Belichick took the whiteboard and the black marker and in ten seconds drew up “F 27 Trap,” even diagramming it so Bellino scored a touchdown! Belichick handed it to Bellino, who gave it a thumbs-up as Belichick beamed as though he were six again.
It’s a side of Belichick most people don’t see. The man who mumbles at most questions, who threw away his Microsoft Surface tablet on the sideline, and who commented on Brady’s record-tying 200th win with, “Well, it’s a quarterback’s job to win games,” is actually a thinking-man’s mush-ball. That’s right. He puts the team first, he honors the traditions of football (learned at the Naval Academy), and he wants, first and only, for each player to just “Do Your Job.” Belichick is not sentimental about the ability of players, but he does have a soft spot for those who give their all.
When Belichick gave up his tablet, which the league uses on the sidelines to provide images of players (and which he declared a nightmare), he said, old school, “I’ll stick with pictures—there just isn’t enough consistency.” Ah, consistency, one of Belichick’s favorite concepts. In 1975, after he’d been the captain of Wesleyan lacrosse, the Baltimore Colts hired him as a glorified gofer. He had two more stops, Detroit and Denver, while he was mastering the NFL game, then he joined Parcells with the Giants in the 1980s. Parcells, never one to embrace anybody publically, called him Coach Doom and Gloom, but Belichick was an excellent defensive coach.
In 1979, on a windy day in Giants Stadium, the great Will McDonough said to me out the side of his mouth, “Go meet that guy, Bill Belichick, he’s going to be great.” I hustled across the field and extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Lesley Visser from the Boston Globe.” He looked at me like I was from Mars. We talked about lacrosse, since I had lived for a while in Easton, Maryland, which is on the Eastern Shore, across from Annapolis, and both are big on lacrosse. It was a natural conversation, not the scripted responses he gives now. I’ve had many dealings with Bill over the last three decades, pregame, postgame, features, and conversations, and he’s been all over the spectrum—friendly, cold, dismissive, and warm. The famed NFL General Manager Ernie Accorsi, who hired Belichick as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in 1991, once said, “Almost better than anyone, Bill Belichick learned from his mistakes. He learned how to win Super Bowls.”
I used to think I knew Bill Belichick (there was a time when we exchanged personal Christmas cards!), and I always flattered myself that I understood him. I had had a private school education at Derby Academy, and he was a product of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Although it might seem unimaginable, I can guarantee there was a time that Belichick said “Yes, Sir” and “No, Sir” and looked people in the eye. In New England, he is considered emotionless and remote. He lives in Hingham and Nantucket, but the way he acts, he could live anywhere. It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s that he doesn’t care if you care. After that, he just wins division titles, conference titles, and five Super Bowls. And for that, New England has decided that he has earned their trust.
People who know him well say he actually has a sense of humor, that he jokes and even laughs out loud. In thirty-five years, I’ve seen this once or twice. Bill is sarcastic, busting players for giving up too much yardage on third down, questioning every player on a specific route, then dressing up for a player’s Halloween party. If you love football, if you “Do Your Job,” he’s fun to play for; if not, you’re gone. When I met him in 1979, he was part of the great Ray Perkins’s staff. Perkins was a taskmaster—he’d coached at Alabama and learned from the legendary Bear Bryant, but Perkins and I got along great. My original impression was that Belichick was socially awkward (one friend calls him an “epic slog”), but that didn’t include his depth, the acumen it took to go to Andover and Wesleyan. And of all the people he could have befriended at Andover, he picked Ernie Adams, a guy with no ego who loved Latin, football, and naval history. I always said that underneath Belichick’s boorish behavior is a prep-school guy who knows exactly what is going on.
Yes, Belichick has made some questionable moves—first-round disappointments in Brandon Meriweather and Laurence Maroney, and both the Spygate and Deflategate sagas—but the number of career victories (more than two hundred) and five Super Bowl rings prove that the man is the best among active coaches, actually better than many coaches in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. One interesting aspect of Belichick is how he flipped from being obsessed with defense to being obsessed with offense, how he went from designing low-scoring games to becoming the pass-happy Patriots. The Patriots set the NFL season scoring record in 2007, then led the league again in scoring in 2012, while setting the league record for first downs. Belichick grew to love the no-huddle and rule changes that favored the offense, and he decided that it’s better to aim for 45 points a game than 20.
