by Ian O'Connor
“Saturday meetings were my favorite with Belichick,” he said, “because of what he does with a game plan. He narrows it down and makes it very simple so that we all understand what the main takeaways are for the team we’re about to play . . . So he’s got his pointer up there and he’s like ‘Look, Wayne Chrebet: We are going to hit this fucker on third down. Wayne Chrebet is not getting the ball on third down, OK?’ Or ‘Tony Gonzalez: When we get in the red zone, we’re double-teaming his ass.’ He’ll say to the defense, ‘You do these three things, we’ll win the game.’ Then he says to the offense, ‘You do these three things, we’ll win the game.’ And sure as shit, we started winning the games.”
But the games ended up leaving Johnson a broken man who came to believe that he’d suffered dozens of concussions that left him, he said, “in the darkest place for the longest time.” Johnson’s case helped force league elders, most notably commissioner Roger Goodell, to take the mushrooming concussion crisis more seriously than they had. The ex-linebacker took pride in that, too—the fact that he had the courage to tell his story. He could’ve been a made man in Boston for life, a TV personality, maybe a candidate for the team’s Hall of Fame. “I knew when I told my story, I’d never get behind the velvet rope again,” Johnson said. “But I felt I could really make a difference.”
Belichick had been staggered enough by the onslaught of negative publicity that he agreed to sit down for a rare two-hour interview with a Globe features writer, not a sportswriter. Bella English opened her piece by citing Belichick’s request that it be stated that he had not asked for this story to be written, and that he merely agreed to an interview request, because he wouldn’t want readers to think “this is some type of a campaign trail.” Nevertheless, his cooperation had Najarian written all over it; Berj knew that his boss desperately needed to open a small window on his softer side. So Belichick spoke in the interview of looking forward to spending more time with his three children, and more time reading, golfing, and fishing on Nantucket, where he owned three properties. Belichick’s charitable causes were detailed, including his support of homeless shelters, Jim Brown’s Amer-I-Can program for at-risk youth, an athletic and fitness program for the disabled, and his own foundation, which awarded college scholarships to graduates of his high school (Annapolis) and his father’s (Struthers, in Ohio).
The Globe piece reported that the coach’s friends “invariably say Belichick is a great father” to 22-year-old Amanda, a senior at Wesleyan; 19-year-old Stephen, a prep student at Northfield Mount Hermon; and 15-year-old Brian, a student at the Rivers School, in Weston. A Wesleyan classmate and good friend of Bill Belichick’s, Rob Ingraham, told the story of how Belichick had “brought the house down” by singing “Love Potion No. 9” at his 50th birthday party on Nantucket. The sports marketing executive also said Belichick had given the executive’s children a puppy and had treated his young son Tucker to a ride on the team plane to the Super Bowl and to regular email correspondence.
This profile helped stop the bleeding, at least for a while. But a quote in the story attributed to a law clerk for the judge in the Shenocca divorce case didn’t help Belichick’s longtime friend Sharon Shenocca. The law clerk for New Jersey Superior Court Judge Thomas Manahan told the Globe of the case, “The whole Bill Belichick issue is not really relevant. It’s just about trying to destroy a reputation. What it’s really doing is wasting money.” Vincent Shenocca’s attorney, Ed O’Donnell, said he asked for Manahan’s recusal based on that quote, and that the request was granted.
O’Donnell had agreed to wait until after the 2006 season to depose Belichick, but the coach’s attorneys kept maintaining that he wasn’t available, due to team and league commitments. “This is when he had the wrong playbook, I guess,” O’Donnell said years later. Sharon Shenocca wanted to move her children into the Brooklyn townhouse that “a friend” she didn’t name (Belichick) had purchased for Shenocca and her sister, a singer named Terry Radigan, but she couldn’t produce her friend, Belichick, as a supporting witness. The judge who replaced Manahan, Stephan Hansbury, wrote in his June 29, 2007, judgment that Sharon Shenocca, the defendant, “is relying completely on the whim of the friend to provide her and the children with shelter when he is not so obligated. Defendant also never produced this friend to testify at trial nor did she offer any reason or explanation why she should be the recipient of this financial bounty.”
