Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  Nice sentiment, but very few people believed it. On the first series of the season against the Bengals, CBS broadcaster Gus Johnson reminded everyone watching that Bledsoe had “signed a multiyear, multimillion contract that should keep him a Patriot through the end of his career.” It’s what people said and thought. It was just obvious. So when the Patriots lost that first game to the Bengals and looked bad on offense along the way, there was no suggestion that a change at quarterback needed to be made.

  Two days after the game, the team was looking to its quarterback and other team leaders for guidance and structure. There had been a terror attack on American soil, in New York City, and the reality of airplanes being intentionally flown into skyscrapers needed context, discussion, and consolation. One of the Patriots linemen, Joe Andruzzi, had firefighting brothers in New York, and the brothers Andruzzi were fortunate to escape the wreckage of the fallen World Trade Center as they attempted to save lives. The entire team gathered at Bledsoe’s house to be together on such an awful day in American history. It was hard to think about football, and no one in the league had to; the games scheduled for September 16 were rescheduled for the twenty-third.

  After a pregame display of unity of patriotism on the twenty-third, the Patriots and Jets got back to some degree of normalcy by acting the way they always did at Foxboro Stadium. It was 10–3, Jets, with five minutes to play when Bledsoe began to run toward the right sideline. He was trying to pick up ten yards on third down, and he was doing just fine until he picked up his eighth.

  He was met on the sideline by Jets linebacker Mo Lewis, listed at 260 pounds. It was far from Lewis’s biggest hit of the day, given that he delivered the brunt of it solely with his right shoulder. But it was a shot to the chest of the quarterback, legal in terms of the game, and it was significant for football reasons and otherwise. Will McDonough, the Globe columnist with a penchant for getting people to talk, was eventually able to unearth the real story. The first several hours after the Lewis hit weren’t just confusing; they had been life-threatening.

  Bledsoe had gone back into the game after the hit by Lewis, even though, unbeknownst to the quarterback, his blood pressure was falling. Blood was also draining from his chest into his chest cavity. That wasn’t known until after the game, when he was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital and diagnosed by a doctor, Daniel Berger, who had been at home watching the Patriots game. Obviously, Brady was going to be the Patriots quarterback for several weeks. But more than that, Berger explained to McDonough, Bledsoe’s injury could have led to the second Patriots tragedy in the span of six weeks.

  “We were fortunate that the bleeding slowed down, and eventually stopped,” the doctor said. “If we had to operate, we would have had to try to check the area around his ribs and lung first to see if we could find the problem and repair the damage. If that didn’t work out, we would have had to operate, and make the incision in the middle of his chest, pull the ribs back, and make the repair that way. If that had to happen, then his career would have been in jeopardy.”

  The Patriots were 0-2, and just 5-13 since Belichick became the head coach. There were lots of questions about Bledsoe’s return in 2001, why the quarterback had been allowed to reenter the game, and the readiness of Brady to rescue a team that was unlucky enough to have the high-powered Colts next on the schedule. Perhaps Belichick could sense the skepticism of the media crowd, representing the uneasiness of the region. Or perhaps it was a rare slip, where he uttered in public the same things he had said previously to his staff. Whatever the reason, Belichick gave his most honest Brady response during a particularly intense back-and-forth with the media.

  “I don’t think we’re talking about John Elway here, but I don’t know how many of those there are,” the annoyed coach said. “He’s got a good NFL arm. I really don’t think I’m going to be standing here week after week talking about the problems that Tom Brady had. I have confidence in him.”

  What the coach didn’t realize was that his statement had officially begun campaign season, and he had presented the first endorsement. For Brady. It’s all people talked about in New England for weeks and weeks. A simple question—Brady or Bledsoe?—would generate hours and days of discussion on sports-talk radio. The arguments never cut conveniently across generational lines. There was never a simplistic conclusion based on the value of experience versus the possibility of the new. The argument never stopped; it would be paused for a while and then resumed. It was on late-night sports shows where, going in, several segments had been planned, yet the participants had gotten stuck on this one. Brady or Bledsoe?

