Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  “Steve had superior intelligence and intellect,” Bill Walsh, the former San Francisco 49ers coach told me, “and he not only saw the game as very few scouts did, but as he was seeing it, he understood as very few scouts did.”

  He taught many younger men how to scout and how to watch film and how to prepare their teams for the next week’s game, but his best pupil, fittingly enough for the Hollywood scenario, was his own son, who started watching film with him when he was all of 9 years old, and one of whose greatest skills as a coach to this day remains his ability to analyze other teams, figuring out both their strengths and their vulnerabilities, and shrewdly deciding how to take away from them that which they most want to do. In that sense, perhaps more than any other, Bill Belichick is his father’s son.

  Steve Belichick was active until the end, a crusty, zestful, honorable, amazingly candid man, someone uncommonly proud of his son’s success. He both enjoyed it, and knew the limits and the dangers of it, and he was very shrewd when other coaches and writers spoke of his son as a genius. He knew the G-word was two edged, potentially something of a setup, that if they used it for you on the way up, they might just as easily use it against you on the way down. “Genius?” he would say. “You’re talking about someone who walks up and down a football field.” At the end of his life he still went down to the Naval Academy regularly to check in with younger coaches, active still, though somewhat irritated that a minor stroke now limited his ability to go surfcasting off Nantucket in the summer.

  His life spanned an extraordinary era in American life, and in American sports. He entered the game after an exemplary career at Cleveland’s Western Reserve University, enjoyed a very brief career—one season—as a professional player in 1941, playing the game when the rewards were, in the financial sense, at least quite marginal. He was paid about $115 a week during his brief tour with the Detroit Lions.

  But even as he began his coaching career at the Naval Academy in 1956, Steve Belichick watched as television changed the nature and importance of football; both college and professional football moved to the very epicenter of American popular culture, and his son, as the most successful of contemporary professional coaches, eventually drew a salary of $4 million a year.

  His was quite a remarkable American story. The name was originally Bilicic. But it was phoneticized, much to the irritation of his mother, by a first-grade teacher in Monessen, Pa., when his older sister entered school and the teacher seemed puzzled by how to pronounce Mary Bilicic’s name. His parents were Croatian immigrants—his father could not read or write in his native language—who settled in the coal-mining and steel-making region of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.

  Steve Belichick was the youngest of five children, and because of the Depression, his father was unemployed during most of his high school years. As a high school student, though he was obviously very bright and got very good grades, he did not take college-track courses. The principal of Struthers (Ohio) High once pointed this out to him and asked him why he didn’t take physics or chemistry. “Why should I take them?” Belichick answered. “I’m only going to work in the steel mills anyway.”

  “Well,” the principal answered, “you never know—maybe there’ll be something out there for you.”

  There was. He was a very good high school running back, a little small, playing at around 160 pounds, but fast with very good peripheral vision and exceptionally good hands. His parents never tried to stop him from playing football—but the importance of sport in the process of Americanization eluded them and they never went to see him play.

  By chance, a local basketball coach connected him with a football coach named Bill Edwards, an old friend of the legendary Paul Brown, the greatest of Ohio coaches; because Brown was legendary, Edwards, his pal, was at least semi-legendary and he coached at Western Reserve in Cleveland, where he had to recruit the kids that the Big Ten schools did not go after. Bill Edwards, for whom William Stephen Belichick is named, offered him a scholarship and in time he became a star running back there. In the process, Edwards became a great family friend and a lifelong mentor.

  For a brief time right before World War II began, Bill Edwards coached the Detroit Lions, and brought Steve Belichick, then waiting to go into the service, to the team, first as an equipment manager and then as a fleet fullback who could handle the ball better than the all-American who was supposed to play fullback. Steve Belichick played on the same team as the famed running back Whizzer White. Belichick averaged 4.2 yards per carry, had his nose broken repeatedly, once quite deliberately by a player named Dick Plasman, who played for the Chicago Bears, “the last player to play in the NFL without a helmet, if that places him for you,” Steve Belichick told me.

