Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  Belichick had a photographic memory, or something close to it, and he could read a page of a script once and spit it back out. Sometimes during the show’s walk-through he’d read a question in the script that he didn’t want to answer on camera, like this one: “When you’re driving in your car, what music do you listen to?” A perfectly harmless question for a Jon Bon Jovi friend who loved rock music, of course, yet Belichick wanted no part of it.

  “What do you want me to say when I’m asked this?” he asked a crew member.

  “Why don’t you say what you listen to in the car?” the crew member responded.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Belichick said. “It’s nobody’s fucking business what I listen to in the car. It’s nobody’s fucking business where my wife gets her hair done. It’s nobody’s fucking business where my kid goes to school, and it’s nobody’s fucking business that I even drive my car. So what do you want me to answer?”

  “Bill, you’re friends with Bon Jovi. You’re friends from back in New Jersey, and you went on tour with him. OK?”

  Belichick was asked the $100,000 question during the taping, and everyone on the set held their collective breath. Asked what music he listened to in his car, Belichick answered with two words: “Bon Jovi.” Those two words, nothing more. Mueller wanted to know if they should reshoot the exchange and was immediately told by the crew that there would be no do-over.

  The Browns kept trying with Belichick. They understood that in the cold grayness of winter in places like Cleveland, Green Bay, and Buffalo the locals desperately needed something to warm up to, something to lift their spirits. They knew that their owner, Modell, would invite fans into the huddle if he could, and that Belichick would rather keep them as far away from his team as possible.

  So they brought in a comedian, Mike Veneman, to lighten up their show. Veneman did a cooking segment with Belichick that opened with the coach wearing a Browns sweatshirt and introducing what he called his “BBPBJ” recipe. “Bill Belichick’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich,” he said. “How divine,” replied Veneman, wearing a white apron. Belichick proceeded to spread peanut butter on both slices of raisin bread (he said his mother liked to use raisin bread), explaining how that approach prevented the jelly from leaking through the bread. “That’s why you’re the head coach,” Veneman said. “It’s forward thinking like that. I’ve never seen that.”

  Belichick actually thought that segment was funny. “Other than that,” a crew member said, “it was awful.”

  Belichick was the ultimate long-term project. One off-camera stunt that many didn’t find humorous could’ve gotten the coach in trouble with the league. In an apparent attempt to lighten the mood among his players, Belichick allowed two exotic dancers to appear before them, according to six people in the room. The witnesses provided different accounts of what the women did. One defensive player said the dancers “got totally naked.” Another defensive player said they were wearing outfits that resembled Playboy Bunny outfits. “They didn’t strip down or anything,” that player said, “but some guys thought it went too far.”

  A third player said he left the room when he saw the women arrive and someone else roll out Visqueen on the floor, suggesting a potential act he did not care to witness. One offensive player said the women didn’t strip down naked. “It was hilarious, and it was to make a point,” he said. “No titties were exposed, I will tell you this.”

  All witnesses agreed that some players remained in their seats and enjoyed the entertainment, others remained in their seats and ignored the women, finding their presence silly and uninteresting, and others walked out of the room in protest of something they found in poor taste. One player estimated that half a dozen Browns walked out.

  One of the Browns who left the room thought Belichick was trying to bond with the team and had just picked the wrong approach.

  “Desperate people do desperate things,” said one defensive player. “Bill was trying to do anything to loosen up the team . . . It turned some guys off . . . I didn’t feel right about it. I didn’t think it was appropriate at that time.”

  “He saw how frustrated and tired we were,” another defensive player said of Belichick, “and he thought this was going to make us happy. It didn’t make me happy. I didn’t need to see that. I’d rather go home. I don’t think a lot of the guys needed it.”

  One offensive player said the female dancers had been brought in as part of a rookie show. NFL teams had long staged training-camp talent shows that were tied to relatively benign rookie hazing. Sometimes these NFL talent shows could get a little raunchy and things could get a little carried away, in the middle of a long, brutal camp.

