by Ian O'Connor
Pat McQuillan, a captain on the 1974 team, remembered Belichick taking a Wesleyan course taught by Macdermott in football theory, or football coaching, and writing a 50-page dissertation on a defensive scheme. It was a shame that Belichick’s body couldn’t keep pace with his mind. As a rising sophomore, before he got hurt, Bill had little chance to beat out a converted center named Bob Heller, who would become a two-time Kodak Little All-American. As a returning senior, he had little chance to beat out a defensive end named John McVicar, who would also become a two-time small-college All-American.
McVicar was a 6´4˝, 200-pounder from Broomfield, Colorado, who was a long, lean, and explosive athlete, a pass rusher out of central casting. The first-string tight end, Nelson, went head to head against McVicar in practice. “He was like Ted ‘the Mad Stork’ Hendricks, the spitting image,” Nelson said. “He had long arms, and you couldn’t get into his body. He’d stonewall you off the line of scrimmage. I never had much problem blocking anybody except him.”
McVicar appreciated the fact that a senior, Belichick, would pull a freshman aside—especially one like McVicar who was playing ahead of him—to offer tips on an opponent’s formations and tendencies. “Bill,” McVicar said, “was starting to coach right there.”
McVicar was also well aware of his backup’s considerable talent deficiencies. Belichick saw some playing time here and there over the Cardinals’ first seven games, five of them losses, before replacing the injured McVicar for the final game of the season, against longtime rival Trinity. McVicar was suffering from a severely sprained ankle, and his absence allowed Belichick to assume a significant role against 6-1 Trinity in the last football game he’d ever play.
Nelson said Belichick was a plugger who could usually hold his own whenever he replaced a starter. Bill couldn’t hold his own against Trinity before the home crowd of 4,000. At halftime, McVicar said, Macdermott and his assistants discussed what to do about one area of defensive weakness that was hurting the cause.
“The discussion,” McVicar said, “was if me on one leg was faster than Bill on two. It was an even footrace. I was able to play that game with a heavily taped ankle and couldn’t put much weight on it. But we were getting killed on this corner that Bill was playing, because he just couldn’t pursue that fast. They were attacking the edge and it was like ‘This is killing us.’ He just didn’t have the footspeed. They could outrun him, then the cornerback ended up as the first line of defense. I played some in the second half, but I wasn’t able to do much better [than Bill]. I couldn’t run at all.”
Trinity won the 74th meeting between the two schools, 21–15, to leave Wesleyan with a 2-6 record. The Cardinals’ final points of the season effectively told the story of Belichick’s college football career. Quarterback Brad Vanacore, a sophomore who was Bill’s designated little brother in the Chi Psi fraternity, threw a touchdown pass to Nelson, the freshman who started over Bill at tight end. Vanacore then threw the two-point conversion pass to Ralph Rotman, the freshman who beat out Bill as the second-string tight end. Belichick had also lost the long-snapping competition to Weiss at the start of the season.
“Bill kept running into stone walls,” Nelson said.
Yet Belichick was still going to leave his mark as an athlete at Wesleyan. Some of the same teammates who played ahead of him in the fall would watch from the stands and the bench as he outperformed and outsmarted a frustrated series of opponents in the spring.
Bill Belichick, economics major, chose in Wesleyan a school known for its liberal worldview (especially relative to Williams and Amherst). The school was years ahead of most colleges in aggressively recruiting African American students, and it was the kind of place where a football player might be more interested in writing poetry than launching himself into a blocking sled.
Frank Levering, an offensive lineman who later became a poet, an author, and a Hollywood screenwriter, described the Wesleyan of the early to mid-seventies as “a place where there was a lot of drugging going on, and a lot of casual sex, which came as a shock to me. I didn’t grow up in a culture like that. The smell of marijuana was very much in the air every day. But not so much the football players. They were very conservative guys, by and large.”
Belichick fit that definition. He did party while listening to the Dead and Bob Dylan, and he did make trips to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in a canary-yellow Subaru (“An awesome car,” Chris Diamond said), and he did persuade Debby Clarke, his high school friend, to set aside her elementary education studies at Alabama’s Birmingham–Southern College for a few days to join him at Mardi Gras and become his steady girlfriend.
