by Ian O'Connor
The son of a Boston dressmaker who hoped he’d become a rabbi, Kraft ascended out of a family of modest financial means; the Krafts didn’t even own a car. Robert was a class president on an academic scholarship at Columbia, a Harvard Business School graduate and longtime season-ticket holder who made his fortune in the paper-and-packaging industry after taking control of his father-in-law’s company. Kraft got the break of a football fan’s lifetime when the owning family of the Patriots and their stadium, the Sullivans, lost a bundle promoting Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour in 1984, forcing Sullivan Stadium into bankruptcy and starting a team-ownership domino effect—from Billy Sullivan to Kiam to Orthwein to Kraft—that forever changed the NFL.
Kraft bought an option on 300 acres of land surrounding the stadium in 1985. Against the wishes of his banker, Kraft bought the building out of bankruptcy for $25 million in a 1988 deal that included the lease requiring the Patriots to play there through 2001.
Built for a lousy $7.1 million, the stadium was a godforsaken dump with a long history of plumbing issues. It made baseball’s ghastly Shea Stadium, in Queens, look like the Taj Mahal, and Kraft’s banker thought the place would end up as a white elephant if the team moved out of Foxborough. But Kraft was a natural-born risk-taker, a guy who’d make a ten-dollar bet on the street with only five dollars in his pocket. As a young entrepreneur, he took over a struggling paper mill in Newfoundland by guaranteeing a sale of 200,000 tons, even though he didn’t have the financial wherewithal to make any such guarantee. Kraft later turned that company, International Forest Products, into a global juggernaut with business interests in more than 90 countries.
Kraft had grown up a fan of the Boston Braves, his first love, and he was saddened when they moved to Milwaukee in 1953. He didn’t want to see the Patriots end up in St. Louis, and he relied on his experience as owner of the Boston Lobsters, of the World TeamTennis league, in blocking that move. The Lobsters played in Boston University’s Walter Brown Arena in the mid-1970s, and though Kraft’s product and advertising were putting fans in the seats, the university pocketed the concessions and parking revenue. From that bum deal, Kraft learned the value of controlling a team’s venue.
With control of what had been renamed Foxboro Stadium, Kraft declined Orthwein’s $75 million bid to buy out the lease and move the franchise in 1994 and instead offered Orthwein $172 million for the team, a record price in American sports. Kraft’s wife, Myra, thought her husband had lost his mind.
Kraft knew he was crazy for paying that kind of money for a team with a lousy Q rating, stuck in a lousier ballpark, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d become an instant fan when the Boston Patriots were born as an American Football League franchise in 1960, back when NFL-starved New Englanders regularly watched the New York Giants on TV and adopted them as their own. He’d watched the Patriots play at Boston University, Fenway Park, Boston College’s Alumni Stadium, and Harvard Stadium. He bought season tickets for his family in 1971, the year the team moved into what was then Schaefer Stadium, where he sat with his sons on those dreadful metal benches above the end zone in Section 217, Row 23, Seats 1 through 6, and dreamed of someday running the club.
In 1994, he bought the franchise that had won one playoff game in ten years in the old AFL and three playoff games—all in the 1985 season—in 24 years in the NFL. Their games were often subjected to TV blackouts in the market for failing to sell out. They were 19-61 over the five seasons preceding Kraft’s purchase, and running a distant fourth in a sports-mad market hopelessly devoted to the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. The day after Kraft was made their official owner, the Patriots sold nearly 6,000 season tickets in the middle of a winter storm, or nearly 5,000 more than their previous one-day record—set when Parcells was hired. They would sell more than 40,000 season tickets and sell out every home game for the first time. Kraft’s man-of-the-people vibe was appealing to the masses, even if it wasn’t appealing to Parcells, his most important football asset.
