by Ian O'Connor
He analyzed his roster year after year and analyzed his opponents week after week and installed new schemes that best fit his personnel. “Back in Annapolis,” Belichick said, “we had four running plays and two pass plays. It was a completely different story at Andover. We had a lot of plays and options.”
They also had a lights-out quarterback in Milt Holt, a one-year postgraduate student from Hawaii who called his own plays. He had a cannon for a left arm and nimble feet that seemed quicker, more dazzling, because he wore white shoes while the rest of the team wore black. Holt had insisted on wearing white, and Sorota, realizing that the quarterback had talent rarely seen in Andover, thought it would be a good idea to relent.
Sorota ran practices that were light on contact and heavy on film work, organization, innovation, and just plain thinking. Sometimes he’d go up in the stands and watch as his boys ran through their drills. “He would be looking at things,” Seero said, “more like a manager than a coach you’d find at most high schools.”
It was clear early that Belichick, wearing No. 50, would be a de facto assistant coach for Sorota on the field, just as he was for Laramore. Gay, the team manager, who later became a physics professor at the University of Nebraska, recalled that during a break in the middle of a game, he saw the head coach initiate a meeting with his center.
“I do vividly remember that Coach Sorota sidled up to him,” Gay said, “and sidling away after getting information. I never saw Coach Sorota do that to another player.”
Belichick had earned that trust by nailing every one of his blocking assignments, and by correcting on the fly teammates who had better memories when taking an advanced calculus exam than when trying to pick up blitzers. “I would ask Bill who to block,” said Falangas, the left tackle, “and he’d get tired of me asking. He didn’t have an awful lot of patience for people who didn’t know their assignments, and that would be me . . . He let me have it once. He told me, ‘Block that guy.’ He told the guy, ‘You’re going to get hit,’ and I ended up being the one who got hit instead.
“Not many people knew what the backs or receivers would do, but Bill was attuned to everything . . . That gave the team an awful lot of stability, too. He anchored that front line out of his will and intelligence more than his size.”
Dwarfed by the 6´3˝, 225-pound Seero, the 6´3˝, 190-pound Bonds, and even the 6´2˝, 200-pound Adams, the 5´10˝ Belichick weighed in around 180, making him the smallest man on the line. He was quick out of his stance, and some teammates thought he was more athletic than he gave himself credit for. Not that Belichick would ever say so. “He was a quiet person,” Falangas said, “never one to brag. In fact, I never knew his father was a coach [at Navy] until after Bill graduated.”
Falangas recalled Belichick once growing angry over something an assistant coach said. Though Seero and others maintained that they never heard the remark, Falangas said the assistant referred to Belichick as the “weak link” on the line. “That pissed him off immensely,” Falangas said. “By no means was he a weak link. I’m sure it was in jest. Bill never made a mistake.”
Belichick’s job was to cleanly deliver the ball to Holt, a wondrous dual-threat athlete booked for Harvard, and deliver it he did. Bill was already an advanced student of the game. When he wasn’t practicing football, he was talking it with Adams. They feverishly shared notes as if they were co-authors working on the first draft of a football encyclopedia.
Belichick was the better athlete, but Adams was the more powerfully built player, a guard who relied on his brute strength and technique. “Ernie executed our trap plays,” Seero said, “and he was much stronger than the guys he played against. But he wasn’t the guy to make a downfield block on a broken play or get downfield with someone on an end run.”
Together, Bill and Ernie were quite a pair. They played a lot of bridge together, at least when they weren’t debating the merits of one defensive scheme over another. “Ernie,” Seero said, “had a madras jacket he wore for many years, but many of us did as well. He migrated to tweed somewhere along the line.” Ernie wore the clothes a suburban father of four wore in the 1950s. He had a distinct Boston accent and was friendly and outgoing at the time, easy to interact with, while Bill often looked at the negative side of things. “Dour Bill,” some teammates called him.