“The rebellious years,” Belichick called them.
Bill did also get himself drunk on at least one occasion. The night before a big football game, Conklin recalled Belichick, still wearing his leg cast, drinking to excess and losing his balance, then falling into a trash can. When Belichick woke up in his bed the next morning, his friends told him jokingly that he’d slept right through the game.
But all in all, Bill tried to keep the debauchery at Chi Psi under some degree of control. According to the college newspaper, the Wesleyan Argus, Belichick was serving as president of the frat in 1973 when some 30 to 45 of its members urinated on the Beta House frat, where five windows were broken. The Argus reported that Belichick “expressed concern and said such an incident would not occur again.”
Diamond said the mass urination on Beta was a Chi Psi tradition, and that Belichick did what little he could to keep it under control. “Nobody wanted to be president of the frat house; we were having too much fun,” Diamond said. “Bill volunteered. He held the place together through a couple of rough moments.”
One time, as Thanksgiving neared, Diamond, Langner, and a couple of hungry Chi Psi brothers stole Belichick’s freshly cooked turkey out of the fridge in the middle of the night. They stuffed a smallish frat brother into the dumbwaiter and lowered him downstairs behind locked doors to pull off the heist. They stripped the turkey bare to make sandwiches, then returned the carcass to the fridge for Belichick to find the next day.
Other nights, the boys used the dumbwaiter to break into the kitchen to make themselves hamburgers. Bill handled the pranks with ease, as he himself could enjoy a laugh at a friend’s expense. “He was a needler,” Conklin said. “He’d needle guys and was constantly on them . . . In one incident, Bill needled to a point where he almost came to blows with someone, so that was a part of his character, too.”
So were common sense and common decency. Chi Psi hosted a stag party one night for a frat brother who was getting married, and someone had convinced a female Wesleyan student to jump out of a cake. As the party turned a bit rowdy, Belichick was smart enough to help Conklin escort the female student onto the fire escape, out of the frat, and back to her room.
By and large, Bill carried himself as a focused, serious-minded student who understood his purpose on campus. He was clearly at Wesleyan to get an education (Lenny Femino did hear him speak eloquently about Napoleon for 20 minutes in a seminar), though the Andover experience had reduced this esteemed university to a relative layup. People who knew Belichick figured he’d end up as a successful executive at a big firm, living the Wall Street dream, even as he was already inquiring about entering his father’s business, the business of coaching.
In the end, Belichick made his greatest impact at Wesleyan on the lacrosse field. He was a known lacrosse commodity coming out of Annapolis and Andover, and for a while it looked as if he might play for the coach who would become an institution at Williams, Renzie Lamb, who said he had Belichick’s name on a list of ten or twelve recruits he submitted to the admissions department. “And if I got one or two of them in,” Lamb said, “I’d be as happy as a pig in shit.”
Though Bill was academically fit and appealing as a two-sport athlete, said Lamb, who later worked with Steve Belichick at the Naval Academy, he didn’t make the cut. (He’d added only two points to his SAT score after enrollin
g at Andover, a source of comic relief to his father.) At Wesleyan, Terry Jackson, head soccer coach, moved up from his lacrosse assistant’s post to head coach for Bill’s junior and senior seasons. Jackson admitted that he initially knew little about the sport, and Lamb said there were times he tried to help his Little Three opponent with suggestions during games.
Many of the students who went out for lacrosse at Wesleyan had never played the game in high school, making Belichick the exception. Jackson surrounded the lead-footed midfielder with football players who had speed, and hoped Bill’s stick skills and field vision would complement their raw athleticism. The plan worked.
Don Russell, athletic director, watched Belichick play lacrosse and immediately realized he was “running the show. Always a leader on the field every time. Bill was our leader, and that was it, right from the beginning.” This came as no surprise to Russell, who had received a phone call from Navy assistant football coach Rick Forzano, a colleague of Steve Belichick’s, recommending Steve’s son for Wesleyan. Forzano had told Russell that young Belichick was a good kid, a slow but smart football player who knew how to handle a lacrosse stick.
