| |
Dale: This hour it is with a
great deal of pride and pleasure that Michael and I have back in our studios
best-selling author, and the author of a brand new book available in your
bookstores as of yesterday. It's called The Education of a Coach, and
it's all about, well it's really about Bill Belichick and Steve Belichick
more than anything else, but David Halberstam joins us. It's great to see
you again.
Halberstam: Well how nice to be
with both of you. And Michael obviously made my way, earlier, easier with his
earlier book.
Dale: I've got to ask the question, I
guess, to begin the proceedings: Why?
Halberstam: Why did
I do the book?
Dale: Yes.
Halberstam: It was
a way to learn. It was a great chance…
Dale: What drew you
to Bill Belichick?
Halberstam: Oh,
I've been watching him for forever. I live in the New York area, and I've
been watching NFL since probably the 1940s, back when it was a minor
league sport, before television came in the mid-50s and made it the peer of
baseball. When college football was bigger, my father took me to NFL games.
I think the Giants played at the Polo Grounds even then, and then at Yankee
Stadium. And when Belichick came in, in the early '80s, he fascinated me.
First off, there was a Belichick signature to a game: whatever the other
team did in the first half, his defenses tended to take away in the second
half. And then he was so seemingly uncoachlike. I mean, he wasn't big, he
didn't thunder – Parcells didn't let him get a lot of air time – but he'd been to
Andover for a year, and then Wesleyan – I mean, we're not talking football
powerhouses. And so he interested me, I'd been watching him, and then about a
year and a half ago a friend of his mentioned to me that he was interested
in doing a book, and was I interested? I've never done an 'as told
to' book, I'm not a ghost-writer, but I was interested. And we began to sort
of explore it by phone. We hadn't met. We both have houses in Nantucket,
ironically. In fact I'd always, I knew he was there for years and I sort of
looked in the phone book – Belichick – he wasn't listed. And I thought, well,
don't presume, don't call up and say let's have lunch, would you like to
meet me … I was a little timid about that. But we talked a couple of times, and it
was clear he was backing off the idea. And he was backing off for very
Belichickian reasons, prototypically Belichickian reasons. First, if he did
a main book and took a lot of money from a publisher, he'd have to promote
in-season. Bill Belichick's not going to give up four, five, six, eight
hours a week in-season to do a book.
Dale: Or one or two
hours.
Halberstam: Or even
twenty minutes. The second thing was that he's telling everybody not to
have ego. But then if he did a book like this – how he won the championship
season – it would look like he had ego. So by the time we had lunch about, oh I
don't know, sixteen months ago, seventeen months ago, I knew this. I knew a
little bit about him and I said, 'Well, what about a book?' We had a
very nice time at lunch. He's really smart. And he's smart in lots of other
areas – he's not mono-dimensional in his curiosity. I said, 'What about a book
on the education of a coach – who taught you, who you learned from and how do
you get to be a coach, what is the learning process?' And he said, 'That's a
really good idea,' and he liked it. And I said, 'Well, why don't you come for
dinner? If I'm going to do this, you better find out whether you trust me,
like me, whatever.' They came for dinner – my wife's a very serious, very good
cook – on Nantucket, just the two of them. Jean Halberstam said, 'Well, what do
I do? I've never entertained a football coach before.' And I said, 'Oh, he'll
be very disciplined, he'll go home before ten o'clock.' They left after
midnight. [Laughter] It was a very, very, very nice evening, and out of that
was a sort of tentative agreement to do the book. Then they had Super
Bowl three victory, mercifully. And in his soft season – May and June – I
started interviewing him. My book – no chance for him, he would not
look at the final version, and no money for him – but he would know the rough direction.
The book was going to be, 'How did you get to where you are, and who taught
you?' And I think the fact that so much of it would be about his father, Steve
Belichick – wonderful man, 33 years, great coach. But no one knew his name.
A
lifer. Probably the best scout of his generation. But his name had never
been in print. If there's a photograph of Steve Belichick in anything but
maybe The Baltimore Sun at a Navy game, I'd be surprised. And I think
he saw it possibly as an homage to his father.
