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 Steve Belichick was, some of the
players thought, perhaps an even better coach, a man of exceptional
intelligence, commitment, and knowledge, a man whose true potential had not
yet been realized. He was an original teacher, and he had a rare skill in
preparing them for a game, because he was unmatched as a scout. "The best
scout I've ever seen—the amount of detail and knowledge was unmatched. What
he had was like nothing we had ever seen before," [Mac] Robinson said. "If
Steve said something was going to happen in a game, then it was going to
happen in a game." Other players agreed. "Best scout in the pre-computer age
that football ever had," said Don Gleisner, who played defensive back at
Vanderbilt and then played in the NFL. "Nothing was left to chance." Steve
did not prepare with broad generalities, but with minutiae, detail after
detail. Each player, he felt, should go into a game feeling he had a
distinct advantage over the player he was matched up against. For Robinson
there had been one memorable game, against Alabama, in which he had played
fifty-nine minutes and could barely walk off the field at the end. Alabama
had an end named Al Lary, a kind of stealth player. He would get off the
line of scrimmage somewhat slowly and come at the defensive back as if he
were no threat; then he would explode, and in that millisecond, he would be
gone. The previous week against Tulane, as Robinson recalled, Lary had
caught three touchdown passes. So Belichick and Robinson worked on it and
worked on it, and Robinson dropped off the line a few extra yards and was
ready when Lary turned it on. He caught no touchdown passes that day as
Vanderbilt beat Alabama. . .
Years later Bill Belichick would understand what made his father so good a scout:
the absolute dedication to his craft, the belief that it was important, and
the fact that so many people—the people who paid his salary, his colleagues,
and the young men who played for him—were depending on him. But it was not
just about the superior work ethic; it was about the natural abilities.
Steve Belichick had been blessed with great eyesight, 20/15, he was told. He
had come to believe, though no one had ever measured him on this, that he
had great peripheral vision, as well, because when he played he had been
able to see the play as it opened up, and the dangers that existed for him
on the periphery. He could see clearly where other people had black areas.
But it was more than just a gift of exceptional vision; it was the ability
to use that vision, to be able, as a scout, to anticipate the play and read
it. No one did that better than Steve Belichick. The key, he decided early
on, was to watch the center, for the center almost always told you so much:
whether it was a pass or run, and which way the play was going. Then your
eye flashed accordingly to the flow of the play, out to the end and the
linemen on the side to which the center had tipped you, and you had to do
all this quickly, almost before the play developed, because otherwise you
would be too late, and then your eye would not see the entire play
unfolding.
Steve Belichick was also incredibly smart. "It was the superior intelligence,
too," said Bill Walsh. "Steve has superior intelligence and intellect, and
he not only saw the game as very few scouts did, but as he was seeing it, he understood it as very few scouts do." Scouting seemed to come so
naturally to him, not so much an end in itself, as some of his colleagues
who watched him thought, but more accurately as a game within a game, one
which he was always determined to win. Most of the other scouts were
assistant coaches who did not really want to be scouting. They wanted to be
back with their teams on Saturday, watching their handiwork in action, and
their work habits showed it. They were, Bill Belichick remembered from
watching them when he was a boy, "all so casual about it, talking to each
other, paying attention but not really paying attention, doing a lot of
coaching small talk, gossiping really. Not really paying attention to the
game, but thinking that they were. Instead they were halfway interested.
There were a lot of questions they would be asking each other, like 'Hey,
did the guard pull on that play?' It was like a social occasion for them,
and they would be ordering hot dogs and coffee. And, by contrast, he was
always working. Every minute. He was like a hawk up there. And by watching
him, I learned to see the game, how well prepared you have to be and how
quickly your eyes have to shift. He had his own sheets which he had created
himself to make it easier to get the information down, and he could get the
basics down, the rest to be filled in later. The other guys were barely
operating off the programs. He had it all laid out—the plays, the downs, the
tendencies, the different yardage needs on different downs, the different
formations, all of it. He had such quick eyes, a great field of vision, and
such great anticipation, play after play. If he could not get everything
noted in time before the next play was run, he could make some little note
to himself that probably only he could understand, and then he would fill it
in at halftime or after the game. The others might have one or two pencils
and one lawyer's pad, but there he would be with thirty pencils, all of them
sharpened." He was, his son said, "the first great scout." "What I learned,
going with him," Bill Belichick added, "was that it was not just a game, it
was a job."
He was always working. Bill remembered one year when he had been allowed to make
the trip to Philadelphia with his father to scout Penn. They were the first
to arrive and Steve did not waste a minute, immediately checking out the
players in the pregame drills, the punters, how long they held the ball, how
they dealt with the wind, and finally what kind of returns they were setting
up on punt returns. There was, Steve Belichick taught his son, always
something to learn.
His name was never known to those in the larger society, even to those who thought of
themselves as football junkies. What he did was rarely written about, and
few journalists or broadcasters sought him out for halftime interviews. He
greatly preferred it that way, since probably not very much good would come
of it—fame for an assistant coach was not usually regarded by the head coach
as a good thing, and it could easily be viewed as the beginning of a move on
a head coach's job. Belichick's feeling was that all the people who needed
to know about his talent already knew, and those people were other coaches.