  “It wasn’t crazy like a strip show,” the offensive player said. “We laughed. I was happy about it. We were tired of looking at each other all day. So this was something better to look at.”

  Another offensive player said that veteran Browns were booing rookie performers one night, and that Belichick responded by telling the rookies they’d have to rise early and run the hill if they didn’t pick up the entertainment a notch. “I think more than anything, bringing in the dancers,” the offensive player said, “that was one of the nights that the rookies were supposed to do something. I don’t know if Bill did it. I think it was the rookies that did it. We laughed.”

  Some Browns executives were later made aware of the appearance of the female dancers in the facility but took no apparent action against their coach. As it was, Belichick couldn’t afford to take another direct public relations hit. Bud Shaw, Plain Dealer columnist, recalled a training-camp day when Belichick was asked on live TV about the number of defensive backs he planned to keep. The coach just buried his head in his hands for what felt like two minutes before finally looking up and saying, “Six. I don’t know.”

  This from a man whose wife once cut out newspaper articles that mentioned him as a Giants assistant to put in a scrapbook. This from a man who handed out playbooks to his team that included a page titled “Cooperating With News Media,” which opened with these two paragraphs:

  Reasonable cooperation with the news media is essential to the continuing popularity of our game and its players.

  It is important that each coach and player be courteous and prompt in associations and appointments with radio and television broadcasters and newspaper reporters. Please recognize that each member of the media, like you, has a job to perform.

  The Belichick playbook included pages on the running-hole numbering system (even numbers to the defense’s left, odd to the right), the defensive signal system (including calls “Steeler 1 Lock” and “K.C. Red Dog”), and master’s degree research from ex–Browns assistant John Teerlinck on how athletes react to stimuli. It included calls for the “Under” alignment (including “Under Viking” and “Under Wide”), the “Over” alignment (“Over Stack Viking”), and the 4-3 (“4-3 Solid” and “4-3 Plus”). It included a “Cover 2” summation that said the defense was designed to “allow very few touchdown passes” and to “force the ball to be thrown short and outside,” and that listed audibles including “White” (Cover 2), “Larry” (zone left), and “Roger” (zone right).

  For Belichick, the most pertinent page in the Cleveland playbook concluded with this paragraph: “The media is a direct link between you and the fans who support our game. Therefore, it is important to you and this organization that you present yourself to the media in a manner and style in which you yourself would like to be received and treated.”

  And yet team executives were forever worrying about the damage Belichick might’ve been doing to the brand with his daily disdain for the sporting press. “Bill just had no respect for the media, or didn’t demonstrate any,” Jim Bailey said. “Those guys were very tough—a tough media at that time—and he just couldn’t bring himself to cooperate very much . . . I never confronted him; I know our PR guys did. We always felt he could’ve made life easier without hurting the franchise . . . He would come in and slouch down in h
is chair and stare down at his shoes and mutter one-word answers. It was a really difficult situation.”

  On the other hand, Ernie Adams told the Beacon Journal, local reporters and columnists needed to accept part of the blame for the way Belichick treated them. “To read some of this stuff,” he said, “you would have thought that Bill was down there in the bunker at the end of World War II with Eva Braun.”

  The players were among the constituents who yearned to experience a kinder, gentler, more human side of their boss. Perry was among the team leaders who occasionally led a boycott of Belichick’s mandate to practice in full pads.

  Before the Monday night game against the 49ers, Perry and Ball decided they couldn’t allow their boss to go ahead with a third consecutive day of hitting. They ordered their teammates to leave their pads in their stalls and head out for stretching. Belichick made his way to the field with his practice plan in hand and found his players in helmets and shorts. He looked down at his paper that said they were supposed to be dressed in full pads. He threw up his hands, rolled up the paper, and walked up to Clay Matthews and Mike Johnson, who pointed toward Perry and Ball, who were stretching in the back row.

