by Ian O'Connor
The snap was true, the hold was pure, and Vinatieri launched the ball high over the outstretched arms of the Rams’ interior linemen. It felt so good, Vinatieri later told his old kicking coach, Doug Blevins, that he had to pick up his head early and watch. Belichick ran out onto the field, near his own 24-yard line, to get a better view of this beautiful kick sailing right down the middle and through the uprights. Belichick threw up his hands toward the Superdome roof, and almost immediately his daughter, Amanda, was right there with him, along with Lawyer Milloy, who would lift him off the ground. Belichick pulled Milloy in with his right arm and Amanda in with his left, pulled them in tight.
“The happiness on Bill’s face,” said Burke, the offensive assistant, “was more palpable than I’d ever seen.”
Little Bill had won a Super Bowl all his own. He was nobody’s coordinator or protégé as the red, white, and blue confetti fell around him. He would call the moment “surreal.” He would call this takedown of St. Louis “a miracle.”
The devastated Rams would call it something else after they staggered off the field. “A sick feeling” was the way Proehl described it. “They cart you off like cattle to get the stage on for the winners, and then you hear the celebration through your locker room.” Asked to identify the difference in the game, Proehl said, “Bill Belichick. It’s that simple. He is a great football coach, and his team knew everything we were going to do.”
During the postgame ceremony, Belichick held the Vince Lombardi Trophy high with his left hand. His 83-year-old father, Steve, joined him on the makeshift stage; Steve found himself standing next to Brady, who had both hands planted on his backwards-turned championship cap as he shook his head in disbelief. Steve’s son said that when he handed the team to Brady in the wake of Bledsoe’s injury, “the Super Bowl was the farthest thing from our minds.”
Now the Super Bowl trophy was right there in Belichick’s hands. He said his players’ selflessness was the reason they had won, and he thanked Kraft for giving up that first-round pick and hiring him when so many thought he was positively mad to do so.
The Patriots partied deep into the night. At some point during the postgame celebration, Belichick was approached by Jason Licht, the team’s national scout. “Wow,” Licht said, “that was awesome. Now what?”
“Now what?” Belichick responded incredulously. “We win more.”
Belichick retreated to the hotel bar to celebrate with his wife and friends, stayed up until 4:30 in the morning, then conducted a Monday morning press conference before flying back home with his team. The next day, 1.25 million fans lined the streets of Boston for a parade celebrating the franchise’s first title since its birth as the Boston Patriots, in 1960, and the city’s first championship team since the 1986 Boston Celtics.
Before the Patriots made their way to the parade route, Belichick was already conducting business for the 2002 season. He approached linebacker Ted Johnson, a starter for most of his seven seasons, and said, “Before we get on the bus, I just want you to know—don’t read anything into it—I put you on the expansion draft list.”
Each team had to make five players available for the incoming Houston Texans to choose from, and Belichick didn’t see the need to wait to inform his. Damn, Johnson thought. He couldn’t even make it to the parade unscathed.
It was just a small reminder that Bill Belichick wasn’t only going to win championships. He was going to win them his way.
12
Bigger Bill
Tom Jackson had a little bit of history with Bill Belichick. Jackson was a Pro Bowl linebacker for the 1978 Denver Broncos, and Belichick was a low-level assistant learning about the 3-4 from Joe Collier, defensive coordinator of the Orange Crush, and spending a lot of time wishing the Broncos would give him bigger responsibilities than he had.
So when Jackson used his ESPN platform on the popular pregame show Sunday NFL Countdown to attack Belichick on the morning of September 14, 2003, he drew a significant amount of blood. This criticism wasn’t coming from a TV guy who had spent more hours in the makeup room than any locker room, or from some newspaper columnist who had never even put on the pads and experienced the living high school hell of a nutcracker drill. This was coming from a man who had competed in 201 regular-season and postseason NFL games and had established himself as a thoughtful voice in his second career.