Holley:
That's a great point. I think the title of the book, Education of a Coach,
I like the fact that you put in there people who know Bill Belichick
understand, and I'm paraphrasing…
Halberstam: Mmm-hmm.
Holley: People who
know him understand he is just as much a product of his mom as he is his
dad. Could you talk about his mother's influence on him, because, as you pointed out,
she is a wonderful lady.
Halberstam: She's
terrific. I mean, Jeannette Belichick was teaching at Hiram College, this
little college in Ohio. All football coaches of a generation come out of Ohio,
and they come out of, one way or another, the Paul Brown school, which
makes what happened to him in Cleveland sort of particularly painful and
ironic. And she was this very pretty, very vivacious young woman, I think a
class notch – one or two – above Steve Belichick, who is the son of Croatian
immigrants out of the steel mills of western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Only got to college because he was a very good high school running back. But he
was driven, and he's very smart. And this unlikely marriage of these
two wonderful, very different people – as Steve said, all her friends thought
she was crazy: 'She liked opera, spoke languages, read The New Yorker,
and I was a football coach, I was a jock.' And it has lasted more than fifty
years. But she was a teacher, and Bill is a great teacher, first and
foremost. If you go and interview him and you're asking a question, maybe
ten times in the hour he will stand up, go to a blackboard, and draw
something for you. I mean, he must have spent three special sessions trying
to get me to understand cover-2 and cover-4. I think, at the very end, I
finally have it. But you're absolutely right. And she's very disciplined. I mean, everything gets done, great attention to detail. So he's a very
interesting combination of both.
Dale: The most
interesting chapter for me, in an extremely interesting book, dealt with the
relationship between Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick. Something that I
think many people don't understand to this day. As you pointed out, they
weren't friends, they weren't alike in any way, shape or form, except for
the fact that they were both football coaches.
Halberstam: And
each got a lot out of the association with the other.
Holley: Right.
Halberstam: It was an odd
marriage. I mean, every one thought of them together because the Giants
took off when they married up. Under the ages, the original person
who brought them together was Ray Perkins, the very tough guy who was to be
Bear Bryant's successor at Alabama. He brought them in, and they
couldn't be more different. Parcells is the living embodiment, to the degree
there is one, of the Vince Lombardi prototype of coach – emotional, making
players go in hitting the emotion, getting guys to play harder, and making them
feel they're wimps if they can't do it. And then Bill Belichick, who
is really, although on defense, a kind of lineal descendant of Bill
Walsh – cerebral, doesn't play with the emotions of his players, thinks that
everything can be broken down and analyzed. But they came together and it
really worked. Parcells knew how to run a team, how to get the
emotions, and Belichick was the creator of those great defenses with great
players. They stayed together too long. It got harder and harder, I think,
the more Belichick got to parity. The more people began to give him credit,
I think, the more it grated on Parcells. And they probably should have gotten
divorced about two years before they did.
Holley: At one
point in the book you talk about Bill Belichick, and you talk about his
personality, how he's unadorned, he's just a straightforward guy. And you said
you get his answering machine and it says, 'Sorry to have missed you.' And
you say, 'Well it doesn't sound like he's sorry to have missed you at all.'
[Laughter] As a matter of fact, it sounds like he's delighted to have
missed you.
Halberstam:
[Imitating Belichick] 'Hi, this is Bill. Sorry to have missed your call.
Leave your name and I'll get back to you.' [Laughter] I mean, it's like the
voice of an undertaker.
Holley: Exactly.
But were you surprised at the public image – you said you didn't know Bill
– the
public image of Bill Belichick, the Bill Belichick in the press conferences,
and the guy you got to know? Because there is a huge difference, isn't
there?