  “Bill got back there to us, fuming,” Ball said. “He came over to me and Michael Dean and said, ‘If we don’t win, it’s going to be your ass.’ And we beat the 49ers . . . We had some motivation for that game.”

  The scene captured the disconnect between Belichick and his players. “Technically,” Metcalf said, “we were his guinea pigs. It was his first deal. It was a tough group to have as your guinea pigs.” The old guard, he meant, had been entrenched and perhaps more than a bit entitled. Belichick could’ve done more to bridge the gap. Burnett recalled that whenever the coach passed players on his walk from facility to field, or field to facility, he avoided a typical exchange of pleasantries. “As soon as guys would go, ‘Hey, Coach,’” Burnett said, “he would look the other way.”

  Sometimes Belichick ignored front-office types, too. One midlevel executive was sure he was about to be fired after he approached Belichick in the hallway, only to have the head coach look through him and walk away as if he weren’t even there. (The executive wasn’t fired.)

  Belichick was wearing out the people he worked with, including Saban. The defensive coordinator was looking a bit run-down by the 1994 season; he seemed to have aged in his four-year term at the rate of a United States president. He told one associate he had no use for his boss’s restrictions on assistants talking to the news media. Saban dearly wanted to land a big-time head coaching job, and he wanted more freedom to talk to get his name out there. “I’m not going to be Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator forever,” Saban told the associate, who said there was less communication between Saban and Belichick in ’94 than there had been in their three previous seasons together.

  “At the end of the day,” Rob Burnett said, “[Belichick] didn’t allow Nick to be the best . . . Nick expressed some frustration. At the end, it wasn’t the best relationship.”

  But their Tuesday game-plan meetings, coaches and scouts said, were a thing to behold; their genius for football was on full display. Belichick always encouraged his assistants to offer their opinions, even if—or especially if—they conflicted with his, and he went back and forth with his coordinator over this or that scheme. Belichick and Saban did share a philosophy of building a defense around big, bruising players in the middle of the lineup. And with their defense leading the league in points allowed, eventually surrendering only 204 (30 points fewer than the second-ranked defense in Pittsburgh), Belichick and Saban also shared a frustration with an offense that was improving and finally had an official coordinator—Steve Crosby, who had been a de facto coordinator late in ’93—but was still not ranked among the league’s top ten in points scored.

  That frustration contributed to Saban’s own dour moods. He was a small man with “the voice of a 6´5˝, 280-pound guy,” said safety Louis Riddick, and he ran as hot as Belichick ran cold. Riddick said the head coach “had a way of undressing you in a meeting room when watching tape,” usually with a laser beam pointing out a player’s mistakes. Steve Everitt, center, said Belichick often made the Browns laugh with his stinging critiques about everyone from his own players to opposing assistants. “He’d be like ‘There’s no fucking way Al Groh is going to come in here and beat us. Fucking Al Groh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’” Everitt said. “He’d be like ‘Vinny, we’re not playing fucking Georgia Tech next week.’ That’s how he knew how to push guys’ buttons. It was fun to watch.”

  By contrast, Saban was almost never fun to watch or to be around. He was always rocking back and forth in his chair, as if preparing to launch himself into someone’s sorry ass. “Not good enough—do it again!” Saban screamed over and over in practice. He often used poor Phil Savage as his personal tackling dummy, verbally blasting him at every turn. The coordinator also used Savage and a couple of other slapdicks, or slappies, George Kokinos and Jim Schwartz, to landscape the property around the pond in his yard. Scouts sometimes were sent on “Saban rehab” assignments to look at small-college talent. “Saban rehab,” said one Browns staffer, “was just getting away from him.”

  Schwartz ran the team’s tape room, where Belichick and Newsome and the rest of the coaches and personnel men regularly returned the tapes they’d taken out to watch. “Not Saban,” the staffer said. “Belichick could be a dick when it was time to be a dick. Saban was a dick all the time.”