Jackson was talking about the New England Patriots the Sunday after they’d lost their season opener in Buffalo by a 31–0 score. Belichick had released his captain and popular strong safety Lawyer Milloy five days before that game over a salary dispute, and Milloy had immediately signed with the Bills and contributed a sack of Tom Brady, five tackles, and a forced interception to the rout. Milloy had long been an emotional leader for the Patriots, and his teammates were furious over Belichick’s decision to release the four-time Pro Bowler so close to the start of the season.
To get under the $74.6 million salary cap, Belichick wanted Milloy to take a bigger pay cut than he was willing to take. The coach said it was the toughest decision of his career. He called Milloy, who had made 106 consecutive regular-season starts, a “casualty of the system” and also conceded that he wasn’t replaceable. The year before, Belichick had sent another popular Patriot, Drew Bledsoe, to Buffalo, but the circumstances were entirely different. Bledsoe wanted out after losing his job to Brady, and Belichick was so certain that New England’s former franchise player no longer presented a credible threat to the Patriots that he allowed him to stay in the division, trading him to the Bills in April 2002 for a first-round pick.
Milloy, on the other hand, was still a valuable starter. “Has it ever been this quiet in here?” Tedy Bruschi, another heart-and-soul type, asked reporters in the locker room after Milloy’s release. “I don’t think it has. I think ‘shocked’ is the word . . . You sort of just shake your head and ask yourself Why?” The Patriots then staggered, zombie-like, through the game in Buffalo and lost for the first time in three meetings with Bledsoe.
Milloy couldn’t help but deliver this shot to his former coach’s rib cage after the shutout: “I miss my teammates, I miss the fans. It’s unfortunate that they’re stuck with an organization that deals away players, good players. There’s no loyalty there.”
The Patriots had missed the playoffs in 2002, had lost eight of their seventeen games since upsetting the Rams in the Super Bowl, and had just watched their coach coldly cut the first player to run to him to celebrate his greatest victory. The safety didn’t record an interception in 2002, his tackles were down, and his 30th birthday was approaching, but it appeared that Belichick had underestimated Milloy’s impact on his teammates. He thought he needed to make a business decision, a brutal one, and now it seemed he’d forgotten how important the human heartbeat is in sports.
“Bill Belichick is pond scum again,” wrote Kevin Mannix in the Herald. “Arrogant, megalomaniacal, duplicitous pond scum.”
Belichick was bloodied and on the ropes when Tom Jackson threw his roundhouse punch. Sitting in his ESPN studio across from Chris Berman, a friend of the Patriots’ coach, Jackson started to speak as the question HAS BELICHICK LOST HIS TEAM? appeared on the screen beneath his image. Jackson looked straight into a camera that was transporting his message to football fans from coast to coast and said, “I want to say this very clearly: They hate their coach, and their season could be over, depending on how quickly they can get over this emotional devastation they suffered because of Lawyer Milloy.”
Jackson would later explain to colleagues that he was speaking in a general context, that he was trying to say any NFL coach would face locker room backlash after cutting a popular starter so unceremoniously. Regardless, Patriots players assailed his take as completely erroneous. Rodney Harrison, the former San Diego safety who had replaced Milloy, called Jackson’s claim “one of the stupidest things I ever heard.” The broadcaster would later admit that he never spoke to any Patriots players before delivering an opinion that was presente
d as fact.
Belichick was furious with Jackson and said he wouldn’t dignify his comments with a response. The analyst wasn’t the only ESPN employee Belichick had an issue with. Greg Garber, who had covered the Giants as a newspaperman in the 1980s, had wanted to talk to the coach about the Milloy fallout in the days after the Buffalo loss. He didn’t want to have to ambush him with some jagged-edged questions in his daily press conference.
As a Giants assistant, Belichick had taken Garber into the film room to show him what different coaches were doing. Garber made his request through Belichick’s gatekeeper, Berj Najarian, in the hope that their history might make a difference, and he was disappointed to find out that it didn’t. So the reporter asked his tough questions in the presser, and Belichick never talked to him again.
