by Ian O'Connor
A lacrosse player at Penn State who played a year of football at Monmouth, Hogan had been let go by four NFL clubs, including two AFC East teams and the only franchise (the Giants) to beat Belichick’s Patriots in a Super Bowl. Hogan had helped send New England back to Houston, where it had won it all a dozen years earlier, by shredding the Pittsburgh zone for 180 yards and two touchdowns in the AFC title-game blowout, and he helped kick start this drive against Atlanta with a 16-yard catch on third-and-10.
Mitchell followed with an 11-yard catch on second-and-10 before Brady fired his next pass over the middle into what Belichick would ordinarily call a “fucking team meeting” while reviewing his Monday morning lowlights. The throw was intended for Edelman and was batted in the air by Robert Alford, leaving the Patriots’ receiver and three Atlanta defenders, including Alford, to go for the rebound at the Falcons’ 41. In an unwieldy tangle of 16 arms and legs, with the pass hitting Alford’s right leg and left foot, a diving Edelman somehow gathered the ball before it hit the ground. It was a catch that made Tyree’s look like a five-yard square-out. Quinn had almost no choice but to challenge, and, in losing the review, he burned his final timeout with 2:03 left.
At that moment, the Falcons surely knew they were going to lose. On the next three plays, Brady hit Amendola for 20 yards, White for 13, and White again for 7. On his way to a 20-point game, a Super Bowl record (he also set a record with 14 receptions), White scored on a one-yard carry on the next play. New England still needed the two-point conversion to tie, and converting two such attempts on back-to-back possessions would usually be a long shot. But Atlanta was a broken team, and Belichick and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels had worked on two-point plays all week.
“I don’t know,” Belichick said, “just Josh and I had a sense that we may need a couple of them.” Lined up on the left side, Amendola went in motion, caught a bullet from Brady, and got the ball across the goal line before two defenders could stop him. The same Amendola who had taken a $4.4 million pay cut in May to remain a Patriot and to have a chance to do what he had just done.
The Falcons had at least a 99 percent chance to win at 20 different points in the game, according to ESPN Stats and Information, and they couldn’t finish off Belichick and Brady. The Patriots won the overtime coin toss when Matthew Slater called heads, and it was all Amendola, Hogan, Edelman, and White again, all the way down to the Atlanta 2, as New Englanders in the crowd flipped NRG Stadium on its ear. On second-and-goal, Brady took his 99th snap and pitched the ball deep to White, who headed for the right corner, cut back at the 5, and plowed his way through two tackles and into the end zone to give the quarterback and Belichick their record fifth Super Bowl title.
Matt Patricia bear-hugged Belichick and lifted him off the ground. Brady and running back LeGarrette Blount were on their knees, surrounded by photographers and camera operators, when Belichick found them amid the confetti on the field. He leaned down to hug them both, and they rose together as one. Soon enough Brady fell into the arms of his mother, who had motivated him on this night far more than Roger Goodell’s Deflategate suspension ever could. The only imperfect part of Brady’s perfect night would unfold in the locker room, where a credentialed Mexican journalist would swipe his game jersey from his bag.
On the stage for the trophy presentation, Terry Bradshaw told Belichick, “Well, there’s so much debate about who’s the greatest coach in the history of the NFL. Tonight that got solved, and that would be you, my young man. Congratulations.” Wearing a blue jacket minus the standard “Flying Elvis” team logo missing from his upper left chest—likely a hard jab at a league office demanding conformity on its biggest night—Belichick thanked Bradshaw. “But look,” he said, “it’s all about these players. We’ve got great players. They’re tough and they compete. We thought they competed for 60 minutes, but it took more tonight.”
It had taken everything Belichick had inside him to turn a 28–3 deficit into a 34–28 victory. It had taken a little of Steve Belichick’s attention to detail, Al Laramore’s focus on fundamentals, and Steve Sorota’s ability to adapt to overcome the challenges he faced in this game. Belichick also needed to elevate his players the way his first NFL boss, Ted Marchibroda, had during Baltimore’s comeback season in 1975. Marchibroda had died, at 84, some 13 months before Super Bowl LI, and he would’ve been awfully proud of Billy on this night.
