Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  Williams was beginning what would be a long and somewhat bitter comeback, but he harbored no ill will for the man who was succeeding Parcells. “We loved him,” Williams said of Belichick. “We all wanted him to be the head coach.”

  That fateful day, with Belichick at his side working the treadmill, Williams thought the coach seemed a bit somber. “I could tell something was wrong with him,” the cornerback said, “but I had no clue what was wrong.”

  For once, Belichick wasn’t in the mood to talk about the pros and cons of various defensive schemes. He looked at Williams and said, “All you can do, Kevin, is get up and try to do the best you can every day. Be the best person and the best player every day. And sometimes that’s still not enough, but that’s all we can do as people.”

  Williams assumed Belichick was talking about him and his recovery from a near-death experience. He had no idea the coach was waxing philosophical about his own career. Williams remained on his treadmill for a while after Belichick left the room, and soon enough he’d look up at a TV monitor and discover exactly what his coach was trying to tell him.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Williams said.

  Nobody could.

  On his way to a 2:30 p.m. news conference scheduled as his official introduction as head coach, Belichick had a few stops to make inside Weeb Ewbank Hall, named for the franchise’s only Super Bowl–winning coach. He told Parcells and some co-workers that he was stepping down. He found Gutman and handed him a piece of loose-leaf paper that contained the handwritten scribblings of a man desperate to get out. The note informed the incredulous team president that Belichick was resigning “as the HC of the NYJ.”

  Dressed in a dark gray suit that reflected the mood of the day, Belichick made his way to the facility’s auditorium, where Ramos told the gathered media members that the man of the hour had an announcement to make. His hair, shirt collar, and tie knot askew, his face glistening with sweat as he stood before a backdrop of Jets and Cadillac logos, Belichick read from a resignation statement that looked and sounded more like a ransom note, and then put on a show before a flabbergasted audience that wouldn’t soon be forgotten.

  “Due to the various uncertainties surrounding my position as it relates to the team’s new ownership,” Belichick said, “I have decided to resign as the head coach of the New York Jets.”

  His time as the counterfeit coach of the Jets—after the 1996 season—had lasted six days. His time as the genuine coach of the Jets lasted only one. This wasn’t Pat Riley breaking his contract with the New York Knicks four years earlier with a faxed resignation and a getaway trip to Greece; Riley had won four championships as head coach of the Lakers before executing his outrageous escape from New York. Belichick? He’d proven nothing as a head coach before running away from a team in the biggest market that was only one season removed from reaching its sport’s final four.

  Belichick then went on a 25-minute filibuster to nowhere. Little Bill agreed that he had a deal in place to succeed Parcells, but he contended that Hess’s death and the continued two-man duel to determine the new owner had changed the circumstances “so significantly it wouldn’t be fair to make a half-hearted commitment with all these questions in the back of my mind.”

  Belichick was concerned that a new owner could mean a new general manager and a new power structure. As to why he wouldn’t merely wait for either Johnson or Dolan to emerge as his employer, Belichick said, “We were supposed to have a new owner by December 15, and now it’s January 4. It’s not fair to the organization to drag it out until the middle of February.”

  Parcells didn’t bother to attend the presser, and Belichick took advantage of his absence by mocking his former boss. Big Bill had been threatening to retire and hand over the controls to him for a dozen years, Little Bill said, and he’d learned not to take him seriously . . . until the previous day. “Until Monday morning,” Belichick said, “when he made me aware that this was the final decision and not 80 percent, 90 percent, 83 percent, 77 percent . . . It had gone as high as 99, but I’ve seen it back off and come back again. Until it was ‘This is what I’m going to do,’ that’s really when I started to think, ‘OK, well, now that means this is what I’ve got to do.’”

  Belichick said he yearned to spend more time with his family, even as his lawyer was already looking over his contract in the hopes of making him free to pursue another 18-hours-a-day job. Belichick also maintained that his treadmill time with Kevin Williams had suddenly given him a fresh, broader perspective on life.

