by Ian O'Connor
In the end, no matter how anyone looked at it, the two Bills made a formidable pair. Their ’86 team opened the playoffs with a 49–3 destruction of the 49ers, defined by Burt’s vicious hit on Joe Montana, who threw a pick-six to Taylor on the play before heading to the hospital with a concussion. Belichick had advised Parcells to play more man-to-man coverage against Montana the night before the game. During the game, Belichick had rattled Montana with a scheme that called for Taylor and either Carson or emerging star Carl Banks to shoot through the center-guard gap to produce immediate and intense pressure on the star quarterback.
The following week, the Giants hosted the Redskins in an NFC Championship Game that was played in cold, howling winds. The irrepressible mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, was already on record saying he had no interest in hosting a ticker-tape parade for what he called a “foreign team.” (The Giants had left the city for the New Jersey swamplands more than a decade earlier.) The Giants were more concerned about the blustery forecast than about the blustery mayor. They needn’t have worried. In winds gusting up to 30 miles per hour, the Redskins would go 0 for 14 against the home team’s defense on third down, and 0 for 4 on fourth, while managing a grand total of 40 rushing yards on 16 attempts in a 17–0 defeat.
A stunning scene unfolded after the Giants clinched their first trip to a Super Bowl, and their first appearance in a championship game since 1963. Wearing a red Giants jacket, a gray hoodie underneath, and a look of boyish glee stretched across his face, Belichick left the field on the shoulders of Greg Lasker, a safety, and Pepper Johnson, a linebacker. Little Bill had his left hand planted on Lasker’s head and his right hand planted on Johnson’s right shoulder pad. The assistant who had been ignored, mocked, and disrespected by his players was now being carried off the field under waves of swirling paper and garbage—the ticker tape Koch promised they’d never see.
The picture ended up on the front page of the New York Times. Yes, Little Bill Belichick had hit the big time. His family and friends all saw the picture, and he figured he must’ve collected 100 copies of that Times front page. He was 34 years old, and he was two weeks away from stepping onto the Rose Bowl field in Pasadena, California, to face the Denver Broncos for a chance to make the Giants champions for the first time in 30 years. And as fate would have it, that game would be decided, in large part, by a Navy man shaped by a college coaching lifer named Steve Belichick.
Before facing the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI in Pasadena, Bill Belichick had to come up with two plans: (1) a plan to keep quarterback John Elway in the pocket and (2) a plan to keep Lawrence Taylor awake.
The Giants had barely beaten the Broncos at home in the regular season, and only because 6´4˝, 245-pound George Martin shed a blocker, rose up to deflect an Elway pass with his right hand, caught his own rebound, broke an attempted Elway tackle in the open field, and rumbled his way home for a 78-yard touchdown. Parcells called it the best play he’d ever seen.
In the days preceding the big game, LT felt the same way the Vegas oddsmakers did—that the Giants stood little chance of losing. They were riding an 11-game winning streak and were fiercely determined to make up for their shutout loss to the Bears in the ’85 playoffs. Sean Landeta, who had all but whiffed on a punt against those Bears and gifted them a touchdown the day before his 24th birthday, symbolized the Giants’ resurgence by rebounding with a Pro Bowl season. Mark Bavaro had also made the Pro Bowl, playing through a fractured jaw and carrying half the 49ers’ defense on his back on a catch-and-run during a comeback victory at Candlestick Park. Simms had thrown five touchdown passes against no interceptions in the two playoff victories, and the Giants’ linebacker corps had become even more dominant with the emergence of Carl Banks, their first-round pick in 1984.
So Taylor wasn’t about to sit at attention when Belichick started going over some adjustments in the way the Giants would defend Elway. “Lawrence had his cap down over his eyes, sunglasses on,” Martin said, “and Bill calls him and Lawrence doesn’t respond. He calls him a second time and Lawrence doesn’t respond. So Bill walks across the room right in front of LT, lifts his glasses up, and Lawrence is sound asleep. This is the week of the Super Bowl. That’s Lawrence . . . Bill did coach him differently, but with that kind of talent, every coach did. You don’t want to poke that bear unnecessarily. Bill was standing on a long line of individuals who gave that broad latitude to Lawrence.”
