by Ian O'Connor
Braden gave Belichick a piece of advice to help him relate better to players. They were watching film one day when Bill saw something he didn’t like out of one of the Broncos, and ripped into the guy. It wasn’t a big deal, Braden recalled, but he wanted the young assistant to know that coaches with short fuses often say things they quickly regret.
“Don’t downgrade the players too much,” Braden told Bill. “It’s the same guys you’re downgrading on Wednesday that you practice with on Thursday and play with on Sunday. You’ve got to keep them up. You can discipline them. You can correct them and drive them and give them more oomph than they think they’ve got. But don’t be too caustic.”
Belichick shared an eight-by-ten office with John Beake, personnel man, in a tiny brick building that served as the Broncos’ headquarters at 5700 Logan Street. Beake thought the young assistant learned a lot from Collier about how to be a smart and tireless worker.
Collier even schooled Belichick in racquetball, regularly beating him in staff matches. Carroll Hardy, player personnel director and a former big-league ballplayer who was the only man ever to pinch-hit for Ted Williams, also taught Bill a few lessons on the racquetball court. Hardy often stood in front of Bill to reduce the size of his target, and Bill would hit him with the ball because he couldn’t get it around him. “I got the best of Bill Belichick,” Hardy said, “and he didn’t like it. He got mad. He smashed his racquet pretty good against the wall. He did a little cussin’ along with it.”
Though Belichick stayed in Denver for only one year, he was given an advanced education in coverage concepts by Collier, who presided over a defense defined by its closing speed, not its size. Ultimately, the Orange Crush defense of Lyle Alzado, Tom Jackson, and Randy Gradishar couldn’t replicate its 1977 success. The Broncos finished 10-6 and got blown out by Pittsburgh in a divisional playoff game, 33–10.
Though he enjoyed skiing with Debby, Belichick wasn’t happy in Denver. He missed living near the water, and he wanted bigger responsibilities than he had with the Broncos. He thought only briefly about leaving coaching for law school. He spoke with the first-year head coach at Air Force, Bill Parcells, about a role at the academy, but Parcells was already burdened by what would be the first of many stay-or-go crises in his career. Braden had known Parcells since his high school days; he’d tried and failed to recruit Parcells’s brother, Don. So Braden visited with the Air Force coach and talked him through his choice between staying at the academy and leaving for a position with Ray Perkins’s New York Giants.
Parcells chose the Giants. Meanwhile, Belichick had his brilliant friend from Andover, Ernie Adams, whispering in Perkins’s ear, too. Adams and Perkins had worked together with the New England Patriots, and Ray was so impressed with the way Ernie broke down film that he promised to hire him once he became a head coach. Sure enough, Perkins said, Adams was the first man he called after he was appointed by the Giants. And one of Adams’s first contributions was telling Perkins he knew of someone who could help him win.
“His name is Bill Belichick,” Ernie told him.
“OK,” Perkins said. “What’s this guy’s deal?”
Ernie spelled out Bill’s background, and Perkins was interested. He told Adams that he was about to take a trip to San Diego, where he’d worked as the Chargers’ offensive coordinator, to take care of some personal matters, and that Ernie should set up a meeting with Belichick out there.
“Everything gave you the feeling that this guy was going to get it done, or he was going to ask somebody for help to get it done,” Perkins said of their meeting in a hotel. “He was going to do the job either way.”
Before Perkins made a decision on whether Bill Belichick should be his special teams coach, he wanted to hear Bill’s answer to a simple question that he asked every job candidate he interviewed. Perkins listed three words: consistent, right, and fair. He then asked Bill which word did not apply to the playing of a football game, or any game.
Belichick didn’t hesitate. Not even for a second.
“Fair,” he said.
“You’re right,” Perkins told him. “And you’re hired.”
6
Little Bill
Shit rolls downhill.
Bill Belichick made that claim in a meeting in 1979, his first year as a New York Giants assistant under rookie head coach Ray Perkins. Belichick was a special teams coach and defensive assistant, and Perkins, once a teammate of Joe Namath’s at Alabama and a blind believer in the Bear Bryant way, had just reamed out his staff over some real or imagined breakdown.