  “That kid has gone through so much,” he said. “Thinking of the commitment that Kevin has made just to live and what it takes to win and compete at a high level in this league, I looked out at the fields and thought of all the players and practices and all the game plans and all the decisions . . . all those things, and I went up to my office and wrote the letter.”

  Belichick was using a player’s near-death experience as a shield. It was not his finest hour.

  The 50-minute presser defined perhaps the most bizarre day in the history of a franchise that often led the league in bizarre days. Gutman took the podium after Belichick walked out and assured reporters that the coach’s contract had been modified “on at least five occasions in the last three years” to address every management and control issue he’d raised. The team president called the existing contract “unambiguous” and surprised many in the auditorium by suggesting more than once that Belichick was in a state of personal chaos.

  “We should have some feelings of sorrow and regret for him and his family,” Gutman said. “He obviously has some inner turmoil.”

  The NFL then announced that the Jets’ contract was binding, and that no NFL club was permitted to talk to their one-day wonder without the team’s permission. Belichick had already planned to file a grievance with the league so he could pursue the New England job, leaving Parcells enraged over the way this was playing out.

  Big Bill thought Little Bill owed him his loyalty. Parcells’s high school basketball coach and lifelong father confessor, Mickey Corcoran, summed up his former player’s feelings about Little Bill this way: “Parcells made [Belichick’s] career. After he fell on his ass in Cleveland, he grabbed him right up. Without Bill Parcells there is no Belichick.”

  Tagliabue, the commissioner, would have to officiate this dispute, just as he’d officiated the dispute between the Jets and the Patriots over Parcells three years earlier. Meanwhile, one week after Belichick’s resignation, Woody Johnson won the right to purchase the Jets with a bid of $635 million. He immediately tried to persuade Parcells to return to the sidelines.

  That wasn’t going to happen. Parcells wasn’t going to return to his vacated job, and Belichick wasn’t going to return to his, either. They ended up face-to-face on the 38th floor of a Times Square building in an eight-hour hearing to determine Belichick’s status. Big Bill testified for more than an hour, and Little Bill for more than three. Charlie Weis testified for only three minutes but reportedly revealed that he had heard Parcells tell Gutman that Belichick wouldn’t gain the full personnel control that was outlined in his contract. Feeling betrayed by an assistant he’d hired for the Giants in 1990, when Weis’s last two jobs had been selling long-distance phone service in South Carolina and coaching New Jersey high school football, Parcells threw Weis out of the Jets’ facility for good the very next day.

  Tagliabue eventually ruled in favor of the Jets, swatting away Belichick’s claim that he never actually took over as head coach by citing more than ten discussions between Big Bill and Little Bill about putting the succession plan in place after the 1999 season. Belichick was then about to withdraw an antitrust claim against the team and the league after a federal judge denied his request for a temporary restraining order that would’ve granted his freedom. In fact, U.S. District Court Judge John Bissell chided Belichick for locking himself in a prison of his own design.

  “He had a head coaching position with the New York Jets, highly compensa
ted, with the prestige, the title, the exposure, the market, and the team that certainly should have provided to him adequate rewards,” Bissell said. “It was he who turned his back on that.”

  Parcells knew that he was holding a big hammer—that he could force Belichick into exile by compelling Kraft to hire Jacksonville Jaguars defensive coordinator Dom Capers. So on January 25, three weeks after Little Bill quit, Big Bill called Kraft’s office and identified himself as Darth Vader. The Patriots’ owner knew it was an ominous villain of a different kind.

  They talked for the first time since their acrimonious divorce. They even reminisced and laughed, and agreed that each could’ve handled things differently before and after their Super Bowl loss to Green Bay. And when they got down to business, Parcells told Kraft he needed his first-round draft pick in exchange for Belichick. He wanted a first-rounder for a coach with a losing record just a year after Green Bay got a second-rounder from Seattle for the right to hire a Super Bowl winner, Mike Holmgren.

  Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell, who’d lived the Belichick experience in Cleveland, was among the many league observers who couldn’t believe the asking price. Modell had warned Kraft that he shouldn’t make Belichick his football coach. “If you do it,” Modell said, “you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your life.”

  Executives inside NFL headquarters, including Belichick’s old friend George Young, the former Giants GM who became the league’s senior VP of football operations, strongly encouraged Kraft to hire someone else. Columnists in New York wrote that Little Bill’s method of escape exposed him as an unworthy candidate. (BELICHICKEN—JETS BETTER OFF WITHOUT QUITTER, read a New York Post headline.) Friends in the Boston media sent Kraft tapes of Belichick at his mummified worst in press conference settings in Cleveland. Though the owner was alarmed by what he saw on those tapes, Kraft kept hearing from Patriots defensive backs such as Ty Law and Lawyer Milloy that Little Bill was a keeper. The owner kept going back to Belichick’s early command of the salary cap and his willingness to consistently communicate with Kraft during the 1996 season when Parcells would not.

  The risk-taker couldn’t resist his hunch; Kraft called back Parcells to say he was ready to do the deal. The owner had thought about the fickle nature of draft picks. He thought about using his 1998 first-rounder from the Jets—received as compensation after they stole away Curtis Martin—on running back Robert Edwards, who would follow up a great rookie season by wrecking his knee and his career playing flag football in the sand at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii.

  In Kraft’s opinion, Belichick was a safer bet. So Kraft agreed to build their transaction around New England’s first pick in the 2000 draft, No. 16 overall. Early the following morning, Parcells called a flabbergasted Belichick to give him the OK to contact Kraft, and to make sure he secured at least four years in his contract.

  A cease-fire had been established in all Jets–Patriots hostilities. Parcells faxed a letter to Kraft at his International Forest Products office in Boston. The letter read as follows:

  Dear Bob:

  This letter is intended to memorialize our conversation from last night, which occurred around 11:00 pm.

  The New York Jets hereby grant permission to the New England Patriots to talk to Bill Belichick about any position they desire.

  If Bill Belichick accepts and assumes a position with the New England Patriots, and reports to work on or before Monday, January 31, 2000, then the New York Jets trade to the New England Patriots their 5th round pick in the 2001 annual NFL selection draft, and their 7th round pick in the 2002 annual NFL selection draft, and the New England Patriots trade their 1st round pick in the 2000 annual NFL selection draft (16th overall), their 4th pick in the 2001 annual NFL selection draft, and their 7th round pick in the 2001 annual NFL selection draft.

  Formal trade papers will follow, and all copies will be filed with the league office.

  Sincerely,

  Bill Parcells

  Kraft and Belichick started finalizing their deal by phone around 10 a.m., and the coach who was facing a season on the bench jumped into his car and made the four-hour drive from his Long Island home to a hotel in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Kraft picked up his new coach at the hotel and drove him in his Lexus to the team’s facility in Foxborough, where some cameramen were waiting near the plowed-off snow at the gate. The Patriots introduced their new head coach at 6 p.m.

  “Hopefully this press conference will go a little better than the last one I had,” Belichick said in his opening remarks, drawing a rare hearty laugh from his audience. He thanked reporters for gathering at a late hour, on short notice. “I know the last three weeks have probably been trying for all of you,” the new coach continued, “but that’s all behind me. I’m tremendously excited to be here and to be a part of the New England Patriots organization. This is a first-class operation.”

  Belichick described the previous three weeks as “quite an ordeal,” though he denied that he was fleeing Parcells more than he was fleeing the ownership uncertainty now embodied by Woody Johnson. “If I wanted to get out of Bill’s shadow,” Belichick said, “I wouldn’t have come to New England. There’s a shadow up here, too.” Out of his failed five-year term in Cleveland, Belichick said he’d learned to delegate more and put a greater focus on big-picture tasks.

