by Ian O'Connor
The Giants survived the gaffe and made the playoffs for the first time in 18 years—the first season Belichick, Parcells, and Taylor spent together—and even won a wild-card-round game over Philadelphia. After the NFL players’ strike of 1982 reduced the season to a nine-game mess, Perkins left the Giants to succeed Bear Bryant at Alabama, and the two Bills got promoted: Parcells to head coach, and Belichick to linebackers coach and de facto defensive coordinator. Big Bill and Little Bill. Belichick was 31 years old, only eight years out of Wesleyan, and already he was running a defense for a flagship NFL franchise.
Parcells didn’t officially name Belichick coordinator in 1983, even though he was very much in control of the unit. “He was coaching the defense,” Parcells explained, “but my [third year] was when I named him coordinator. I thought it would be better. I was a defensive coach, and I just thought it was going to be less pressure on him if I did it that way, and waited some time to name him after giving him the responsibility.”
Parcells almost never got the chance to make that appointment official. The Giants were his dream job as much as Alabama was Perkins’s. Parcells grew up in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, a few miles from the team’s current home. He was 13 when he saw his first Giants game at the Polo Grounds, in 1954, and he cried his eyes out four years later after listening to the radio call of the Baltimore Colts’ Alan Ameche scoring in overtime to defeat the Giants in their epic Championship Game in Yankee Stadium. For Parcells, landing the Giants job at age 41—only four years after he thought he was quitting football for good—was an overwhelming experience.
But he made a bad choice to start the 1983 season, and it nearly proved fatal to his career ambitions. Parcells decided his first-string quarterback should be Scott Brunner, who had replaced an injured Simms in 1981 and ’82, instead of the former first-round draft pick who had returned from a knee injury. As a result, the Giants would win three games out of 16 and compel Young to try to hire University of Miami coach Howard Schnellenberger.
Schnellenberger stayed at Miami, and Young begrudgingly stayed with Parcells. Belichick had an offer from the defensive coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings, Floyd Reese, his old Detroit colleague and friend, to coach the Vikings’ secondary, but he ultimately decided he didn’t want to leave the New York area and the badly wounded Parcells, to whom he felt indebted. Of even greater consequence, Lawrence Taylor backed out of a deal to play for Donald Trump and the New Jersey Generals of the new United States Football League and accepted a revised and greatly enriched contract with the Giants.
Parcells was angry at Young entering the 1984 season, and he was angry at himself for going soft on his underachieving players and for acting like a coordinator instead of a head coach. Parcells started hunting for confrontation with his players and assistants, and nobody was safe. If he was going to get fired, he was going to hit some people hard on the way out. The approach worked, too. Parcells made Giants players and coaches uncomfortable, pressing them every day to chase perfection. He wasn’t a genius tactician. Instead, Parcells discovered that his most valuable asset was the force of his personality. Great coaching, especially in a violent sport governed through the power of non-guaranteed contracts, generally involves persuading athletes to do things their hearts and minds advise them not to do. Bill Parcells could impose his will on his athletes and his assistants. That was his gift.
He showed it even as a defensive coordinator, when he chewed out a linebacker for dropping into the wrong area in pass coverage, only to have the secondary coach, Fred Glick, tell Parcells that the linebacker had actually done as he was taught. “Even though he was wrong,” Glick said, “Parcells said, ‘Don’t ever correct me again.’ He didn’t want to be corrected in front of players. I don’t think Parcells ever thought he was wrong.”
So he ripped into his quarterback, Simms, and his best player, Taylor, along with everyone else, while slowly building a championship-level team out of the ashes of the ’83 season. The Giants finally assembled a line that could protect the quarterback, and an offense that was designed to do something more than stay out of the defense’s way. “Our direction on offense,” said receivers coach Pat Hodgson, “was not to lose the game. For Bill Parcells, it had always been defense first, special teams second, offense third.”
