Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  Belichick was headed to New York, a city where he would become idolized as a prepared and visionary coach. In exactly twenty years he would go to court for the right to leave New York. It wouldn’t be leaving New York as much as it would be professionally separating himself from Bill Parcells, a boss with whom he was tired of being associated. One day he would feel as if he were an established country that some haughty explorer claimed to have discovered. One day he would take exception to the notion that Parcells was his mentor. Belichick had watched his father. He had watched Marchibroda, Shurmur, Glanville, Reese, Red Miller, lots of people. However, he would be linked to Parcells for many years. That link would gradually weaken in the late 1990s. It would pop, dramatically, at the end of 1999 and in the first few weeks of the new millennium.

  But no one could have imagined that in ’79, when New York Giants head coach Ray Perkins was looking for a special-teams coach. The foreshadowing was there, but who could see it? Who would guess that Adams, who also began working with the Giants in ’79, would still be a key member of Belichick’s football Cabinet? A sergeant’s son, Romeo Crennel, would arrive in New York two years after Belichick. Who would guess that he would one day become the top coordinator in the NFL as part of Belichick’s staff?

  There was one clue that the twenty-seven-year-old Belichick would be just as forceful as the fifty-year-old Belichick. He made it known in the beginning that he was a coach, not one of the guys. He looked young. He was young. He was in good shape from his days of playing football and lacrosse. It would have been easy for players to look at this assistant coach as a peer, not as someone charged with giving and teaching them assignments.

  “It was an awkward relationship because in a lot of cases I was younger than the players,” he says. “Each year I was older than a couple more guys. But for a lot of years there were a bunch of players, certainly the higher-profile guys, who were older than I was. You know, I was never one to go around with the players anyway. I could relate to them because I was their age, but I was never gonna hang out with them and do some of the shit that they did.

  “And I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do anyway. It would be great for a night, but in the long run it could really deteriorate your relationship. Everybody that I’d worked with told me that too. Ted told me, Rick told me, Red told me.”

  They told him because they knew there would be a point when he would be challenged. Some player was going to step up, and the young coach was going to have to prove that he was in authority. That happened in New York, and it happened during one of Belichick’s first meetings in front of the entire team. He was trying to explain how the Giants were going to handle a technique when he noticed a conversation to his left. One of the players was laughing, trying to get the attention of his buddy. Belichick called the player out, and the player replied with a verbal jab of his own. Perkins was watching the exchange, but he didn’t say anything. Belichick took over then.

  “Shut the fuck up, all right? If you don’t want to sit here, then just get the fuck out of here. But this is important. Everybody else is listening.”

  No more words were necessary. The talking and laughing stopped, and the new special-teams coach in New York was able to make his point. Perkins approached him afterward and told him the performance was great. It’s what the head coach had wanted to see. Perkins was a tough coach who saw no problem with starters playing on special teams. When Belichick needed to be backed because players were late for special-teams meetings, Perkins was there to give him support.

  “If they’re late, you just have to fine ’em,” he would say.

  And it wasn’t hard to figure out why some players were late. They didn’t want to be there. Since the rosters were smaller in ’79, special-teamers were closer to being starters then than they are now. There weren’t as many players on teams then who were known purely as great “gunners,” for example. They were backups in many cases, third receivers and third corners, who would have much rather been on the field for three downs than for one. They were among the first group to hear what Belichick tells all his players now. He tells them about the importance of teams, being attentive on teams, and being in position to turn the game on teams. He said it in ’79. He said it in ’02.

