Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  He can be relaxed during television production meet ings, depending on the broadcast crew for the game. He’s been extremely loose with Phil Simms, Greg Gumbel, and Armen Keteyian of CBS. He trusts them enough to joke with them. Once he went into a meeting seeing if he could needle Simms. “Phil, I’ve heard you’ve been ripping the shit out of me,” he said to the former Giants quarterback. “That’s all I hear from people: ‘Simms is ripping your ass during the broadcast.’ ” Simms didn’t fall for it. He knew that Belichick wouldn’t leave anything to hearsay and that if he had indeed ripped Belichick, the coach would know exactly when it happened, down and distance included. “Bullshit,” Simms said. “All I do is talk about how smart you are. We call you the smartest coach ever every week.” Belichick laughed, leaned back in his chair, and acted as if he were getting ready for a card game with his friends.

  It helps that Simms has known Belichick since 1979, but that’s not the only reason Belichick respects him and his crew. He is even more impressed with their preparation. They are often dressed casually in these meetings— T-shirts, baseball caps, flip-flops—but they always have a plan for what is going to be discussed. Simms is indeed their quarterback, so they all watch film and jot down observations to present to Belichick. Their hard work makes him so comfortable that he often sits in the meetings, feet propped up, telling stories. He once told them that he ran a marathon and was spotted by Giants fans. “They saw me, and one fan says, ‘Look, there’s Belichick of the Giants. They still don’t have a running game!’ ”

  On some days when things are quiet at Gillette Stadium—after the Saturday morning walk-through and before the Saturday evening coaches’ meeting—Belichick is visited by one of his three dogs. Sometimes he entertains Tom Brady—a sports fan with an appreciation of sports history—by telling tales about the old Giants. He once called defensive lineman Richard Seymour into his office so they could watch tape and talk about some of the dominant players of the NFC East in the 1980s.

  He may have been born in Tennessee and raised in Maryland, but he’s got a lot of Northeast humor in him. He can be clever, sarcastic, and profane. Coming from his office it’s not unusual to hear the voices of Frank Rizzo and Sol Rosenberg, the characters dreamed up by the Jerky Boys, the notorious telephone pranksters from Queens. When he isn’t listening to their funny stories, he tells a few of his own. He tells one about a family vacation in Europe in the mid-1990s. No matter where they went, the Belichicks saw dozens of Europe’s aged churches. They saw landmarks and a certain recurring icon. At one point Brian turned to his parents and said, “Who is this guy? We’re seeing him everywhere.”

  The “guy” was Jesus Christ.

  “I don’t know if I should tell that story,” Belichick says, shaking his head. “People are going to think we’re bad parents.”

  He has gone from twenty-six-year-old coach-peer to fifty-two-year-old coach-teacher. He has learned to be more of a negotiator with his own team, making compromises in some areas—or at least being able to listen—without selling out his core beliefs. He no longer has to worry about the potential conflicts of interest that he encountered in Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, and the early days of New York. He was a young coach then, either the same age or just a couple of years older than the players who reported to him. He has an understanding and respect for issues now that he didn’t after the 1989 season, when he had his first head-coaching interview. The Phoenix Cardinals were interested in talking to him then. The team had moved from St. Louis one year earlier, and ownership wanted someone who would go from city to city in Arizona, helping to promote the team.

  “I didn’t realize how much they were looking for that,” Belichick says. “You know, I figured winning would generate the interest as opposed to going out and doing little rallies.” It’s not what the Cardinals wanted to hear. They gave the job to Joe Bugel. It would be years before Belichick would develop a head coach’s scope of vision, years before he would see that planning the issues around the game is as important as planning the game itself.

  “Let’s put it this way: when you’re the head coach, you’re the head coach twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No matter what happens, it’s on your watch and, to a degree, it’s your problem,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what. Some guy can run a stop sign and get pulled over by the police, and they’re calling you. If the fertilizer doesn’t come and the grass is going to be brown, you might get a call, ‘What are we going to do?’ It’s everything.”

