War Room

by Michael Holley

  He had been able to go this time, but the toilet was filled with blood.

  “Don’t panic,” he said to Helen.

  “I’m not panicking,” she replied, trying her hardest to be calm. “But you can’t go on the road in the morning. We need to see a doctor.”

  What they learned was that Tom had a massive, ten-inch cancerous tumor, about the length of a football, around his kidneys. Doctors were able to remove the tumor and kept Tom in the hospital for a week. About six weeks later, he was playing racquetball again.

  Tom and Helen Dimitroff, who had led a football life and raised a football family for more than thirty years, weren’t thinking about the sport as much as usual at the start of the ’95 season. Tom had been doing well since the scare in March. But the hardest thing for him to come to terms with at that time was the emotional separation he had been forced to make from the Browns.

  They had fired him.

  His mind was as sharp as ever and no one knew the game better. He was well liked by most and fairly paid, but by no means was his salary burdensome. Lombardi was in charge of the scouting department, and there were times when he and Tom didn’t see things the same way. Everyone who had been around Tom knew that he was a passionate defender of his positions and was much more in favor of raw opinions than diplomatic filters. There were arguments with Lombardi, and often they’d become heated and personal. The dismissal of Tom led to some intense conversations when all of the Dimitroffs were together. There was considerable time spent trying to sort out some of the feelings they had toward Lombardi.

  “I had a lot of respect for Tom, and I know I could have handled the situation a lot better,” Lombardi says. “I made some mistakes. I take full responsibility for them.”

  It was a challenging time for the Dimitroffs because the family members were in different places. Randy was in Canada, Thomas was in Atlanta, and while their sister, Sharon, was in the Strongsville area, where Tom and Helen lived, she was there raising her own young family. Being away from his father was a source of guilt for Thomas, who went back and forth on whether he should leave his job with the Lions. Both Tom and Helen told him the thought was ridiculous and that they’d be fine. They also let him know that they were getting unsolicited visits from Pioli.

  There were times when Pioli would make the short drive to Strongsville just to sit and talk football with a lifelong player, coach, and scout. Sometimes, that’s all the Bulldog needed. Their talks could be profound or trivial, like the time Tom spent a few minutes trying to persuade Pioli to incorporate bison jerky into his diet. To make these visits, Pioli would take his multitasking to a higher level so he could get all his work done and still make time for people whom he considered family.

  Tom wasn’t working with the hometown team anymore, but there hadn’t been anything alarming with his health for a few months. His follow-up visits and checkups were all clean, and he even found time to play a few racquetball games in September and October. After playing one day he said to Helen, “I don’t feel good.”

  “Tom, you’re not twenty-one anymore,” she answered. “Maybe you should play fewer games.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s it. I just don’t feel like myself.”

  Their wedding anniversary was October 28, and they were planning to celebrate out with some friends. But Helen noticed that Tom wasn’t quite right, so she told him that they could cancel and stay in for the night.

  “I think we should go,” he said. “Something tells me this may be the last time we get the chance to do it.”

  They did go out that night, and everyone could see it. The Tom they knew was the guy who once had a taco-eating contest with a coach and was jubilant when he won, 14 to 13. He was someone who would go through three or four bottles of Tabasco sauce a year because he’d pour the blazing stuff all over his plate. He was the one who went crazy for his wife’s Hungarian stuffed peppers, and he’d clean those medium-hot banana peppers himself because when Helen tried they brought tears to her eyes. His foods had spice, and so did he. He was a presence. He told great stories and enjoyed a muscular laugh as much as anyone. But none of it was there that night. He was quieter than his wife and friends had ever remembered, seemingly drifting elsewhere.

  He went to see his doctor again, in November, and was given a CAT scan. When they got the news, they were speechless. The tumor had returned and spread throughout his abdomen. He had renal-cell carcinoma. It was too much for even a world-class hospital like the Cleveland Clinic to control.

