by Ian O'Connor
The good times were fleeting. Belichick had a large anchor placed in the locker room to remind the players of the dead weight his ill-conditioned team had carried around the year before. To show his players the ultimate exercise in teamwork overcoming long odds, Belichick took them to a Providence theater to see a film about the early-20th-century explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose men somehow survived a nearly two-year ordeal after their ship was crushed by ice and sank in the Antarctic.
The 2001 Patriots confronted real-world adversity of their own before the season started, when their quarterbacks coach, Dick Rehbein, died of heart failure during camp after passing out on a treadmill and again during a hospital stress test. Rehbein had a good working relationship with Bledsoe and had done more campaigning on Brady’s behalf, before the 2000 draft, than anyone in the organization. Rehbein had Brady reading biographies on everyone from General George Patton to former Giants quarterback Phil Simms to learn more about leadership.
“He made you look forward to coming to work,” Bledsoe said of his late position coach, “even in the hard times.”
Belichick and Weis took on Rehbein’s responsibilities with the quarterbacks; Romeo Crennel, Belichick’s former staffmate with the Giants, Patriots, and Jets, had taken over the defense in the off-season. After the Cincinnati loss in Week 1, the Patriots were desperate to beat the Jets in their home opener to establish a degree of stability in Belichick’s program. Michael Felger, beat writer for the Boston Herald, had written in July of a “genuine feeling in Foxboro that the Pats will surprise a lot of people in 2001” because, among other reasons, Belichick and Pioli made sure there were “fewer bad players” on the depth chart than there were in 2000. An 0-2 start would pour a keg of cold beer on that optimism.
As it turned out, the Patriots and Jets played a game lacking in aesthetic value, especially from an offensive perspective. The Jets’ Vinny Testaverde threw the ball 28 times for a lousy 137 yards and no touchdowns. Bledsoe did connect with Troy Brown on a 58-yarder, but he accounted for a grand sum of 101 yards on his other 27 attempts, along with two interceptions—including one in the end zone to kill a fourth-quarter drive—and no touchdowns. He also took a damaging delay-of-game penalty on a fourth-and-goal at the 1. Curtis Martin, the star back Parcells had pilfered from the Patriots, was the only man all day who carried the ball across the goal line, giving the Jets a 10–3 lead late in the third quarter.
Facing a third-and-10 at his own 19 with time melting away in the fourth, the 6´5˝ Bledsoe tried to salvage something out of nothing in a most unconventional way: with his feet. He felt the rush, scrambled out of the pocket to his right, and then headed down his own sideline for the first-down marker. As he was pursued by Shaun Ellis, the player the Jets had landed with the first-round pick New England sent them in the Belichick trade, Bledsoe ran, or trotted, in an upright and reluctant way. Just as a lunging Ellis got a piece of the Patriots’ quarterback from behind, Jets linebacker Mo Lewis launched his right shoulder hard into Bledsoe’s upper torso, two yards short of a first down, separating the quarterback from the ball and sending him flying out of bounds. It was a perfectly legal, if vicious, tackle that made a frightening noise.
“It sounded like someone had been hit by a truck,” said Jets defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell.
Brady would call it “one of the hardest hits I’d ever seen. I could hear it. His entire facemask was turned around on his head and it was bent.” Brady also said that if he got hit the same way, “I’d be in the hospital for a month.” Bledsoe actually returned to the game for one more series, which ended in a second Marc Edwards fumble—all while a torn blood vessel was spilling blood into the quarterback’s chest and abdomen. Of course, the Patriots’ medical staff wasn’t aware of the seriousness of the injury at the time, and it wasn’t until Bledsoe was sent to Massachusetts General that the hemothorax was discovered and doctors realized their patient could’ve died from internal bleeding.
Before he’d even learned of the severity of Bledsoe’s condition, Belichick reprimanded himself in his postgame news conference. “I shouldn’t have put him out there,” he said of Bledsoe’s final series. “Watching him play, he wasn’t himself. He got his bell rung. When I went over to him, he seemed coherent and said he was OK. But after watching him, I didn’t think he was. I told him what decision I had made. He understood.”
