Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  The records for Belichick’s own divorce were sealed and impounded, but the Morristown case was antithetical to everything he envisioned, media-wise. New information about the case was trickling out weekly, in New York and Boston, and the only way to stop it was for Shenocca to settle with her ex-husband, which she eventually did.

  In early February, Brady put the $14.5 million Time Warner Center condo that he had purchased five months earlier on the market. He bumped the price to $16.5 million. It was thought that he purchased the space to be closer to Bridget Moynahan, but the couple’s relationship ended late in 2006. Through a mutual friend, the quarterback had been introduced to one of the savviest and most successful supermodels in the world, Gisele Bündchen, who had her own palatial space in Tribeca. Rolling Stone once referred to her as the most beautiful girl in the world, and perhaps she showed the magazine’s phrasing to some of her classmates in her Brazilian hometown; back then, in the small city of Horizontina, she was nicknamed “Olive Oyl.”

  As a five-foot-eleven-inch international symbol, her modeling nicknames were a little different and much more suggestive, such as “The Body” and “The Boobs from Brazil.” She was discovered when she was fourteen. By nineteen, she was considered a star. At twenty-six, when she and Brady quickly fell for each other, she was known for making any cover she graced or clothing she modeled fly off the shelves.

  She and Brady also had a lot in common, beyond their Hollywood exes (actor Leonardo DiCaprio once went so far as presenting Bündchen with a $500,000 engagement ring). They were both physically attractive people whose smarts were overshadowed by their looks. They also had similar views of celebrity, which Bündchen summarized one year into her superstardom: “I know that if I had a normal job, I wouldn’t make as much money, but if you have a normal job, you can go home and be normal. I love my job, but I don’t love all of it. And I don’t love being famous.”

  The rich and famous were forced to live differently, such as releasing good news via publicists. That’s what happened on February 20, when Moynahan announced that she was three months pregnant and the father was her ex-boyfriend, Brady. It wasn’t long before Brady’s agent, Don Yee, was announcing that Brady “and his family are excited about the pregnancy.”

  This was one of the downsides of fame that Bündchen mentioned, the speculation of what might have happened and then the subsequent judgment based on the speculation. One thing quickly became clear, through publicists and sources: Bündchen and Brady were staying together and Moynahan, with cooperation from Brady, was going to raise the child alone. It was mind-bending news in Boston because the reputation of Brady was nothing short of angelic.

  “Brady never has ripped a coach, turned on a teammate, shoved a cameraman, whined about money or forgotten to send a card on Mother’s Day,” Gerry Callahan wrote in the Herald. He continued, “Bottom line: The guy has been virtually perfect since the day he stepped in for a severely wounded Drew Bledsoe more than five years ago. It is hard to believe the first bump in the road turns out to be a baby.”

  Dan Shaughnessy took a similar tack in the Globe: “Brady was going to be the Boston superstar athlete who’d get in and out of town without being touched by scandal or controversy. No police blotters… No diva demonstrations. No steroids. No suspensions. No palimony suits. No taking money under the table while at Michigan… Now he has taken a hit—something far more bone-rattling than any blind-side tackle delivered by Dwight Freeney or Shawne Merriman.”

  Brady was used to having his quarterbacking scrutinized, and even his appearances at expensive dinners and galas. Now his potential to parent from another household was a debate point, along with some sleuthing to find out when exactly he ended things with Moynahan and started things with Bündchen. He was a cover boy, often described as a sex symbol, although it was clear from TV and radio shows, blogs, and conversations locally and nationally that few people believed that he would actually have unprotected sex.

  There was some harsh criticism of Brady, but it was mostly national voyeurism of how three wealthy people planned to handle an issue that affects more than one-third of the country.

  Belichick had coached the AFC in the Pro Bowl in February, and he’d hit it off with a couple of players. One of them was free agent linebacker Adalius Thomas, a man who claimed to have no position. He wanted to be called, simply, “a football player.” In Baltimore, Thomas’s bombastic defensive coordinator, Rex Ryan, had called him a cross between Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks. He had played corner, safety, linebacker, and defensive end.