Parcells didn’t like the fact that his boss was a much more visible presence than the Giants’ Wellington Mara, and that Kraft clearly enjoyed the newfound spotlight. (“I had stardust in my eyes,” the owner admitted years later.) Kraft didn’t like the fact that Parcells barely acknowledged his wife and, after boarding the team plane, refused to talk to the banker who had loaned Kraft the money to buy the franchise. From there, Kraft’s decision to strip Parcells of his personnel power and to back Grier in the draft room in favor of Terry Glenn inflicted, in the coach’s eyes, irreparable harm on the partnership. Parcells asked the owner to remove the final year from his contract. Kraft obliged and absolved Parcells of any financial penalty for the amended deal, but he maintained the right to seek compensation if Parcells tried to coach another team during that year.
Parcells and Kraft were becoming Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones all over again. Their personality clash wasn’t helped by the fact that the owner’s wife compelled her husband to cut a 1996 fifth-round draft pick, Christian Peter, after reading reports of his violence against women at Nebraska, or by the fact that Robert and Myra Kraft were angered by the coach’s mocking reference to Glenn as “she.”
Even though the Patriots were days away from playing the Super Bowl, and even though Parcells and Kraft held a joint news conference in New Orleans in a farcical attempt to project a unified front, the coach was already out the door. The Giants had opened that door for the Jets, and Kraft later came to believe that an informal deal between Parcells and Hess had been in place in December. Years later, Parcells would rail against a report in the book Patriot Reign that said his hotel bill for Super Bowl week showed dozens of itemized calls from his room in the team hotel, the New Orleans Marriott, to Hempstead, New York, home base of the Jets. “That was total horseshit,” Parcells said. “Some Patriots officials want to make it look good by saying, ‘We had phone records.’ If I talked to the Jets, do you think I’m stupid enough to talk on Patriots phones?”
In a rare public rebuke of the man who promoted him with the Giants, and who threw him a lifeline after his firing in Cleveland, Belichick would tell author Michael Holley that he believed Parcells was distracted enough that week to affect New England’s preparation. “I can tell you firsthand, there was a lot of stuff going on prior to the game,” Belichick said. “I mean, him talking to other teams. He was trying to make up his mind about what he wanted to do. Which, honestly, I felt [was] totally inappropriate. How many chances do you get to play for the Super Bowl? Tell them to get back to you in a couple of days. I’m not saying it was disrespectful to me, but it was in terms of the overall commitment to the team.”
The entire week revolved around the Parcells-vs.-Kraft narrative, not the Patriots-vs.-Packers narrative, and in the end the better team with the better quarterback and better organizational chemistry won, 35–21. Favre threw two touchdown passes, including the 81-yarder to Antonio Freeman in the second quarter that gave Green Bay the lead for good. Drew Bledsoe, the No. 1 overall pick in the 1993 draft, threw four interceptions—four more than Favre threw—while Parcells kept repeating the mistake of kicking the ball to Desmond Howard, who ran free the entire game and scored the game’s final touchdown on a 99-yard kickoff return.
Parcells didn’t even fly home with his losing team. He resigned that Friday, and conceded in yet another strange press conference—with Kraft sitting up there with him—that the owner’s choice to diminish his role in personnel had played a part in his exit. Parcells quoted a friend who told him, “If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.” He accepted NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s ruling that the Patriots owned his coaching rights for the 1997 season, and that they would be owed compensation for trading those rights.
Kraft called his daily dealings with Parcells’s ego “a handful,” and he was very clear about his terms for trading that handful to the New York Jets. “I’m not playing chicken,” the owner said. “I’m not bluffing. I’
m not even threatening. I’m just saying, ‘Guys, if you want Bill Parcells as your coach in ’97, make sure your No. 1 draft choice is there in its current position’ . . . How would you like to be the guy that Bill Parcells left and you’ve got to face him twice?”
Truth was, Bill Belichick would’ve done almost anything at that point to face Parcells twice a year in the AFC East. Little Bill wanted Big Bill’s job with the Patriots as much as he had wanted Big Bill’s job with the Giants. Belichick spoke at length with Kraft on the flight home from New Orleans, the flight Parcells had skipped. Little Bill wanted to build a championship program that he envisioned but couldn’t build in Cleveland, and he wanted to do that in Foxborough, a formless town wedged between Boston and Providence. He wanted to work for Kraft, too. After Belichick’s playoff victory in Cleveland over Parcells and the Patriots, Kraft showed up in his locker room to congratulate him. “In my whole career,” Belichick would say, “I cannot recall any other owner, executive, or coach doing this to my team.”
