War Room

by Michael Holley

There was also plenty to learn by watching the veteran scouts. Pioli adored them, and they reciprocated because he was eager to learn and willing to listen. One of his favorites was a local, born and raised just forty minutes away in industrial Barberton. He was fifty-eight, but he was in better shape than most people in the office due to his football genes and his obsession with playing racquetball. There were many ways to describe his personality, but his nickname said it all: Bulldog.

  “A man’s man,” says Vital. “The kind of guy who wouldn’t back down from anything. He’d invite you to his home for a meal and had a beautiful heart, but you just knew he wasn’t going to let you handle him any kind of way.”

  “Old-school guy all the way,” says Belichick. “Very focused, very tough, and a hard grader. If he said a player was tough, you could take that to the bank.”

  His given name was Thomas George Dimitroff, but most people used that appropriate nickname or just “Tom.” Pioli called him “Mr. D.” The stories about him were legendary. His parents, immigrants from Macedonia and Hungary, used to own a restaurant-bar in nearby Portage Lakes called Van’s Blue Gill. Tom, with his short-sleeved white dress shirt, skinny black tie, and horn-rimmed glasses, was often behind the bar serving drinks and food. He was a shade under six feet tall and was two hundred pounds of muscle. He was a gentleman and a brawler: Any hint of trouble at last call would lead to the removal of his glasses, and magically, it would seem as if the rowdies were seeing him for the first time. They always knew to stop the nonsense when the glasses came off.

  Some people in Barberton remembered him as Tommy George, from the days when his parents believed that Americanizing their last name would lead to less grief for the family. But he was such a good high school quarterback that it wasn’t long before Duhmitt-troff was rolling off local tongues. He got a scholarship to play at Miami University, the in-state one, and played for future Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian. He was actually drafted by the Browns in 1957, the same year the team selected Jim Brown in the first round, but instead played professionally in Canada. He had a brief stay in the AFL with the expansion Boston Patriots and was retired by the time he was twenty-five.

  His parents wanted him to be an electrician, something that would provide steady work. But he was too competitive, and after helping out at Van’s for a while, he got into coaching. By 1974, he was an assistant coach in the CFL as the offensive coordinator for the Ottawa Rough Riders. Two years later, his team won the Super Bowl of Canada, the Grey Cup. Between pro coaching opportunities in Hamilton; a head coaching stint at the University of Guelph, about an hour away from Toronto; and the chance to scout and pick players in Ottawa, Tom Dimitroff and his family stayed in Canada for fourteen years. Anyone who played for him knew what a stickler he was for details and how he had no tolerance for players who put themselves above the team and didn’t want to listen.

  Anyone who lived with him could tell you that, too.

  “If I was ever bringing any of my friends to the house, I’d warn them before we went in there,” says his son Thomas. “I’d say, ‘Don’t just grunt something out there.’ He was an old-school coach, a disciplinarian. If you didn’t call him ‘Coach Dimitroff’ or ‘Mr. Dimitroff,’ it bothered him and there’d be a problem.”

  Not only did the youngest of Tom and Helen Dimitroff’s three children share his father’s name, he also wanted to be in the same profession. Young Thomas idolized his father and inherited his intensity. When his father brought home six oversized bags that are typically used for sharpening football techniques, Thomas spent the entire summer doing bag drills. He was fourteen. His brother, Randy, who was four years older and a better athlete, told him to relax and be a kid. He wasn’t interested. What really excited him was sneaking out to night practices at Guelph, where Tom was the head coach and Randy was a quarterback. Tom would sometimes glare across the field and ask him what he was doing there, but he’d always let him stay, knowing the familiar look of someone smitten by a game.

  By the time Thomas graduated from high school and went to play at Guelph as a cornerback-safety, his father had taken a scouting job with the Browns. Randy was still there, so they were able to play one season together. After that, Thomas was on his own and he emerged as a team captain. But despite all his drills, and despite meticulously watching the Dallas Cowboys on TV because he loved cornerback Everson Walls’s ability to backpedal and anticipate, he knew what was coming. He didn’t just inherit Tom’s intensity; he had his honesty, too. He wasn’t good enough to play in the NFL or CFL. His future was in coaching or evaluating players. He already knew it, and he’d overheard his parents, one of them the NFL scout in the family, confirm it.