Yes, he understood why Belichick approached Tom Brady on the sideline and said, “Drew’s out and you’re in.” Starting at his own 26 with 2:16 left and the Jets ahead by a touchdown, Brady completed five of his first six passes for short but productive gains, driving New England into Jets territory before an Andruzzi holding penalty sent him back across midfield. Brady erased that mistake by running for nine yards and then hitting receiver David Patten for 21, bringing a Foxborough crowd to life for the first time in his career. But as the clock worked against him, 29 yards away from pay dirt, Brady threw four consecutive incomplete passes to end the game and leave the Patriots devastated at 0-2.
As the teams walked off the field, the Jets’ backup quarterback, Chad Pennington, was struck by the look on Brady’s face. “He was completely dissatisfied with the result,” said Pennington, a first-round pick in the 2000 draft and a prospect taken 181 spots ahead of Brady. “You could see in his eyes he expected to lead his team back . . . I saw in his demeanor in the game, his focus, drive, his eyes, body language—nothing about him said he was a sixth-round pick who was just happy to get a couple of reps.”
Belichick was more concerned with the final score than with Brady’s performance. “I felt like the team really deserved better,” he said, which was a most un-Belichickian thing to claim about a loss defined by four New England turnovers. His team appeared to be a Cleveland-size mess. Belichick was 5-13 overall as Patriots coach, he couldn’t generate any offense, and his stated intention of focusing more on the macro than the micro in his second head coaching stop wasn’t translating into on-field success. Beyond that, one locker-room divide was suddenly deepening over the sight of Bryan Cox playfully interacting with his former Jets teammate John Abraham after Bledsoe was leveled. Pepper Johnson, a Belichick assistant at the time, would later write in his book Won for All that the scene “haunted us for some time” and inspired some to wonder about Cox’s loyalties.
“A lot of guys were hurting after the loss to the Jets,” Johnson wrote, “and some began thinking that we had these ex-Jets on the team who didn’t give a damn about born-and-bred Patriots players. Even a lot of our coaches had come over from the Jets with Belichick . . . In addition, the ex-Jets were angry because they knew how some of their teammates felt, and they thought it was unfounded.”
On the drive home from the stadium that night, agent Mark Lepselter, who had just placed his client Patten in New England, recalled listening to sports talk radio proclamations that Belichick was done in Foxborough, or should be done. Lepselter was among many who thought Belichick might be a couple of bad losses away from the end of his head coaching career, but his focus was on Patten, an undrafted receiver who had once lugged bags of coffee beans for a living and was trying to establish himself as a legitimate NFL starter in his fifth year. “And now you’re wondering if your client is going to catch any footballs,” Lepselter said. “We didn’t have a clue about Tom Brady, or even know who he was.”
Nobody did, not really. Tall and dimpled, Brady looked the part of a leading man and, despite being a sixth-round pick, projected first-round faith in himself. One day, after he was drafted, Brady was leaving the stadium and carrying a pizza box when he came upon Kraft and attempted to introduce himself before the owner cut him off.
“I know who you are,” Kraft told him. “You’re Tom Brady, our sixth-round pick out of Michigan.”
The quarterback looked the owner in the eye.
“And I’m the best decision this organization has ever made,” Brady said.
At 0-2 in 2001, Kraft was not a believer in that prophecy. Bledsoe was his b
oy, and now the franchise player was being replaced by an untested quarterback who’d had an uneven career at Michigan. Kraft couldn’t afford this twisted turn of fate, not with a new stadium going up. Three years earlier, when he couldn’t make a deal with Massachusetts lawmakers, Kraft had agreed to move the team to Hartford after Connecticut officials promised to build a $350 million stadium as part of a deal that could ultimately be worth $1 billion to him. He walked away from that deal of a lifetime five months later in order to keep the team in Foxborough, in an agreement that required him to contribute as much as $325 million of his own money.
As the Patriots were preparing to host the Indianapolis Colts in Week 3, the first start of Brady’s career, a dour-looking Kraft approached linebacker Ted Johnson, lowered his head, and pointed toward the construction site of his new stadium. The owner didn’t say much, and he didn’t need to. “He was worried that nobody would sign up for season tickets,” Johnson said.