“I remember most of us were writing long essays or doing experiments in a physics lab,” Gay said, “and Bill and Ernie were breaking down plays, and so it was clear they were football gurus . . . People didn’t just say ‘Bill’s the genius.’ It was like ‘Look at Bill and Ernie—they are total football guys.’ They were a team from the get-go.”
Bruce Poliquin, a backup halfback who later became a congressman from Maine, recalled that he often saw Ernie and Bill together in the dining hall, the library, and the common campus areas, with Ernie usually carrying a football and Bill a clipboard. Dan Lasman, a backup lineman and one of only two lower middlers, or sophomores, on the varsity, saw the two of them poring over game films as he walked through the gym and toward the locker room. Belichick and Adams never ripped into the younger backup when he made mistakes on the practice field; Lasman felt only guided and instructed by them.
“Ernie was a notch below Bill as a player,” Lasman said. “Ernie seemed so accepting of what he was, and never tried to be somebody he wasn’t. He was completely nonplussed by his ability compared to the other, clearly more gifted athletes on the team. That wasn’t the point for him. He loved to play football.”
And this would turn out to be a great season to play football at Andover, even though the school paper forecast a rebuilding year. Phillips opened with a 26–12 victory over the Tufts freshmen and a 28–22 victory over the Williams College freshmen, and yet it was the third game that strongly suggested that Andover might have the makings of a special team. Sorota took his players on the road to New Jersey for a meeting with Lawrenceville, which had toppled Andover the previous fall, and a coach, Ken Keuffel, who taught a master class in the single-wing offense.
To some members of the Andover team, the Lawrenceville kids seemed four or five years older. Phillips beat them anyway, and suddenly there was chatter about running the table and finishing 7-0. Writing up the Lawrenceville game story for the Phillipian was a student named H. G. Bissinger, who went by the byline Buzzy. Bissinger, who would later be known as Buzz, would become a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the bestselling author of Friday Night Lights. It was another reminder that everyone at Andover was heading somewhere.
Phillips blew out Mount Hermon and Deerfield by a combined score of 60–6, improving its record to 5-0 and creating a feeling of exhilaration among the players. Belichick and his fellow offensive linemen were getting their due for keeping their quarterback upright and clean, and for blowing open holes for the running game. Through it all, Sorota kept his even disposition perfectly intact. Belichick and the rest of the Andover players watched him carefully, watched how he handled in-game success and adversity as if they were one and the same. Sorota’s tone helped them remain balanced and in the moment.
Andover was two games away from its first perfect season since 1959, and Sorota kept to his weekly routine of contained hitting in practice and plenty of film work. Every Sunday, Callard, who doubled as a tough-as-nails religion teacher, picked up the film of the previous day’s game at the nearby drop-off place, the police station in Stoneham. Callard watched the tape first before handing it over on Sunday evening to the head coach, who spent Monday doing his own review.
Callard had played on the offensive line at Princeton and, though he worked more with Adams and the other guards and tackles than he did with Belichick (Sorota liked having the centers work with the quarterbacks), he noticed something unmistakable on those films. “Other kids would forget something on a play,” Callard said, “but I can never remember Bill Belichick missing an assignment. Bill wouldn’t always make an outstanding block, but he always had the right man . . . Obviously he was thinking all
the time.”
Andover improved its record to 6-0 with a 21–0 thrashing of Dartmouth’s “B” freshman team, and the victory elevated the stakes for the final game of the season, prep football’s answer to Harvard vs. Yale: Andover vs. Exeter, the team in blue against the team in red, the longest-running rivalry in American high school football. They started competing in 1878, 100 years after Andover was founded and 97 years after Exeter opened 35 miles to the north in New Hampshire. Visiting teams once traveled by stagecoach to the opposing campus. To students and alums at each school, it was the only game on the schedule that truly mattered.
A lot of great young Andover men from great American families had battled in this game, and almost all of them would take the memories of victory and defeat to their graves. This was an unbeaten season on the line. Andover could not possibly throw it all away by falling to a 3-2 Exeter team.