  “Let’s face it, Helen,” his father had said. “Tommy’s smart and works his ass off, but he’s an average athlete.”

  Average? It wasn’t exactly the analysis he wanted to hear but he agreed it was the right one. When he graduated in 1990, he began scouting in Canada. Three years later, at the start of the 1993 NFL season, he was working side by side in Cleveland with his father. In theory, at least.

  While the man known as Bulldog was continuing to scout for the toughest players in the country, his twenty-six-year-old son was a first-year member of the Browns’ grounds crew. Thomas had gained scouting experience in Saskatchewan and in the NFL-backed World League of American Football. He wasn’t above getting dirty for the job, so when the World League folded he leapt at the part-time opportunity in a city his parents called home. Four days a week, Thomas was like any other groundskeeper the Browns employed at the suburban practice facility: His sandy brown hair was usually filled with grass blades and paint; he limed the field; he sprayed fertilizer; he did his best to avoid swirling neurotoxins.

  But he had a couple things going on that many of his landscaping coworkers weren’t aware of, although Belichick was. The most impressive thing he could say was that he had access to the Browns’ files on college players. That’s because he had Belichick’s blessing to look at the files, even though he was working part time for another team. Thomas was a part-time weekend scout for the Kansas City Chiefs. What it meant was that he scouted Ohio and Pennsylvania, all via car trips, from Friday through Sunday.

  Belichick knew that Thomas was watching tape in the office, but he didn’t mind because it didn’t interfere with what the Browns were doing and he had great respect for his father. It’s also why Thomas the Groundskeeper, full of funk and ambition, was allowed to pop into scouting and talk with his father, if he was in town. Sometimes he’d go in there, toting his vegan lunch, to talk with Pioli and Muraco.

  “Oh, we all remember what it was like when he’d come in,” says Muraco. “He’d have all this dust on him, he’d be wearing dirty shorts, and he’d have paint on his chin. If I was filing reports, he’d sit there and help me file them. Sometimes we’d order food from a place called Bucci’s, an Italian restaurant in Berea, and we’d be eating chicken parm and rigatoni. He’d pull out a Tupperware container full of rice and tomatoes. It was always a good time when he was around.”

  As the Browns approached the midway point of the ’93 season, it was hard for most people to complain.

  The team had begun the season with its best start under Belichick, 3–0, and was 5–2 heading into its bye week after a satisfying win over its most hated rival, Pittsburgh. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were separated by just 130 miles, so while the rest of the NFL gave respectful nods from afar to the Steelers for the four Super Bowls they’d won in a six-year span, Cleveland was the empty-handed neighbor forced to stand by and watch the frequent celebrations. No one had to be reminded that the Steelers had basically lived at the Super Bowl while the Browns had never been. It was that void that made a loyal fan base even more manic, and it’s why the recent mini-drought of losing seasons was so irritating.

  While Belichick had named Bernie Kosar the starter for the 1993 season, his actions seemed to suggest that his heart was elsewhere. At the hint of any struggles from Kosar, Belichick
would pull him and replace him with Vinny Testaverde. Objectively, Testaverde looked better on the job. His arm was stronger and he was more mobile, although he didn’t have Kosar’s ability to quickly diagnose what defenses were trying to do to him. After being pulled from three straight games, Kosar saw the inevitable happen. He lost his starting job to Testaverde. But the only negative to the Steelers win was that Testaverde was simultaneously crushed by two linebackers and separated his right shoulder. He was out for the season, so by default, the job was Kosar’s again.

  Temporarily.