Belichick was worried more about his career, and so were the people he brought with him to Foxborough. He’d hired Ernie Adams out of NFL exile, a second time, to be his shadow adviser and another set of Andover eyes. He’d taken Pioli from Parcells, and he’d turned over the offense to Weis, whom Parcells had dispatched over his perceived betrayal. He’d given the defense to Crennel and the defensive secondary to Eric Mangini, his fellow Wesleyan grad and a low-level Browns and Jets aide who had the look of an up-and-comer. He’d also hired Berj Najarian, the young PR man with the Jets who had played baseball at Manhasset, Jim Brown’s high school on Long Island, and then at Boston University, before interning with the New York Knicks.
The Knicks’ PR chief, John Cirillo, said Najarian “had the look of success” and “a great confidence and composure” when handling tasks that would normally be assigned to higher-ranking staffers. Najarian had grown close with Belichick by keeping the same round-the-clock schedule while they worked for the Jets. Frank Ramos, the Jets’ PR chief, said he’d see the two side by side on treadmills before he left for his early-morning run. “I thought Berj did a very good job,” Ramos said. “Very conscientious. The hours never meant anything to him.” Belichick thought he needed his own de facto publicist, which he hadn’t had in Cleveland, where he felt isolated in his endgame struggle with Modell and those who worked for him. Kraft wasn’t about to move out his own media guys, Don Lowery and Stacey James, but he did allow the coach to hire someone to serve as his consigliere.
Najarian became Belichick’s chief of staff, and one of his early moves was to arrange meetings between his boss and influential Boston media members, including some who had been critical of the Kraft hire, to help bridge the chasm between the coach and the press. One Boston Globe columnist, Michael Holley, had written weeks earlier that Belichick had lorded over awful drafts in Cleveland, and that his hiring would leave the Patriots “looking like the ruins of Rome.” Najarian had some work to do.
Upon his arrival in 2000, Belichick sat down with the Globe’s Ron Borges for a humanizing, 4,400-word magazine piece that detailed his life on Nantucket—his Wesleyan lacrosse teammate, Mark Fredland, helped Belichick build three homes there, including two used by his parents and in-laws—and quoted old classmates and friends talking about a softer side the coach kept hidden from public view. Belichick also did a sit-down in Nantucket with Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy for ESPN the Magazine, though he insisted on doing the interview at an airport inn—no home visits allowed.
“They were trying to make nice and repair his damaged Cleveland reputation,” Shaughnessy said of Belichick and Najarian. The writer recalled Belichick arranging salt shakers on the table to diagram plays and using his wife, Debby, as a prop to illustrate a blocking technique; Shaughnessy thought the coach came off as more likable than his reputation suggested. Belichick met with another columnist, Steve Buckley of the Herald, in the coach’s grim Foxboro Stadium office—the writer likened it to a high school guidance counselor’s office—and told him he was among the few who wrote about his stormy New York escape and actually got it right.
Whatever goodwill came out of Belichick’s marginally lighter approach to media relations wasn’t going to last unless the Patriots started winning football games. One league official said that Belichick had been “toxic” when he started in New England and that the FOBs (Friends of Bill) who left the Jets to join him “were almost committing career suicide going with him. He was hated. Well, maybe not hated, but he wasn’t liked around the league, and his friends weren’t liked, either.”
So all of Belichick’s men felt a profound sense of urgency at 0-2, with the $103 million quarterback just starting to recover from his life-threatening bleed. In fact, one team official said that some members of the coaching staff and front office were “secretly happy” that they could get Brady on the field without upsetting Kraft, who all but considered Bledsoe his fifth son. Of course, they weren’t happy that Bledsoe was seriously hurt; they’d never wish that on anyone. But Belichick, Pioli, and others wanted to play Brady, and they couldn’t figure out how to get that accomplished. Now they had their opening. Now they had an opportunity to dramatically alter the dynamics of the program. Now Belichick could move on from Bledsoe and avoid a sequel to the Kosar fiasco that had caused him such irreparable harm in Cleveland.