  Belichick had coached Taylor and Banks, so he knew Ryan was exaggerating, but he lived for players with the 270-pound Thomas’s skills and mentality. He returned to Foxboro excited about the big football player’s intelligence, speed, and character.

  With their first chance to get the twenty-nine-year-old Thomas, the Patriots overwhelmed him. They gave him $18 million in guarantees and $24 million in the first three years of his contract. They also bought their receivers in bulk: They agreed to deals with former Saints first-rounder Donté Stallworth; Wes Welker, a twenty-five-year-old slot receiver that they were getting in yet another heist from the Dolphins; and Kelley Washington, a receiver whom they also projected as a special-teams ace.

  The Patriots were in the middle of a shift, and so was the league. The new commissioner, Roger Goodell, was getting stellar reviews just seven months into the position. It didn’t seem to concern anyone that Goodell, with an economics background and an economic platform to get the job, seemed to be magnetized to discipline and legal matters.

  The tough-talking sheriff played well in Football America, and when he took the stage on draft day he was well received by the Radio City Music Hall crowd. The Patriots held two first-rounders, with the extra one coming from Seattle in the Branch trade. Far ahead of the Patriots’ first pick at number twenty-four, Eric Mangini had pulled off a Belichick-like maneuver for a player he craved. It was University of Pittsburgh cornerback Darrelle Revis, whom Mangini had personally worked out and given the highest possible grades in several categories. He felt that Revis was one of the best prospects he’d ever seen and was ecstatic to get him at number fourteen.

  The Patriots, meanwhile, approached this draft tepidly. They drafted Miami safety Brandon Meriweather with their lead first-round pick.

  They traded their second first, number twenty-eight, to San Francisco for the 49ers’ top pick in 2008. It was a patented Belichick move, exchanging a current asset for a future one that had the potential to be much greater. Overnight, the Patriots also had conversations with one of the most exciting receivers in NFL history. Randy Moss, thirty, was desperate to play on a winning team, and he expressed that to Belichick and Scott Pioli in a candid and emotional conversation. He was introspective and tearful, and he even agreed to rip up the deal he’d signed with the Oakland Raiders, reduce his cap number from over $9 million to $3 million, and prove his worthiness on a one-year contract.

  The next morning, the slender six-foot-four-inch receiver was riding in Josh McDaniels’s SUV, headed from Logan Airport to Gillette Stadium. The Patriots traded a fourth-round pick, number 110 overall, for the right to gamble on the resurrection of Moss. Moss was a prodigy at the position when he was in the right space, and when that happened the field was wide open for everyone. Belichick and McDaniels were pinning their hopes on that version of Moss, and it was part of the reason the offensive coordinator had picked him up from the airport. They were going to need to talk about the possibilities of the new offense.

  “You’re going to really see some things that you’ve never seen before,” Moss boasted to the local media in his first conference call with them. “And when it does happen, don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

  Briefly, there was no controversy with the Patriots, or any other local team. Belichick, not known for his outward displays of affection, was seen in Boston and on Nantucket with his new girlfriend, Linda Holliday. They’d gone to Celtics, Red Sox, and colle
ge basketball games together. They’d held hands on Nantucket, drinking wine and listening to romantic piano ballads. The coach looked happy. When he went to those games around town, there was a lot to be cheerful about. The Sox had been in first place all season, and at the start of training camp on July 27, they led the Yankees by eight games. A few days later, the Celtics, coached by Belichick’s friend Doc Rivers, announced that they had acquired future Hall of Fame forward Kevin Garnett from Minnesota. The addition of Garnett to a team that already included All-Stars Paul Pierce and Ray Allen meant that there could be another year of multiple rolling rallies in downtown Boston.

