by Ian O'Connor
Sometimes at practice, Laramore dunked a ball in a bucket of water, to simulate game conditions in a rainstorm, and handed it to his center. Bill made a clean snap to Terry every time. Whether the ball was wet or dry, the quarterback said, “we never had any problems with any fumbles or anything like that. I don’t remember dropping a single snap.” Soaking a practice ball to prepare players for miserable game conditions was a coaching method Belichick himself would later adopt.
Chris Carter, a gifted tailback and safety, had played a lot of ball with Belichick growing up and was by far the superior athlete. He shattered the Annapolis single-season rushing record with more than 1,200 yards as a senior and twice ran for four touchdowns in a game; at one point he was the only white starter on the school’s basketball team. But Belichick impressed Carter as an advanced tactician who thought his way around the football field. “We had a pretty good offensive line,” Carter said, “and Bill was the leader of that offensive line. He was the signal caller, and his size was not a hindrance . . . He was always one of those guys who always had something good to say before the crew would go out for the game. He was not a rah-rah guy, but he had good, solid information. He got a lot of that from his dad.”
Perhaps Belichick’s most conspicuous on-field moment during his senior season unfolded against Bel Air High School. Annapolis had a 5-0 record entering that game and had outscored its opponents by a 158–66 margin. Bel Air took an 8–0 lead before the Panthers fumbled on their way into the end zone, and before Belichick, No. 50, alertly pounced on the loose ball to apparently give his team a touchdown. “Everyone was jumping around,” Terry said. Only there was a problem: The official on the scene ruled that in the mad scramble to retrieve the fumble, Belichick had not gained control of the ball before he touched the back line of the end zone. In other words, it was a touchback, not a touchdown, giving the ball back to Bel Air.
“No, no, no,” the ref barked at Belichick. “You’re out of bounds.”
To the surprise and dismay of some of his teammates, Belichick responded, “Good call, ref. That’s the right call.” Laramore’s reaction? “Al wanted the touchdown,” Terry said. “He didn’t like it as much.”
Annapolis lost that game, then got crushed by Good Counsel in the next one, 52–6. The Panthers rebounded with decisive victories over Andover and Glen Burnie, which had shared the county title with the Panthers the previous year. Laramore would never let a season get away from him without putting up a hell of a fight. He knew how to reach his boys in his pregame talks, often citing everyday life challenges and connecting them to the team prayer. “It didn’t make any difference what faith you were,” said one colleague. “It was like he would be talking to each person in that room individually, looking them square in the eye. I could see it in their body language. They were ready to play, brother. I mean, those kids had damp eyes. They could not wait to get out of that room. You better not be standing in the doorway or your ass was going to get run over.”
Annapolis was all set up for another season-ending duel with a Severna Park team that had ruined its hopes for an outright championship in ’68. Before that road game in Belichick’s junior year, Laramore was quoted in the Evening Capital as saying, “We’ll be there at 11 a.m. and ready to play.” That was the extent of his public expressions of confidence.
Laramore never wanted his team shooting off its collective mouth—he once gave one of his captains a look that could kill for predicting victory at a pep rally. But Big Al did want people to know that he would play any team, anywhere. And he wanted to play and beat the Severna Park Falcons more than he wanted to beat anyone. “For whatever reason,” Bounelis said, “Severna Park had our number.”
On November 22, 1969, Annapolis and Severna Park met for a Saturday afternoon contest in Panther Stadium; school officials had decided against continuing the series on Thanksgiving Day. Annapolis took the field before a packed and energized crowd, hoping to avoid a defeat that, for the second consecutive year, would leave the Panthers with only a share of the county title.
Severna Park scored first on a Mike Thompson six-yard run in the first quarter, setting a tense tone. But a big Carter gain in the third quarter preceded Scott Crandall’s eight-yard touchdown, making it 6–6. (Both teams’ two-point-conversion attempts failed.) The Panthers wanted to avenge the ’68 defeat, but they knew that a tie would give them sole possession of the championship. They preserved that tie with two goal-line stands, finishing with a 6-0-1 league record (8-2-1 overall) and another testament to Laramore’s standing as one of the very best coaches in the state.