  “How long do I have?” Tom asked.

  He was still a coach, a scout, a tough guy. He had a way of getting answers to questions that aren’t normally answered. He wanted the truth or the best guess at it.

  “It doesn’t look good,” he was told. “Maybe two months.”

  There wasn’t a lot they could or wanted to say. Helen immediately thought of alternative therapies and made appointments with an acupuncturist. They told their children, and all of them tried to visit when they could, adjusting work and family schedules. Pioli heard the news and didn’t wait for the family to ask for anything. He wanted to know when Tom needed to go to the clinic, and when he found out, he’d be the one to take him. When Tom was at home, covered in blankets in his den and simply in need of a football conversation, Pioli was there. No questions asked.

  “My mom didn’t like to drive down to the Cleveland Clinic, and my dad was in a really bad place,” Thomas says. “And there’s Scott, you know, in a very precarious situation, working at a place that had let go of my father but still taking time away from there and letting it be known to them that he was being a friend.

  “His humanity was more important than a job. And I think he understood that if this was crossing the line, he could get a job somewhere else and still be able to look [at] himself in the mirror. Scott was taking my dad to chemotherapy. I know my mom will forever remember that.”

  There was a less important precariousness at the office but one that still had deflated the entire region. The news had finally broken about Modell and the Browns. They were moving to Baltimore. Modell was seduced by the reality of making twice as much in stadium revenue in Baltimore as he had in Cleveland. He had slyly met with Maryland politicians for months, once having an entire meeting on a private jet while never leaving the tarmac. After having their letters and phone calls unreturned, Ohio politicians began to sniff out what Modell was up to in late September. It was confirmed in November. He had gone to Maryland, signed the Browns over to that state, and naively thought that the story wouldn’t get out until the Browns were safely out of town.

  Headlines screamed, and fans and talk-radio hosts screamed louder. The Browns, fixtures on Sunday afternoons since 1946, were leaving. They were 4–4 when the news leaked. Afterward, they went 1–7. No one’s job was safe, Belichick and Pioli included.

  Tom Dimitroff had already lost his job, then his team, and now he was fighting for his life.

  In his last days, he sometimes sounded like himself. That was if he could muster the strength and be lucid through all the drugs he took to dull his pain. On those days, he still had words for his family. He asked Thomas and Randy to please find it in their hearts to forgive the Cleveland Browns. He loved all his children, and he was particularly moved that his sons were so protective of their father. But he had advice that was initially tough for them to hear.

  “Forgive Mike Lombardi,” Tom had whispered.

  He learned that friends, former players, and prayer warriors whom he didn’t know were praying for him. He was touched by their phone calls and letters. “You know what, Helen?” he said one day. “I’m sorry the Lord is taking me now because I have so much witnessing to do for Him.”

  After Christmas and New Year’s, he got weaker. What he wanted at that point was to be comfortable and around his family. He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to do it in hospice care. Thomas wrote a song for him, “Dad, My Hero,” and sang it to him, strumming a guitar. Tom s
miled and tears welled. He slept for long hours at home, and as he slept, a wooden cross was placed on his chest. It was a reference to one of his favorite gospel songs, “The Old Rugged Cross.”

  It wouldn’t be long.

  “I’ll never forget when we were all gathered around him,” Thomas says. “My mom had to deliver the message of what the doctors had told her. They didn’t expect him to make it longer than a couple days. And my dad said, in the calmest voice, ‘Helen, I’m going home. This is what I’ve been praying for.’”

  Thomas pauses for several seconds as he recalls the story. He tries to continue the thought without becoming emotional but can’t: “In that moment, you definitely feel God’s presence… I don’t know… I still tear up about it…”

  Thomas George Dimitroff Sr. died on January 20, 1996. He was sixty.

  His funeral was on a harsh, gray, and icy day in northeast Ohio. They were the kind of conditions he would have expected his players to execute in without excuses. Many of those players were there, as pallbearers carrying his casket to its final resting place. One of the pallbearers was Scott Pioli.