Belichick was a football lifer from the start. Born in Nashville, his father moved around until finally settling in as a scout for the Naval Academy. Steve Belichick would take young Bill, an only child, to practices, and when things got busy, Bill would go by himself to a projector room and break down film. Bill Parcells, his coach from 1983 to 1990, said, “Bill lived this game his whole life. He knew the nuances at a very early age. He likes to portray the image of an outlaw, but he’s really just a guy who likes to look at film and diagram plays.”
I remember once when I had to do a story on Andre Rison, who played for Belichick with the Cleveland Browns. Rison’s girlfriend at the time was Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, a member of the group TLC. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame agreed to close for one hour so Rison and Left Eye could give CBS a tour. I told Andre that he could not be late, and Bill suggested I take Andre’s AMEX card and not give it back to him until he was on the steps of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It worked perfectly, and it made me laugh. Even though Belichick had a terrible experience in Cleveland, he surrounded himself with greatness. The assistant coaches with the Browns, among others, were Nick Saban (of Croatian descent, as is Belichick), Jim Schwartz, and Kirk Ferentz. And Belichick outworked them all. God forbid you had family or kids—Bill lived in a rented apartment with a cardboard box as a coffee table. When the assistant coaches didn’t break down film exactly as he wanted, he spent countless hours breaking it down with them.
After three years of losing football, Belichick turned it around in 1994, winning eleven games, but Art Modell was at the end of his bank account and was moving the team to Baltimore. I covered the last game in Cleveland in December of 1995, with the 20-degree wind whipping off Lake Erie and people burning stuffed dolls of Modell. But Modell felt he had nowhere to go and no help from the local government. Instead of 80,000 people freezing and cheering at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, there was bitterness and silence, and it took a toll on Belichick. The Browns won the game, but Cleveland had lost six of their last seven games and the city was depressed. I’ll never forget Belichick’s final press conference, as people taunted, “Bill Must Go.” Belichick waited for them to finish, and it was clear he was just as torn as they were. His next few years were rocky, coaching with Parcells for both the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. Wanting to get out from under the enormous shadow of Parcells, he finally bolted back to New England and from there—destiny. Did he make Tom Brady, or did Brady make him? We’ll never know, but the culture Belichick created has stood the test of time. Do your job.
CHAPTER 11
In the early 1980s, after John Madden had been out of coaching for nearly five years, I took the train with him to Minnesota. It was Amtrak’s “Lake Shore Limited,” meaning it stopped in Chicago. John was only forty-four then; he’d coached for ten years with the Oakland Raiders and had a Super Bowl title and an ulcer to show for it. In 1979, he went into broadcasting, but he soon felt crowded at 30,000 feet. With the Raiders charter flights, he would sit in his seat for takeoffs and landings, then he’d get up to talk to coaches and players. But when he became a broadcaster, he had to sit in his seat. He hated it. In the late fall of 1979, he had what h
e called a “full-blown panic attack” in Tampa, sweating all the way to New Orleans, where he called his wife Virginia (then in Oakland) to come get him by car. That’s when he went to Amtrak.
I met him outside his home at the Dakota in New York. His huge apartment was across from where John and Yoko lived, and Madden was there in 1980 when Lennon was shot outside the entrance. We took the train from Penn Station, and I’ll never forget the scene. Madden was six foot four, wearing sneakers with untied laces, and he was already famous from the Miller Lite ads. The railroad car we boarded was nearly full except for one seat next to John. The next guy who got on the train took that seat. John looked at me sideways until the man finally said, “Do you think the Giants have a chance this year?” And so it went at every stop—Syracuse, Cleveland, Toledo, Elkhart, Indiana.