“Perkins was shitting on them,” recalled linebacker Harry Carson, “so the coaches were shitting on us. I’ll always remember that expression, ‘Shit rolls downhill.’ That came from Belichick.”
Hired by Perkins, who made his mentor Bryant appear timid and soft in comparison, Belichick arrived in the New York area on the same flight as Parcells. The Giants hadn’t appeared in a playoff game since 1963, and they were fresh off eight consecutive losing years. The 1978 season had been particularly painful; the Giants lost seven of their final eight. They fumbled away a game to the Philadelphia Eagles in the closing seconds when they could’ve taken a knee to run out the clock (Philly’s Herm Edwards scooped up the loose ball and ran it into the end zone), and the fans couldn’t forgive the folly of what would be called the “Miracle at the Meadowlands.” Soon enough they were hanging owner Wellington Mara in effigy, burning tickets in the parking lot, and flying a banner over the stadium that read 15 YEARS OF LOUSY FOOTBALL—WE’VE HAD ENOUGH.
The conservative Mara had been feuding with his uninhibited nephew and business partner, Tim, over how the organization should be run, and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle mediated by suggesting that George Young, formerly of the Dolphins and Colts, take control of football operations. Young’s first two significant moves in 1979 were the hiring of Perkins and the drafting of a quarterback from Kentucky’s Morehead State, Phil Simms, whose selection with the seventh overall pick in the first round was met with a robust round of boos.
The Giants’ attempt to regain credibility and stabilize the franchise took a hit when Parcells, the first-year defensive coordinator, resigned after four months on the job. His wife, Judy, didn’t want to move their three daughters from the Colorado Springs area, where he had been the head coach at Air Force for one year. Parcells took a sales job with a land development company, and Belichick stayed behind with a group of football players who had very little use for him.
“I have to say that secretly we sort of looked at him like ‘What does he know? He’s never played the game. He’s a lacrosse player.’ He wasn’t really one of us,” Carson said. “When you look at another guy who has played linebacker, you look at him with a certain amount of respect, because he’s been there and he knows what ramming it up there and taking on a blocker means. He knows what it’s all about . . . But with Belichick, the subject of playing Division III football never came up. The subject that came up was: He played lacrosse. He didn’t play football.”
Belichick’s non-career as a football player wasn’t the only thing that bothered some Giants. George Martin, a former 11th-round draft pick who became an impactful starter at defensive end, said the 27-year-old assistant was “very nerdy to most of us” and years later compared him to a character in the sitcom Family Matters, Steve Urkel, the bespectacled geek. John Skorupan, outside linebacker, said the Giants took every opportunity to remind Belichick that he had done nothing, at that point, to earn their undivided attention and respect. “We did abuse him,” Skorupan said. “There’s no doubt about that. He was a smaller guy, younger than us, and we certainly knew that he didn’t play in the NFL. He was kind of roly-poly, and he was watching films all the time and he was very intense about it. He’d say, ‘OK, it’s time for special teams,’ and we’d moan and groan and give him a hard time.”
In those days, starters were often used on special teams, usually against their will, and the young assistant paid the pr
ice for it. With sunscreen on his nose and flip-flops on his feet, sporting a seven-dollar haircut, Belichick was a frequent source of locker room and lunchtime conversation among the players. “He was a guy we mocked, we made fun of,” Martin said, “because we saw him as a peer age-wise.” The veteran defensive end and team leader also echoed what some of Belichick’s past colleagues had privately grumbled about—that Bill was landing jobs because of his father’s standing in the profession.
“We knew his dad was an accomplished coach,” Martin said, “and we thought he was a young whippersnapper who was riding his dad’s coattails and hadn’t earned the right to be in the NFL . . . His dad showed up at practice, and we almost gave more attention to his dad. In our estimation, [Steve Belichick] earned the right to be respected. He came there to validate his son, and that was the wrong thing to do for us veterans.”