Extreme tension sometimes existed between the defensive players and coaches and their colleagues on offense. Ron Erhardt, offensive coordinator, once walked into a unit meeting and told his players that if they didn’t turn the ball over against certain opponents, “maybe we can tie them 0–0.” When the Giants fielded an offense that could make the defense proud, they went 9-7 and 10-6 in 1984 and ’85, winning one playoff game each year before running into the 15-1 49ers (in ’84) and the 15-1 Bears (in ’85), both eventual champions. Along the way, Parcells also engaged in full-contact drills with his finest assistant coach.
On the chalkboard and grease board, Bill Belichick had an answer for just about everything. “On special teams,” Hodgson said, “he had all sorts of gadget plays. He was very creative with the things they’d do. We’d put ten guys out there and run a guy onto the field, hesitate, wave him off, snap the ball, and then he’d go down the sideline. We had hideout plays, every kind of gadget you could think of when needed. Then he went to the defense and they fought battles, Big Bill and Little Bill.”
Opposites don’t always attract. Parcells was a physically imposing man, a loud and proud Jersey Guy with the temper of an overheated motorist stuck in Shore traffic. Belichick was a physically underwhelming, charisma-free automaton. Parcells didn’t hesitate to seize his advantage in size, volume, and position on the food chain to verbally assault Belichick in front of insiders and outsiders alike.
Kevin Gilbride, a future NFL head coach, was working for the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League when he witnessed one such assault. Belichick was meeting with Gilbride inside Giants Stadium—Little Bill was often generous with his time with outside coaches looking to pick his brain—when Big Bill stumbled upon the scene and exploded.
“He just ripped Belichick for meeting with me, just fiercely ripped his rear end,” Gilbride recalled. “I felt horrible. I didn’t know what the deal was. We’d been to summer camps and had been on the sideline and watched practice. I don’t know if Parcells looked at me as a potential threat, but I wasn’t even in the NFL. But when Parcells ripped Bill, it didn’t even faze [Belichick]. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He asked me, ‘You want something for lunch?’ At the time, I felt embarrassed for Belichick . . . Obviously this wasn’t the first time it happened. He became inured to this type of treatment to develop thick skin. And the more I got to know Parcells, the more I understood this wasn’t a one-time thing.”
Parcells was not a one-dimensional bully when it came to motivating his subordinates; he was too smart for that. He knew he had to build up players and coaches after he tore them down. One assistant coach described public embarrassment followed by a private apology as “something that happened all the time with Big Bill.” Parcells had a knack for saying a reassuring word at the most opportune time.
Parcells’s playing past also helped his relationship with his team. Unlike Belichick, he’d been a good enough college linebacker to get drafted into the NFL (seventh round, Detroit Lions, 1964). He loved the jock life, the camaraderie, the feeling young men share when they accomplish something as a unit in a sport as dangerous as football. Parcells tried to re-create that bond he’d known in his college days with the Giants he was putting in harm’s way.
“We could give it to him and he’d take it,” Carson said. “We’d horse around . . . Bill loved being in the locker room, and that’s one thing a lot of people don’t know. He enjoyed being around the guys. He got a lot of energy from being around the guys, and being one of the guys. And that’s how the whole Gatorade thing got started with us—because he was razzing on Burt.”
Jim Burt, the nose tackle who started the tradition of dumping a bucket
of Gatorade on a winning head coach.
“Bill got under Burt’s skin,” Carson said, “and Burt got so pissed off with Parcells as he was riding him that at the conclusion of a game against Washington, Burt came to me and said, ‘Parcells is such a cocksucker. Let’s get him.’ I said, ‘What do you mean Let’s get him?’ He said, ‘Parcells is your boy. If I did something to him, he’ll have my ass. But if you do something with him, he’s not going to do anything. So let’s get him.’ I said, ‘Get him with what?’ He said, ‘Let’s get him with Gatorade.’ So we did it together, and there were no ramifications.” Of course, the fun could last only so long. Parcells had made his decision after the 1983 disaster to be true to himself, to be an unapologetic hard-ass, and there was no turning back from that. Phil McConkey, backup receiver and return man, absorbed his share of verbal abuse for dropping a punt or for some other not-so-venial sin. McConkey maintained that Parcells feared no Giant player or coach, except one: his young tight end. “He was deathly afraid of Mark Bavaro,” McConkey said. “But he picked on everyone, including the staff. He would absolutely yell at Bill Belichick in front of players. I think Parcells went too far with Bill, but he did that with a lot of people.”