  Early in his head-coaching career he couldn’t resist obsessing over minutiae. He would sit in on the Cleveland Browns’ defensive meetings and talk about how a pattern should be covered. He would pop into special-teams meetings and talk about punt-protection techniques. He would map out the offensive game plan because, for two seasons, he was also his team’s offensive coordinator. He was a coaching phenom, a young fastballer who didn’t know how to change speeds. The joy to him then, at thirty-nine, was the pure rush of coaching. It was the ideal of coaching in a vacuum, having a vision with no periphery required. But it really was an ideal. Thinking like a football CEO is part of the job. Allowing the media glimpses of the team and being cooperative in the daily dance with them is part of the job. He underestimated the importance of that in Cleveland, and he was generally resented for it.

  “When I got there, there had been a very open media policy from previous regimes. They had open practices, open locker rooms, pretty much whatever they wanted, to the point where the players really had no privacy. You know, a guy would play a joke on somebody or say something and it would be in the paper the next day. There was no real opportunity for the team to build much of its own personality or chemistry because that stuff was reported on a daily basis.

  “I clamped down on them. It could have been done in a more positive or gracious way. I could have made some concessions so that it wouldn’t have come off as being so harsh. I take responsibility for it. But the bottom line was we just didn’t win quickly enough. The media logic was ‘Okay, you want to come in and close practices and limit our access and give us some short answers? You had better start putting up some wins.’ And when that didn’t happen, with three consecutive losing seasons, there wasn’t a great defense mechanism built up there.

  “But I was kind of oblivious to that too. Because I really was more concerned about coaching the team than trying to be a PR machine.”

  Back then he didn’t have someone taping the Sunday night wrap-up shows on local TV, as he does now. Unlike today, he didn’t have a thick pack of local and national newspaper clips that he would read as he worked out on a treadmill. He didn’t have someone to not only monitor the discussions on sports-talk radio but also filter the volume and give him any items of significance. He didn’t have radio personalities and columnists freely saying “In Bill We Trust,” as is the case in New England. He had more to prove then, in an organization that would prove to be less competent and unified than the one he’s in now.

  For Belichick, there was always the game. But with each addition to his personal and professional timeline, he began to see it from new angles. A lot happened in the twenty years between his ambitious start in Baltimore in 1975 and his employer’s shocking announcement that it was moving to Baltimore—he guessed that the moving trucks would take off without him—in 1995. One day in his early twenties he is living at Howard Johnson’s and driving Baltimore Colts head coach Ted Marchibroda to work. Then one day in his late thirties he is flying into Cleveland and being shuttled to the Ritz Carlton, where Browns hats and sweatshirts are lying on his bed. He and Debby join Art Modell and his wife, Pat, at the Modells’ home for dinner. Bill and Art go into the den, shape a contract, and agree to terms that will make him the coach of the Browns. Then one day in his early forties, one of the strangest days he’s ever had, he learns midseason that his team is moving and finds himself calling a member of the media for insight.

  He looked in the Boston Globe on November 4, 1995, and saw an ar
ticle headlined “Browns Look to Baltimore.” Will McDonough broke the story and began it by writing, “The Baltimore Browns. Get used to it.” McDonough wrote that an announcement would be made in two days, on Monday, the day before the NFL owners were scheduled to meet in Dallas. “I saw the article and I’m thinking, Wow. I talked to Will, and Will said, ‘Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. This is what’s going to happen.’ Will had some good inside information. So that really kind of sent the antennas up.” The lame-duck Browns had a home game the next day against Houston and were crushed, 37–10. They lost seven of their final eight games. “Modell” became a six-letter obscenity in Cleveland.

  Four months after the announcement, Belichick was dismayed, though not surprised, when news of his job status was finally delivered. He knew he was going to be fired. It was the delivery of his firing that was problematic. “I’m sure there were things that I did that Art wasn’t thrilled with, but I worked hard for him. I spent a lot of hours there, and I tried to do what was best for the team. And in typical Art fashion, five years later, it was just a phone call.” During that call Belichick debated Modell on the wording of the proposed firing statement to the media. Belichick didn’t like the way the document was phrased. He thought the statement was one-sided, a piece of propaganda that attempted to place all the organization’s problems at his feet. He looked over the announcement and warned Modell, “If you release this statement, I’m going to release one and you’re not going to like it. So let’s try to come up with something that we can both live with.”

