Belichick Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Teacher

  Big Al

  Andover

  Wesleyan

  Billy Ball

  Little Bill

  Cleveland

  Mistakes by the Lake

  Border War

  Brady

  Champion

  Bigger Bill

  Dynasty

  Photos

  Spygate

  Imperfection

  Hernandez

  Deflation and Elation

  The Comeback

  Human Bill

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author’s Interviews and Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Ian O’Connor

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: O’Connor, Ian, author.

  Title: Belichick : the making of the greatest football coach of all time / Ian O’Connor.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018017251 (print) | LCCN 2018019659 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544786752 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544785748 (Hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Belichick, Bill. | Football coaches—United States—Biography. | New England Patriots (Football team)—History. | Kansas City Chiefs (Football team)—History. | Atlanta Falcons (Football team)—History.

  Classification: LCC GV939.B45 (ebook) | LCC GV939.B45 O25 2018 (print) | DDC 796.332092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017251

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photograph © Maddie Meyer / Getty Images

  v1.0918

  To my kid sister Rita.

  A Giant in life.

  A lion in death.

  Introduction

  People will long recall September 23, 2001, as a momentous date in National Football League history, and yet for a columnist who had reported from the smoldering 9/11 crime scene that was downtown Manhattan, this was no day to write about what transpired between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. This was the first NFL Sunday after terrorists had flown hijacked planes into the World Trade Center towers, committing a mass murder of unspeakable depths. Some 60,000 fans had gathered inside Foxboro Stadium for a three-hour reprieve from the horror of it all.

  I was standing on the sidelines with colleagues Adrian Wojnarowski and Gary Myers during the game’s final minutes, and my story for the next morning’s newspaper was already set. Joe Andruzzi, a Patriots guard from Staten Island, had three firefighting brothers among the responders at Ground Zero, including Jimmy, who had evacuated one of the doomed towers and, by an estimated 45 seconds, had narrowly escaped the fate that claimed more than 400 firefighters, cops, and EMTs. Dressed in their F.D.N.Y. helmets and coats, the Andruzzi brothers were the honorary game captains, joined on the field by their father, Bill, a former New York City cop.

  No, there wasn’t a damn thing between the lines or on the scoreboard that could possibly rearrange my sportswriting priorities on this day. Not even the dawning of the greatest coaching career pro football has ever seen.

  Bill Belichick would lose this game to the Jets by a 10–3 count and fall to 0-2 on the season, to 5-13 in his time in New England, and to 41-57 overall as an NFL head coach. Belichick was facing a potential sixth losing season in seven years of running the Patriots and the Cleveland Browns. No matter what he tried, the coach could not temper the growing suspicion that he was just another brilliant coordinator who didn’t have the leadership skills and charisma to run his own team like his former boss Bill Parcells had.

  But a second-year quarterback named Tom Brady, sixth-round pick, was leading that failed final drive, after the starter, franchise player Drew Bledsoe, had taken a vicious shot from Jets linebacker Mo Lewis. I’d never heard a hit like that around any football field on any level; it sounded as if one of the dressed-up militiamen in the end zone had fired off his musket. As Bledsoe’s backup trotted onto the field in the fourth quarter, looking very Ichabod Crane–ish, I thought of Brady’s underwhelming career at Michigan, of his lack of mobility and athleticism, and of Michigan coach Lloyd Carr’s constant (if failed) attempts to replace him with the younger and more dynamic Drew Henson.

  More than anything, I thought Bill Belichick was done as a head coach.

  Frankly, I wasn’t terribly surprised that Belichick found himself in deep trouble a mere 18 games into his Patriots career. Cleveland owner Art Modell had fired him after the 1995 season for his apparent lack of human relations skills as much as anything else, and had advised Patriots owner Robert Kraft that he’d be making the biggest mistake of his life by giving him a second chance. In fleeing the Jets after the 1999 season, running from his contractual commitment to succeed Parcells, and reneging on his decision just 24 hours earlier to assume control, Belichick only notarized Modell’s feelings. He wrote on a piece of paper that he was quitting his position as “HC of the NYJ.” He handed in his chicken-scratch resignation and then gave his chickenshit reasons for it in the mother of all bizarre New York press conferences.

  That public unraveling appeared to confirm the worst fears about Belichick—that he had a losing personality to go along with his losing record. I’d written a column saying that Kraft would regret this hire, for reasons beyond the first-round pick he gave the Jets as part of the compensation deal. And in the immediate wake of the 0-2 start in 2001, with the Patriots down and Bledsoe out, that prediction looked as good as gold.

  It now stands as commentary more absurd than Belichick’s resignation note.

  On February 4, 2018, when the Patriots lost Super Bowl LII to the Philadelphia Eagles, Belichick’s baffling decision to bench cornerback Malcolm Butler, hero of Super Bowl XLIX, temporarily complicated his legacy. The move angered some Patriots and exacerbated Belichick’s increasingly tense relationship with his two best players, Brady and Rob Gronkowski. The Butler move was a damaging unforced error, and suddenly people were back to questioning the depth of the coach’s greatness.