John loved people and they loved him, but he had some rules. “You can never let them buy you a drink,” he said, “because then they think they can sit with you and nurse it for three hours.” He also had certain favorites in the dining car, which comprised ten small tables with blue paper tablecloths. John loved the short ribs, and was saddened when Amtrak took them off the menu. From then on, he went for the chicken Kiev. Always America’s best-known commuter, Madden enjoyed the club car and the endless questions about the Raiders’ 32–14 win over the Vikings in Super Bowl XI, which he loved, as he said of the game played at the Rose Bowl, “because it was played on grass. Real grass.” After a few years of crisscrossing the country by train, he went to the Madden Cruiser.
In Central Park with friends at midnight as the millennium ended
It began in 1987 when John needed a bus for a photo shoot, so he rented Dolly Parton’s tour bus. He loved it and decided to get one of his own. He became a celebrity on wheels, at first with Greyhound—an $800,000 command post called the Madden Cruiser. It was a blast. With two drivers, in the beginning Willie Yarbrough and Dave Hahn, with Joe Mitchell later replacing Hahn, the forty-five-foot luxury coach was a rolling party, filled with friends or players or his agent, Sandy Montag. By the time he retired in 2009, Madden had been through four buses, and during his ten years with Outback Steakhouse and his buddy, CEO Chris Sullivan, Madden had visited more than half of the one thousand Outbacks in America. Madden loved every one of those buses, the E4500 Entertainer made by Motor Coach in Schaumberg, Illinois. When the Madden Cruiser pulled into town, people lined up to see it, like the bus was a celebrity itself.
I remember once in Chicago, I’d ridden with him to do a Bears game at Soldier Field, and the bus was parked down by the Navy Pier. More people oohed and ahhed at the red and white cruiser (later orange and green with an Australian Outback boomerang painted on the side) than they did at the 150-foot Ferris wheel. There was no denying it was impressive. With multiple TVs, cell phones, an enormous bedroom, and complete navigation system, John didn’t want for anything. There was a deal to traveling with him on the bus. No complaining, no stopping except for gas, a greasy diner, or a high school game. And no being late. “Wheels up at 10 AM,” John would say, and if you weren’t outside the Dakota at 9:45, the bus was leaving without you.
Young people might not know him now, but John Madden was a Mark Twain of our time. His observations were original and funny. One time, riding through Iowa, he said, “I don’t get it with dark chocolate—it’s like they got halfway to milk and quit.” Another time, on our way to a 49ers game, he said, “You know, in a hotel, where you sleep by the side of the bed where the phone is? You must never do that, because that’s where every businessman sat his ass while he was on the phone.” There was no telling what would come out of his mouth. When riding in Nebraska one time, John said, “People in Nebraska weren’t just pioneers—they know their Cornhuskers!”
John loved enthusiasm, and he loved learning. He told me once that he came within one degree of getting his PhD (he already had a master’s) but that if someone like him could get a PhD, what was it worth? As a teenager, he read everything by John Steinbeck, especially Travels with Charley—and that book informed his life. Madden wanted to see America, not just fly over it. He was born in Austin, Minnesota (the home of Spam, as he often reminded me), but he only lived there until he was six. Then his family moved to California, but he never lost his love of people and places. He would watch fishermen in Longboat Key, Florida, or people raking leaves in Green Bay. His favorite Mexican food was a restaurant called Chuy’s in Van Horn, Texas, where he’d call ahead of time and Mama Chuy would make chicken and beans and rice. He loved ordering off the plastic laminated menu, and he devoured Mama Chuy’s homemade tortillas.
Pregame interview with John Madden and Pat Summerall at Super Bowl XXIV
When traveling, Madden would sit by the window on the right-hand booth, with a Diet Coke or bottle of water, and watch I-80 in New York disappear into Middle America. When coming from California, he would take Interstate Highway 5 and stop at Wool Growers, a Basque restaurant in Los Banos, where Madden had the pork chops and ice cream. What he’d learned from Steinbeck was just how big America really is, and wherever you are reading this, Madden was right—you shouldn’t just go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or Orlando, you should spend time in the middle. Madden always said that before anyone could be a senator or a president, he or she should travel the country—“How can you represent America if you haven’t seen it?” Madden himself had to learn it the hard way. One of his assistants with the Raiders in the mid-1970s was his childhood friend John Robinson. Robinson told John that he had no life other than looking at football tapes or coaching games. Madden told Robinson he was right—and ten years later, after he’d changed his life, we’d stop in a diner in Elko, Nevada, to eat and talk and walk. Madden used to say he slept better on the bus than he did at home.