Asked if Giants players had said this to Bill Belichick’s face, Martin said, “Actions speak louder than words. We didn’t have to tell him. When a coach tells us to turn the lights on and nobody moves, that’s disrespectful. When he tells you to go to the weight room or do this and you do it at a snail’s pace or ignored him or laughed at him, that’s disrespectful . . . He’d come over to the sideline and we were lounging around and he’d say, ‘Get the hell up and get out of here.’ And we didn’t move. We neutered him and totally disrespected him.
“I’m ashamed to say we did a lot of that when Bill came on the scene. That’s the price of admission and initiation.”
It was a price Belichick was willing to pay.
Martin, for one, had no use for Perkins, who was as lean and mean as a 1-iron and had cold, penetrating blue eyes that could make a man twice his size buckle at the knees. Perkins coached the game the way he played it—hard—and the Giants didn’t appreciate his draconian approach to discipline and conditioning, or his lack of bedside manner. “He was actually vehemently hated by the vast majority of the team at that time,” Martin said, “and he seemed to revel in it.”
Belichick wasn’t hated like Perkins. In fact, as much as the Giants initially saw him as something of a pathetic figure, they soon realized that their new special teams coach wasn’t one who would easily back down.
“To Bill’s credit,” Martin said, “he was undeterred and undaunted by the ridicule or by the lack of respect we showed him. He came in with a focus, and the fact that he was smart really caught our attention. He went from ridicule and laughter to getting our attention . . . Even at that young age, he had an insight that was absolutely uncanny. It seemed like every game he saw our opponents’ Achilles’ heel and would implement something that was pure genius and find something to give us an advantage.”
Belichick had impressed Perkins before he started to win over the players. The head coach sat in on Belichick’s first meeting at his first Giants training camp; that special teams meeting was the equivalent of a full team meeting, because just about everyone on the roster had some role in the kicking game. Perkins wanted to see how the players reacted to Belichick, especially the ones who were known to challenge authority.
Sure enough, one such player acted in a way that Perkins described as out of line. The head coach wouldn’t specify the exact nature of the remarks or behavior, but he suggested that the player, Gary Jeter, was trying to humiliate the new coach running the meeting. Belichick completely shut down the offending Giant, told him he’d been part of the problem the previous season, and ordered him to either act professionally or leave the room.
“I was tickled to death,” Perkins said, “so I got up and left. By me leaving the room, I think I told everybody in there I was pleased with the way he handled it. And I didn’t worry about Bill ever again.”
As he started to find his footing and his voice, Belichick still projected a vibe to some of being in over his head. John Mara, the oldest of Wellington’s 11 children, was an attorney at the time of Belichick’s arrival and an occasional visitor to practice, years before he assumed control of the club. Mara thought the new special teams coach seemed very young, almost like a little kid. He most certainly did not fit Mara’s idea of what an NFL assistant coach should look like.
“He dressed in flip-flops and jeans and sweatshirts,” Mara said. “My only impression of him was that he looked out of place.” Mara’s brother Chris, who worked in player personnel, recalled the subject of Belichick’s disheveled appearance coming up in conversation during golf outings with linebackers Brian Kelley and Brad Van Pelt. “They always joked about him and laughed about him,” the scout said. “And a lot of that had to do with the fact Bill just didn’t look the part of a serious coach.”
But then the owner’s sons watched Belichick go to work. “He was very engaged in what was happening on the field,” John Mara said, “and was always talking to players in a group and individually . . . never really yelling or screaming. You would have to look for him to find him on the field. He kind of blended in . . . He looked like the student as opposed to the teacher, and all of a sudden he’s out on the field with guys who looked older than he was, and he’s leading them around.”
Harry Carson watched Belichick put the stopwatch on punter Dave Jennings to record his hang time and noticed that the special teams coach was thorough and passionate about everything he did. Over time, Perkins saw the Giants respond to Belichick, approach him with questions, a sign that they respected his aptitude for the game. The head coach also saw Belichick become quicker to jump on a player who wasn’t giving maximum effort in a drill.
