against only one kind of player: those who couldn’t help him win a ball game.
A grizzly bear of a man, the 6´3˝, 300-pound Laramore stood as an imposing figure in the school hallways and operated as a de facto police force of one, respected equally by students white and black. On the team bus, he commanded the same kind of respect. The Annapolis Fighting Panthers sometimes stopped at a fast-food joint after a victory on the road, and the players would be engaged in loud, triumphant chatter while tearing through their burgers and fries until the moment their coach stepped on the bus.
“And then there was total silence,” Ron Pastrana said. “He would look at his assistant and say, ‘Are we all here?’ If the answer was yes, he sat down and then everyone could start talking again. And half the team was minority and half wasn’t, but you couldn’t tell on that bus. When you looked on the bus, it was integrated. The school cafeteria wasn’t—it was black on that side, Jewish in this corner, WASP in another section. But on Laramore’s bus, everyone was one.”
Pastrana said the black players often led the team in song on Laramore’s bus. One of them, a defensive back named Wayne Blunt, said the coach treated the black athletes on his team with the same consideration granted the white athletes. Blunt was one of seven children, and he was thinking of quitting football to focus on helping his family pay the bills. Laramore visited the Blunt home to talk to Wayne’s mother. He paid for her son’s football shoes and helped him get a part-time job as a short-order cook that he could fit in after practice. Blunt got paid every Saturday, and after he’d collected two or three paychecks, his parents made sure he reimbursed his coach.
“Al wanted me to play for him. He kept after me,” Blunt said. “That made me feel really good.” As for the racial problems at school, Blunt maintained that they were tempered by athletes of different colors working together in highly functioning units. “And look,” Blunt said, “there was no more problem when Al got involved.” One story, later passed down to Laramore’s twin sons, Dan and Dave, and perhaps embellished over time, had Big Al wielding a baseball bat as he guarded the gym that day the protesters were ransacking classrooms, ready to defend what he’d worked so hard to build.
Laramore’s larger-than-life presence—and the image of him as a white sheriff standing tall in what had been a largely white domain—didn’t stop him from establishing credibility in the black community as an equal-opportunity distributor of playing time. In later years, when his sons were in elementary school, Laramore took them along for rides while dropping off some of his black players after practice. These were places, Dan Laramore said, “where no white person would go, even a fireman wouldn’t go. My brother and I and Dad would go in there, and we were accepted because of who my dad was.” And for good reason: Big Al would become the first Annapolis basketball coach to field an all-black team, despite heavy resistance from the locals. “If there was pressure to put a white kid or two on the team,” his son Dan said, “he resisted it.”
In fact, a close friend of Laramore’s believed that Big Al’s health suffered under that pressure. Laramore endured bouts of depression in the 1970s and ’80s that required hospitalization, a fact his son Dave wanted on the record to show the kind of tenacious fighter his father had been. (“This is the same person,” Dave said, “who once had a mild heart attack in the middle of a game and didn’t tell anybody.”) Big Al ultimately became the first Maryland high school coach to win state titles in three sports—football, basketball, and lacrosse. “And I think each year after he suffere
d from depression, he won a state championship,” Dave said.
One of Laramore’s black basketball players, Kenny Kirby, who became an alderman in Annapolis, said Laramore made it known in 1971 that he was going with the best 15 players available to him, regardless of color. “He made that crystal clear to everyone,” said Kirby, a 6´6˝ forward and later a team captain. According to Kirby, the players knew that Laramore had suffered “some stress problems and psychological problems” as a result of the objections voiced by white administrators and fans over the makeup of his roster. Laramore was temporarily replaced as Annapolis’s football coach in 1972 (for the stated reason of an illness), and as basketball coach early in 1973—by former Detroit Pistons star Eddie Miles—before returning for the close of the season and a run into the state playoffs. The fact that Laramore wouldn’t blink and effectively compromised his own health in defending his all-black basketball team, Kirby said, “made you believe in him that much more.”