  Appropriately, his words have always had a resounding economy to them. When he speaks to his team, no one is murky about where he stands. He has an opinion. It is always direct, and depending on the subject, it is sometimes rimmed with the obscene. He has been speaking to professional football audiences for more than half of his life. All he requires is for you to be alert, listen, and do what’s supposed to be done. Trust him. There’s an art to playing this game.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FOXBORO TRIANGLE:

  THE KRAFTS, PARCELLS,

  AND BELICHICK

  It was a Tuesday morning, just after ten o’clock, when Bill Belichick was having a meeting with his trusted adviser and friend, Ernie Adams. They were exchanging ideas about the Tennessee Titans, whom they would play six days later in Nashville. Belichick and Adams were talking about ways to stop quarterback Steve McNair when they were interrupted by a soft knock on the office door.

  A few seconds later a man who is also in the football business joined them. It was Robert Kraft. He was just stopping in to hear the experts analyze pro football, a sport he obsesses over as much as they do.

  He listened to their comments on quarterbacks who can run. “We are so slow on defense,” Belichick said, “that scrambles bother us a lot more than other teams. I’ll bet Daunte Culpepper scrambled for more yards against us than he did anyone all year. Or close to it.” Kraft listened to them talk about McNair—“You almost have to treat him like a running back”—and watched them dig into their archives for any plan of theirs that had once slowed the 235-pound quarterback. They came up with a New York Jets game plan from November 1998, when the Jets beat the Tennessee Oilers, 24–3. McNair was so bad that day that Dave Krieg replaced him. Expecting anything close to that same outcome was a reach, but at least they were holding proof that it could be done.

  Kraft listened to them promise to fix an aspect of their defense: “We’re going to get this ‘mirror’ straightened out if we don’t do anything else this week.” An effective mirror would put them in position to limit a quarterback’s scrambling. Kraft listened to a few more minutes of planning before he quietly slid out the door.

  Kraft, the team owner, would probably return later and listen to Belichick’s thoughts. Or he might call from his office and try to understand a part of the game the way his head coach understood it. He knew he could talk to Belichick without any charges of being a meddlesome owner. And Belichick knew that when he was in conversations with Kraft he was talking to both a curious football fan and an exceptional businessman. Each man was receiving something—an implicit understanding between coach and owner—that had eluded him in the past.

  After Bill Parcells left New England in 1997, Kraft and his family had to fight the perception that their constant hovering and tinkering had driven Parcells away to New York. On the September night Parcells returned to Foxboro with his new love, the Jets, a one-liner by former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle captured a local sentiment that was gaining popularity. “I did not realize,” Barnicle wrote, “that Amos Alonzo Kraft was the true architect of this team.”

  The reference to the football coaching legend and the suggestion that the owner was some type of intrusive football demigod annoyed Kraft, then and now. “Look, we’re going to pay attention. I think fans should want owners who are going to pay attention,” Robert Kraft says. “It’s our financial net worth on the line. In Parcells, we had a guy who was coaching year to year. And the issue of his contract was supposed to be irrelevant to us? That’s preposterous.”

  Too, the Krafts had dealt with Parcells every day. They knew how he had made them feel. Robert is careful and diplomatic when talking about Parcells today, but you can sense that there is a vast network of emotions
lingering beneath each safe sentence. Jonathan Kraft, the team’s vice chairman, is more candid on the subject. “I hated the man with a passion,” he says. “He is someone who tried to make my father look bad. He tried to make him look foolish. And as a son, I hated him for it.”

  Belichick had arrived in New England as an assistant head coach during the height of Kraft-Parcells in 1996: “Obviously a lot of things had happened before I had gotten there. My sense of it was there wasn’t a lot of communication.” Once in New England, assistant coach Belichick and owner Kraft became friendly, and Belichick found himself much more comfortable speaking with him than he had been with Art Modell in Cleveland. They would converse several times a week, talking about football and the business of football. At times people overhearing their conversations would have thought, Listen to these eggheads.

  There was the brainy Wesleyan graduate, with credentials in economics and Super Bowl defenses, talking with the multimillionaire Columbia University and Harvard Business School grad who had spent his entire forties and early fifties planning to buy the Patriots. And when Jonathan was part of their talks, another voice from Harvard Business School—via Williams College—was being heard. Belichick never found the discussions with Kraft to be taxing. “To me, what stood out was his smarts. He instinctively had good thoughts on football, and he understood why something would or would not be a good idea. Whereas Art had that same curiosity, and he had no idea of why things might be happening. None.”