  But one ill-conceived decision on America’s biggest sports and entertainment stage could not alter Belichick’s place among the game’s enduring icons. Belichick has won more Super Bowls (five) than Hall of Famers Don Shula and Tom Landry combined (four). He has won 28 postseason games—eight more than the next most prolific winner (Landry). Belichick has built and maintained a 17-year dynasty (15 division titles and an average of 12.29 regular-season victories over that period) at a time when the NFL uses the salary cap, the draft, the schedule, and free agency as weapons to prevent franchises from doing just that.

  Belichick hasn’t just reduced the rest of the AFC East to a perpetual punch line; he has made a mockery of the league’s commitment to parity. Along the way, he has surpassed Vince Lombardi as the best NFL coach of all time.

  For me, as a 1982 graduate of St. Cecilia High School, in Englewood, New Jersey, and as a member of the last football team to reach the state finals at that storied school (it closed in 1986), those aren’t easy words to write. Lombardi’s first head coaching job—and only head coaching job before taking over the Green Bay Packers in 1959—was at St. Cecilia, where the Carmelite priests and nuns who
lorded over my youth insisted on punctuality, good penmanship, a daily regimen of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, and a lifelong devotion to this one article of football faith: Nobody will ever compare to our own Saint Vincent.

  Lombardi won five NFL championships in Green Bay, including the first two Super Bowls, and in 1969, his one and only year in Washington, he led the Redskins to their first winning season since 1955. Had cancer not claimed him at 57, Lombardi likely would have established records that no coach would ever touch.

  Some observers view his nine victories in ten postseason games as proof that he still belongs at the top of any historical ranking of coaches, above Belichick, Paul Brown, Papa Bear Halas, Don Shula, Bill Walsh, and Joe Gibbs. But Lombardi ruled a league that offered its players virtually no rights. It was easier back then, through the NFL’s restraint of trade, to keep together a powerhouse team.

  Others might move to knock Belichick down a peg or three because he “lucked” into Brady, the 199th player chosen in the 2000 draft, or because his program was sanctioned for cheating in the Spygate and Deflategate cases. Of course Belichick wouldn’t be Belichick had he spent his entire career with average and aging quarterbacks. In fact, he feared he would be fired if a healthy Bledsoe saddled him with another losing season in 2001. As much as Belichick and his personnel man, Scott Pioli, would never want to see a player get hurt, never mind confront the life-threatening injuries Bledsoe suffered from the Lewis hit, they were privately thrilled they’d found a way to get Brady under center in place of a Kraft favorite whom the owner had just signed to a ten-year, $103 million deal.

  Brady turned out to be an even better player than his childhood idol, Joe Montana. But that shouldn’t count against Belichick. Every legendary coach in every sport has needed a transcendent talent, an on-field, on-court vehicle for his greatness. John Wooden needed Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton. Red Auerbach needed Bill Russell. Lombardi needed Bart Starr. Walsh needed Montana.

  Belichick needed Brady, and the quarterback arrived for him just in the nick of time.

  On the black-ops front, hey, few dynasties are perfect. The stately Wooden won ten national titles while turning a blind eye to the UCLA booster, Sam Gilbert, who supplied the Wizard’s players with extra-benefit goodies the NCAA does not allow. The Yankees of the late 1990s and early 2000s—led by the avuncular Joe Torre—fielded a full roster of significant faces across the pages of the 2007 Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drug use, including Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. The Patriots? Though they acknowledged illegally filming opposing coaches’ signals for years in the Spygate case, they never conceded any material wrongdoing in the Deflategate case, which revolved around the alleged improper deflation of footballs in the January 2015 AFC Championship Game rout of the Indianapolis Colts.

  The league imposed substantial fines and seized first-round picks as a result of Spygate and Deflategate, and that’s why Belichick’s standing in the sport outside of New England isn’t what it is in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Case in point: I was on the phone once with a former Maryland high school coach, Andy Borland, who had competed against Belichick’s coach at Annapolis High, Al Laramore, and had been one of Laramore’s best friends. Borland happened to be watching a college football game that day with a colleague who also knew Laramore. And when that colleague heard Borland was talking to an author working on a biography of Belichick, the man yelled, “Al Laramore never taught his ass to cheat, I’ll tell you that. Put it in the goddamn book.”

  Borland immediately countered his colleague, saying, “I don’t think he’s a cheater, but a great coach.”

  Any right-minded observer of the game knows that Belichick did not become an NFL titan by bending or breaking the rules, even if it represented a part of his playbook. He won more Super Bowls than any coach dead or alive by finding, in the team-centric Brady, the perfect centerpiece of a system forever emphasizing the group’s agenda over individual pursuits. Nobody’s salary or seniority or résumé or draft position would determine his playing time. Belichick would put on the field the Patriots who gave him the best chance to win that week, and nothing else mattered.