  Belichick taught on-field restraint and media understatement, but it was hard to keep the 2007 Patriots in the box. McDaniels was quickly seeing how a routine play and the mere whiteboard theory of it could explode into artistic greatness when players such as Moss and Welker were executing the assignments. They were going to be hard to stop, and there weren’t going to be many opponents, on the field, capable of doing it. This was quite the offensive wake-up call from last year’s camp.

  “Randy was the type of guy who would light up a room,” Richard Seymour says. “He was such an amazing talent. Everyone else was pros, but he was like a Greek god. He had the ability to do whatever he said he was going to do.”

  On August 22, a Wednesday, Brady wasn’t there to answer a question about Moss, the possibilities of the new offense, or anything else. He wasn’t spotted during the fifteen-minute period when the media could view practice, and the Patriots were offering no clues about where he was. But it was obvious. Moynahan had announced her pregnancy, at three months, in February. It was just over six months later. Brady was on his way to Los Angeles to see his newborn son. The healthy baby was given a good Catholic name: John Edward Thomas Moynahan. Tongue in cheek, the critics astutely noted that the baby’s initials spelled “JET.”

  Brady and the Patriots were now focused on the beginning of the season, which was two and a half weeks away. They’d be opening against the other Jets, certainly not the cuddly kind, and there was plenty of work to do on them. They didn’t have time to study news trends and the opinions of American sports fans. But if they had, they would have found an angry sporting public, disappointed by a year that had already represented fraudulence and broken trust.

  The summer pushed many people over the threshold, which in part explained the early popularity of Goodell. The public wanted someone to be firm in the face of unethical and criminal behavior. Michael Vick had been accused of bankrolling and gambling on dogfighting, and equipment for the crude sport was found on his Virginia property. Investigators found whips, injectable drugs, chains, and treadmills. Sixty pit bulls were found, many with scarring and broken limbs. Vick was likely going to prison and his Atlanta Falcons and NFL career was in jeopardy. An NBA official, Tim Donaghy, had been found guilty of betting on league games. There was already suspicion about the league’s officials, who had to fight the perception that they looked the other way when superstars fouled, traveled, carried, complained, or did anything negative that might interfere with the predestined result of the game. It wasn’t that simplistic, but that was the perception, and the criminal actions of Donaghy fueled the urban legends and conspiracies.

  And then there was Major League Baseball, with the saddest and most legalistic record-breaking chase ever. Barry Bonds, who unconvincingly claimed he never knowingly took performance-enhancing drugs, was in pursuit of Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record, and no one wanted to see or hear him break it. Literally. The year before, when Bonds passed Babe Ruth’s 714th home run for second on the list, the microphone of play-by-play man Dave Flemming went dead just as he was saying, “A drive deep to cen—” That was number 715, and no one on San Francisco’s KNBR radio heard it. This year, commissioner Bud Selig sent someone else to witness historic number 756 and Aaron sent a video tribute. Except even that wasn’t really a tribute. A Giants executive had asked Aaron to do it a month earlier in New York, and the slugger agreed only after he was able to have his statement carefully written and vetted. That was sports in 2007; even the heartfelt moments needed copywriters and lawyers.

  Which explains how the Patriots stepped right into the spirit of the cheating times, twice in the span of two weeks, and found themselves on a rotary with no exit. They had always been seen as contrary to the age, in every way. Players behaved badly elsewhere and their crooked paths became straight in Foxboro. Commentators measured talent individually through Pro Bowls; the Patriots countered by speaking collectively about Super Bowls. In a culture of shortcuts, they went the long hard way, and you could see it with receivers playing cornerback, linebackers playing tight end, and everyone chipping in on special teams. Isn’t that why they were celebrated as the model organization? Isn’t that why the clever coach and analytical quarterback were celebrities? But then Rodney Harrison, one of the captains, admitted that he purchased human growth hormone online. He had been injured the year before, and he said he took the NFL-banned drug not because he wanted a competitive advantage, but because he wanted to get back on the field.

  It sounded hollow. It sounded like a rationalization for cheating. It was easy for Goodell to make the call. He suspended Harrison for the first four games of the regular season.