  He scored two touchdowns in one game against the New York Giants, and then in a game against Green Bay, a play he never forgot, and the details of which he could recount to his last day on this planet, he took a punt, got it on a perfect bounce, one he said that you dreamed about getting because you did not have to break stride, slipped to the outside with all the Green Bay defenders clustered in the middle of the field, and ran it back 77 yards for a score. During the war, he served with the Navy on merchant marine ships that made Atlantic crossings and then repeated trips from England to France after D-Day.

  After the war, Bill Edwards helped him get a job as a coach at Hiram College in Ohio. There he met a young, vivacious instructor in Romance languages named Jeannette Munn. He asked her out and for their first date took her to a Western Reserve game. The date was not a great success. She thought she might learn a great deal about football, which seemed extremely important to everyone else in Ohio. But he did not talk very much during the game, and instead spent a lot of time smoking cigars.

  After the game they went out for a sandwich, but all sorts of people kept coming up to their table—and he repeatedly failed to introduce her. At first she thought he had exceptionally poor manners, but it turned out that he simply did not know their names—they were fans who recognized him. He was, she realized, something of a local celebrity. He persevered with her. She did not think him particularly handsome, but there was something about him—his obvious raw intelligence, his fierce sense of purpose and his innate honor that she did admire.

  In 1950 they were married, much, as he liked to say, to the surprise of all her friends who were not necessarily football fans and a bit more raffin, and he suspected looked down on him and his world.

  As they grew older and they spoke of their Hiram days, it was like hearing two great comedians who had a routine down perfectly on the question of whether he had tried to get her to give his football players a break on their grades. “I never asked for anything for them,” he would say.

  “Yes, you did,” she would answer, “but you did it subtly—you would ask about how the player was doing, but I knew what you wanted. You didn’t fool me a bit.”

  “Okay, maybe I did,” he would answer, “but you never helped any of them.”

  In 1949, Bill Edwards took the job as head coach at Vanderbilt and brought Steve Belichick along as an assistant. At Vanderbilt he was viewed as a tough, smart, extremely original coach and a brilliant scout—he always gave his players an edge with his scouting reports.

  If anything, some of the players thought, he might have been a better, more gifted coach than the more laid-back Edwards. There was always something original in the way he went about his work. For one quarterback who did not keep his throwing arm high enough, Belichick built special wooden sawhorses, so that if the quarterback’s hand ended too low at the end of his throw he would bang it on the sawhorse. He tried to get some of his running backs and receivers to improve their peripheral vision by first walking and then running down the field alongside them, and holding up different numbers of fingers, getting them to see more even as they ran.

  Edwards and Belichick did reasonably well there, but Vanderbilt’s coaches do not last a long time, and they were fired after four years. From there
he went to North Carolina with Edwards, where they were part of another ill-fated coaching team before being let go.

  With that, in 1956, he took a job at the Naval Academy. He and Jeannette loved Annapolis, the value system of the academy, the exceptional young men who went there and were so receptive to coaching, the feel of the entire community. He was, he remembered, paid about $7,000 a year when he started—assistant coaches did not get rich back then. He was shrewd about it, and in some way he sensed when he first arrived that he had found a permanent home; he had been shot down in two previous jobs and he was wary of the life of a coach, the abundant pitfalls and the ever-tricky politics that went with the game itself and above all with the job of head coach.

  Within the profession his talents were hardly a secret and there were repeated offers to go elsewhere for a good deal more money, either in the college world or as a pro scout. But he had everything he wanted, and he was content to be an assistant and a scout; he had an absolute sense of the value and the quality of his work. He was also shrewd enough, on the advice of a friend, to get tenure as a physical training instructor. That meant that, as a family, the Belichicks had a permanent base, one that gave them immunity from the normal viruses that struck at men in the coaching world. He coached there until 1989.