Kraft liked Little Bill, liked him a lot. New England’s defensive players, especially the defensive backs, had raved about Belichick’s ability to coach them up, and Kraft thought he had a better understanding of the salary cap than Parcells did.
Only the owner couldn’t bring himself to hire someone so closely aligned with the man who’d just made a tumultuous break from the franchise. One night when the Krafts were having dinner with the Belichicks, the owner told Little Bill why he couldn’t have Big Bill’s job. Debby was said to be less understanding of Kraft’s reasons than her husband was, but the sides parted amicably, and with a sense that they might someday meet again to do business. Kraft hired the agreeable and energetic Pete Carroll, the former Jets coach, who represented everything Parcells was not, and Belichick participated in a shell game designed to help Kraft’s AFC East rival land Parcells.
The plan executed by the Jets’ president, Steve Gutman, was simple: The team would hire Belichick as an interim one-year coach, then reduce him to Little Bill again when Parcells was liberated from his Patriots deal to coach the 1998 season. The Jets didn’t even bother seeking permission from the Patriots to talk to Parcells. Big Bill and Little Bill signed up for the scam, Parcells was made a Jets consultant, and then Belichick would be made Parcells’s eventual successor after Big Bill coached another two years.
“You sure you want to do this—be a temporary coach?” Hess, the oil baron, asked Belichick.
“I want to do this as much as I want to do anything in my life,” Little Bill replied.
The Jets introduced Belichick as their new head coach in a packed press conference at the team’s Long Island headquarters at Hofstra, and they added to the absurdity of the event by having the lurking and looming Parcells speak by phone, Wizard of Oz–like, to the gathered reporters. “Bill and I will work in concert as we always have,” Belichick said, “and I think we’ll be successful.” Parcells swore that he wouldn’t have the final word on personnel in his strange new role. “I will just act in an advisory capacity,” he said.
The Patriots released an angry statement calling the arrangement “a transparent farce.” Leon Hess tried to negotiate with Kraft from a counterfeit position of strength, and Kraft kept insisting he wanted the Jets’ first-rounder, the No. 1 overall pick, and argued that Parcells was more valuable than any of the college players expected to go at the top of the draft.
Meanwhile, Belichick started hiring some of his former Cleveland staffers, such as Scott Pioli and Eric Mangini, with Mike Tannenbaum on deck. He stole a truckload of assistants from the Patriots, including former Giants coaches Al Groh, Romeo Crennel, Mike Sweatman, and Charlie Weis. Belichick, the substitute teacher, was clearly trying to leave his mark on the curriculum before the headmaster returned.
“I am not waiting around for Bill,” he said. “When I took it, I had the understanding it was full speed ahead and I am making the decisions to put the organization in the best situation to win in 1997. I am in charge of the Jets’ operations to try to strengthen the football team.”
Belichick allowed that he’d run the same offense and defense as the Patriots ran under Parcells, and that he’d install the same media policy for assistant coaches, who wouldn’t be allowed to talk to reporters. “If you guys don’t behave,” he told media members through a smile, “I won’t let you talk to Bill Parcells.”
Belichick represented the Jets at the pre-draft combine in Indianapolis, where he said he was hoping to re-create the winning environment he’d had with the Giants. He met with Pioli to determine what the Jets could and couldn’t do under the salary cap. He met with draft prospects, too, including an Ohio State linebacker named Mike Vrabel. According to Jets executive Pat Kirwan, a former coach and scout who had become the team’s director of player administration and was in place before Belichick arrived, Belichick reacted to the linebacker in a way he almost never reacted to a prospect.
“Vrabel comes in,” Kirwan recalled, “and right away I never saw Bill Belichick light up like this. He’s always all business and intimidating to the player, but he was all lit up and having a great time talking to Vrabel. They were really engaged. Bill says, ‘Look, I don’t have a pick where you’re going to go. We’re going to miss you, unless I figure out how to get one. But I promise you this: The first time you’re a free agent, you’re going to play for me.’”