  There had been a bit of a family stir earlier when Lombardi had arrived to pay his respects. But Thomas remembered the words of his father, and although he still had questions about how things ended with the Browns, he greeted Lombardi warmly.

  At the grave site, five minutes from where Tom had gone to high school, a singer performed “Amazing Grace.” As the casket was lowered into the ground, a man approached Helen Dimitroff. It was Bill Belichick. He knew then that he wasn’t going to be a part of the Browns’ future, but he felt compelled to apologize for their past. The Browns hadn’t had a good 1995, from the dismissal of an ailing Tom Dimitroff to sneaking out of town. They were just a few weeks away from dismissing Belichick, too.

  Belichick said he was sorry for the way things were handled with her husband and best friend, and apologized for some of the mistakes he made during that time. Then he and Helen embraced.

  “Would you mind if I put a rose on your husband’s casket?” he asked.

  She thought it was a beautiful gesture and nodded. He placed the rose on the casket and then stepped back. Helen could sense his sincerity. She knew as well as anyone how unpredictable the business of pro sports was, and it was part of the reason she made a point of encouraging people she knew in the business. She had always done that with her husband and son, and she was known for writing cards with small notes of encouragement to their friends. Bill Belichick was going to be added to her list. There would be a time when Helen would send one of those cards to Belichick’s office, and the address wouldn’t be just his place of business; it would be Thomas’s and Pioli’s as well.

  2

  The Patriot Way

  In one of his first team meetings as head coach of the Patriots, Bill Belichick stood before a roomful of players and coaches and began speaking calmly. He planned to tell this group what he expected in the 2000 season, and he hadn’t been talking for very long, maybe two minutes, when a player entered, walked past the coach, and tried to take an empty seat in the second row.

  “Katzenmoyer!” Belichick snapped at the linebacker, one of the team’s two first-round picks in 1999. “Who in the hell do you think you are? Get your ass outta here! I’ll talk to you after the meeting.”

  A big man at six feet three inches and 260 pounds, Andy Katzenmoyer was made to feel small perhaps for the first time in his entitled, athletic life. While in college at Ohio State, he was the cliché star athlete who suspiciously slid through the academic system, having failing grades changed to passing ones and remaining eligible by taking intro-level golf, tennis, and music classes. When he was drafted by the Patriots, he joined a team that was often coddled by its head coach, Pete Carroll, and he took advantage of the relaxed working environment.

  Being kicked out of a Belichick meeting for lateness was just a glimpse of what was to come for Katzenmoyer. He wasn’t going to make it in New England. Not with this coach. He wasn’t alone, because many people in the organization, from players to coaches to scouts, wouldn’t be able to adjust to the cultural makeover, either. For many of them, the problem would be simple: They believed in things that Belichick didn’t.

  The players had gotten used to workdays in which pads were worn for half of practice, and the other half the pads would be taken off. Under the collegial and perpetually positive Carroll, special names were given to practice days, like “Turnover Thursday” and “No-Repeat Friday.” Some players had found that they could glide into meetings a minute or two after they had begun without consequences from the coach or the captains, leading to an atmosphere that lacked tension. They knew that Carroll was the head coach but not the de facto general manager, so a few of them would take trips to the personnel department for an audience with Bobby Grier, who was the top personnel man at the time. All the while, the victory totals went from ten to nine to eight.

  It took just a couple days to see that things were going to change under Belichick. His first press conference was in the evening on January 27, 2000. The next morning he fired a longtime strength coach who had four years left on his contract. When it came to one of his favorite topics, team-building, Belichick was likely to be unsentimental and blunt with his decision-making. It had been five years since his Cleveland dismissal, and he’d spent much of that time growing as a coach and football thinker.