  For the shadow of that hard childhood, being an immigrant’s son in the Depression, always fell on their home, even in Annapolis in an ever-more affluent America. In the home of Steve and Jeannette Belichick, the values were old-fashioned and came right out of Monessen and Struthers. Nothing was to be wasted. Nothing was to be bought on time. Anything that could be repaired was repaired. He ran a summer football camp each year, and the money saved from it went to Bill’s education. When he scouted at another school and the trip was 1,000 miles, which he drove in his car, and the government was paying eight cents a mile, then the $80 expense check went into a separate bank account to be used for the next Belichick car.

  One of his best players of the Vanderbilt era, Don Gleisner, was a farm boy in Ohio and recalled for me the day that Steve Belichick showed up to recruit him.

  “I was,” Gleisner told me, “very cocky back then and when Steve came to the farm, I said something like, ‘Coaching, that sounds like a pretty good deal—is there any money in it?’”

  Belichick proudly pointed to his brand-new car and said, “That’s a ’49 Chevy, son, and there’s not a penny owed on it.”

  That extraordinary work ethic was passed on to his son, and is one of the reasons he has done so well in the same profession. Nothing with the son, as with the father, is ever to be wasted, least of all time.

  In every book a writer does, there are side benefits—the bonus of dealing with people whom you come to like more and more as the book progresses. So it was with Steve Belichick for me with this book. If he had been a crusty man with a rather tough interior when he was younger, then the interior had long ago softened, in part because of both his own success, and that of his son, and the sheer richness of his life. I loved talking to him—there were always stories, and each story begat another story. We became, as my work on it continued, the most unlikely of pals.

  In the months I worked on the book I dealt with him almost every day, and he got quite accustomed to my calls. Sometimes he would answer the phone and say, “I thought that was going to be you—why are you so late calling this morning?” There was always something more he had thought of, something more he thought I should know about the game, always something more to be learned and to be taught. I thought he was straight and smart and funny, and quite brilliant. Because he was so tough and so focused a person, I think many people did not realize how truly smart and original he was. If he did not get all the recognition he deserved himself, then it was his good fortune in his own lifetime to see his son recognized for the uses of his mind as he himself had never been.

  THE FITNESS-GOERS

  From Vogue, July 1987

  We were, I suspect, a motley-looking group that first gray morning at the rowing school. Nothing came even close to resembling a uniform, and our T-shirts advertised everything from soft drinks and resorts to prep schools and musical comedies. Our bodies, regrettably, were hardly advertisements for the new aerobically conscious America. By and large, we did not look like rowers; nor, in fact, did many of us look like athletes.

  In addition, we were all, I suspect, like kids at the first day of some strange new camp, filled with all the long-forgotten fears of dealing with new faces in a strange setting. If that were not bad enough, there was an additional anxiety—that of successful middle-aged people about to expose themselves not just to failure but, even worse, to looking foolish in front of fellow adults. My wife and I and about a dozen others, ranging from a teenage rower from Deerfield Academy to a retired New York University professor of seventy, had arrived at the Florida Rowing Center in Wellington, Florida, for a brief course in sculling.

  Jean Halberstam and I possessed different levels of skill and different levels of apprehension. I had rowed and sculled relatively well in college some thirty-two years back; had let my skills, such as they were, atrophy; then had come back to the sport in 1984, when I had written a book about America’s best scullers. In 1985, I bought an Alden shell, a recreational boat that I had rowed with rare pleasure over the past two summers in Nantucket. Having written about the nation’s best scullers, and become a friend of some of them, gave me additional anxiety. I was, at the age of fifty-two, exposing my true vulnerability; I did not want to make a fool of myself in front of these teachers as well as my fellow students.

  Jean faced a somewhat more primal dilemma. She had never before rowed a stroke. She was about to be forty, and she wanted more control over her body and more strength. In the preceding seven months, she had gone to a demanding gym in New York City and by dint of exceptional diligence had gotten herself in excellent shape. She still had not found a summer sport that gave her much pleasure.

