Belichick Was a Miserable Motherfucker

He may still be, but he was, too. (i)

Over the last 23 years I couldn’t have been the only person among all the writers who had to endure any of Bill Belichick’s sarcastic, uncomfortable, rude, dismissive, uncivil and really irritating press conferences — after practice, after wins, after losses, after any event that required his presence — who then left the room with an empty notebook, a simmering anger and a simple question: Is this man simply an ogre of a human, or is it an act?

Yes, the majority of NFL head coaches tend to adopt the persona they think they have to adopt in a league that models itself on the George Patton school of military protocol — hard-ass, cocky, no fun at all, mocking of the lessers and losers. Whether that’s the character of the person they originally were or not, whether that’s how their mom brought them up to be, the NFL doesn’t encourage soft men to enter their corral.

(The NFL also encourages coaches to wear camo. It also favors pregame ceremonies featuring fighter jets, whose day gig is practicing to drop napalm and other things, flying over

a 40,000-square-yard American flag.)

And I also completely understand why head coaches are wary of sportswriters in general. Like any industry — gel-pen manufacturing, say, or forest rangering — the sportswriting world comprises a top level of really good workers, and then the majority, a lot of workers doing their job well, good and admirable and highly professional craftsmen/women, but then, in the bottom of the barrel, are people who are really bad at their job.

But unlike assembly-line workers hungover on a Monday morning who put too much strawberry filling in Little Debby’s Unicorn cakes, causing nary a ripple in the snack-cake world, sportswriters who badly ask stupid questions of a man on national TV tend to have consequences for that man’s career.

(I’d be wary if I were a coach, but then, I wouldn’t be a coach. I think you’d have to be crazy to be a head coach. Some comedian once said about people running for president, “Imagine someone saying,`I have this little box here and the fate of the world is in it, and would you like to have it?’ Sane people would run in the opposite direction. Presidential wannabes say,`Sure!’” That’s head coaches._

I had the occasion to spend significant one-on-one time with other great coaches. Don Shula would rip your flesh off in front of your peers with a few dripping words if your question was dumb, then apologize for his rudeness in front of the same peers a minute later, and give you all the time you later needed in his office. Bill Parcells had a bark in public, but one-on-one in his office, he was wry and funny and personable. Bill Walsh would summon security to to tell writers they can’t sit during practice because his players were not allowed to sit on their helmets, but one-on-one in his office, he was engaging and respectful and relaxed, in my case playing a Saint-Saens cello concerto playing on the tape deck. (ii)

But so anyway: When I wrote for GQ, I was determined get into Belichick’s sanctum to see if could pry some humanity out of him, so I asked the Patriot PR guys if I could just break down some film with him to see how analyzed opposing teams’ formations, as a key to divining his ongoing success. Surprisingly, he bit. 

The film work was fascinating. He broke down the tape on two games that the Patriots had won the previous season. He led me through safeties telegraphing blitzes, QBs setting their feet differently on pass plays, how to divine hidden zones — examples of his outthinking and outthinking and then outthinking again.

It was a master class delivered by the most tedious professor you ever had.  He was bored. I was bored. Fair enough. Like the Harvey Danger lyric, “If you’re bored, then you’re boring.” (iii)

And then, over a half-hour or so, I got him to open up about himself. Like how close he and Bon Jovi were. Who his neighbors were on Nantucket (Kathy Lee and Frank). The world-class extensiveness of his football-book library. Fair enough. Except this was the number of times he really smiled in ninety minutes: Zero. Nada. 

A week or so later, I asked the PR people if I could get a few follow-up questions on the phone. Didn’t hear. But they gave me a credential to a following game, so I caught up with him in the stadium bowels after his post-game press conference — they’d won — and asked if I could ask a few more questions. No, he said, not losing stride. Nope.

Last week, losing his final game as a Patriot in a wintry mix, he watched the game wearing a full-face ski mask that revealed only his eyes. At the end of the game, when he obligatorily met with the Jets’ winning coach Robert Saleh at midfield, Belichick didn’t even pull the mask down to reveal his face. He just patted Saleh’s parka shoulder and kept on running toward a new city, and more personal misery.

See if you can keep from sharing it this time? Just because you don’t like yourself doesn’t mean you have to make them feel the same way. They deserve better.

(i) I got that from this Mitch joke

(ii) He might have been conning me, and when alone, favored Billy Joel and Neil Diamond, but he was a nice guy.

(iii)