Kirwan thought of Belichick as the most effective interviewer of prospects he’d ever come across. He saw the coach as an evaluator who could run a penetrating one-on-one and quickly get to the essence of a player without turning the sit-down into a police interrogation. Kirwan recalled Belichick meeting with a talented defensive lineman at the ’97 combine who had a reputation for being an underachiever. Belichick wanted to test the kid to see if he was accountable for his disappointing play and, perhaps, worth a gamble in the draft. As the player entered the room, he presented his hand for a handshake that wasn’t going to happen. Belichick ignored his gesture, told the kid to sit down, and turned out the lights.
“The tape comes on, and it’s programmed so the kid is playing shitty on the tape,” Kirwan said. “Bill is saying, ‘Tell me what happened here, and here, and what went wrong on this play, and why did you do that here.’ After ten minutes, the kid cracked and started blaming his coaches, saying, ‘They didn’t use me right.’ You can only imagine where this is going. The lights go on, and Bill goes, ‘Hey, we’ll be in touch.’ The guy leaves, and Bill says something to the effect of ‘That guy will never play for me.’”
Kirwan remembered the first time Belichick sat with him, while Parcells remained in limbo. Little Bill told him that he’d learned a lot in Cleveland, that he never got out and spent enough time with the fans, and that he would do things differently the next time around. Belichick also went over every Jet on the roster with Kirwan, asking him how much each player engaged the media. He wanted to know the identities of the talkers and the locker room leakers.
“He also prepped for me by reading anything he could get his hands on in newspapers from two months before,” Kirwan said. “He looked at guys ripping Kotite. If they ripped Kotite, he felt, ‘ultimately they’ll rip me.’ So he got rid of some guys. They didn’t last long.”
Belichick didn’t last long as the Jets’ head coach, either. The Little Bill–Big Bill circus was a terrible look for the league, and Tagliabue knew he couldn’t let the circus carry on for long. The commissioner also knew it was good for business to have Bill Parcells as a head coach on the sidelines every Sunday, up front and center, rather than as an unseen mystery consultant. Tagliabue listened to the arguments from both sides in a midtown Manhattan meeting and then ruled that the Jets should send four draft choices to New England, including their 1999 first-rounder, but not their No. 1 overall pick that spring.
Parcells had agreed to a six-year deal, including at least four as head coach, and said he couldn’t wait to honor the faith that Hess had put in him by surrendering four picks over th
ree years. Belichick? His second go as an NFL head coach had lasted six days. He had a six-year contract of his own as assistant head coach and defensive coordinator, and the promise of being the next man up whenever the impetuous Parcells decided once again that he’d had enough.
“That was the plan we came in with,” Belichick said. “I was racing around for six days, trying to get as much in place as I could.”
And in the early days and weeks of the new administration, Parcells was asking questions about some of the hires made while he was still serving only as a consultant. “All these young kids running around,” Kirwan said of the Piolis, Manginis, and Tannenbaums, “they were really Belichick guys . . . Parcells asked me all the time about the young guys Belichick brought in. I told him they were doing great, don’t worry about it.”
Parcells needed to control everything, and for those six surreal days, anyway, he couldn’t control Belichick. When order had finally been restored and Parcells had finally taken his place as head coach and general manager, the Jets were in the hands of the best 1-2 coaching punch in the NFL.
Parcells and Belichick would do their share of winning with the Jets; that much was certain. But things had changed for Big Bill and Little Bill since their Giants days, and it soon became clear that the functional side of their partnership was on borrowed time.
On the afternoon of September 12, 1999, the New York Jets appeared to have won the Bill Parcells trade with the New England Patriots, their opponent that day in Giants Stadium. With Parcells as their coach the previous season, the Jets had won their first division title since the AFL–NFL merger, in 1970, advanced to the AFC Championship Game for the first time in 16 years, and established themselves as a popular choice to reach the Super Bowl for the first time since man had walked on the moon.