  Only it couldn’t be that simple. Belichick is hardly the only boss in the NFL who preaches small-picture sacrifices and selflessness for big-picture gains, or the only head coach who can belt out 18-hour workdays with a nine-to-fiver’s ease. So how in the world did he do this? How did he rage so successfully against the NFL machine? How did that stone-faced automaton at the podium inspire ever-changing circles of young men to compete at such a high level, practice after practice, game after game, for 17 consecutive years?

  I set out to answer those questions in part because of how wrong I was about Belichick in the early winter of 2000, and because of how wrong so many longtime football men were about him. NFL officials practically begged Kraft to stay clear of him. People up and down the New York Giants organization who considered Belichick their finest assistant coach since Lombardi and Landry also believed he would fail in Foxborough, just as he had failed in Cleveland.

  Belichick defied them all, and I wanted to find out how he did it. In the search for answers, in assembling this portrait of a hooded figure who has remained a mystery to most, I interviewed more than 350 people, some under cover of anonymity to protect their relationships with the Patriots’ coach.

  I expected nothing from Belichick as I started this project, which offered him no financial reward and no editorial control. He met those expectations. He declined to be interviewed for this book and asked a number of his friends and colleagues not to speak with me, sometimes using his longtime lieutenant, Berj Najarian, as the messenger.

  Some Belichick associates were terrified to talk and apologized for being unable to share even the warmest stories of a Bill the public never saw. Some would speak only if I promised them protection. (One jokingly asked that I guarantee him immunity from future prosecution.) Some were comfortable enough in their own skin, and confident enough in their place in life, to talk freely about the man, whether he liked it or not.

  I learned a lot about Belichick in the process. I learned he was a game-day reflection not only of his father, Steve, a lifer scout, but also of his high school coach, Laramore. I learned that Belichick once taught a college teammate how to cheat in lacrosse. I learned he was an immature head coach in Cleveland who did some immature things, but that he was also remarkably generous with his overworked assistants. I learned that Belichick grew from a disconnected tyrant with the Browns into a vastly underrated motivator in New England who knew how to lift players, staffers, former teammates, and longtime friends with acts of kindness and decency.

  I learned that he blamed himself for the Patriots’ most devastating defeat, in Super Bowl XLII, and that he always credited his players—in public and in private—for the team’s most glorious victories.

  This book is the yield of what I discovered through my interviews, and from the other sources I have cited in these pages. In the end, I was trying to humanize a person who had no interest in being humanized, and it proved to be the most daunting challenge of my 30-plus years in journalism.

  I think it’s a safe bet to say William Stephen Belichick would have had it no other way.

  1

  The Teacher

  By the time Steve Belichick arrived at Hiram College of Ohio in 1946 to start a full-time career in coaching, he was already something of an all-American success story. He was a college graduate out of the Pennsylvania and Ohio mill towns that had forever produced lifelong miners and factory workers, and he was an honest-to-God NFL equipment manager turned Detroit Lions fullback who had scored three touchdowns in one season before serving in World War II.

  But as much as anything, Belichick was the son of Croatian immigrants who had honored his uniform and his flag by being way ahead of his time—and his country—in matters of black and white.

  Belichick was an armed guard officer in the United Sta
tes Navy when Samuel E. Barnes entered the officers’ club one day on Okinawa and encountered a different kind of enemy within. Every white man present, except one, walked out on Barnes, who commanded a black stevedore battalion and stood among the pioneers known as the Golden Thirteen—the first 13 African American officers in the Navy. This was more than two years before Jackie Robinson made his debut at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field as baseball’s first black player, and more than nine years before Brown v. Board of Education rendered segregated schooling unconstitutional.

  Belichick knew that Barnes had been a three-sport athlete at Ohio’s Oberlin College, and he told Barnes that he need not worry about the walkout and that they should enjoy the empty club together. “He was one of the most unprejudiced persons I’d ever met,” Barnes would say of the white officer who befriended him that day.

  Barnes almost never spoke about his experiences in the war, or about the white seamen who crossed the street when they saw him approaching so they wouldn’t have to salute a black man. He didn’t tell his daughter about his place in history until the 1970s, when she found his picture in a book on African Americans in the military and called him on it. “I’m 22 years old,” Olga told him. “Why did you never speak of this?” Barnes explained that “a lot of people fought in the war,” and that was that. He did tell his wife about Steve Belichick’s grace and dignity, and how that had helped him advance from one day to the next.

  “They were roommates,” Olga said of her father and Belichick, comparing their cross-racial bond to the one between two Chicago Bears running backs in the 1971 film Brian’s Song. “The best example I can give you, though I can’t say it was the same depth of friendship because they were on the same team for years, would be Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo in the sixties, in terms of the kind of respectful relationship they had.”

  Belichick saw a man as a man, and he had long embraced the virtues of equal opportunity and an honest day’s work before showing up at Hiram after the war was done. He had accomplished so much for a 27-year-old raised in the Depression by a father (Ivan) and mother (Marija) who arrived in the United States around the turn of the century with next to nothing to their name—which was Bilicic before their daughter’s first-grade teacher misspelled it and altered it forevermore. The 1920 U.S. Federal Census apparently listed the name as “Biliciek,” though that is not how the family and the teacher came to spell it.