  For years, I had bored Jean about the pleasures of sculling, about how good it made you feel about yourself, about how sweet it felt when you did it right with the entire body—shoulders, back, and legs—working as one, with the stomach as the linchpin; how you could do it on your own terms, to your own specifications, without needing anyone else; how it was probably, in terms of aerobics and body toning, the almost-perfect sport for someone approaching middle age. In addition, I had told her (and this, for a woman whose husband works at home, was particularly persuasive) that there was a solitude to rowing that was particularly attractive, a sense of being utterly by yourself and with nature that I found uniquely calming. Finally, not without considerable misgivings, she had agreed to lessons. In addition to the normal fear of a grown woman trying a relatively complicated sport for the first time, Jean had—and I never knew it before—a deep and abiding phobia of being on the water, stemming from a serious accident when she was young. She was about to enter a wonderful new sport which, for all the pleasures it can generate, has been known for how easily its boats can capsize. She was not just anxious, she was also terrified.

  But the world of rowing has changed, as I repeatedly pointed out to her; and the boats, at least the ones for beginners, are more stable now. Until quite recently, it would have been impossible to have a camp like this. Sculling, an almost perfect aerobic sport, remained a sport for those who had come to it very early—by and large privileged upper-class Americans whose fathers had rowed, who had gone to a handful of selected prep schools or (as in my case) one of the few colleges in the country where rowing and sculling were important. In the past, one rowed racing sculls—graceful, slim, paper-thin craft twelve inches across at the beam and weighing perhaps thirty pounds. They were exhilarating to row (on days when I was rowing at my best, I felt that the boat was not even touching the water), but they required considerable skill to handle. One bad stroke by even an expert oarsman and the scull could flip over. What changed—and democratized—the world of sculling was the arrival, sixteen years ago, of A
lden recreational shells. Made of fiberglass, these are not as slim nor as fast as racing shells, and they are nearly impossible to flip; they are the almost perfect introductory craft for someone new to the sport or someone, like me, who has to row in relatively rough water off Nantucket. Now, with a minimum number of lessons, many people who had once watched from a distance can learn to scull and get as much fun from doing it as a champion. Anyone with a lake, a pond, or a relatively tame river now can scull; hardier souls can even try the ocean. For that reason, Jean and I had finally gone to Wellington, just west of Palm Beach, to row on Lake Wellington, a small invented lake of protected water about a mile and a half long. While there we, like most students at the school, stayed at the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club.

  The Florida Rowing Center is the brainchild of Arnold Guy Fraiman, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice. Judge Fraiman, who is sixty-one and looks about ten years younger, opened the center two years ago out of a lovely mixture of self-interest and altruism. A serious runner who had competed in forty-three marathons, he had found in recent years that his running had worn out his knee cartilage, that his days as a jogger were over. At age fifty-eight, he took up rowing. Evangelical about the sport, Fraiman thinks that every serious amateur athlete should learn to row; by opening the camp, he also now has a place to row during the winter.

  At the camp, Fraiman is the founder, all-purpose manager, cheerleader, chief of operations, and reassurer of the parents of teenage students—responsibilities he handles with exceptional goodwill. Coaches are Peter Sparhawk, for fifteen years head coach of men’s crew at Princeton University; John Marden, one of America’s premier scullers; John Murphy, a young man with boyish good looks who was hoping to win the Canadian lightweight singles title this year; and Marlene Royle, an excellent young American sculler hoping to make the national team in the lightweight double shells. The club can handle sixteen scullers at a time. Students come for either three or five days. The routine at the school is simple: two lessons a day, the first one starting at 7:30 A.M.; then a break for breakfast. At a midmorning meeting, coaches show videotapes of the morning workout; then a late-morning session is followed by a voluntary row in the afternoon.