The world champion coach was a world-class grudge holder. Yet those close to Belichick understood why he was so angry, and so protective of what he’d built. Back in his Denver days, Belichick had been told by the special teams coach, Marv Braden, to make sure he didn’t “downgrade the players too much” during the week, because they needed to play inspired football on Sundays. For all of the player-relations errors he committed in Cleveland, Belichick thought he’d made great strides in that area. He had the proof, not just in the form of the Lombardi Trophy but in what his ex-Brown and current Patriot Anthony Pleasant had told him during the 2001 championship run. Pleasant saw a more caring and compassionate coach in Foxborough than he saw in Cleveland, and for that reason he told Belichick he wanted to win a ring for him.
And then suddenly the coach was cast again in the role of a hater and forced to defend the way he ran his program. It had been a long, trying year for Belichick, who nearly had to attend a second funeral for an offensive coordinator in two seasons. Charlie Weis almost died in the 2002 preseason after undergoing gastric bypass surgery designed to shed weight (Weis weighed more than 300 pounds) and to improve his life expectancy after burying his father at age 56. Weis suffered severe internal bleeding after the stomach-stapling procedure and was given his last rites by a Catholic priest before making a dramatic recovery. Belichick took over the quarterbacks until Weis could return to work, but that position—held down by Tom Brady—wouldn’t be the problem as the Patriots came crashing back to earth.
The defense was the problem, especially the defense against the run. The 2002 Patriots allowed more rushing yards than 30 out of 31 fellow NFL teams, and they couldn’t run the ball themselves. (They finished 28th in rushing yardage and scored only nine touchdowns on the ground; the league leader, Minnesota, scored 26.) They did open the season with three consecutive victories, but those were followed by a streak of four consecutive losses that set a dispiriting tone for the second half of the season.
Most of the low-budget free agents signed in the spring hadn’t breathed any new life into the cause. The Patriots looked like a tired team, and by season’s end Brady’s right arm—forced to throw 601 passes, or 188 more than he threw in 2001—was dangling like a wet towel from the shoulder he separated in the Week 17 game against Miami. New England’s roomier, upgraded workplace inside Gillette Stadium (the new place was supposed to carry the name of CMGI before the Internet company ran into financial trouble) did nothing to reinvigorate a team clearly suffering from a Super Bowl hangover; in fact, if anything, the Patriots’ relative penthouse might’ve made them too comfortable at the office.
Belichick had been creative in his attempts to keep his much-feted players motivated. In August, a year after he took his team on a preseason trip to Providence to see an IMAX film on the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, Belichick took his players to see a documentary on Bill Russell, who had won 11 championships with the Celtics, including eight in a row. Russell himself walked onto the stage after the film ended, and the floored Patriots gave him a standing ovation. The Celtics great spoke to his captive audience about the need to stay focused and hungry in pursuit of a second straight title.
Belichick knew he had to stay on top of his players now more than ever. Victor Green, defensive back, said the Patriots frustrated their coach early in the season by constantly using the word swagger in the news media. “One day in a team meeting,” Green recalled, “Belichick says, ‘Guys, stop with the fucking swagger. I’m tired of that word anyway. What the fuck is that? Swagger?’ He never wants players to get comfortable with success.”
This was always a 24/7 proposition for Belichick, even in the off-season, when the Patriots’ coach was an omnipresent watchman at the team facility. Grey Ruegamer, center, recalled going out late one Friday night for beers with friends and then working out at the facility the next morning. He didn’t see any cars in the parking lot, so after he headed in for a post-workout steam, he was surprised to see a figure sitting at the far end of the sauna. Belichick.
“My mind is racing at this point,” Ruegamer said, “and I’m like Holy shit. I say, ‘Coach, good morning.’ He just looks at me and says, ‘Grey,’ and that was it. That was it for 15 to 20 minutes, and I’m thinking, I must smell like a brewery, and he’s got to be noticing this. Do I say something? Anything? I was freaking out the whole time. He was absolutely an intimidating presence . . . A lot of times he just looked at you and you felt that intimidation. You could be the only two dudes in the hallway, and you’d say, ‘How are you doing?’ And he’d just look right through you like you’d just shit on his shoes.”