An AD at a small school like Wesleyan can bounce from game to practice to game to practice, and Russell watched Belichick play squash for Coach Don Long before “crowds” of a dozen friends, frat brothers, and stray faculty members. But he particularly enjoyed watching Bill work his way around a lacrosse field.
Belichick adored the game—he was often seen outside Chi Psi with his stick, throwing the ball around—and he taught the novices around him how to play. “Bill was my first lacrosse coach,” said Pat McQuillan. “Bill’s campus dorm room looked like an equipment cage. Bill had everything in his room—equipment, jerseys, lacrosse sticks, balls . . . I got pretty good coaching at a very reduced rate.”
An accomplished soccer coach with some basketball experience, Jackson was smart enough to defer to Belichick and to Bill’s buddy from Annapolis, Mark Fredland, a gifted attackman. In turn, Bill never abused the privilege in attempting to tell his coach how to run the team. He would visit Jackson in his office and leave him with some ideas to ponder. Bill would babysit Jackson’s children, and help him move from one house to another. They were good friends beyond their sound coach-player relationship.
Jackson had a strong rapport with most of his players, and he’d taken some lacrosse instruction in Florida to better understand how to put them in a position to succeed. “Bill would do some things in practice,” he said, “like skip-passing to people and passing from midfield to behind the goal, that I’d never taught, basically. But we let him do it. They got added to the program.”
Belichick often resorted to the skip pass—one that bypasses a nearby teammate in favor of one on the opposite side of the field—when an opponent applied defensive pressure or doubled the ball, leaving a distant man open. Bill wasn’t merely a facilitating point guard who saw the entire court on the fast break; he was also Wesleyan’s toughest player. He broke his thumb playing lacrosse, and after a Wesleyan doctor refused to clear him to return, Belichick made an appointment with Russell. He asked the AD if it would be OK for him to seek a second opinion, and Russell was impressed with the young man’s maturity in even making the request. Second opinions weren’t in vogue at the time. “I don’t know how many kids would’ve thought of that,” Russell said. Bill found a doctor in Annapolis who green-lighted him before the postseason tournament to play with a soft, removable cast, and Wesleyan’s physician approved.
Jackson only once saw Belichick lose his cool in lacrosse the way he did when he suffered the season-ending football injury; it was during a brawl against Bowdoin in which Bill was “livid” over some alleged offense committed against a teammate. Otherwise, Belichick operated with cool efficiency while probing an opponent’s weaknesses. “Bill is the smartest player I’ve ever coached in lacrosse, without question,” Jackson said.
Bill was also a selfless recruiter. In an attempt to improve the roster, he persuaded athletic kids with no experience to give the sport a chance, even kids like John McVicar, the freshman who had beaten out Belichick in football his senior year. Jackson thought lacrosse was Bill’s “first love right from the beginning” and that Bill didn’t miss playing football after his injury as much as he missed being a part of football. “But he transferred everything into lacrosse while he was at Wesleyan,” Jackson said.
Everyone on the team ribbed Belichick about his lack of foot speed. They all got another laugh at Bill’s expense when he accidentally scored on his own goal. Mike Sanfilippo, the starting goalie, had taken a penalty in one game, and the versatile Belichick was forced to replace him. Bill didn’t like playing in net, Sanfilippo said. But Belichick grabbed a goalie stick and, while attempting to clear a ball, lost control of it when an opponent delivered a wraparound check from behind, sending the ball bouncing into Wesleyan’s net. “Bill scored against us,” McQuillan said, “though I don’t know if he’d ever admit it.”
Belichick more than compensated for that sequence with the intel he often gathered on opponents. In a critical 7–6 overtime victory over Williams in 1974—a season that saw Wesleyan sweep its Little Three rivals—Sanfilippo recalled Belichick warning him that a certain Williams player preferred to shoot high. Sure enough, that player had a clear shot at the goal on a breakaway in the game’s decisive possession, and on Belichick’s instructions Sanfilippo guessed high and made the save.