There were other offers, often for much more money. Earl Blaik wanted him to
come to West Point. Hank Stram wanted him to come out to Kansas City and
work for the Chiefs. When Eddie Erdelatz was fired at Navy and went to
Oakland as an assistant with the Raiders, he pushed hard for Steve to join
him. But Belichick was reluctant to leave. . .
That he was always an assistant coach did not mean he was always a compliant one or
that he felt he should not have strong opinions. He was intense, stubborn,
opinionated, absolutely sure of when he was right. He was capable of
towering arguments with Erdelatz over strategy, and he won most of them on
defensive strategy—over, for example, rotating the defensive secondary
toward the strong side. Particularly memorable was the fight the two men had
at the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day 1958, following Navy's 14—0 defeat of
Army. In the Cotton Bowl, Navy had taken a 20—0 lead over Rice, a team that
had two very good quarterbacks, King Hill and Frank Ryan, the latter
eventually a star with the Cleveland Browns. Because Navy had such a big
lead, Erdelatz had started substituting much sooner than Belichick thought
safe. Those two quarterbacks, he thought made Rice and unusually explosive
team, one capable of scoring quickly and often, and Navy could all too
easily lose its momentum. He argued with Erdelatz from the press box when
the substitutions began, telling the coach he was being precipitous; he
watched Rice score once, argued with the coach again, and then saw Rice go
on a long drive that ended on the Navy 2-yard line when the clock ran out.
He was so angry with Erdelatz that day that he refused to ride on the team
bus back to the hotel; he decided to walk back, the better to burn off his
anger.
Even after he retired he went back and coached. No one coached punters better than he
did, and long after he retired, other coaches would call him for tips on how
to handle their punters, who were somehow believed to be different from all
other football players. Dean Pees, then coaching at Kent State, once asked
Steve Belichick about a punter who kicked brilliantly in practice and poorly
in games. How does he prepare in practice? Belichick asked. "Well, he punts
and punts and punts, one after another," said Pees. "Have him practice the
way he kicks in a game," Belichick suggested. "Have him punt, and then take
a fifteen-minute break, and then punt, and then take another break." Pees
did, and the problem was solved. On other occasions Pees called because he
was having trouble with another punter. This punter was not able to do the
two-step, which was the generally approved approach; he needed a three-step.
Whenever he did the two-step, his punting suffered. "Have you timed him on
the two-step?" Belichick asked. Yes, Pees had, and he came in at 2.3
seconds, a little above the ideal, which was 2 seconds. "And what about the
three-step?" Belichick asked. "He does it in two seconds," Pees said. "Well,
there's your answer, just let him be," Belichick said, and Pees thought, of
course, how simple, and then he thought, no wonder the son is so smart and
wastes so little of everyone's time.
Both Steve and Jeannette
Belichick thought that Annapolis was a good place to raise a son, and from
an early age Bill liked to hang out with his father at practice. Steve
enjoyed that, too—some coaches, he knew, did not like having their sons at
practice, but he was more than comfortable with it. He was gone so much of
the time scouting that he liked being around his boy when he could. Bill
liked practice, and he would, in the years when Roger Staubach was there—and
was always the first to arrive at practice and the last to leave—catch
passes that Staubach threw, or take snaps from the great center Tom Lynch,
who eventually went on to become the superintendent of the Academy.
The Belichicks were careful in the way they lived, because the salaries were
never that big, even if his pay had been gradually going up. At North
Carolina he had been paid $6000 a year, and at Navy he started at $7000.
The Navy paid for their move from Chapel Hill, which was the first time
anyone had done that. But the shadow of Struthers, the steel mills, and the
Depression was always there. In that era, coming out of the Depression,
small increments of success were to be valued, for they were not necessarily
small. When Steve Belichick, as a young Vanderbilt assistant, had recruited
eighteen-year-old Don Gleisner in 1949, visiting him on his farm near
Oberlin, Ohio, Gleisner was fascinated by the idea of someone who made a
living by coaching. "I think I'd like to do that too," he said. "Any money
in it?" Belichick pointed at his new car. "That's a '49 Chevy, son," he
answered proudly, "and there's not a penny owed on it." Nothing was ever to
be wasted. No food to be left on anyone's plate. There was never any doubt,
Bill once said, where that value system came from. He knew all of his
father's stories, which had been told again and again: the grandfather who
walked back and forth to work every day (the distance seemingly growing
longer with each telling), the caddying for the family kitty with only 10
cents to go to the caddy himself, the older brothers who had been forced to
leave school and go to work before they graduated, the Sunday chicken as the
one meal to look forward to. When Bill Belichick grew up, it was with the
most natural conflict imaginable for someone of his generation, who was
living in an ever more affluent America, yet was acutely aware of the
hardships that had shaped the previous generations, and how those hardships
had made them stronger, and how much they had sacrificed to make him
successful. Out of that, eventually, an exceptional work ethic was fashioned
in a young man whose life was infinitely more privileged than that of his
parents and grandparents. |
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