  Nick used to chew Red Man tobacco, and during one set of warm-up drills he accidentally spat a huge wad of chew all over safety Bennie Thompson’s leg and didn’t bother to apologize. During one film session, Saban went on a tirade after watching a pass rusher on another team break through the line, fall down, and then make little effort to get up while the opposing quarterback was preparing to throw the ball. “He just laid up there like a freakin’ fish,” one veteran in the room said of the fallen pass rusher, “and [Saban] goes, ‘I want you sons of bitches to roll and give [the quarterback’s] ass a surgical knee.’ That’s what he said. He goes, ‘Hit the ground and start fucking rolling and give his ass a surgical knee.’ And I was like ‘What did he just say?’”

  The NFL was never for the faint of heart, and in the end Belichick needed Saban on that defense as much as Parcells had needed Belichick with the Giants. The coordinator was so thorough, so detailed, so good, he was as valuable as any playing member of his unit. Riddick said Saban taught at a Ph.D. level, telling the defensive backs how their feet should be set, where their eyes should go once the ball was snapped, and then the second place they should go while the play unfolded. And as volatile as he could be during the week, Saban was just as composed on Sundays.

  “He yelled and screamed and spit and motherfucked you; he just was very rude and condescending,” Burnett said. “But on game day he was about as calm as an Olympic pool . . . whether we were winning by 20 or losing by 50.”

  His defense didn’t even give up 13 points a game in ’94, which was a very good thing for his boss. The only way Belichick was going to win over the team and the town, especially after the Kosar firing, was to win, and win big. And in year four of his program, his vision started to come into focus at last.

  Belichick never stopped grinding in search of even the slightest competitive advantage. He slept overnight on a couch in his office, using an afghan his wife had knitted for him back in his assistant days in Denver, just to get an earlier start on the game plan in the morning. He pored over newspaper clippings from the market of his upcoming opponent to find a revealing quote or injury update—something, anything, that might give the Browns an edge that Sunday. He held long Saturday afternoon meetings with his staff during the season—home or away—that his secondary coach and future coordinator, Rick Venturi, called “unheard of.” He made sure the cafeteria was stocked with healthy food for the players, even as he enjoyed eating buckets of Johnson’s Popcorn from the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey,
Mike Lombardi’s hometown.

  Belichick didn’t ask his assistants to work longer hours than he did. “I don’t know if he ever went home,” said Woody Widenhofer, linebackers coach. Belichick had dinner served at the facility so the coaches could refuel and work deep into the night. The offensive and defensive staffs watched film together, and they watched both sides of the ball so an offensive coach could offer his opinion on what the defense was doing, and vice versa. That made the nights longer than they were in most corners of the NFL. “I’d never seen that before,” Widenhofer said.

  Sometimes Belichick wanted to make changes to game plans at midnight, and wanted them made right away. He didn’t slow down in the off-season, either. Venturi recalled one Friday, a couple of weeks before the draft, that was supposed to precede a rare weekend off. Suddenly Belichick summoned the defensive staffers for a 5 p.m. meeting to assign them film review of about a dozen college prospects who were likely to go undrafted. Thinking of his weekend plans, and hoping Belichick could wait until the following Tuesday or Wednesday for the reports, Venturi asked him when he wanted the work completed. Belichick shot his assistant a look. “As soon as possible,” he said. The weekend off became a weekend on.

  The grind took a toll on everyone who tried to keep up with Belichick’s pace. “I got into coaching for fun,” Widenhofer told a co-worker. “And this isn’t fun.”

  Fun simply wasn’t a part of Belichick’s assistant-coach playbook. Kirk Ferentz was working at the University of Maine when he interviewed for a job coaching the Browns’ offensive line. Belichick subjected him to a stone-faced interrogation like he’d never before faced, and Ferentz was sure he’d failed miserably, before getting a second call and, ultimately, the offer. The upside? Everyone agreed that Belichick let his assistants coach on the field, didn’t suffocate them, and gave them room to succeed or fail.