Belichick also made plays with his stick that some of his teammates found hard to believe. On a snowy early April day in ’74, Belichick cut across the field against a loaded Bowdoin team and caught a clearing pass with the back of the head of his stick, ran toward the Bowdoin goal with the ball in this unusual position, finally flipped it in the air and caught it with his net, and then dumped it to an attackman.
In that same game, Belichick also used his knowledge of the rulebook as a lethal weapon. He realized early that Bowdoin star Josiah Spaulding Jr. was playing without a chinstrap, and he informed the officials of the violation. At an imposing 6´3˝ and 225 pounds, with long hair and an unwieldy beard, Spaulding said he was known as “a seventies hippie playing lacrosse.” He was also known as the product of a prominent local family. His father, Josiah, had lost a bid for the U.S. Senate to Ted Kennedy in 1970, and his mother, Helen, was a direct descendant of James Bowdoin, the second governor of Massachusetts and the man for whom the college was named.
Spaulding thought he looked funny wearing a chinstrap, but now he had no choice. Somehow Bowdoin hadn’t packed an extra one for the game, forcing the oversize attackman to run athletic tape through his helmet earholes and around his beard. “It was extremely uncomfortable,” Spaulding said. Bowdoin lost the game, 10–7.
The two teams met again in the ECAC New England Regional Championship game, and this time around Spaulding secured sweet revenge. He had four goals and an assist in Bowdoin’s 15–7 victory, but it was one particular goal that Spaulding would remember forever.
The ball was down near the Bowdoin net, and Spaulding was watching from afar and standing beside the much smaller opponent guarding him, the two of them waiting for the action to come to them. Suddenly that Wesleyan defenseman, Belichick, took his stick and swung it hard into Spaulding’s left leg, just below the knee, knocking him to the ground. An enraged Spaulding pulled himself to his feet and threw a hard right hand that landed underneath Belichick’s helmet and knocked him down. The officials didn’t see either infraction.
Meanwhile, Bowdoin’s goalie secured possession of the ball and saw his biggest and best attackman wide open down the field. He fired the long pass as Belichick tried to gather himself, and Spaulding caught it on the run and scored. “I was scoring goals left and right on him,” Spaulding would say of Belichick.
Wesleyan finished 8-4 that year, and then 8-3 in 1975, when Belichick returned from his thumb injury before the Cardinals lost to Middlebury in the ECAC playoffs. “Obviously,” wrote his hometown paper, t
he Capital, “Belichick was a leader in how to live right in his four years at Wesleyan, since he was elected co-captain of the school’s 1975 varsity lacrosse team.”
But as much as Jackson thought Belichick cherished his time playing lacrosse, the coach conceded that football “never really left his inner soul.” Bill decided he didn’t want to parlay his Wesleyan and Andover degrees into a corporate job, though his father said he twice met on campus with Procter & Gamble for a possible spot in its management trainee program. Bill decided he wanted to follow his dad’s lead, like he had as a young boy.
Bill had gone to a national coaches’ convention with his old man in the hopes of networking, and Steve Belichick worked his considerable connections hard. He called Lou Holtz at North Carolina State. “And he said he’d love to have him,” Steve recalled.
Holtz later reported that the opening he’d reserved for Bill was closed by new budget realities under Title IX legislation that mandated increased funding for women’s sports. Steve Belichick knew some of the Baltimore Colts’ assistants, including George Boutselis, who put in a word for Bill with their head coach, Ted Marchibroda. Baltimore’s head coach also heard from his own son Ted, who had played high school ball for one of Steve’s teammates at the Great Lakes Naval Station.
Herb Kenny, the Wesleyan football assistant and head basketball coach, also said he recommended Bill to Marchibroda, Kenny’s former teammate at St. Bonaventure. Despite his role in Belichick’s football injury, Kenny said Bill walked into his office one day and asked if he’d call the coach of his hometown Colts.
“I called him and I said, ‘Ted, I’ve got a kid who’s really thorough and I think he’d be good for you,’” Kenny recalled. “Ted said, ‘Coach, I don’t have anything, but I could use a person to break down film . . . I don’t have any money. I’ll try to do the best I can for him.’”