Hansbury continued, “Plaintiff contends only the friend could explain Defendant’s entitlement to reside in the home. Plaintiff contends Defendant’s friend could have provided knowledge as to his intentions, if any, to support Defendant and her children. Simply stated, Defendant has not met her burden of proof that there is a dependable home awaiting her and the children in Brooklyn.”
The judge ruled that Vincent Shenocca was “correct in that the Court may draw an adverse inference” against Sharon Shenocca for failing to produce Belichick, who she said had given her about $150,000 since the complaint was filed, and that she could not move her eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter from Morris Township, New Jersey, to Park Slope on what Hansbury called “a whimsical dream.”
Had Belichick said under oath that he wanted Shenocca in the townhouse and would continue fully supporting her, and had he opened himself up to potentially embarrassing testimony that would be made public, Sharon might’ve had a chance to prevail in the case. But her husband, a contractor making a $55,000 salary, was awarded residential custody of the children. Sharon Shenocca was granted visitation rights every other weekend and for an occasional midweek dinner. She was ordered to pay Vincent $121 a week in support and $67,500 in legal fees.
O’Donnell said that he never saw direct evidence of a romantic relationship between Belichick and Shenocca. “But at the end of the day, if you want to see how good of a friend he was to her,” the attorney said, “he did what was best for him.” By sidestepping the deposition, Belichick basically protected Belichick.
He was only a few weeks away from the opening of training camp—his sanctuary, his place to hide from annoyances outside the boundaries of the NFL life he loved. His Patriots were loaded after some high-powered off-season additions, including an absurdly talented and troubled superstar named Randy Moss. Only the receiver wouldn’t be the cause of the trouble that was just around the bend. The kind of trouble that made the Sharon Shenocca and Ted Johnson stories seem manageable.
The kind of trouble that only Bill Belichick could answer for.
Richard Seymour was sidelined after knee surgery, and Rodney Harrison had been suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs, and yet the 2007 Patriots entered their season opener against the New York Jets as slam-dunk favorites to reach the Super Bowl after a two-year absence. They had acquired Baltimore’s Pro Bowl linebacker Adalius Thomas a year after pulling all-time great Junior Seau out of a brief retirement, and they’d decided to give Tom Brady some skill people worthy of sharing his huddle.
Belichick sent second- and seventh-round draft picks to Miami for Wes Welker, a rising receiver and valued return man, and a fourth-round pick to Oakland for Moss, who arrived as the most physically gifted talent Belichick had coached since Lawrence Taylor. Moss was 30 years old, and, because of injuries and a diminished focus while playing for losing Raiders teams, he hadn’t been the same receiver he was as a five-time Pro Bowler in Minnesota. Moss had a long history of troublesome behavior dating back to his youth, which was why 20 NFL teams passed on drafting a receiver who had 174 receptions and 54 touchdown catches in two record-setting seasons at Marshall. As a pro, Moss confirmed some pre-draft fears by bumping a traffic cop with his car, squirting an official with a water bottle, verbally abusing a corporate sponsor, pretending to moon a Green Bay crowd, and leaving the field before the end of a game.
But Belichick figured that Moss was worth the same gamble he’d taken, successfully, on Corey Dillon. He thought the organizational culture was strong enough to absorb anyone and everyone and lead them on
a path toward compliance. So he called Moss on the other side of midnight, while the receiver was out at a club, and when Moss heard the caller identify himself as Bill Belichick, he assumed it was a prank. “So I’m cussing him out,” Moss recalled years later. “I’m like ‘Man, get the hell out of here. Who the hell is this now?’ So it went on until he kept saying, ‘This is Bill Belichick.’ And I’m like ‘You’re shitting me, man. I don’t want to hear that, man. Now, who is this really?’ And he said, ‘No, Randy, this is Bill Belichick.’ So I had to apologize, man, because I was basically taking it as a joke and the conversation went on from there.”