Belichick was booked for another parade in Boston, for a rally that would feature him leading the crowd in a chant of “No days off” as he held the Lombardi Trophy in his left hand. But before he left Houston, before he could savor his place as the only coach to have won a Super Bowl ring for every finger on his left hand, Belichick had the number five in his mind for a different reason.
“As of today,” he said the morning after his breathless comeback, “and as great as today feels, as great as today is, in all honesty we’re five weeks behind in the 2017 season to most teams in the league.”
Belichick was already prepared to play catch-up, prepared to start grinding for next year. But next year was going to be different, radically different. Much to everyone’s surprise, the 2018 season was going to be turbulent enough to challenge every last virtue and value of the Patriot Way.
19
Human Bill
Is Belichick really as big a prick as he seems?
Most national football writers have likely fielded that question a few times at family barbecues and weddings, at least those family barbecues and weddings held outside of New England. Bill Belichick might be the most disagreeable figure in sports, and his real and/or manufactured contempt for the news media makes his press conferences must-see TV for executives, coaches, and fans everywhere.
If Belichick cared about how he came across to much of the country, he had a funny way of showing it. Though in recent years he had replaced the trademark hoodie with relatively stylish outfits at pressers (undoubtedly at Linda Holliday’s urging), Belichick had long abandoned any meaningful attempt to burnish his public image. He could have made millions upon millions as a product endorser for companies that found creative ways to monetize his dark genius, and yet he didn’t bother to profit off the character he created when the cameras were on. The modern entertainment-industrial complex had rewarded Kardashian-esque figures who were famous for being famous, people who had built empires on almost no discernible accomplishments. Belichick stood on the other end of that spectrum. He had won five Super Bowls. He had so much to capitalize on.
And there was a period in the spring of 2007 when he considered doing just that. He started Bill Belichick Inc. as a for-profit company that would specialize in “consulting, entertaining and endorsing,” and he appeared ready to build his brand and act as a paid corporate spokesman and guest speaker. Around the same time, Belichick met in a Boston restaurant with two New Jersey executives from 16W Marketing, Frank Vuono and Steve Rosner, who had counted Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms among their clients. Belichick wanted to discuss a possible representation agreement. Vuono said that he found Belichick less interested in the extra cash than in the potential impact on his image and legacy, and that he had heard the coach do a strong impersonation of Bill Parcells at the Pro Bowl and found him witty enough to be an effective pitchman.
“It would be easy for him to poke fun at himself if he did go into endorsements,” Vuono said. “He’d be the perfect Oscar in The Odd Couple.” Rosner told Belichick that assuming a tongue-in-cheek role in a commercial would be a good way of showing people a different side of him. “When I said that,” Rosner recalled, “a smile came across his face.”
The marketing execs knew that a hard sell would not work with Belichick, so they kept it light for a couple of hours, headed home, and waited for a signal. A couple of weeks later, the coach called to say thanks but no thanks. Time commitment might’ve been a concern for someone who all but lived at the office, and perception could’ve been an issue, too. Even if it meant limiting his net worth to $35 million (by Forb
es’s estimate) down the road, did Belichick really want any Patriots fan thinking that success had made him a bit soft, even a little distracted?