Big Bill was once heard screaming into his headset, “Don’t you start giving me any shit, Belichick. Your ass will be out in the fucking parking lot.” Parcells often told his assistant that something was “screwed up,” but when Belichick pressed for a specific correction, Parcells would bat away the request and order Little Bill to figure out the fix on his own.
If there was one place Belichick could strike back at his boss, it was on the racquetball courts in the bowels of Giants Stadium. During his time with the Giants, Bill was an avid jogger and stationary bike rider who also competed in what he called a late-night “huff and puff” hockey league for men in their thirties and forties. Despite the endless hours at the office, he found time to add racquetball to his fitness regimen. He couldn’t beat Randy Dean, a backup quarterback in 1979 who recalled occasionally seeing “a mangled racquet in the garbage” after an angry Belichick had lost, and he struggled to beat his friend Dave Jennings, the Pro Bowl punter. But Little Bill didn’t have much trouble in lunchtime matches with the immobile Big Bill. Parcells would lose to his assistant, light up a cigarette or two, and then step back onto the court and lose again.
Carson, the team captain, had a front-row seat for many one-sided Big Bill–Little Bill clashes of a different kind. He’d jog to the sideline during a stoppage in play, or between downs, and stand between the two coaches as they figured out what to do on the next snap. “And Belichick is flashing a signal to the signal caller,” Carson said, “and Parcells would say, ‘I don’t want that.’ And Belichick would say, ‘But Bill—’ and Parcells would raise his voice. ‘I don’t want that, Belichick. Just play the fucking thing the way I said to.’ They’re both on the sidelines on headsets, both looking at the field, and they’re communicating to one another and whoever was up in the booth . . . [Belichick] would always take it, because he was the defensive coordinator and Parcells was the head coach.”
These battles of the Bills, Martin said, were almost always fought in the heat of game-day competition and not on the practice field. But by the 1986 season, when the Giants established themselves as a deadly serious championship contender by going 14-2, Martin detected a not-so-subtle shift in the Parcells-Belichick dynamic.
To understand that shift, one needed to understand just how badly the Giants’ defensive players wanted Parcells to remain as their coordinator in 1983. “We were absolutely pissed off that we’d lost Parcells from a defensive perspective to be the head coach,” Martin said. “We felt abandoned almost to the point of having an uprising . . . We were cocky and dominant, and we attributed that to Parcells, who had a personality. You could engage him, he was fun, he would kid with you, and he knew about your personality and family. There was that relationship with Parcells. Not so with Bill Belichick. There was absolutely no fluff, no bedside manner. He was strictly business. He was never going to ask you how your kids were doing, how was your wife’s birthday party, what your summer was like. He was incapable of that.”
Parcells assured the unit’s leaders that Belichick was perfectly capable of doing the job, and that Little Bill had Big Bill’s full support. Martin said it took the Giants’ defense about a year to accept Little Bill as a worthy de facto coordinator. Despite Belichick’s youth and lack of a distinguished playing career, the Giants eventually embraced the fact that Little Bill’s relentless attention to detail was an asset that put them in a position to succeed.
Not that players didn’t continue to defy him in their own way. Lawrence Taylor was busy on Sundays redefining the standards of NFL greatness, so he didn’t have much time or use for Belichick in film sessions during the week. Little Bill’s monotone delivery had earned him the nickname Captain Sominex, and he had a great talent for putting LT to sleep.
Carson described how Belichick would be scheming away at the front of the room while Taylor lay flat under a nearby table. Sometimes LT claimed he had a bad back and needed to lie on the floor while watching film. Sometimes he wore sunglasses, too, just to make it easier to wall off all of Belichick’s breakdowns. “He’s got his eyes closed,” Carson said of Taylor, “and when the lights go off to watch film, everybody’s sort of in their own little world. So Lawrence would fall asleep while Bill was diagramming plays. The table would be in the front of the room, and the projector was on the table. Lawrence would have his eyes closed, but somehow he’d be alert and able to answer all the questions Belichick would pose to him.”