  On November 7, an unforgettable Monday in Cleveland, the Browns held a 5–3 record after coming out of their bye with a loss to Denver. They were in first place in their division. On that same day, they cut Kosar, a move that hurt many Clevelanders more than all the combined heartache the organization had suffered since 1964, when the Browns last won a title. This wasn’t just painful in their eyes. This was a crime against the family. This was disrespectful. Bernie was Cleveland: big, sprawling, and unconventional at first sight, but after you looked around for a while, a lot better than you thought.

  But nine seasons into Kosar’s career, Belichick had announced that his skills had diminished. This was personal. Kosar had won division titles for them, gotten them to the cusp of the Super Bowl three times. They’d written songs about him, taking the melody of Richard Berry’s classic “Louie Louie” and making a new song called “Bernie Bernie.”Bernie Bernie / Oh yeah / How you can throw… It was as if everything Belichick said about Kosar he was saying to them, too. What do you mean we’re diminished? What do you mean we’re not good enough for this team? Who the hell are you?

  Some fans dragged out their grills and set their season tickets on fire. A twenty-year-old student at Baldwin-Wallace College, just down the road from the Browns’ practice facility, paced outside with a huge sign: CUT BELICHICK, NOT BERNIE. When she was asked to elaborate in an interview she said, “Bernie Kosar is the heart and soul of the Cleveland Browns. Bill Belichick bites the big one.”

  Belichick was right by saying Kosar’s skills had diminished, but he was still the best quarterback he had, especially with Testaverde out. Many years later, he would be faced with another quarterback controversy and he would handle it much differently. But this was a public-relations nightmare from which he wouldn’t recover.

  Modell publicly backed his coach, for the second time in less than a month. The first sign of support came in late October when he extended Belichick’s contract by two years, which meant he would theoretically have him coaching the Browns through 1997. But Modell was no real ally. Few people in Cleveland knew what a financial mess the owner had gotten himself into, and no one could have guessed what his solution was going to be. Modell not only was left out of the new downtown stadium/arena projects for the Indians and Cavaliers, he lost significant income when he was no longer the Indians’ landlord. It wouldn’t be long before he started having secret meetings with another city about the piles of yet-to-be-claimed cash it had earmarked for a pro football team, and those meetings would eventually lure him out of town, with the entire franchise in tow.

  The Browns lost five of their next six games after releasing Kosar, practically guaranteeing Belichick’s third consecutive losing season. The team needed help with everything: the stadium, ownership, players, dialogue with the public. The words that Belichick delivered to Pioli a year earlier seemed much sharper now. A long run in the NFL was hard enough and even harder if you were bold enough to make decisions that could turn an entire region against you.

  Once again, the season ended without a trip to the playoffs. The Browns were 7–9 for the second year in a row. Belichick and Lombardi had agreed that their scouting system might go through some starts and stops before it finally flourished, and that was proving to be true through the 1994 draft. The issue was franchise-altering, impactful players. The Browns had drafted one, arguably, from 1991 to 1994, and that was Turner, Belichick’s first Cleveland draft pick. They had six selections in the top thirty in that period without hitting on one who could be considered the best at his position in the league.

  They had worked out some of the language issues, getting the pro and college scouting departments on the same page in terms of how a player was described. They all knew the alerts of the system, from the lowercase “a” (which meant there was some type of concern about a player’s age) to the uppercase “Z” (which meant that a player lacked the required size or height according to the height/weight/speed organizational charts). The problem was swinging on draft day, when they didn’t necessarily swing and miss but they came up with a lot of harmless singles.

  The percentages were much better in free agency, where in back-to-back years Belichick had brought in two of his smartest defensive players from the Giants. Carl Banks and Pepper Johnson were everything Belichick wanted in linebackers: studious, instinctive, and big. Both were outliers to that old saw: Those who can do do; those who can’t teach. They could do and teach, which gave them credibility with coaches and players.

  There was a good feel to the beginning of the 1994 season. Testaverde was healthy again, so there was no quarterback drama to keep up with. Kosar had won a Super Bowl ring as a backup with the Cowboys after being cut by the Browns, and now he had returned to his college home to be a backup with the Dolphins. The issue was over for three hours every Sunday, but it would always be a regional talking point.