  Kraft’s thoughts on the game were so good because he had loved it and tried to live it since his youth in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brookline High in 1959, one year before the Patriots were born. He was small, no more than five-foot-eight, but he always wanted to play. He knew it wasn’t possible in high school. He had to attend Hebrew classes every day after school, and Brookline played its games on the Saturday Sabbath. When he arrived at Columbia on an academic scholarship, the urge to play hadn’t left him. His parents didn’t know it, but he played on an intramural football team at school. That is, they didn’t know it at first. They found out after a game against Penn in which Robert injured his knee and needed surgery. Before operating, the school tried to contact the Krafts, but they didn’t answer the phone until after sundown on the Sabbath. When representatives from Columbia finally got through, the news broke:

  SCHOOL: “We need permission to operate on your son.”

  HARRY KRAFT: “What happened?”

  SCHOOL: “He was hurt in today’s game.”

  HARRY KRAFT: “What game? A football game? What?”

  He was just a kid, not even twenty-one. But it was clear then that, somehow, football was going to be a part of his life. When he was twenty-nine and the father of a young family, he arrived at his Newton home and was greeted at the front door. That was part of the routine. The house at 60 Graylynn Road had a foyer on its right side, and that’s where Kraft would meet his wife and sons. It was 1971, so his oldest, Jonathan, was seven years old.

  “Come on, I want to show you something,” he said to the boy.

  He opened his briefcase and showed him season tickets for the Patriots, who were playing at a new stadium in Foxboro. Jonathan was excited, although the tickets had caused a household problem. Myra Kraft was not happy with her husband, and Jonathan could hear her raised voice—his bedroom was next to his parents’—as she asked Robert what exactly he was doing. The tickets were not a good investment for a family that had just begun to build its wealth.

  Myra could have won her argument strictly on the performance of the team: it was bad. The team won 24 games and lost 46 between 1971 and 1975. The best thing about the games was the time Kraft was able to spend with his sons. He’d pick up roast beef sandwiches from Proviser’s Deli on Commonwealth Avenue and drive to the stadium. He’d slip a $10 bill to one of the parking guys so he could get a good spot and avoid the postgame traffic gridlock. Sometimes he would have rolls of toilet paper with him. That was the local tradition at Patriots games. When the team scored, the people up high would throw their rolls and watch them unfurl into the crowd.

  It was fun, even if the teams were no good. Through the years the family grew, and so did its dreams. Kraft began his career with a paper products company, Rand-Whitney, which was owned by his father-in-law, philanthropist Jacob Hiatt. Kraft displayed a velvet business touch by the time he was in his midtwenties: he analyzed the stock market, hit for about $40,000, and made strong investments. By the early 1980s Kraft had gone beyond simply owning a business. By that time he had long since founded International Forest Products and amassed enough capital to acquire Rand-Whitney. Now he was looking for more than season tickets in section 217. He wanted to buy the team. He wanted the team to play in a stadium that was more appealing than the low-budget bowl that sat on a hill just off Route 1. He was a Boston kid who in his lifetime had seen frequent championships from the Celtics. He saw a couple of titles from the Bruins and none from the Red Sox, the most heartbreaking bridesmaids of all. What he had really wanted to see was the Patriots win a Super Bowl. That way, he could point to them and proudly say it was his team.