As always, the campus came alive the Friday night before the game at the traditional pep rally, which ended with the burning of a wooden A. The following day, fans packed the Brothers Field stands at Andover for the 90th edition of the rivalry. Bissinger was covering for the Phillipian, and this was the one time a game between old-money boarding schools in the Northeast could even remotely approach the madness that defined the culture of West Texas high school football he’d write about 20 years later in Friday Night Lights. (It was Adams who suggested Odessa’s Permian High as the foundation for his book.)
Led by the cheerleaders and band members, Andover students marched to the field Saturday and were rewarded with the first home victory over Exeter since 1958 to secure the perfect season. The 34–8 rout was the lead story on the front page of the Phillipian, under Bissinger’s byline, the first time the football team led the weekly newspaper all year. Holt was spectacular throwing and running the ball, Tom Mulroy caught nine passes for 149 yards and two touchdowns, and the defense delivered two goal-line stands. What a game, what a day, what a lifetime memory. Thirty years later, when his daughter, Amanda, enrolled at Phillips, Bill Belichick would give her a framed 1970 pennant that carried the score of the game, with Andover’s 34 in a bright shade of white and Exeter’s 8 in a dim shade of gray.
In the end, Holt was the chief reason why a team expected to go 3-4 finished 7-0. The triumph belonged to Sorota, too, and his calm and cerebral approach, not to mention his willingness to alter his system when necessary to best serve his kids. Decades later, Andover players could see the impact their head coach had on their PG from Annapolis, Belichick. Sorota was flexible on offense and defense. He was never emotional on the sidelines, and yet he was very demanding of his players. He believed that nothing in football, or in life, was deserved.
In the fall of 1972, his senior season, Dan Lasman would be demoted by Sorota before the Exeter game for poor play and replaced by a friend. It was a humiliating experience for him, but Sorota knew he needed to send a message to his player and his team. On cue, a freshly motivated Lasman came off the bench and played one of his better games in helping Andover again beat Exeter.
Lasman learned a hard boyhood lesson that week—that you need to work for everything you get—and Sorota was the man who hammered it home. In that sense, Lasman said, “Bill Belichick would become a modern-day Sorota. They’re different people, but in some ways Bill would become kind of the son of Sorota.”
By the time lacrosse practice started, Bill Belichick had finally figured out how to survive and sometimes thrive at Andover. He was a B student at a school where a middle-class public school student from Maryland needed an A-plus effort to get that B.
“It really took me about half a year before I got straightened out up here,” he would tell an assembly of students three decades later, “both academically, athletically, socially. I was just pushed to a much higher standard than I’d ever been before, and I wasn’t really sure how to react to that at times. But gradually I understood the program and understood what was expected and how to achieve it . . . It started to really hit me as to really how special this was and how much I was getting out of it.”
As Vietnam raged on and American boys kept coming home in body bags, Andover remained a campus on edge. If Belichick wasn’t engaged in the turbulent political atmosphere on campus, the same could be said of his classmate Jeb Bush, whose father, George H. W. Bush, had lost his bid for the Senate in Texas before being appointed by President Nixon as ambassador to the United Nations. Jeb reportedly spent most of his four years at Andover disconnected from any and all discourse on Vietnam and other third-rail political issues, and he admittedly smoked pot, drank alcohol, and underachieved in the classroom before meeting his future wife while studying in Mexico and finally cleaning up his act.
Many years later, as a Republican candidate for president of the United States, a job his father and older brother, George W., had won, Jeb Bush said he had never smoked marijuana with his classmate Belichick. “I remember him being a football geek even back then,” Bush said.
Belichick was not a rebel with or without a cause, but he did let his hair down a bit—literally and figuratively. “Bill’s hair,” said Seero, “was about the length of the early Beatles’.”
Back home in Annapolis, his old man was not a fan of the look. Steve Belichick was a proponent of Naval Academy guidelines, and as Bill made his way through Andover and then through four years of college, Steve had only two problems with his only child.