  Kraft was overjoyed about having landed the man Parcells had first persuaded him to take on as an assistant, over budget, four years earlier. The owner and Belichick started mapping out their plans over dinner at the Capital Grille, in Chestnut Hill. Meanwhile, a number of columnists and respected football voices weren’t quite as thrilled with the move. Paul Needell, of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, wrote that the Patriots’ owner was the clear loser in the trade. Across the river, one New York columnist wrote that Kraft would regret the day he hired Belichick. Up in Boston, Herald columnist Karen Guregian named nine coaching legends, including Parcells, whom she found worthy of a first-round pick, and Belichick didn’t make the cut.

  Parcells? He rejected the notion that he’d outfoxed Kraft, and stated that he would’ve paid the same price if put in Kraft’s situation. Big Bill said he was glad Little Bill was back in the game.

  “The Patriots got a good man,” Parcells said. “He’ll be a formidable adversary.”

  Big Bill had no idea.

  10

  Brady

  The NFL was back to playing football 12 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Bill Belichick was already telling confidants that he feared for his job. Part of his stated concern was an extension of his natural pessimism—Bill Parcells had nicknamed him Doom for a reason. Belichick liked to tell people his team sucked whether or not he believed it to be true.

  This time around, he had real cause to worry. He’d coached 17 games with the New England Patriots and lost 12 of them, and his most recent game had been a dispiriting road loss to a lousy Cincinnati team to open the 2001 season. Belichick was ripped afterward for failing to challenge a questionable spot on Drew Bledsoe’s fourth-and-two quarterback sneak, which had come up an inch short in the final minutes. Meanwhile, he was locked in an energy-draining stare-down with his most productive playmaker in 2000, Terry Glenn, who had been suspended for four games over substance abuse, and for the remaining 12 games by Belichick for leaving camp, before winning a grievance and his reinstatement to the active roster in Week 5.

  Robert Kraft was already confessing to associates that maybe he should’ve listened to Art Modell, that maybe he should’ve kept that first-round pick he surrendered to land Belichick, and that maybe he would have to fire his coach at season’s end. He’d gotten rid of Pete Carroll after Bill Parcells’s replacement won an average of nine games over three seasons, and here was Belichick starting his second season on a miserable note after winning only five. Carroll didn’t have complete personnel control in New England, and he had advised Kraft, upon exit, to give that power to his successor. Now Kraft was wondering if he’d made a big mistake in following Carroll�
�s advice.

  So Belichick carried this heavy baggage onto the Foxboro Stadium field before the second game of 2001, a home game against his old friends the New York Jets, who felt a much more profound burden as high-profile representatives of their devastated city. Belichick had shown a proper human touch in the wake of the attacks by suspending operations and allowing his players time away to be with their families. Now that the Patriots and the Jets had reassembled for football, the man who had quit the latter to join the former appeared to have put his money on the wrong horse.

  Years later, multiple sources would say that in a pregame conversation, Belichick told the Jets’ rookie head coach, Herm Edwards, that he was likely on his way to getting fired for a second time. One Jets coach, Mike Westhoff, said Belichick told Edwards, “I don’t know if I’ll make it through the year. We stink.” Edwards insisted that this hadn’t happened. The Jets coach did say that Belichick’s offensive coordinator, Charlie Weis, had expressed concerns to him about the state of New England’s program while the two spoke on the field before kickoff. Edwards declined to offer specifics, but Weis had already shared with others that the staff thought Bledsoe was running the locker room and resisting some of the culture changes Belichick was trying to install. “We don’t have veteran guys believing in our system,” Weis told one coach.

  This had hardly been Belichick’s vision when he took over in 2000 and attempted to toughen up what he found to be a soft, flabby, and mentally weak team. For starters, he tried to work the New England holdovers and newcomers into his idea of peak physical shape. The Belichick-Parcells idea of what peak physical shape meant didn’t always jibe with the definition of the term around the league. Kevin Williams, the recovering Jet who was on the treadmill next to Belichick the morning of his resignation, ended up with Dave Wannstedt’s Miami Dolphins late that 2000 season and discovered that not every NFL head coach was as maniacal in his approach.