On the football field a few years earlier, Laramore had already earned his players’ trust. His culture of inclusion, a young Bill Belichick thought, represented the ideal of what a team was supposed to be. “It’s the great thing about sports,” Bill would say. “Race didn’t have anything to do with it.”
The Panthers’ program was a pure meritocracy, which meant that Belichick had to work his way onto the Panther Stadium field. Bill wasn’t big, and he wasn’t fast, and he wasn’t athletic. “He was a great help to the coach, telling others what to do,” Jeannette Belichick said. “But he was slow, like his mother . . . He knew where he was supposed to be, but it was hard for him to get there.”
Laramore found plenty that he liked in Belichick anyway, even if the kid couldn’t move as quickly as his father did. The coach realized that his center could see the entire field like few teenagers could, and knew every teammate’s assignment on every play. They formed something of a partnership, Laramore and Belichick, two Baltimore Colts fans who appreciated sound fundamental football. If Bill saw in his father a perfectionist’s attention to detail, and in Navy coach Wayne Hardin a willingness to be bold and creative on special teams (“That wasn’t lost on us as little guys,” Gary Hardin said), he saw in Al Laramore an emphasis on toughness and simple execution.
Laramore’s approach would have a lasting impact on Belichick, who later acknowledged what millions of young football players across the country understood—that, outside of your parents, few people can influence and shape you like a good high school coach. Bill was impressed that Laramore could run four plays, two base defenses, and the same punt and kickoff returns over and over and still dominate an opponent. Belichick saw that the game could be mastered through a relentless commitment to the basics.
He also saw that a head coach didn’t need to be a big talker or showman to get his point across. Laramore wasn’t one to waste words, and when speaking to local reporters from the Evening Capital and the Baltimore Sun who covered the Panthers, he generally kept it short and semisweet, volunteering nothing outside the narrow boundaries of the message he wanted to see in print. The coach was quick to blame himself for losses and to credit his players for victories, a habit greatly appreciated by Belichick and his teammates. In return, when his players were quoted in the press, Laramore expected them to remain humble and to talk about the team, not themselves. He was a devoted admirer of Vince Lombardi who wanted—no, demanded—a Lombardi-like program built around Old World values of sacrifice and grit.
In fact, Laramore’s son Dave later said that when he read about the Packers legend, “it was like Wow, I feel like I’m living with him.” Back at St. Cecilia’s, in New Jersey, Lombardi had been a self-made high school basketball coach, and he coached those kids in sneakers and shorts just as he coached his kids in helmets and pads. Laramore operated the same way, expecting his basketball players to fully commit to his football values.
A Belichick classmate and basketball team member, Leslie Stanton, likened Laramore’s style to that of a different old-schooler: Woody Hayes at Ohio State. “Three yards and a cloud of dust,” said Stanton, who remembered his basketball coach forever running drills emphasizing the bounce pass, the chest pass, and proper layup form. As far as nontraditional dribbling was concerned, Kenny Kirby said, Laramore had an unbreakable rule. “If you needed to go behind the back or between the legs to get somewhere on the court, he allowed it,” Kirby said. “But you had to prove to him that you knew when to do it, and that it wasn’t just showboating. He was a fundamentals-first person. He couldn’t stand showboating at all.”
On the football field, beyond the expected prohibition on end-zone celebrations, Laramore believed in a lot of running, a lot of sweating, a lot of three-a-days in the summer, and plenty of full-contact drills in the fall—which shaped young Belichick’s vision of how to properly prepare a football team. Big Al’s philosophy was as simple as the Panthers’ white helmets, with their single solid stripe down the middle and jersey numbers above each earhole. “Our slogan was ‘Hit or be hit,’” Ron Pastrana said. Other people around Laramore, including his wife, Dorothy, the school librarian, said another of his favorite sayings was “My way or the highway.”