  Players were asked about it, and they certainly had opinions, but they were too smart to answer. Belichick, after his initial honesty, was noncommittal. But just like at Michigan, there were hints about what was coming with Brady, some nuanced and some overt. Adrian Klemm, the offensive lineman who lived with him before the draft, noticed a distinct Brady style in the huddle. “There’s a certain presence that he has there,” Klemm says now. “He’s emotional, but he’s never out of control. He really has a command of it.” It probably was a reflection of what he truly was thinking about, opinions he shared only with those who were closest to him. He was actually the topic when several members of the defense got together shortly after Bledsoe was injured. They talked about picking the kid up, rallying around him, just doing whatever they could to give the team a chance until Bledsoe was ready to return.

  Soon after that conversation, there was a fun team dinner during which the players laughed, drank, and teased one another. At one point, Brady and Law began to chat. The quarterback was calm and direct. “Ty,” he said, “I’m not giving that job back.”

  “I was thinking of the business side of things,” Law recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh, yes you are.’ But I didn’t say that to him. I actually got a kick out of it. Lawyer was my boy, so I had to tell him. ‘Hey, this young dude, he’s got some spunk to him. He says he’s not giving that job back to Drew.’ But I didn’t think it would be his choice. There was a man called Mr. Kraft, there was Bill Belichick, and there was that big check that they were writing that all said otherwise. I thought, ‘When he gets healthy, he’s coming back.’”

  Brady, showing his political acumen, played the role of someone who was just happy to be there and help the team. The public bought it. They hadn’t seen the real Brady, sweating behind the curtain to get himself ready for this stage. So why did they think they knew him now? The unknown from the discount bins of the previous season’s draft, just trying to find his way in the pros.

  Cute. And pure fiction. He was smart, athletic, and gifted. Bledsoe or Brady?

  Brady.

  Of course. His circumstances in high school, college, and now the pros had given him an identity. He had been buried so much on depth charts and draft charts that, just to be noticed, he had been forced to climb. So he’d put that label with the one he already had. Now he was Tom Brady, climber and winner.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GREATEST REALITY SHOW ON EARTH

  Once a week, the five of them met in a tiny Foxboro Stadium room and shared their precocious football thoughts. It was Bill Belichick, Charlie Weis, and the three quarterbacks, in order of the depth chart: Tom Brady, Drew Bledsoe, and Damon Huard. Two of the men, Belichick and Bledsoe, rarely spoke directly to each other, but that didn’t seem to matter. The important things were always covered, and that’s one of the reasons they could live with the dysfunction without it becoming destructive.

  Well, that and the performance of the team. It was late November and a year that seemed to be lost was now being salvaged. The Patriots were actually winning some games, and there was a chance they could make the play-offs. Because of this, a season wasn’t the only thing being saved; a city’s potential for optimism was. It was hardly news that people in Boston monogrammed their sports teams and consistently made the business of the games personal. That’s the way it was, they were used to it, and no seminar on balance
and proper perspective was going to change it.

  The sports year hadn’t been all that encouraging, and the bitterness of it could be heard and felt in the city’s casual conversations. Predictably, Rick Pitino quit the Celtics. The surprise was that he did it after a road game in Miami, with no plan to return to Boston for an explanation. He never produced a winning team in Boston, but he did have a read on the city that wasn’t wholly unfair: “All the negativity that’s in this town sucks. I’ve been around when Jim Rice was booed. I’ve been around when Yastrzemski was booed. And it stinks. It makes the greatest town, greatest city in the world, lousy.” Nomar Garciaparra, frustrated with Red Sox personnel decisions, shouted after a loss to the hated Yankees, “That’s why no one wants to fucking play here.” The comment stung, and it just seemed to be destiny that the New Yorkers would go to the World Series, again, while the Sox would mark eighty-three years without a championship. The Bruins had gone through five goaltenders and two head coaches, on their way to missing the postseason for the second consecutive year. Then there was that ferocious hit on Bledsoe that was scary only well after the fact, when the quarterback realized that it could have killed him.