“I don’t think we’re talking about John Elway here,” Belichick said of Brady, “but I don’t know how many of those there are. He’s got a good NFL arm. I really don’t think I’m going to be standing here week after week talking about the problems that Tom Brady had. I have confidence in him.”
Brady had earned that trust by surviving a most improbable journey to a starting position in the NFL. In 1991, as a teenager in San Mateo, California, the brother of three older sisters who were terrific athletes, Brady was a backup on an 0-8 freshman team at Junipero Serra High School that scored two touchdowns all year. He was a pear-shaped 6´1˝ sophomore who got a break on the junior varsity when the kid ahead of him, Kevin Krystofiak, quit football to focus on basketball. The JV coach, Joe Hession, thought Brady looked more like an offensive tackle but gave him a shot at quarterback anyway. In the first quarterback start of his life, a scrimmage against Pinole Valley, the 15-year-old Brady took such a fierce pounding that Hession felt like quitting and drowning his sorrows at the nearest bar.
Neither the coach nor the player quit. Through constant film study and footwork and jump-rope drills to improve his small-college speed and agility, Brady made himself a big-college prospect. He won only 11 of 20 games as a two-year varsity starter but threw the ball convincingly enough to earn a scholarship offer from Michigan. Some of his coaches wondered if he should take the safer, closer option at Cal–Berkeley, or even if he should pursue baseball—the Montreal Expos would pick the left-handed-hitting catcher with power in the 18th round in the 1995 draft. But Brady fell in love with Ann Arbor, much to the dismay of his father, Tom Sr., who needed eight weeks of psychological counseling to deal with the fact that his only boy would be playing some 2,100 miles from home.
Actually, Brady would be sitting—not playing—some 2,100 miles from home. “I got to Michigan, I was seventh [string],” he said, “and I had a hard time getting to be number two. And when I finally got to be number one, there was someone else they wanted to be number one.”
Drew Henson, everybody’s all-American. A fourth-year junior, Brady had thrown all of 20 passes over his first three years as a student. He’d earlier told his head coach, Lloyd Carr, that he was seriously weighing a transfer to Cal. “Tom pretty much had his plane ticket purchased and was ready to go,” said his friend and fellow quarterback Jason Kapsner. Brady reconsidered and returned to Carr’s office to tell him he’d decided to stick it out. And now the 6´4˝, 220-pound Henson, a three-sport phenom from nearby Brighton High, had come along just when Brady had ascended to first string. At a Michigan team autograph session, about 500 people lined up from midfield to the end zone to spend a fleeting moment with Henson—who had set nation
al career high school records with 70 home runs and 290 RBI and who had already banked $2 million to play minor league ball in the summer for the New York Yankees—while the ignored Brady stood in the stadium tunnel with a student assistant named Jay Flannelly. Brady signed three autographs that day, tops, and never took his eyes off that endless line to Henson.
Brady was such a non-star at Michigan that one prominent booster waiting near the team bus one day with a Sharpie and a souvenir program didn’t want him to sign the program, because he coveted only the autographs of legitimate NFL prospects. As an athlete, Henson was everything Brady wasn’t. Carr felt so much pressure to play the freshman that he had him share first-team snaps with Brady in the late summer of 1998, after the fourth-year junior had beaten out Kapsner and Scott Dreisbach in the spring for the job vacated by Brian Griese, who had led the Wolverines to the national championship.
Carr named Brady the starter, yet he immediately said the golden-boy freshman would also get to play. For most of his two seasons as Michigan’s starter, Brady dealt with the ever-looming specter of Henson, who held a hammer over Carr. The kid had the New York Yankees as leverage, and a father who was representing him while working for the global juggernaut that was IMG. Students, alums, boosters—they all wanted to see Henson, even with Brady as a senior co-captain in 1999. Carr started that season playing Henson in the second quarter as part of a rotation that had him going with the hot hand in the second half. Despite knowing that one mistake at the wrong time could cost him, Brady eventually played Henson back to the bench for good. He’d win 20 of 25 games and effectively go the distance in his final start at Michigan, an epic 35–34 overtime victory over Alabama in the Orange Bowl that saw Brady overcome two 14-point deficits and throw for 369 yards and four touchdowns—he threw 46 passes against the Crimson Tide, while Henson threw one.