Laramore believed in playing seniors over juniors, and juniors over sophomores, and in making practices harder than the games. He expected his linemen to block downfield, play after play and series after series, because he expected his ballcarriers to regularly plow their way into the secondary. Al Laramore, Pastrana said, “wanted one thing out of his team: reckless abandon.”
Line up with a purpose, block with fury, pound the ball through the defensive front, and then do it all over again. Laramore did not often deal in the currency of deception. He thought execution and determination would trump the opponents’ pre-snap knowledge of what was coming their way. One Annapolis player said Laramore sometimes shouted in the play call from the sideline and didn’t care if the opposing sideline heard it.
“We lined up in the same formation 99 percent of the time,” said Tom Terry, the starting quarterback. “We had two tight ends, one wingback or wide receiver, Bill Belichick at center, myself, a fullback, and a halfback. On 24 Quick Trap, that play goes directly up Bill’s backside, and the fullback took the ball. We ran 22 Power 90 to 95 percent of the time to the right or up the middle, because nobody would stop it. We had a very good offensive line, and we’d throw it occasionally here or there because we had a track star at receiver, Bill Mason.”
The Panthers hit the blocking sled and ran through the Smitty’s Blaster and used the rope pulley to harden their developing bodies. If a kid said something even slightly out of turn, Laramore immediately ordered the smart-ass to run a lap. Laramore could get loud and angry in a hurry, but he wasn’t one to constantly berate his players, an approach that made a mark on Belichick.
Big Al liked smart players and good listeners, and he found both in young Bill. Belichick was an earnest student and a lunch-pail athlete who spent his summers waiting tables and working for the Mayflower moving company when he wasn’t helping at his dad’s football camp. Though his teammates and classmates didn’t identify anything truly exceptional about him, Bill did stand out at Annapolis in a curious way.
“Oh, man,” Ron Pastrana said, “Billy was always with a beautiful girl.” One in particular was Deborah Lynn Clarke, Bill’s high school friend and future girlfriend and wife. Debby was a cheerleading captain and the daughter of Doris and Stuart Clarke. Stuart was an Army veteran of World War II, the first personnel director at the NASA Johnson Space Center, in Houston, and one of the men involved in picking the original Gemini astronauts. Bill was sports editor of the yearbook when Debby worked on the staff. Next to her yearbook photo, she quoted the William Blake line “Exuberance is beauty.”
“Debby Clarke, all those good-looking girls in school—Billy was always on it,” Pastrana said. “I don’t know what it was about him. He wasn’t chiseled. He was a quiet, ordinary lineman. Maybe Billy had a good car or something, I don’t k
now.”
If nothing else, Bill had a good thing going with the football team. He was proud to wear his A.H.S. Football sweatshirt, proud to be part of the program. He wasn’t among the most prominent Panthers as a junior, but he developed into a senior starter on a winning team and did enough with his limited skills to earn his teammates’ unconditional respect.
“Bill stuck his nose in everything,” Blunt said. “He wouldn’t back off you.”
Sometimes Belichick drove his blue Volkswagen Bug to summer practices with his backup, Bob Bounelis, who recalled the starting center as a young man of very few words. They had first met as seven-year-olds in a Naval Academy boxing clinic. Bounelis arrived that day in a T-shirt and long pants and was summoned into the ring with Bill. “I got one lucky shot in and knocked him down,” Bounelis said. “He humiliated me the rest of the day, and then we became fast friends.”
When they were high school seniors, Bounelis had no problem sitting behind Belichick. He thought his friend had earned the first-string job going away. “Bill was the catalyst to keeping everything moving on offense,” Bounelis said. “Bill knew what he was doing better than anybody else.”
Terry, the quarterback, remembered Belichick as very small in stature in high school, about 5´9˝, but thought of him as a perfect deliverer of the football. There was good reason for that: Bill had spent hours upon hours snapping balls into a target he’d draw on his basement wall. “Bill shook the entire house with that ball banging against the wall,” his father said.