His departing center, Belichick, still had a season left to play in lacrosse, a sport that had occupied a firm place in his heart since he began playing it around the seventh grade. He would be a starting defenseman on an 8-2 team that lost the county title to unbeaten Severna Park. The Falcons’ coach, Ron Wolfe, raved about the impact Belichick had on the group.
“Bill had a great stick,” Wolfe said. “He was physical for his size, and he knew how to compensate for his lack of speed with positioning on the field. He got to where he had to be . . . It was like having a coach on the field.”
Al Laramore always said the same thing about Belichick. He told his wife that Bill’s extreme intelligence was a valuable asset at a time when Big Al didn’t have even one assistant coach helping him. Laramore ran the Panthers all by himself, so in practices and in games he needed a few reliable teenage advocates to cover his back while he was tied up with this or that unit. Chris Carter was one. Belichick was another.
“He treated us almost as equals,” Carter said of his coach.
This had a tremendous effect on Belichick, who would talk about Laramore’s influence on him for years to come. Big Al would go on to break records at Annapolis High over the better part of the next two decades, before his life was tragically cut short by a heart attack. Little Bill? He would carry Laramore’s lessons with him on his journey into manhood. For his farewell to Annapolis, Belichick quoted the 17th-century English poet Abraham Cowley next to his senior yearbook photo.
“I would not fear nor wish my fate,” read the passage, “but boldly say each night, / tomorrow let my son [sic] his beams display / or in the clouds hide them; i have lived today.”
Bill had decided to attend one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools, Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, for a year of postgraduate study. As for college, Belichick told his father he wanted to find another school in New England.
“You’ve never even been to New England,” Steve Belichick shot back, ignoring the summer trips to Nantucket his son had made with Mark Fredland.
“Yeah,” Bill said, “but I’ve done some studying and found there are more good schools in New England than anywhere else, and I want to see them.”
So, 350 years after the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower, Bill Belichick would go ahead and discover New England. It was a place that would dramatically change his life.
3
Andover
Bill Belichick was staying late after practice to work on his snaps, which was not in itself a profound development. He was the new starting center on the football team at Phillips Academy, and he had already proven himself to be diligent in his approach to the game.
But this was a rainy day before the season opener, and the grass was wet, and a fellow offensive lineman and two-way starter named Dana Seero was struck by a sudden thought. Phillips had lost a game the previous season because its center had snapped a rain-soaked football over the punter’s head, sending it rolling a good 30 yards in the wrong direction, and here was Belichick making sure the same thing did not happen two years in a row.
Was Belichick, a fresh postgraduate arrival, somehow familiar with the story of this crushing 1969 defeat? Or was he just doing what a coach’s son ordinarily does by using a set of circumstances—in this case, a passing storm and an ample supply of footballs—to give himself and his team a competitive edge?
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bsp; Seero didn’t believe Belichick had any knowledge of the 1969 season at Andover, and it didn’t matter. Either way, the four-year Andover player had never before seen anyone on his team make such productive use of bad weather. This is good, Seero told himself as he watched Belichick put in the extra work. This way, if it rains, he’ll be dialed in and we won’t lose the damn game.
In later years, Seero thought Belichick was embracing a militaristic view of football that rainy day, honed by watching his father coach Naval Academy students who were taught in the classroom and on the field that every detail needed to be addressed with life-or-death urgency. Young Belichick also learned from the Midshipmen that authority figures were to be respected, not questioned, and that a player should celebrate a team’s achievements rather than waste time celebrating himself.
The time he spent around disciplined and mature young men had helped make Belichick college-ready straight out of Annapolis. But according to David Halberstam’s Education of a Coach, Belichick decided he’d spend a year in prep school if he couldn’t get into Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, or Williams. After Belichick went 0 for 4, he ended up at Phillips, where Steve Belichick’s staffmate at the academy, Dick Duden, had been a legendary player.