  On game days, the only thing to discuss was the Browns’ defense. Nick Saban, who was as close to being Belichick’s coaching twin as anyone in sports, had the unit playing better than any in the league. It helped that Saban got a Pro Bowl season out of Turner, but he also coaxed one out of Johnson, just the second of the thirty-year-old inside linebacker’s career. In November, after beating the Oilers by 24 points, the Browns had their ninth win, securing the first winning season of Belichick’s career. Cleveland finished 11–5 and allowed 204 points, the fewest in the league. The last time a Browns defense had such sparkling numbers was the 1950s, when they were coached by Hall of Famer Paul Brown.

  The 1994 season’s high and low points came in consecutive weeks. On New Year’s Day 1995, the Browns won their first play-off game since 1989 with a wild-card victory over the New England Patriots, who were coached by Belichick’s former boss Bill Parcells. The next week, the Browns went to see their rivals, the Steelers, and were easily rubbed out, 29–9.

  Thomas left the Browns to take a scouting job with the Lions, moving to Atlanta to become their Southeast scout in 1994. He got insight on the Browns’ productive season from talks with his father and Pioli. He missed joking with Pioli at the office and seeing his father, and his extended family, so often when he lived in Ohio. The positive was that when his father was on the road scouting, he had a connection to the family, because sometimes they’d be scouting at the same schools. They’d talk about players, have dinner, and make fun of each other.

  Tom always told his sons and his players about the importance of being on time. So Thomas loved it when he would arrive on campus forty-five minutes to an hour before his father did. “I see how it is,” Thomas would say, pointing to his watch. “Slacking off a bit this morning, huh?” When Tom learned that his son was a vegan, he’d tease him about what he was, or wasn’t, eating. “Berries and twigs today?” he’d ask. “Or ‘too-fu’?” But then the ultimate meat-and-potatoes man, in a meat-and-potatoes business, would mention that he loved the fact that his son had principles and was sticking to them.

  Tom liked that his son and Pioli took the time to truly listen to what they were told, sometimes to a fault. When Thomas moved to Atlanta, his father told him that any full-time scout in the league needed a reliable car. The obvious choice was his father’s favorite, the Ford Taurus. Thomas got a cobalt-blue one, quickly became conscious of how uncool it was, and told the half-truth that it was a “company car” when he took women out on dates. Car tips aside, Tom gave his younger son business survival tips, often using his
own mistakes as lesson plans.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine,” he told his son. “And know when to express yourself and when to bite your tongue. I probably could have done a few more things in this game if I had held my tongue more often.”

  On a few occasions he would tell Helen, “If you’re lucky in this life, you can count your true friends on one hand… Thomas has got a true friend in Scott.”

  It was yet another example of superior advance scouting, because Tom couldn’t have realized just how prophetic his words would turn out to be.

  Although everyone could see Tom’s toughness, and his nickname suggested that he didn’t have much nuance, he could surprise you away from the office. His wife, whom he met in Barberton, was his best friend. They loved to spend hours in their garden or take road trips to flea markets and antique shops, where Helen could look at the Victorian furniture that she was partial to. None of the other scouts would have been able to grasp the image of the Bulldog in an antique shop. The man they knew was tireless in talking about football and playing racquetball. Whenever he talked to his older son, Randy, and he knew that a visit was coming, he’d always end the conversation with “Bring your racquet.”

  “He wouldn’t stop at five games,” Helen says. “If you’d let him, he’d go to seven or eight.”

  As the Browns headed into 1995, Belichick’s fifth season, Tom felt refreshed. He was fifty-nine, still as active and athletic as ever. Early in the year, a couple months before the April draft, he was on the road and played a half dozen rigorous games of racquetball as usual. What wasn’t normal was that, after the games, his body was telling him that he had to urinate yet he still couldn’t go.

  He told Helen about it when he got home, and she said it was something they definitely needed to monitor. Soon after, there was another problem. He was scheduled to leave town again for at least a week, but he was starting to wonder what was going on. He called Helen into the bathroom. “Oh my God,” he said. “You’ve got to see this.”