  That’s what troubled him when part of his dream came true. He already owned sorry Foxboro Stadium, the team that played in it, and the land that surrounded it. In January 1994 he bought the team from James Busch Orthwein for a then-record sum of nearly $200 million. But by 1996 he had not worked out a deal for a new stadium, and he didn’t have a championship. It mystified him that the team could be on the verge of winning a Super Bowl—XXXI—but that pursuit was running equal, or even secondary, to the imminent departure of Parcells. It bothered and hurt him that opinions were split on the departure and that, in some precincts, he received the blame. It was hard to find an emotion for what happened to his team after Parcells left and before Belichick arrived, because it happened so quickly. The play was poor, the drafts were bad, and the middle management was second-rate. It was upsetting to him because this was happening to the Patriots. And the Patriots, in heart and deed, were his team.

  “My father—I think people have always, throughout his life, underestimated him,” Jonathan says. “He didn’t come from a lot financially, and he was always underestimated. You can look at his business career, either how he started International Forest Products or even our ownership of [Boston television station] Channel 7. He would be told that he didn’t have the resources, or the smarts, or whatever it was. People would think he was crazy. But he would see things, map them out in his head, and once he committed, he’d stick with something. He’d be tenacious as hell and stick with it.”

  Toward the end of the 1996 season Robert Kraft began to realize that he might have to use his tenacity in an unusual way. He might have to use it to clear up the contract issues of his own head coach. Kraft was hearing rumors that Parcells was looking to move on to another team, even though he was still under contract with the Patriots. If this was true, it was going to be a problem. As Kraft understood Parcells’s contract, the options were limited: Parcells could coach the Patriots in 1997; he could leave coaching altogether for a year and then return in 1998; or he could accept a deal with another team in 1997, which would result in a compensation windfall for New England.

  Clearly there was discomfort between Kraft and Parcells, and the discomfort became intensely personal. It may have begun as a simple personality clash, a predictable occupational hazard given the profiles of both men. Parcells, after all, was recognized as one of the best coaches in modern football history and an owner of things—championship rings—that Kraft coveted. His charisma was difficult to match too. Parcells’s daily press conferences were reality TV shows before the term even existed. Members of the media would show up for updates from the solo character just to see what kind of colorful verbal frames he would place on ordinary football pictures. No one in the NFL was better at entertaining you for thirty minutes without revealing an ounce of substantive news. He’d waddle into the room, sit at a table, and begin with a
familiar line, “Fire away, fellas.” On the days he really had it going, Parcells would grant a backstage pass to the media members. After the press conference he’d chat for an additional ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes. Parcells was good at detecting the pulse of the media, and he should have been: he demanded that clips from the New York and Boston newspapers be placed on his desk by seven A.M., and sports-talk radio was often the soundtrack in his office. He had a lot of caricature in him, the Jersey wiseguy who was always on the verge of telling you that he knew a lot more than you did.

  Not only was Kraft a new owner, but he was an owner who had inherited Parcells’s contract. The coach was actually signed by Orthwein, Kraft’s predecessor. Orthwein stayed out of Parcells’s way and let him run football operations as he saw fit. Kraft wasn’t going to do that. He believed in giving managers their space, but he did not believe in giving any manager carte blanche. He wasn’t going to let Parcells wall himself off in football operations while “the suits” did their jobs elsewhere. As an owner, he was going to ask business questions. And as a football fan who had paid more for a team than anyone before him, he believed he was entitled to have his football questions answered. It was his team.

  There was no compatibility between the two. While Belichick and Kraft would talk for hours about the game as well as the mathematical principles that are applied to the salary cap–driven NFL, Kraft had no such bond with Parcells. In a way, the differences between Kraft and Parcells helped expose the growing differences between Belichick and Parcells. One man was uncomfortable with the owner’s style. One man was eventually impressed by it. “Everyone has dreams, but the Krafts take it up a notch or three,” Belichick once said. “Hey, a lot of people dream of meeting a rock star one day; Robert brings in Elton John for his anniversary party. When you and I receive a box or a package in the mail, we want to know what’s inside. So does Robert, but before he gets to all that, he’s figuring out whether he manufactured the box. And if not, why not? It’s probably a different way of thinking from most people, but I think it’s one of the things that draws us together.”