The all-boys boarding school, widely known as Andover, was founded in 1778 (George Washington sent his nephews there) and was notarized by Paul Revere, who engraved Andover’s official seal, which includes images of an active beehive and a flowering plant and the Latin mottos FINIS ORIGINE PENDET (“The end depends on the beginning”) and NON SIBI (“Not for self”). The school was tucked in the northeastern part of Massachusetts and was known for its green grass and blue blood.
Andover had a gorgeous campus with a colonial vibe, a majestic bell tower encased in brick and dedicated to the 85 Andover men who died in World War I, and a physical plant superior to those of many liberal arts colleges on the East Coast. America’s ruling class and society elites sent their sons to Andover, the second home to what would be the Bush dynasty from Texas—George H. W., George W., and Jeb would all attend—and to future scholars, philanthropists, and Wall Street financiers. It was a hell of a place for a ham-and-egger like Bill Belichick—former caddie, furniture mover, and busboy—to go to school.
Some tension naturally existed between the preppies and the townies, and occasionally word filtered out about a Friday night fight between the groups. Only two and a half miles separated Phillips from Andover High School, and there was some interaction between the two (the Andover track team would practice at the Phillips indoor facility), but the schools were effectively worlds apart. One working theory, said Seero, was that Phillips “always accepted one big, tough townie a year to keep the rest of the townies away from campus.”
Seero was a working-class student and a local who figured he’d end up like his brothers: as a football captain at the very public Andover High. “But poor, dumb Dana Seero from Andover High had good grades, played the trombone, and was pretty good at football, and I went to Andover,” he said. “It’s a terrific school that prepares you for a lot of things. There are incredibly talented people there, and they don’t give a fuck if your name is Bush or Seero or Belichick. They only care if you can deliver the goods. And if you can’t handle never being the best at anything while you’re there, don’t go there.”
Belichick found out quickly that he wouldn’t be even close to the best at anything at Andover. He’d had solid grades at Annapolis, but he wasn’t at the top of his class, and, by his own admission, he devoted more time and energy to sports than he did to his schoolwork.
At Phillips, Belichick had no choice but to work harder than he’d ever worked in his young life. The school offered little support—and certainly no babying—for even the most pampered incoming students; Phillips all but advertised itself as a sink-or-swim place. “And if you sank, that was too bad,” Seero said. “That means you didn’t belong at Andover, and off you go.”
Belichick was ill prepared for the rigors of the Phillips curriculum, and he was, at times, in awe of the academic prowess of his fellow students. As the football team manager, Timothy Gay, put it, “Even the jocks were smart at Andover.” Belichick was very much out of his element and out of his league. He described the typical Andover student as “light-years ahead of me” and told himself he needed to pick it up if he didn’t want to be left behind.
Coming from his conservative upbringing, Belichick also experienced at Phillips a culture shock of a different kind. College campus protests over the war in Vietnam, the bombings in Cambodia, and the shootings at Kent State (where National Guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine) inspired at Andover a sense of rebellion that challenged the headmaster, John Kemper, a West Point graduate and career Army man. Students had been pushing back on decades-old restrictions on hair length and smoking, on required attendance at chapel, and on the mandatory dress code of jackets and ties. (They all received, on arrival, a 30-page book of rules on behavior and penalties for violations.)
Over time, the Andover administration backed off on its restrictions and allowed for the new environment of encouraged expression that Belichick encountered in the fall of 1970, when he became part of a student body of 879 boys. Recreational drug use was rampant on campus—the tall and entitled Andover tennis star Jeb Bush was among the regular marijuana users—and the school newspaper, the Phillipian, proudly announced that it was “uncensored” and that its faculty adviser “never sees the paper until after it has been printed and distributed.” The paper featured editorials that Belichick said he found “outspoken.” Overmatched by the academic demands, taken aback by some by the student freedom and liberalism he never saw at the Naval Academy, Belichick was a postgraduate, or PG, in need of a kindred spirit. He found one in a bespectacled boy born in Waltham, Massachusetts, named Ernie Adams, the son of a Navy officer. Ernie was a mad football scientist in training.