  The Harrison news created a buzz, but it didn’t invalidate the accomplishments of the entire team. That would happen just over a week later, after the Patriots displayed their new look to the NFL in New York. The game itself was fine, with Moss gliding past Jets rookie cornerback Darrelle Revis and a fleet of others on his way to a fifty-one-yard touchdown reception from Brady. The whole defense chased Moss, and it was a reminder of how fragile schemes can be when they try to contain a virtuoso. You’re going to really see some things that you’ve never seen before… Moss had been right; this was supernatural. The Patriots won 38–14, and that was a footnote within hours.

  There had been a report after the game that Patriots employee Matt Estrella had ventured to the sideline, with a camera, and begun filming Jets coaches. The teams had argued about this for more than a year, and the league had sent a memo explicitly detailing the restrictions on camerawork. The Jets had expected the videographer, Estrella, to try this. They took him and his camera off the field and alerted the league.

  As more information was gathered in the days after the game, an undeniable picture was starting to take shape. Belichick had broken the league’s rules on the use of cameras. This was no borderline cruise through the caution light; he had blown through the red, undoubtedly. It was tough for many in New England to accept, and there was a segment of media and fans who claimed that the violation was strictly about location of the taping and not the offense itself. It wasn’t true.

  The league didn’t want teams to videotape the signals of other teams, no matter where they were. A friend of Belichick’s, Jimmy Johnson, suggested that the practice was commonplace when he was coaching. That defense didn’t resonate with the league, the public, or even thousands of embarrassed Patriots fans. The seemingly contradictory nature of what was happening in front of eighty thousand people—coaches giving signals!—and the restrictions on taping those signal-giving coaches was not lost on members of the competition committee.

  “See, not everybody does it,” Jeff Fisher, Titans coach and chair of the competition committee, said. “That’s the misunderstanding. When you say everybody does it, not everybody is recording. There’s not a bylaw against sitting up in a press box and taking notes with binoculars as fast as you can. But there is a bylaw as far as videotaping signals, and that is the issue. We just have to be very careful when we say everyone does it. To my knowledge, this is the only team that videotaped coaches’ signals.”

  Belichick and his players tried to use their Ignore the Noise template to deal with the story, and it worked for them in the cocoon of football operations. But there was a national avalanche outside those doors, and it wasn’t going to slow down all year. It was hard to go anywhe
re without hearing voices. Current and ex-players. Current and ex-coaches. Players in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saying they deserved to have rings because the Patriots were cheaters. Aha moments from the Rams and Panthers, who now had an explanation for how the Patriots beat them in Super Bowls. Suggestions that the Patriots taped practices. And taped walk-throughs. And even taped microphones to their jerseys to pick up the audio of quarterbacks. There were whispers about equipment always failing at critical times in Foxboro. There were those who wondered if three titles, won by a total of 9 points, would have been achieved without those cameras. Was Brady truly a smart quarterback or someone who was clandestinely told everything an opponent was doing? Were those original Belichick game plans? Or was he just a gifted spy, trying to gadget his way to the Hall of Fame?

  It was an onslaught, unforgiving and unstoppable. It even had its own catchy moniker: Spygate.

  The Patriots had to reconcile this and live with it, perhaps forever: They might be able to defeat an opponent on the field, but they would never defeat Spygate. Never. It was impossible. It was fueled by valid criticism as well as irrationality. It got air in its lungs both from the disobedience of Belichick and the discontent of silver, bronze, and non-medalists. It got its muscle from justice and jealousy. There were so many obvious truths, such as the sledgehammer language the league used when it sent its memo about the purpose of cameras. The tone was just short of all-caps: “Videotaping of any type, including but not limited to taping of an opponent’s offensive or defensive signals, is prohibited on the sidelines, in the coaches’ booth, in the locker room, or at any other locations accessible to club staff members during the game.” There were half-truths as well. There were only so many seconds to diagnose an offense or defense and call a play; Spygate was many things, but it was no open-book test.