Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time

568 Pages·2018·10.25 MB·English

by  Ian O’Connor

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.
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
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
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.