Adams had attended Brookline’s Dexter School, the former home of John F. Kennedy, whose son John Jr. would end up at Andover 13 years after his father’s assassination. At the time Belichick met Adams, who had arrived at Andover in the fall of 1967, Ernie was most likely among the only two or three teenagers in America outside of Annapolis who had read Steve Belichick’s book, Football Scouting Methods, cover to cover. (Miraculously enough, Andover teammate Evan Bonds had also read it.) “I do remember Ernie telling me at one point he was very excited . . . to know Bill was coming as a PG,” said Gay, the team manager. “He ran up to Bill all excited and said, ‘Let’s talk about your dad’s book.’”
Adams was thrilled to find that Bill was Steve’s son, and Bill was thankful to have something in common with a classmate who was a budding Latin scholar and whose intellect was clearly superior to his own. Adams played beside his new friend on the line, at left guard. If Belichick felt a bit intimidated by the collective IQ of even Andover’s football players, Seero, the right tackle, said he shouldn’t have been. “Bill shows up for two-a-days and walks down the hallway of the dorm and meets a guy who happens to be Ernie Adams,” Seero said, “and Ernie is practicing conjugating Latin verbs . . . I’ve got news for you: Ernie was the only guy doing schoolwork that week on the whole football team. Ernie was the one academic freak.”
Bonds, the right guard, might’ve qualified as well; he was already advancing an academic career that would culminate in a Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard. But Bonds, Belichick, and Adams were as serious about studying football as any boy on that campus was about studying anything. While other Andover students were reading the classics, Bill and Ernie were going to the library to rummage through back issues of Sports Illustrated and read about football.
It was a daily obsession, not a hobby. They watched film, talked strategy, drew up plays in their rooms, and lost themselves in the minutiae of the game. Lou Hoitsma, a math teacher and assistant football coach, marveled over how rare it was for boys of that age to devote so much time to the philosophies and formations that might or might not work in
a particular week.
Adams and Bonds and the other students who had been at Phillips for years could feed their football addictions and still manage their classwork with little difficulty. Belichick did not have that luxury. The son of a woman who had taught French in college, Belichick thought he could handle French 3 at Andover as easily as he’d handled four years of the language at Annapolis. His first assignment was to read Les Misérables, and he needed to look up every word of it. “Math was the same way,” Belichick said. “I needed extra help every day. I’d turn in a paper I would have gotten an A on in high school, and it would come back with red marks all over it.”
Young Bill had better luck in anthropology, a class he initially had no interest in taking and ended up adoring. “I remember really wanting to go to that class,” he said. “I realized that going off the beaten path sometimes isn’t a bad thing. Andover gave me an appreciation of a lot of different things.”
He was grinding in the classroom just as surely as he was grinding on the football field, where Steve Sorota, the longtime head coach, had a way of seamlessly integrating the one-year postgraduates into his program. Belichick was particularly impressed with Sorota’s ability to keep the incumbents happy while sometimes replacing them with PGs, who were often regarded as ringers.
A smallish man, Sorota was a former teammate of Vince Lombardi’s at Fordham, but he was not a practitioner of Lombardi’s game-day decorum. He was forever a taciturn figure on the sideline, a thinker in rimless glasses, and a mental error by one of his players was more likely to be met with a piercing glare than a shout of “What the hell is going on out here?”
Gay said Sorota “never waved his arms. He just stood there and managed things.” In fact, said Stratis Falangas, the left tackle, “I don’t think I ever heard Sorota raise his voice.”
Despite the clear academic priorities, they took their football pretty seriously at Andover, where Sorota presided over a varsity team and as many as six junior varsity teams. Sorota was a tough guy from a tough town—Lowell, Massachusetts—but he wasn’t Al Laramore at Annapolis. “It was not ‘my way or the highway,’” said Tim Callard, one of his assistants. And Sorota wasn’t married to a singular style of play, either.