In the end, the bad-guy routine was really working for him. Bobby Valentine, who was all but eaten alive by the Boston media during his disastrous one-and-done season managing the 2012 Red Sox, had been among those who watched in awe as Belichick played that media role to the hilt. “I don’t really get it,” Valentine said. “I don’t know how it’s allowed. It’s more envy than anything else. I tip my hat to him for his complete dominance of the situation. I don’t get how he’s been able to do it, but it’s been spectacular to watch. It’s well rehearsed, it’s well disciplined, and he stays within his boundaries better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
Robert Thompson, a trustee professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, likened Belichick to Simon Cowell in the early days of American Idol. Cowell would say cruel things about auditioning performers and seemed to find pleasure in doing so. “Yet there was a sense, when anybody got a yes vote from him,” Thompson said, “that was the thing they always talked about: that Simon said yes. It’s like a really dysfunctional family, when your mean dad finally says something good about you and it means more to you than all the people who were helpful to you. I’m not saying Bill Belichick is Simon Cowell or a dysfunctional father, but there are all kinds of ways to treat people that get them to be motivated to do their best.
“My guess,” Thompson continued, “is if we’re going to wait for people to say what a great guy Bill Belichick is, what a warm human being he is, we might have to wait for people to write his eulogy. Those stories are probably out there, but in many ways we don’t want those stories. He’s played a certain role in this grand drama. It would be like if J. R. Ewing in Dallas suddenly started becoming a philanthropist, or if Walter White in Breaking Bad gave money to a detox center.”
People who were interested in humanizing Belichick found that he had no apparent interest in being humanized. One reporter’s request to Berj Najarian and the coach’s agent, Neil Cornrich, for details on acts of kindness and generosity that might have gone unrecognized—ordinarily a dream request for someone representing a public figure—was met with stone-cold silence. Even Patriots officials hoping to soften his image over the years ran into a wall of stern resistance.
Before the 2017 season started, those officials were likely stunned when a cleaned-up Belichick posed with Holliday (“the rose next to the thorn,” the coach called her) for a photo shoot for Nantucket Magazine, which published an accompanying cover story on his love for his girlfriend and his eastern-end ’Sconset compound under the cover line “Belichick & Holliday: America’s Winningest Team.” Nantucket was the seaside retreat where, for decades, Belichick had gone for his boating, fishing, biking, golfing (at Sankaty Head), and unwinding between seasons, and the Globe reported that the coach’s growing collection of cedar-shingled homes was assessed at more than $10 million; he’d transferred two homes to his ex-wife, Debby, as part of their divorce settlement.
Belichick valued his privacy along the towering bluffs of ’Sconset, and the locals respected his space. Occasionally a story or two would leak out from the island, like the one told by Vito Capizzo, a former teammate of Joe Namath’s at Bear Bryant’s Alabama who became a legendary coach at Nantucket High School. After Belichick won his first Super Bowl title, Capizzo asked him if he would speak to the school’s athletes and cheerleaders as part of a fund-raiser for Nantucket’s library. Capizzo had owned a Thrifty Rental Car place on the island and had seen Belichick here and there, and he always thought the Patriots’ coach was more down-to-earth than the distant Bryant. Belichick immediately agreed to speak to the students at the fund-raiser, which raised $5,000 for the library. “I had a check for him for $1,000,” Capizzo said, “and he wouldn’t take it. He said, ‘It’s for the kids.’ He was still married, and we went over and had a drink. We talked about football and he told me, ‘I wish I had your record.’”
As much as Belichick preferred to keep stories of his common decency buried, they were there to be unearthed, from the early stages of his coaching career through the championship years in New England. In August 1980, before Belichick’s second season with the New York Giants, backup quarterback Randy Dean was traded to Green Bay. Dean had made all of three starts in three seasons, and after the Packers cut him, his NFL career was over. On his way out, his former racquetball partner, Belichick, sent him a video of his highlights with the Giants. Dean was a marginal football player, perhaps easily forgotten, and he joked that the highlight tape was fairly short. “But Bill’s the only coach who ever did that for me,” Dean said. “My kids enjoyed it. It meant a lot to me.”
While with the Giants, Belichick visited the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in Ossining, New York, and spent a couple of hours talking football with dozens of inmates. In order to better understand the urban environments that produced many of his players, Belichick also rode along with Drug Enforcement Administration agents in impoverished pockets of New Jersey. In Cleveland, Bill and Debby funded a financially strapped homeless shelter for women and children, and the coach lent his time to Jim Brown, whose Amer-I-Can Program provided life skills to at-risk youths. Belichick had visited prison inmates with Brown and met with reformed gang members in Brown’s homes and in hotel rooms.