  The statement was changed. Both the Browns and Belichick would be moving. Marchibroda was going to return to Baltimore as coach of the new Ravens. And Belichick was going to pack his van and drive to New England. Miami Dolphins head coach Jimmy Johnson had talked with him about becoming defensive coordinator of the Dolphins, but Belichick had loved New England since prep school and college. He had homes on Nantucket, he had friends from high school and college in the area, and Bill Parcells had promised him a job as one of his Patriots assistants. Over the course of the next four years he would follow Parcells to the New York Jets as his defensive coordinator and assistant head coach, then return to New England, this time as head coach.

  Maybe some people in Andover, Massachusetts, would have found this ironic in 1971. Maybe they would have been surprised to know that the long-haired center on the undefeated football team would one day be forty miles south, in Foxboro, the man with final say in football operations. But it wouldn’t have seemed unusual to a nineteen-year-old Bill Belichick. Even at Andover he was a little different from the other students.

  He listened to the Dead, James Taylor, Bob Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel, as many of them did. He took similar classes and got similar grades—As and Bs—although it didn’t come naturally to him. “When I walked into Andover, I was surrounded by a lot of people who were a whole lot smarter than I was,” he says. “And they knew a lot more than I did on top of that. They had more experience than I did in terms of traveling and being exposed to a lot of different things. Academically, it was the hardest year I had in school. Way harder than college.”

  His prep school notebooks contained Macbeth study notes on one page and an imagined play—the football kind—on the next. He had taken four years of French in high school (Belichick attended Bates High School for one year and graduated from Annapolis High), but he still struggled with the language at Andover. He was assigned to read Les Misérables in French. He found himself looking up forty words per page. “It was unbelievable,” he says. “Jean Valjean—I hated that fucker.”

  He grew up some at Andover. He met students who amazed him with their smarts. Whether they were writing, playing the saxophone, or acting, they were astonishing at what they did. For the first time Belichick asked for help in school. He went to teachers and other students when he came across something that was unfamiliar to him. Andover expanded his mind—and probably would have blown his parents’ minds if they had known what he was experiencing.

  “In all honesty, they probably didn’t know exactly how liberal things were at Andover, and subsequently Wesleyan. You know, you send your kid off to prep schools back then, and you think there’s some structure, and there was. But there was a lot of drug use in the dorms. It wasn’t any big secret. I mean, some dorms were stricter than others, but I think there was quite a bit of drug use on campus from what I saw.”

  There were academic changes and social changes, but there were no athletic changes. He played football at Andover and knew he wanted to continue at Wesleyan. He didn’t want to stop there. He and his friend Ernie Adams had already thought about careers in either college or pro coaching. They both graduated from college in 1975— Adams went to Northwestern—and decided to pursue long-term passion over short-term prestige. Adams, who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, took a job with the Patriots, the pro team down the road. Belichick wanted to get a master’s degree in economics and be a graduate assistant on some college’s staff.

  He took what turned out to be a perfect job with the Baltimore Colts: $25 a week and the chance to absorb football every day from seven A.M. until midnight. He lived for free at the Howard Johnson’s next to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. His boss, Marchibroda, knew the owner of the hotel and traded Colts tickets for four rooms. Marchibroda was in his first season with the Colts after being on George Allen’s staff in Washington. He wasn’t going to move his family from Washington to Baltimore, so he came up with the Howard Johnson’s deal. Belichick, Marchibroda, and two other assistant coaches, George Boutselis and Whitey Dovell, all lived there. They would meet in the lobby at seven, go to breakfast—where Marchibroda would order the same thing every day—and talk about football.