Carson sat in the back of the room in a La-Z-Boy recliner. As soon as the lights went off, he said, and Belichick started droning on, it was difficult for everyone to stay awake. Legs up, Carson would flip his hoodie over his head and start listening to the jazz or rock or religious music in his headphones. If he happened to hear Belichick over the music, he’d answer his questions.
The coach found ways to get his necessary points across. Joe Morris, the running back from Syracuse, was once ripped by Belichick in a film session for missing a tackle on kickoff coverage.
“I really thought it was never going to work out for him,” Morris said. “I was embarrassed. He clearly pointed out my failures as a player, and no player wants to be taken down a peg . . . And I said, ‘Bill, from that day on, I never want to be embarrassed in a film session again, so I’m going to make sure any effort you see on film is my best effort.’”
Years later, Morris told Belichick, “I thought you were a dick at first, but let me tell you something: You made me a better player.”
Belichick made a lot of players better, even the future Hall of Famers. Morris recalled Carson missing a tackle in a game and Belichick making him hit a tackling dummy over and over in the next practice. The coach couldn’t believe the linebacker hadn’t made the tackle in question, and asked him how a Pro Bowler could be so sloppy in his technique. Carson was pissed about the commentary and the requirement to do this drill.
“But he did it,” Morris said. “And Harry never closed his eyes on a tackle the rest of his life . . . There has to be an affinity for someone who makes you get better.”
And this is where some light is shed on that shift in the Parcells-Belichick relationship. Little Bill had earned the respect of his defensive players through accomplishment—theirs—and therefore grew less inclined to be the kind of tackling dummy for Big Bill that Little Bill had put in front of Carson.
“It was almost like a father and son,” Martin said, “where the son comes on and he’s completely obedient to the father. He makes certain he follows instructions to a T, he’s not one step out of line, and eventually that son realizes he has his own platform, his own voice and responsibility, and he comes into his own. It was nice to see Bill Belichick stand up to Parcells and say, ‘Goddammit, I’m the coordinator and I’m going to make this call.’
“They had a lot of fiery
exchanges,” Martin went on. “Parcells was reluctant to give up his command of the defense. It was around 1985 or ’86 where Belichick started not being afraid to stand up to Parcells. All Belichick needed was the support of the players . . . That’s when the pendulum swung and we went from Parcells guys to Belichick guys.”
And yet Big Bill would always be the emotional leader of the Giants, their undisputed heartbeat, the master of pushing the right human buttons at the right time. He wanted to keep the game as simple as possible for his players, wanted them to focus not on newfangled X’s and O’s but on the effort they were expending against the men lined up across from them.
Parcells did give Belichick freedom in how he coached his defense, and remained open-minded to the nuanced changes the coordinator would make. “Occasionally there were some times I had to restrain him,” Parcells said, “because he was very cerebral and he had a lot of ideas, and a lot of them are very good. You have to be able to transmit them to the players, and sometimes I erred on the side of A little less is better, and let’s rely on execution. We have good players—let’s let them play.”
More and more, the defensive players came to view Belichick as the brains of their operation. Carson said that when defensive players took the field, they were so thoroughly tested and prepared by Belichick, they just had to react to what they saw. “We didn’t have to think about anything,” the linebacker said. “When you think about stuff, that’s when you’re dead.” Belichick did the thinking for them, and made them faster to the ball.
Belichick used punters and kickers in practice to run the upcoming opponent’s plays against the defense. He’d show them a card that detailed where they should line up and what routes to run, and if one of the punters or kickers made a misstep, he pounced on the offending Giant and demanded that his defense get a better look. On the flip side, if an offensive or defensive starter was taking a lazy-minded approach to punt, field goal, or extra-point reps in practice, Belichick went after that starter with the same fire and urgency.