  It turns out that Tom Brady had prophesied more than two months earlier without even knowing it. On the day that he officially became the Patriots’ backup, he told reporters that the team would eventually need contributions from all three of its quarterbacks. That’s exactly what was happening: Brady was the starter, Bledsoe was his backup, and Damon Huard was on levity/atmospherics duty. The Brady-Bledsoe debate had consumed the region for weeks, and then it had gone national. There were several teams better than the 5-5 Patriots, but none had a more compelling in-house drama.

  “Drew was pissed every day coming into work,” Ty Law says. “I don’t give a damn what he says. He was pissed. He wasn’t the same person, because he wanted to get back on the field. He had a bad injury and he got knocked out. He wasn’t a happy camper.”

  The Brady-Bledsoe watch started in earnest with Brady’s debut as a starter, on the last day of September. The Patriots had managed just 3 points the week before, but that number ballooned to 44 with an emphatic win over the Colts. It quickly decelerated the next week with a loss to the Dolphins and a lean eighty-six-yard passing day from Brady. “A week later the question isn’t whether Brady ought to be starting in place of Bledsoe,” George Kimball wrote in the Boston Herald, “but whether or not Bill Belichick will pull the trigger and make Damon Huard his quarterback when the Patriots entertain the Chargers.”

  Belichick stayed with Brady, and it picked up again with a victory that would have looked familiar to anyone who saw Brady at Michigan: The team was down 10 points with four minutes to play and, miraculously, Brady led them to an overtime win and threw for 364 yards. Just as impressive was the next week when, for the second time in less than a month, the Patriots blew out the Colts. Belichick was usually understated after games, especially ones so early in the season, but the 38–17 triumph inspired him to reflect.

  “When I think about this game and two of the key players, David Patten and Tom Brady, probably the guy that’s most responsible for both those players being here is Dick Rehbein. We tried to sign David as a free agent a year ago, but lost him to Cleveland. When he became available again, Dick said, ‘Look, we can’t lose this guy.’ He vouched for how good a kid he was and what a good playmaker he was.

  “The quarterback situation was one where, prior to the 2000 draft, with John Friesz getting up there in age, we felt we wanted to take a quarterback. I sent Dick to see two guys and he liked them both. But when I put his back to the wall he came on strong for Brady and said, ‘This is our guy.’ It’s with a great deal of gratitude that I say thank you to Dick. Even though he’s gone, he’s not forgotten by any of us.”

  When Rehbein died in August, Belichick decided not to hire a new quarterbacks coach until after the season. In the meantime, he took on some of Rehbein’s responsibilities and met with the quarterbacks to go over coverages and tendencies, and also listened to their feedback and observations. The arrangement worked just fine then, and when Bledsoe got hurt he happily dispensed advice to Brady. He knew that if the kid kept the Patriots afloat, he could then resume his starting position and lead the team into the postseason.

  But it sounded like Belichick believed that he had something special in Brady. The coach was usually a postgame minimalist. He wouldn’t have been that expansive in Indianapolis if the kid was a fluke, would he? The opinions began to stream in from all angles. Bill Parcells, still a respected voice in New England and now doing a national radio show, went on the air and was prescient prior to the next game, at Denver.

  “Someday he is going to be in a game where he and his team take a beating, like 31–10 or something, and he throws four interceptions,” Parcells said of Brady. “The other players will be mad at him, the assistant coaches will look sideways at him, and he’ll finish the game with a broken nose.

  “Now, what he does the next Wednesday, when he practices with the team for the first time, and what he does the week after that, is where he is going to find out what he is made of. It’s easy when you have a great start, and you haven’t gotten beat up yet. The great ones are the guys that go through the bad times and keep on getting better.”