Though the Giants had in Taylor the kind of defensive force the sport hadn’t seen, their spirit in this game, and in this entire postseason, would be best embodied by a tiny, undrafted castoff, Phil McConkey, a receiver and return man who had learned a ton about football from Bill Belichick’s father. The son of a Buffalo cop who worked two jobs on the side to pay the bills, McConkey was all of 5´10˝ and 145 pounds when he showed up in Annapolis in the spring of 1975 and met Steve and Bill, who was on his way from Wesleyan to the Baltimore Colts. McConkey thought his own father was tough, but Steve Belichick positively terrified him.
“He was one gruff human being,” McConkey said. “Steve was not a man to sugarcoat anything. He ran the off-season program on the basketball court, and all I remember is lining up garbage cans for guys to throw up in. We just ran and ran. Shuttle runs, basketball drills, gassers, calisthenics. Steve was the toughest coach I ever had, by far. He wasn’t only preparing us for football, but to be combat officers in the U.S. Navy, to be responsible for your life and many more lives.”
McConkey did five years in the Navy before leaving the service and taking a shot at the NFL that started with a 1984 workout with Steve Belichick at the academy in Annapolis. McConkey had learned from Steve how to properly stretch before running, how to properly catch a punt, how to watch film, how to do everything. He never wanted to let the old man down.
McConkey twice ran the 40-yard dash in 4.4 seconds on Navy’s practice field while Steve Belichick timed him, and Steve called his son and recommended the Giants give this nontraditional 27-year-old prospect a serious look. McConkey made the team by diving for the ball in practice, bloodying himself in the process. On one such dive, in his first camp, McConkey wrestled the ball away from the Giant who was covering him, and did so right at Belichick’s feet. “McConkey,” Little Bill sighed, “you’re a pain in my fucking ass.” The long shot thought it was the best compliment he ever received.
The Giants released McConkey after the 1985 season, then reacquired him in a trade with Green Bay four games deep into ’86. The return man had remarkable hands and balance; he could hold three balls under each arm and still catch a seventh. Big Bill and Little Bill insisted that he always catch punts in the air, not on the bounce, something that was forever preached by Steve Belichick, too. On days Steve showed up at Giants practices, Parcells often asked him to keep an eye on a certain player or a certain technique or drill. Landeta said that Steve was the first coach ever to tell him that the return team rarely benefited when the ball touched the ground. As it turned out, McConkey, one of Steve’s guys, saved the Giants an untold amount of yardage by absorbing brutal hits on the dead run while following that line of thought.
McConkey caught a 28-yard touchdown pass from Simms in the divisional playoff rout of San Francisco, and he caught enough punts against Washington in the windblown NFC title game for Parcells to tell him he’d saved the Giants at least 100 yards in field position. Yet his Super Bowl performance was the one everyone would remember. It came on a sun-splashed day in Pasadena, where the Giants were thrilled to be 2,400 miles away from a bitter North Jersey winter. Simms knew he was going to have a big day in warm-ups when the ball came flying out of his hand. He ended up nearly pitching a Don Larsen game in this Super Bowl, completing 22 of 25 passes for three touchdowns and winning the MVP award in a 39–20 victory.
McConkey was the unlikely Giant who dramatically changed the game when it was still in doubt. The Broncos were trailing 16–10 in the middle of the third quarter when their left-footed punter, Mike Horan, let one rip. McConke
y always thought the ball’s flight path from a left-footed kicker was devilishly unpredictable, so he had Simms, a right-handed thrower who kicked with his left foot, punt to him in practice. On cue, McConkey caught Horan’s punt and returned it 25 yards to set up a field goal that gave the Giants a two-score lead.
On their next possession, the Giants ran a flea-flicker and Simms found McConkey wide open behind a confused and flat-footed Denver secondary. The play covered 44 yards before McConkey got upended just before the goal line; Joe Morris carried the ball across on the next snap. The Giants held a 26–10 lead entering the fourth quarter, then turned it into a rout when a Simms pass into the end zone bounced off the hands and facemask of Bavaro and into the waiting grasp of McConkey, who scored the Super Bowl touchdown he so desperately wanted on that earlier 44-yard catch.