  He had weighed two intriguing job offers in February 1996, after being fired for the first time in his career. Jimmy Johnson, the former Cowboys coach, had taken over in Miami and wanted Belichick to be his defensive coordinator with the Dolphins. Belichick respected Johnson as a coach and collector of draft chips. In Dallas, before the era of true unrestricted free agency, Johnson took the one-win Cowboys and turned them into back-to-back Super Bowl champions in just five years. He did it exclusively through the draft. He was helped by one of the biggest trades in sports history, when in 1989 he cashed in his most valuable asset, running back Herschel Walker, in exchange for five Minnesota Vikings role players and six draft picks. The picks were always what excited Johnson, and he stacked them and dealt them more aggressively than anyone in the NFL. He approached picks like they were quarters for Vegas slot machines, continually feeding with the expectation that a big payoff would eventually come. While in Dallas, he drafted two Hall of Famers and five other players who all would make at least four Pro Bowls.

  Belichick turned Johnson down, but the two maintained a good relationship, a relationship that would help Belichick sharpen his draft focus. Instead of Miami, Belichick decided to go to New England, a region where he’d spent a year in high school, four years in college, and several summers as a resident of Nantucket. It was also where Bill Parcells, his former boss, was the head coach of the Patriots. Parcells named Belichick as an assistant head coach, and in their lone New England season together, Parcells and Belichick watched the young Patriots advance to the Super Bowl before losing to the heavily favored Green Bay Packers.

  A feud over personnel power between Parcells and Patriots owner Robert Kraft led to Parcells departing New England for one of the area’s most despised sports and cultural rivals: New York. Kraft wanted Parcells to focus on coaching and have Grier pick the players; Parcells wanted the full control and the cash that the New York Jets would give him. While the Jets searched for loopholes that would allow Parcells to be their coach without compensating the Patriots, they named Parcells as a consultant and Belichick as their head coach. Everyone, including Belichick, knew it was a ruse, and it lasted ten days. Still, Belichick knew what to do with authority, even if it was temporary. He used that week and a half to call the old Cleveland Browns, the Baltimore Ravens, so he could get permission to hire away Scott Pioli and Eric Mangini, two of his former star employees who had made the transition from Cleveland to Baltimore.

  The Jets didn’t have a losing season when Parcells and Belichick were there, advancing as far as the conference championship game in 1998. Bu
t when Parcells said he was done with coaching, moving into the role of GM and trying to appoint Belichick as his Jets successor after the 1999 season, his longtime assistant bristled. Belichick knew he had made mistakes in Cleveland, from player evaluation to dealing with the media. But the five years there didn’t make him doubt his ability to be his own man, away from Parcells. If he had taken the Jets job, he wouldn’t have been able to fully steer the franchise the way he wanted because Parcells would still have final say over how things were done. He surprised Parcells and Jets upper management when he rejected the job in a press conference that had been arranged to announce his acceptance. The episode infuriated Parcells as well as New York fans and media, and it guaranteed that Belichick would never again be described as a dutiful Parcells follower. The head coaching job he wanted was in New England, where, despite Parcells’s problems with ownership, Belichick had enjoyed his year of conversations with Kraft and his oldest son, Jonathan.

  He may have wanted to go to New England, but the Jets weren’t going to let it happen without a legal fight. After a staggering amount of billable hours, Belichick became the head coach of the Patriots and the Jets received multiple draft picks, including a first-rounder in 2000.

  One early morning in New York, just as the conflict was coming to an end, Belichick talked with Pioli for twenty minutes. He was likely going to ask him to join him in New England so they could resume building the draft system that they had started in Cleveland. After a year of being in pro personnel in Baltimore and three in New York, Pioli was ready to assume the role that Mike Lombardi held for Belichick with the Browns. But that wasn’t the talk Belichick wanted to have at four A.M. Pioli had followed the coach to the Jets facility in Hempstead, where Belichick was going to drop off his team-issued car. Pioli would then drive him home since they lived in the same neighborhood.