“I thought his hair was too long and his music was too loud,” Steve said.
Steve didn’t need to worry about what was becoming of his boy. Bill was never going to trade in his preferred Andover subculture—the jocks—for a place with the party boys known as the freaks. He was too busy with Ernie Adams and Evan Bonds breaking down film from their undefeated football season as part of a second-term project, and his primary spring-term objective was to try to help Phillips lacrosse go undefeated, too.
Bob Hulburd was head coach of the lacrosse team, and he was an Exeter grad, of all things, and a former All-American at Princeton. Though he wasn’t known as an innovator, Hulburd was efficient, well organized, and hell-bent on having the best-conditioned team in New England. He learned the importance of physical and mental toughness in the United States Navy, in which he served during World War II. Hulburd was a communications officer on one of the first LSTs—tank landing ships—to land at Normandy, in part because German was one of the seven languages he spoke. (He would later chair the German department at Andover.) Hulburd lost his close friend and Princeton lacrosse teammate Tyler Campbell in France, and never fully recovered from it.
“I would say D-Day and lacrosse were the two most important things in his life,” said his daughter Holly.
Hulburd ran his practices at game speed, one reason why he’d pieced together 16 consecutive winning seasons and three straight New England prep school titles entering the spring of 1971. Tim Callard, who was also one of Hulburd’s assistants, said the head coach worked mostly with the offense and encouraged his boys to move the ball rapidly and do a lot of cutting. Callard conceded that Hulburd “was not a great strategist,” but said he connected with his boys by trusting them and empowering them during games.
Andover had a dozen lettermen returning in the early spring of 1971, making it difficult for Belichick to crack the starting lineup. Belichick had been a defenseman at Annapolis, but Paul Kalkstein, another Hulburd assistant, said the PG went out for the team as an attackman in an attempt to secure more playing time. Kalkstein became one of Belichick’s most ardent supporters. Though the assistant felt that Bill was slowed by a knee injury, he firmly believed his advanced stick skill was an asset the team could use.
Hulburd thought his returning attackmen were better options, and Kalkstein kept nudging him to get Belichick into the game. “I never saw Bill without the knee injury, and he was not fast,” Kalkstein said. “But he was always in the right place . . . He had skills beyond a lot of kids, because he grew up playing in Annapolis, and we had kids who had never play
ed or had only played a couple years and were great athletes who didn’t have his skills.”
Belichick just happened to arrive at Phillips the year the school fielded what might have been its most talented lacrosse team ever—the roster was loaded with athletes and midfielders who could run all day long. Bill was the fourth attackman who, according to Dana Seero, his teammate in both sports, “easily could’ve started. If he’d been there two years, I suspect he could’ve beaten out one of the guys.”
Belichick earned an ample supply of playing time anyway, in the sport that many believed was his true passion. Kalkstein said that the fourth attackman never complained while on the sideline. As a raw, bone-chilling Massachusetts winter gave way to the regenerative promise of spring—Andover players sometimes had to shovel snow off their field after returning from break—lacrosse season represented too much fun to complain about anything. Lacrosse didn’t share football’s place of prominence at Andover—the crowds were much smaller, sometimes numbering a few dozen family members and friends—but that hardly mattered.
Hulburd was a reassuring voice of reason during games, and a man who adored lacrosse every bit as much as Belichick did. And Kalkstein was always there to remind young Bill just how talented he was with his stick.
Andover would finish the season 10-1 overall and 6-0 against prep school competition; its only loss came at the hands of the powerful Brown University freshmen. “Bill was on the same level as the Brown freshmen,” Kalkstein said. Belichick would account for seven goals and nine assists on the year, punctuated by an 11–2 victory over Exeter, the rival that had dominated Andover in the years before Hulburd took over the lacrosse program, in 1956. Hulburd consistently beat his alma mater, and finished his head coaching career after the 1971 victory over Exeter with four straight New England prep titles and a three-year unbeaten streak at home.