Unfortunately, the Giants had too many players who too often inspired the wrath of the coaching staff. They just weren’t very good, and Perkins knew it. The Giants started the season 0-5 and never fully recovered. Simms, the rookie quarterback, did replace Joe Pisarcik and did win his first four starts, offering a beaten-down fan base the next best thing to a winning team: hope. The Giants went 6-10, then fell to 4-12 in 1980. Amid the mind-numbing blur of losses, Perkins remembered Belichick pushing him to try some onside kicks in an attempt to jump-start the team. (They tried two against the Eagles, recovering both, in a Monday night game in 1980, but still lost, 35–3.) One more sub-.500 season away from getting fired, Perkins was involved in two moves early in 1981 that forever altered the fortunes of the franchise.
He rehired Bill Parcells, who had been miserable without football and had returned to the NFL the previous year as a New England Patriots linebacker coach. And he supported George Young’s decision to use the second pick in the draft to take a linebacker named Lawrence Taylor out of the University of North Carolina.
The Giants already had Pro Bowlers Carson and Van Pelt at linebacker, along with Kelley, and there were players who thought the team shouldn’t be adding to a position of strength when it had so many holes to fill. In fact, some defensive players were angry over what the Giants planned to pay Taylor and grumbled about a possible walkout.
There would be no boycott in East Rutherford; the 6´3˝, 237-pound Taylor was the Giants’ best player the first time he stepped onto the practice field. Dave Klein of the Star-Ledger of Newark asked Parcells what he planned to do with him. “What we’re going to do with Lawrence Taylor,” the defensive coordinator answered, “has never been done before.”
As it turned out, Parcells was the one who ultimately put Taylor in Belichick’s hands. Though Belichick had been hired to run special teams, Parcells asked Perkins if he could use him on defense. Eleven years older than Belichick, Parcells had played Division I football at the school now known as Wichita State and had worked at seven different colleges, including West Point, where he befriended a smoldering young basketball coach named Bob Knight. Parcells knew the difference between a good coach and a fraud, and he could tell early on that Belichick was very good at explaining what had happened on a particular play.
“I thought he had very good potential,” Parcells said. “He was a coach’s son, and I liked that. I knew his father when I was at Army and his father was at Navy. We had similar role
s, we exchanged film with each other, and his father was the one who introduced me to Bill when I coached at Vanderbilt and we were playing at Army. I liked Steve very much, and . . . I thought Bill certainly had a lot of potential there, and so we phased him into the defense.”
The way Perkins remembered it, the transition from a 4-3 defense to a 3-4 defense was part of Parcells’s motivation to ask for Belichick’s help. The day he was hired as the Giants’ coach, Perkins had said, “Show me a Super Bowl champion and I’ll show you a team that doesn’t play 3-4 defense.” But Perkins did play some 3-4 as early as 1979—he used it when the 0-5 Giants beat the 5-0 Buccaneers—and he knew he needed to take full advantage of the Giants’ biggest strength on defense. “Bill Belichick started helping out with the linebackers,” Perkins said, “and everything he did turned to gold.”
That first year Belichick worked with Parcells, a year after the Giants were ranked 27th out of 28 teams in points allowed, they finished third in the same category. Only Belichick wasn’t infallible. He’d already earned his standing as an innovative special teams mind, and yet he made one move that angered and befuddled his co-workers. After the Giants took a late three-point lead in a critical 1981 game against NFC East rival Washington, Belichick ordered kicker Joe Danelo to attempt a squib kick to keep the ball away from dangerous return man Mike Nelms. Danelo wanted to try to kick it out of the end zone, but Belichick wouldn’t budge. The Redskins recovered the squib, tied the game on a field goal in the final seconds, and then won it in overtime. Perkins blamed himself for the decision but said he was “influenced by too many people.” Of Belichick’s call, an emotional Danelo said, “I don’t understand it at all.”