Moss had accounted for 110 regular-season and postseason touchdowns, and yet New England had acquired him for a middle-round pick. “A lot of people are crediting Bill Belichick,” Moss said, “and I think a lot of people really need to understand that if it wasn’t for Myra Kraft, I would’ve never become a Patriot.” Myra Kraft, the wife of the owner and a woman who firmly believed the Patriots should be a team of high-character men.
“She had a lot of influence on bringing me to New England,” Moss said. “She’s the female face of the franchise, and I think there was a lot of negative attention that I was receiving, and a lot of it was very false. And I think that Mrs. Myra Kraft really had to get to know me personally to really understand that a lot of the stuff that was said, the majority of it was lies. She told me she took a chance. It was just a gut feeling for her, and Mr. Kraft told me that he called her ‘Mama.’ And he said, ‘Mama wanted you to come here.’”
Moss couldn’t believe his good fortune. Tom Brady restructured his contract to allow New England to take on one of the game’s signature receivers, and Moss agreed to downgrade the two years and $21 million left on his Oakland deal into a one-year deal for $3 million plus incentives. “I’m still in awe that I’m a part of this organization,” Moss said after agreeing to the massive pay cut for a chance to win a ring. He had suddenly landed with the most successful coach and quarterback in the sport, and, after missing most of the preseason with a hamstring injury, he was ready to go on September 9, 2007, when the Patriots opened in the building where Belichick had first made a name for himself as an exceptional football coach: Giants Stadium.
As it turned out, Moss and the Patriots were hotter than the game-time temperature of 84 degrees. They ran the Jets off the field in a 38–14 rout highlighted by Moss’s 51-yard touchdown against triple coverage and 183 receiving yards on nine catches. “He was born to play football,” Brady said of his newest and most lethal weapon. The quarterback had it all now. He was getting serious with his relatively new girlfriend, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen (his ex-girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan, had just given birth to their son, Jack), and now he was being paired on the field with a perfect partner of a different kind. Brady wasn’t seeing the Oakland Randy Moss. He was seeing the Minnesota Moss, the vintage Moss, the 6´4˝ receiver who ran past defenders and jumped over them with ease. Brady had all day to throw to Moss and Welker, who caught the first of the quarterback’s three touchdown passes. He wasn’t sacked while posting a quarterback rating of 146.6, his best in nearly five years.
Man, this was a great day for the winning coach all around. On the other sideline, Eric Mangini had made a big mistake by sticking with his quarterback, Chad Pennington, a former teammate of Moss’s at Marshall, when the outcome was no longer in doubt, subjecting his starter to some unnecessary hits as he played on an injured ankle. Pennington was annoyed enough to pull himself from the game with 6:51 left and New England leading by 17. “That was the first time I’ve ever done that,” Pennington said.
Mangini played the fool on this Sunday, and Belichick surely got the biggest kick out of that. But the losing coach actually won a game within the game in the first half that the overwhelming majority of people inside Giants Stadium knew absolutely nothing about. It had started in the days before this opener, when Mangini informed his former boss that the Jets would not tolerate in their own stadium an illegal yet common Patriots practice: the videotaping of opposing coaches’ signals from the sideline. The message to Belichick was simple: Don’t do it in our house.
It was something of an open secret that New England had been illegally taping opposing coaches during games for some time, and yet the first public mention of improper spying involving Belichick’s Patriots actually assigned them the collective role of victim. Following a 21–0 Miami victory in December 2006, a couple of Dolphins told the Palm Beach Post that the team had “bought” past game tapes that included audio of Brady making calls at the line, and that the information taken from those tapes had helped them shut out Brady and sack him four times. “I’ve never seen him so flustered,” said Miami linebacker Zach Thomas.