The Giants were Super Bowl champions at last. Fresh from his Gatorade bath, Parcells gathered his players in the locker room and shouted, “The rest of your life. The rest of your life, men. Nobody can ever tell ya that ya couldn’t do it, because ya did it.”
At some point in the celebration, Bill Belichick was hit by a sudden thought. He wondered if this would be the final time he’d have a moment like this in his NFL career. So he made his way back onto the Rose Bowl field for one last look at the scoreboard, one last look around the building. He took it all in—the sights and sounds of victory—and then got stopped near the locker room by security guards who didn’t recognize him and who likely figured he was too young to be the defensive coordinator of the world champs.
Little Bill finally made it onto the winning bus. At 34, he’d reached the summit of professional football because of a loving father who had taught him the trade, and who had delivered him an undersize, overlooked player from Navy schooled in the Steve Belichick way.
Bill Belichick’s grim disposition inspired some players to call him “the Voice of Doom,” though Bill Parcells shortened it to “Doom.” Big Bill said he liked to call Little Bill “Doom” because he was “always predicting negative things.”
Funny. Not so funny was the fact that George Young, the Giants’ GM, thought Doom’s personality and human relations skills didn’t match up with those required of a head coach. In a Giants Stadium conference room in the late 1980s, Young made it clear to everyone present that Little Bill would not assume control whenever Big Bill stepped down.
“I was there when he said it,” Chris Mara recalled. “He said, ‘He’ll never become the Giants’ head coach’ . . . George, like others, said, ‘This is an ex–lacrosse player. He’s a disheveled-looking mess most of the time.’ George was big on that other stuff as far as appearance, which is why he was so high on Ray Perkins, who took command of everyone around him and was a born leader. I just don’t think he saw that in Bill Belichick.”
Young had grown up in a tough Irish Catholic part of Baltimore, the Tenth Ward, and he had no use for the suburban Baltimore kids who flocked to lacrosse. A star high school and college (Bucknell) tackle in his day, Young thought lacrosse players weren’t real athletes. “The only people who play lacrosse,” he used to say, “are the people who could afford those sticks. The athletes couldn’t afford those sticks.”
Young told associates that what he wanted in a head coaching candidate was intelligence, a high energy level, and something to prove. Belichick checked off all three boxes. “But George believed he’d struggle with the media because he didn’t have that engaging personality,” one of those associates said. “That was part of the reason George wasn’t that high on him as a head coach.”
Belichick didn’t have much experience in major press conference settings, as Parcells was such a large and all-consuming media presence. Yet nearly all the beat writers, columnists, and TV and radio reporters who covered the Giants actually thought Belichick was a valuable and available source of information and insight. Peter King, Bob Papa, Dave Klein, Vinny DiTrani, Bob Glauber, Hank Gola, Mike Eisen, Mark Cannizzaro, and Greg Garber—media members who would spend decades covering the Giants and the NFL for outlets in the New York area and nationwide—all thought Little Bill helped their understanding of the sport and the Giants’ place in it.
In the 1980s, Giants coaches and players would chat informally with media members on a routine basis during their training camps at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York (through 1987), and Fairleigh Dickinson in Madison, New Jersey, and during the season at Giants Stadium. Parcells knew better than most how to work a media room; he’d tell writers to “put your pens down” when he wanted to fill them in on background. Belichick knew how to play the game, too. He’d often stop as he walked through the locker room to educate writers and broadcasters in need. Klein, of the Star-Ledger, said Belichick was the best football coach he’d ever dealt with, on or off the record.
“You could go up to Bill at any time to get any answer on anything,” said Glauber, then of Gannett newspapers in Westchester County, New York. “I’d often go up to him and say, ‘Bill, on this certain play in the game, what happened on this play? Why did it work?’ He had a pencil behind his ear and he’d grab my notebook and start scribbling with a pencil and give me the formation. So he would be very, very helpful . . . We almost shared a bond in that we were kind of in the trenches and Parcells was the dictator. There was a little bit of camaraderie there because of that.”