  On cue, Brady threw four interceptions in Denver and the Patriots collapsed in the fourth quarter. His nose wasn’t broken, but Brady’s momentum in the Brady-Bledsoe battle was. It returned the next two weeks with comfortable wins, one on the road against the Falcons and the other at home over the Bills. The team’s next game was its only scheduled national TV appearance, and it was against the Rams. They were the best team in the league by far, had won seven of their eight games, and halfway through the season, remarkably, their average win came via doubling the score of their opponents. They gave teams plenty to think about on their own, so any distraction during Rams week was more than an opponent could handle. The same was true of the Patriots. The week of the game, Bledsoe held a press conference at Massachusetts General Hospital with his doctors. He was cleared to play and, naturally, ready for the starting job. He had been away for seven games, and the team had gone 5-2 in his absence.

  “I’ve been the starter on this team for eight years and I want to be the starter again,” Bledsoe said as he was flanked by the doctors. “I have to show I’m the guy for the job and the guy who gives us the best chance to win ball games.” He later added, “The guys still look to me. I still have a presence in the locker room.”

  He had been the starter for those eight years, and so it didn’t seem fair that the erasure of the culture he’d known had taken place in mere weeks. He still had a presence in the locker room due to who he was as a man. His teammates could still love and respect him yet want Brady to remain the starter.

  Besides, the shift at quarterback wasn’t the only difference on the team. The Patriots were benefitting from, perhaps, the most successful offseason in modern NFL history. The belittled free agency class, full of the rejected, repurposed, and discounted players, had turned up several productive starters. The first two selections in the draft, Richard Seymour and Matt Light, had become starters also. And the young veterans Belichick had re-signed in 2000, Troy Brown and Tedy Bruschi, made an improbable leap from complementary players to essential members of the core.

  The Brady-Bledsoe undercard had already played out on defense. At the beginning of the season, the starting middle linebacker was the audacious Bryan Cox. He had been released by the Jets in a salary cap move, and had been scooped up by the Patriots on markdown. He was thirty-three, a veteran who was just a step away from retirement. But he knew all the inside tricks, he could work the officials, and, his shocked teammates quickly realized, he could play and speak the position as crudely as the situation called for.

  “When Cox came in, he brought a new dimension to the meeting rooms, the locker room, and even a way to behave in front of the coaches,” Bruschi recalls. “He cra
cked us all up. He could be disgusting. He could mention sites that you’d never dream of visiting on the Internet. That’s just who he was; he was a hilarious and nasty dude.

  “He would have conversations with our positional coaches in ways that were off the wall and aggressive, but still respectful. He would say it in his way if he had a suggestion, and he always found a way to stay within the framework of the team. But that type of communication was so valuable to us. Cox helped us develop that ‘F everybody else’ attitude. He’d have it with the other team, obviously. But sometimes he’d bring it to us. If the defensive line or someone else didn’t like the call from the linebackers, his position was, ‘F you. If you’ve got a problem with it, take it to the coaches.’”

  In Brady’s first start, the play of the game was made by Cox, not the young quarterback. He crushed a receiver who had the nerve to cross him in the middle of the field. After the game, firmly in character, he gave a profane analysis of life in the NFL. The public-relations staff blushed, and the surprised TV stations that showed it live had to beg the Federal Communications Commission for forgiveness. But the team, which had lacked sufficient talent and aggression in 2000, loved it.

  Brady’s worst game of the season, the four-interception game in Denver, was also a transitional moment for the defense. Cox absorbed a hit that he and his teammates believed was illegal, and the blow broke his leg. The injury provided an opening for Bruschi at inside linebacker. He was much shorter and lighter than Cox, but he used his quickness and instincts to play the position well enough to satisfy the exacting specifications of Belichick and defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel. When Cox neared a return to the field, he understood what was happening. He was a backup to the younger and now more talented Bruschi. Yet he roamed the locker room looking for media members that he could educate on team dynamics and the Brady-Bledsoe debate.