Brady called the notion that he’d been duped “a big crock.” Belichick’s former Cleveland assistant, Nick Saban, in his second season coaching the Dolphins after leaving LSU, scoffed at the suggestion that he’d done anything improper and said his team had merely used TV tape of Brady and other quarterbacks to try to decipher their cadences. In fact, the Miami coach later revealed that he believed Belichick had figured out his defensive signals in a 2005 loss to the Patriots. “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Saban said. “Every guy on our team that I talked to about it says, ‘Yeah, we’ve been doing this for ten years.’ We did it in Cleveland [with Belichick]—watched TV copy of the game trying to get the cadence. I mean, now they’ve got us stealing stuff, buying stuff. I mean, like we’re in the Mafia or something.”
The story created an interesting debate around the league. Some coaches and players said that studying TV audio for play-calling clues was commonplace, others said it was not. Of the Dolphins’ defensive adjustments in that 2006 game, one New England player said, “Every shift we made, they were calling out the plays at the line. It was like ‘Wait a minute, how are you doing this?’ . . . They knew exactly what we were doing offensively. If you watch them on film, you’ll see it.”
An NFL spokesman, Steve Alic, disclosed that the league had no interest in investigating the Dolphins. Alic told the Palm Beach Post, “The reaction around the NFL offices was ‘That’s football.’” Some invested observers referred to the case as “Audiogate,” while others went with “Videogate.” Either way, Zach Thomas maintained, the Dolphins beat the Patriots fair and square. “Everybody’s thinking the only way we can beat the New England Patriots is if we steal their signals. There was no stealing signals. You watch tape.”
Years later, this appeared as a remarkable, almost comical starting point in a case that would forever change the way much of America viewed Bill Belichick’s football program. The New England Patriots were actually the aggrieved party, and their AFC East rivals were defending themselves against suspicions that they had benefited from an unfair competitive advantage. This was the subject of discussion on CBS when analyst Charley Casserly, former general manager of the Houston Texans and Washington Redskins and former member of the league’s competition committee, became the first person with a major media outlet to report on a case that would come to be known as Spygate.
“The Patriots got caught doing something early in the year they weren’t supposed to be doing,” Casserly said. “They had a man on their sideline dressed in coaching attire, with a video camera, who was presumably videotaping the other team’s signals. You can’t do that. They were warned. If it happens again, they’re going to be disciplined.”
Of course, Belichick was asked about this in his Monday press conference. And of course, he was unhappy that the topic had been raised. “I haven’t heard anything from the league,” Belichick said. That wasn’t a denial of illegal taping, nor was it a statement that the league hadn’t contacted someone else in the organization. “Why don’t you go talk to Charley Casserly,” Belichick sniped. “He’s the guy that has all the answers on everything.” Two days later, Belichick took another unsolicited shot at Casserly as the so-called answer man. The back-and-fort
h was picked up in some markets here and there, but nationally, the story died on the vine. It was as if the Watergate burglars had been briefly detained by cops on the scene and then sent on their way.
But even if he didn’t realize it, Mangini had turned himself into a one-man Woodward and Bernstein. His relationship with his former mentor had turned about as toxic as Belichick’s was with Bill Parcells immediately following their Jets divorce, though Little Bill and Big Bill had recently met for a peace summit at Scott Pioli’s home on Nantucket and had golfed together at the exclusive Nantucket Golf Club, before going out for dinner. (Belichick and Parcells also spoke warmly during a function at a Manhattan steakhouse for Harry Carson’s induction into the Hall of Fame.) Belichick had raised Mangini in the NFL, promoted him in Cleveland from ball boy and public relations intern to offensive assistant, and then hired him with the Jets and the Patriots. Belichick had named him defensive coordinator—at age 34—after Romeo Crennel left to become head coach of the Browns, and after he’d spent only one year in that position, another former Belichick hire in Cleveland, Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum, hired him away from Foxborough.
Belichick had so much contempt for the Jets, he thought Mangini’s eagerness to take that divisional job was an act of betrayal. Worse yet, Belichick believed that Mangini was quietly recruiting staffers to make the southbound journey with him to New Jersey, a claim the defensive coordinator denied. “Eric wasn’t smart about it; he went behind Bill’s back,” said one Patriots official. “He didn’t stick to the code. It’s like The Godfather: He antagonized Bill, and it got messy.”