Belichick had the same presence in the auditorium for team meetings. Whenever he started quizzing his team on the opposition, fear was in the air. “Every kid who was ever in math or English class,” said tight end Christian Fauria, “and the teacher starts walking around randomly asking questions even though nobody has their hand up knows that feeling. Should I keep my head down and write notes, or make eye contact and dare him to ask me a question? That was the mentality . . . It was ‘Who’s the backup safety? What school did he go to? How did he get there?’ Who’s looking at the backup safety? But you needed to know if the first guy got hurt, if he took his place, what were his strengths and weaknesses if he came into that situation . . . Nobody wanted to be embarrassed in front of their peers.”
On the practice field, regardless of whether the Patriots were making a championship run or just trying to stay above .500, Belichick was forever twirling a whistle in his hand and chasing a perfect day of preparation. J. R. Redmond recalled being about two hours deep into a sloppy practice, with about 12 minutes to go in the session, when Belichick decided he’d seen enough of his team going through the motions. “He blew the horn,” Redmond said, “and we started practice all over from the stretch . . . We went over the plays we messed up again and again.”
Redmond said the 2002 Patriots were on the field five hours that day. The running back ended up with Bill Callahan’s Oakland Raiders in 2003 and found an entirely different culture in place. “If we had a 15-play period of practice,” Redmond said, “and maybe nine of the plays had a busted assignment or a snap-count screwup or some issue, we wouldn’t repeat that play. We just went to the next period. After having one or two practices like that, or a week of practice like that and then playing in the game, that’s a huge difference. We never had one practice like that in New England.”
But as much as Belichick pressed his players on the details and tried to will them into the postseason tournament, they won only nine games and failed to qualify. The same Patriots who had beaten the Jets by 37 points on the road in Week 2 lost to them by a 30–17 count at home in Week 16. “At the end of the game,” said Jets quarterback Chad Pennington, “you could tell they were tired, weary, from two straight years of winning the Super Bowl or trying to defend it . . . You could tell there was a little wind out of their sails.”
On January 26, 2003, the day Super Bowl XXXVII was played between the Oakland Raiders and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Belichick surprised friends and strangers alike by publishing an op-ed piece in the New York Times that was headlined “O.K., Champ, Now Comes the Hard Part.” Pai
d the Times’s standard $450 for his thoughts, Belichick applied his dry wit to the column in cobbling together 37 thoughts on just how uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Among Belichick’s warnings to the eventual winning coach, Tampa Bay’s Jon Gruden:
Several of your players (and their agents) will come looking for a little extra at contract time. After all, didn’t they make Fantasyland possible? Of course they did. Be ready . . .
You’ll stand in front of your team and talk about how different it is being champs, even though you can’t truly know the difference yet . . .
You’ll notice that all your opponents know your team a little better than they did this season: they’ll hit you a little harder and play a little better when you show up. Deal with it . . .
Remember, the Smart Coach/Moron Coach Meter, which is currently way off the charts in the right direction, can be very moody.
Nobody was about to call Belichick a moron for failing to make the playoffs on the championship rebound. Though he disagreed with the popular notion (and the numbers) that said the Patriots were a wildly inconsistent group, Belichick understood that changes had to be made in the off-season. He performed a makeover on his defensive secondary while keeping three-time Pro Bowl corner Ty Law in place, and he traded for four-time Pro Bowl nose tackle Ted Washington. Belichick wasn’t shy about his intentions when he spoke to those he was recruiting to his team.
He invited John Thornton, a defensive tackle for the Tennessee Titans, to make a free-agent visit after he was done spending time with another suitor, Marvin Lewis, of the Cincinnati Bengals. The Patriots were already famous for their no-frills approach to recruiting before Belichick showed up a little late for his meeting with Thornton. The coach was sweating through his cutoff shirt—he’d clearly just come from a workout—and he held a half-eaten apple in his hand. Thornton was impressed by the fact that a Super Bowl–winning coach knew every last detail of his college and pro careers. “He was like an encyclopedia,” Thornton said.