Madden’s life was easy in some respects. He didn’t have to drive through rush-hour traffic, he slept through it. He missed most of the people honking and waving at the Madden Cruiser like it was some kind of display at the Smithsonian. He could look out the window at the wide, open spaces and identify a gray burro or a llama or a deer. Then he could drive into the glorious foliage of western Pennsylvania. We would stop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, and eat at Vinny’s, where John was treated like a visiting dignitary. Madden went crazy over small places with an Ace Hardware store in the center of town. He would talk to the managers about peg hooks and power tools. One year for Christmas, John gave me the bus as a present on Christmas Eve. I got twenty-five of my girlfriends, and the Madden Cruiser went around to bars in New York. John didn’t come with us, but he said if any of these young women couldn’t get lucky on Christmas Eve getting off the Madden Cruiser, they might as well move.
He really enjoyed his busman’s holiday, taking fifty hours to cross the country, usually on Interstate 10 in the South or Interstate 80 in the North. And he loved discovering new places, like a seafood joint in Mississippi or a new cafe in the Twin Cities. He would stop for a festival or a softball game, and he lived by the Outback motto on the front of the bus, “No Rules, Just Right.” By the time we would get back to I-80 headed into New York, John’s spirits would fall. He hated the construction and the bumper-to-bumper traffic. He missed eating at Grandpa’s Steakhouse in Kearney, Nebraska, or the small Italian place in Reno, Nevada. The only thing that saved his sanity was that he felt America was balanced: “People in big cities didn’t want to live on the farms and the people in Kansas don’t want to live in New York.”
CHAPTER 12
I shouldn’t admit it, but I loved having Thanksgiving on the Madden Cruiser. I know my mother and my aunts and my cousins missed me, and I pretended to be blue, but it was great being in either Dallas or Detroit when John had his six-legged turkey and the players would come by after the game for a spread that included green bean casserole, hearty stuffing, cornbread, sautéed carrots, plus my favorite sweet potatoes with brown sugar, marshmallows, cinnamon, and nutmeg. John’s two drivers, Dave Hahn and Willie Yarbrough, would hide the pan of sweet p
otatoes until I got there, in case I had to do a postgame report and the players had wolfed it down.
Traveling in sports for forty years has not only shown me the way America lives; it’s taught my taste buds a thing or two. I was a child of simple food: grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, Fenway Franks, bologna, and Velveeta. But going to all these great cities showed me just how good food can be. To this day, I still don’t cook, but I appreciate regional differences.
I had my first po’boy in New Orleans when I went to an NCAA Regional in Baton Rouge in 1976. I have to say, I didn’t really get the po’boy—I can’t stand oysters—but the games were fantastic: Indiana, Marquette (Al McGuire was late for the tip-off), Western Michigan, and Alabama. Bob Knight, of course, won the National Championship that year with one of his greatest teams, and I remember thinking, Wow, Pete Maravich played here in Baton Rouge. I did like eating a muffaletta, which I think was made of pork and olives.
Some twenty-seven years later, CBS sent me to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, not far from Baton Rouge, to spend the day with Jake Delhomme, quarterback of the Carolina Panthers, shortly before they lost to Tom Brady and the Patriots in the great Super Bowl XXXVIII. It’s a pretty part of the country, two hours west of New Orleans, deep in Cajun country. Half the street signs are in French. Jake was 100 percent Cajun, the proud son of Jerry and Marcia Delhomme (French for “of the man”) and husband of Keri Melancon, whom he met in seventh grade. There are only seven thousand people in Breaux Bridge, and half of them had “Geaux Jake!” signs planted in their front lawns, like he was running for office. The day I went there, his mother had spent all morning making the famous Cajun delicacy boudin, which is a French euphemism for “disgusting pork liver and heart meat.” I told Jake there was no way I could eat that sausage and he said, “My mother spent half the night and all morning making it for you and you will eat it.” Ugh. I did, biting into the pork sausage casings while twenty grandchildren were watching, and I pretended to be thankful. What happened to grilled cheese sandwiches?
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