Gola, then of the New York Post, described Belichick as a great source who pointed a reporter in the right direction. Another New York–area writer agreed but said that Belichick “wasn’t going to be a Deep Throat to sabotage Parcells.” King, then of Newsday, recalled many pleasant locker-room conversations about the game with a Belichick who was “very loquacious and very open. He was not a curmudgeonly guy.” DiTrani, of the Record of Bergen County, New Jersey, recalled Belichick being cold to him for a couple of weeks after he wrote a critical column about the 1981 squib kick against Washington, but, like Gola, he generally found Little Bill to be a helpful not-for-attribution compass on the stories of the day.
George Young either didn’t know or didn’t care about Belichick’s strong relationship with the local media; the GM just didn’t think he had the requisite makeup to serve as the public face of the franchise. Young didn’t think that Little Bill had the leadership skills of the receivers coach, Tom Coughlin, or the same intellect as the running backs coach, Ray Handley.
Some executives in other corners of the league had different ideas. By the end of the 1990 regular season, two years after Belichick had interviewed for the Cleveland Browns job and a year after he’d interviewed for the Phoenix Cardinals job, Little Bill was drawing renewed interest from the Browns and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Even though his proud, self-made leaders, Harry Carson and George Martin, had retired two seasons earlier, and even though Lawrence Taylor had been suspended for repeated drug use that same year and was living just as recklessly off the field as he was known for playing on it, Belichick presided over the league’s No. 1 defense.
The way he managed the high-maintenance Taylor had a fair amount to do with that, which was ironic. Back when Parcells promoted Belichick to defensive coordinator, Taylor had gone into Big Bill’s office and told him, “I’m not listening to this motherfucker. Are you kidding?” LT would describe Little Bill as “a total pain in the ass” and as the “driest-humor son-of-a-bitch you’ve ever seen.” Taylor would add that as much as you want to be sitting next to Belichick on Sunday afternoons, “you don’t want to be near him” any other day of the week.
LT once jumped out of his seat in a meeting in response to a stinging Belichick critique and bolted out of the room. According to linebacker Steve DeOssie, Taylor told Belichick, “Look, you little motherfucker. You never hit anybody when you were at Wesleyan or wherever the fuck you went to school. I’d be surprised if you ever saw the goddamn field. I’m sick of this.” Belichick continued on with his meeting, and Taylor found a soft couch so he could take a nap.
But what struck DeOssie the most was the dif
ference between how Belichick interacted with LT and other players and what he’d experienced in Dallas. As a five-year member of Tom Landry’s Cowboys, DeOssie knew the coach-player dialogue as a one-way street. The coach told the players what to do, and the players did it. Landry, DeOssie said, “was like Moses coming down from the mount with the Ten Commandments.”
Parcells, by contrast, had encouraged a free-flowing exchange of criticisms and profanities. “Some of the things Simms said to him on the sideline were fucking amazing,” said tackle Karl Nelson. “Parcells said that anything said on the sideline during a game, good or bad, is over as soon as the game was over. He said things to assistants on the sideline that would make a sailor blush.”
When Belichick followed Parcells’s lead in defensive meetings, DeOssie initially was afraid to contribute to the discourse. He’d been taught in the Landry system to always submit to the coach’s authority. “It wasn’t just Lawrence going off on Belichick,” he said, “but Belichick going off on Lawrence, too. It was never a one-sided verbal beatdown when it came to Giants coaches and players. It could get personal, but it was never really personal. Wives and children were off-limits, and everything else was up for grabs. It was like an airing of grievances in medieval times.
“But it wasn’t only guys going off on each other and trading insults. Belichick was one of the first coaches I ever saw who actually sought input from his players instead of just saying Do this, do that. Bill saw the value in what his players were seeing on the field, and that was usable information for him.”
In his own way, Taylor was always an astute provider of that information and a reliable asset, despite his chaotic personal life. He wrote in his autobiography that he started using cocaine and crack at least three times a week during the 1985 season, that his wife once had to kick open the door of a drug den to get him out, that he smuggled a teammate’s clean urine into the bathroom—via an aspirin bottle tucked into his jock—to beat drug tests, and that he used golf courses as his personal detox centers. Though Parcells started clearing out what he considered some bad influences in the locker room two years before he won the Super Bowl (he said in his own autobiography that he knew of 20 to 30 Giants who used drugs between 1983 and 1986), Taylor was spared, for seemingly the most obvious reasons. “Parcells knew where his bread was buttered on that one,” Karl Nelson said.