The coach was beyond generous with his assistants, too, giving them his TV and radio money and greeting low-level staffers with hundred-dollar handshakes. “There were always two sides to Bill Belichick,” said one of his Cleveland scouts. “He was an emperor who can be incredibly aloof, condescending, and arrogant, which was always in there. But fundamentally, deep down inside, there’s a good guy who was raised by good parents.”
That person was alive and well in Foxborough, but living in the shadows by choice. Belichick’s support of a young staffer, Mark Jackson, after Jackson’s father died on Christmas Day of 2000 was something that the future athletic director at Villanova would never forget. In March 2002, after Williams College coach and future College Football Hall of Famer Dick Farley dropped him a congratulatory note on beating the Rams in the Super Bowl, Belichick replied with a handwritten letter that read, in part, “Dick—my goal in coaching is to have your record! Congratulations on your continued success.” A couple of years later, after cutting Farley’s son, Scott, Belichick offered to write Scott a letter of recommendation if he wanted to pursue a job in the industry.
In July 2002, Belichick invited the media to a two-hour film session in the new stadium’s auditorium, treating reporters like players and showing them, among other things, how the Patriots had defended Atlanta’s mobile quarterback (Michael Vick) and its relatively immobile quarterback (Chris Chandler) in a game the previous season. In 2003, Anthony Pleasant, 35-year-old defensive end and a pro’s pro in his final NFL season, believed he had been kept on the Patriots’ roster by Belichick solely as a show of appreciation for his efforts in Cleveland and Foxborough.
In the summer of 2004, the year the New York Jets would retire Joe Klecko’s number, Belichick spoke to the Patriots about Klecko’s greatness as a defensive lineman while he locked eyes with Dan Klecko, Joe’s son and a New England nose tackle, and gave the kid goose bumps he could still feel a dozen years later. Klecko reported that Belichick gave punter Josh Miller a book of children’s poetry, Where the Sidewalk Ends, as a gift after Miller and his wife had a baby.
Before his Super Bowl XXXIX victory over Philadelphia in Jacksonville, in February 2005, Belichick received a note from his lacrosse coach at Wesleyan, Terry Jackson, whose wife was undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. Karen Jackson used to cook meals for Belichick and the other Wesleyan players, and, in turn, Bill and his friend and teammate Mark Fredland would babysit for her. Jackson wrote that his wife’s bucket list included trips to the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl, and that he was wondering if Belichick could scratch one of those items off the list.
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��The tickets have already been purchased,” the coach wrote back. “We’ll see you after the game.” Jackson and Karen cherished their time at the Super Bowl; she died months later. Over the years, Jackson deeply appreciated the many notes Belichick kept sending him from Foxborough, thanking his Wesleyan mentor for his kindness and for teaching him the meaning of teamwork. “I know I wouldn’t be in this position without your help and the great example you set for me and all the other players you coached,” Belichick wrote him years later. “Thanks for providing such a great role model for all of us when we needed it most.”
In 2005, Belichick helped turn a reunion for his Andover football team into what teammate Dana Seero called a show of support for the former star quarterback at Phillips and Harvard, Milt Holt, who’d gone on to become a state senator in Hawaii before serving prison time on federal mail fraud charges involving campaign funds, and for failing a drug test while awaiting trial. Belichick gave Holt a tour of New England’s Gillette Stadium facility as part of the reunion weekend. Months later, Belichick got word that the wife of his former Wesleyan football teammate Jeff Gray had been hospitalized for nearly a year, after suffering burns over 60 percent of her body when a spark from their woodstove set her robe on fire. Belichick immediately contacted Gray, apologized for not knowing about his wife sooner, and hosted him and his two sons at practice on the same night he hosted Terry Jackson and his family.