  Belichick was their driver on the way to the office. He was also in charge of film breakdowns, meticulously charting each play by down, formation, motion, and field position. His father, Steve, an assistant football coach for the U.S. Naval Academy Midshipmen, always believed that to be the best way to learn football. Belichick helped run the scout team and assisted with special teams. The only thing he didn’t do was game plans. He was so good at what he did that his salary was doubled after training camp.

  So now he was up to $2,400 a year—before taxes. He didn’t mind the scant salary. Anyway, watching his father had taught him how to handle money. Steve Belichick didn’t believe in credit and never bought anything on it. His philosophy was that you had the money or you didn’t. And when the elder Belichick had it, he bought a piece of Annapolis land for $5,000 and built a $29,500 house on top of it. The Belichicks—Steve, Jeanette, and Bill—moved into the house when Bill was six years old. Bill’s money was fine during the Colts’ 10–4 regular season. But something had to change after the play-offs, when Baltimore was eliminated by the dominant Steelers, 28–10.

  There would be no Howard Johnson’s in the off-season. Which also meant that Marchibroda’s car wouldn’t be there to drive. Belichick was going to need a local apartment, a car, or both to keep the job. Marchibroda wanted him to stay, but general manager Joe Thomas said the team couldn’t come up with an apartment, a car, or more money. These were the new Colts, owned by a man Baltimoreans would come to despise. His name was Robert Irsay. The Colts had traded Johnny Unitas and Mike Curtis, they had begun lobbying for a new stadium, and they couldn’t find a way to keep a promising twenty-three-year-old coach on staff. Thomas even told Belichick to wait tables in the off-season because there wasn’t much else a coach could do all winter until the first days of spring.

  Thomas was wrong, of course, and a head coach named Rick Forzano knew it. Belichick called the Detroit Lions looking for a job, and Forzano offered this deal: $10,000 a year with a 1976 Thunderbird included. The kid needed a car? Well, the kid needed to work for the team that was owned by the Fords. Belichick did some work as an advance scout, coached tight ends, coached receivers, and spent a lot of time listening to the Lions’ defensive coaches. Jerry Glanville was working with
the linebackers; Fritz Shurmur’s group was the defensive line; Jim Carr, “one of the top defensive coordinators at that time,” was in the secondary; and Floyd Reese was assigned to the special-teamers. The offense had Joe Bugel and Ken Shipp, who had coached Joe Namath and John Riggins with the New York Jets.

  “An all-star staff,” Belichick says.

  Some Detroit coaches would talk with Steve Belichick and report, “Your kid is something special. He’s really unbelievable.” The father would say then the same thing he says now: “Thanks. But he’s never been accused of being a dummy.” Forzano didn’t get to witness the professional growth of Belichick for long, though. The team started 1–3 in ’76, with all the losses to NFC Central teams, and Tommy Hudspeth became the coach. The Lions finished with back-to-back 6–8 seasons when Belichick was there. He was forced to leave his job and his Thunderbird after the ’77 season.

  He was four months away from his twenty-sixth birthday. He was unemployed. And he had been recently married to his friend from Annapolis High, an attractive young woman named Debby Clarke. Bill and Debby were married under the golden dome of the Naval Academy’s chapel. They had their reception on campus as well, in the same hall where their prom had been held. They spent 1978 in Denver before moving back to the East Coast in 1979.

  “By the time I got through with those four years, I felt I had been around the block on a lot of different levels,” Belichick says. “I had seen a lot of different players and head-coaching styles. I had been in the AFC and NFC. I felt I had four good years studying special teams, two years studying offense, and two studying defense.”

  He had worked for four coaches in three cities. He was beginning to acquire the education that he couldn’t get in school, no matter how prestigious those schools are. He was twenty-six years old, almost twenty-seven, and now he knew what it meant to take control of a meeting. He understood how dangerous it is to be surrounded by yes men, sycophants who silently nod along with you even though your premise or approach may be faulty. He saw how rapidly an employment status can change. Sometimes it’s because the owners are cheap, sometimes it’s because the owners want the teams to win more, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.