Halberstam: They're
very different. I think he's extremely cautious and careful in his
professional incarnation. He's aware of the scrutiny on him, which is in an
age where – of television – your face is your signature, and the fact that
the game is brought into millions of homes, is far too much. And I think he
has learned that television is addictive – and, generally, destructively addictive
– to the concept of team. I think he believes that if he's caught smiling, it will
subtract. Or caught making a joke. Maybe he thinks that when Adlai Stevenson
lost to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 it was because he was found to have had
too good a sense of humor and made too many jokes. But I think he thinks if
he's caught smiling it's a subtraction, and maybe it will weaken him with
his players or whatever, so there is a kind of steady NFL gameface. I think
it's partly what he put on when he first came in when he was young. He was
almost too young. He was from Wesleyan, he hadn't played in the league, he
hadn't been to a big-time school, he had to prove to all these big guys that
he was a tough-guy, and he put on a harder face that showed no emotion. And
it has served his purpose. In private he's funny, he's loose, he has old and
abiding friends that he stays with – the Fredland family, which brought him
first to Nantucket more than thirty years ago – he's got great loyalty, he
does an enormous amount, very quietly, of pro-bono work for
charities – he and his wife have been very serious people on the charities
guild. He's interested in a lot of things. He's not the person who
coaches. It's very funny, at the end – we did the book, we worked together
very closely – and at the end I said, 'The book is done.' I turned to him, I
said, 'You ever read one of my books?' Because it just never came up.
And he said,
'Yeah, I've read them all.' He said, 'The first one
I read was The Best and the Brightest. Bobby Knight…' (The
basketball coach at West Point. Big friend of Parcells', too, by the way.)
Holley: Yeah.
Halberstam: '… told
me to read it because it's the best book ever,' he said, 'on screwing up.'
[Laughter] Well, there probably will be one on Iraq that will be comparable
to screwing up.
Dale: And I bet
that he didn't say 'screwing up,' too, Bobby Knight.
Halberstam: No, no,
he … But what he left me with was – did you feel this too, Michael
– that he is
straight. That there is sort of an inner honor and ethical sense that he
has. He doesn't manipulate his players. I mean, if anything it's almost
colder – he doesn't give them emotion, he doesn't play with them. Was that
your sense of him?
Holley: Exactly.
And that reminded me of another section in your book which was perfect. In
Cleveland, when they're talking about recruiting the players, or free agents,
and you're wining and dining them, you're taking them to steakhouses, and I
think it was Scott Pioli who said to him, 'Why are we doing this? This is
not who we are.'
Halberstam: Mmm.
Holley: And Rodney
Harrison tells the story, when they brought him here they took him to
Ponderosa or something. [Laughter]
Dale: Something
like that.
Holley: 'Hey Rodney,
this is the way…we see you this way. Do you accept the deal or not?'
Halberstam: Yeah.
Holley: He is a
straightforward…
Halberstam: Yeah.
Holley: That's who
he is.
Halberstam: He
doesn't play with the emotions. And when he did in Cleveland, it went badly.
There's a very good writer, writes a lot for GQ, named Peter
Richmond.
Dale: Yeah.
Halberstam: He's
really, really talented. One year I was one of the judges on Best Sports
Writing of the Year, and we put in two of his articles. I wanted to put in a
third, he was that good. He did a piece – he liked Belichick very much – he did a piece on
him, and what he told me when I called him was everybody wants
him to sort of be more charismatic, and go out … I mean, a lot of people in
the media want him to be more charismatic, do these things, have more charm,
and they're angry at him when he isn't, when he is what he is, which is a
very good football coach. And he said it's almost as if they subtract points
in judging him because he is what he is and he's not charismatic. They would
like him to be more inauthentic. They'd be more comfortable if he fit what
they think a coach should be, rather than just being who he is. And
Ernie Adams, his longtime friend and assistant coach, says the same thing.
He quotes George Young saying, there are a lot of owners in this league that
don't care at all how good the coach is as long as on the sideline he looks
like the Marlboro Man – you know, the chin juts off, and he looks like
a leader. And in a way he's been judged on that – that he doesn't look
football-coachy enough.
Dale: It's
interesting you bring that up. In my opinion, interesting people are complex
characters by definition, and I think he's a very complex character. You're
talking about his sideline demeanor. I think he cultivates this monk,
sweatshirt thing that, you know, he wants all the credit to go to the
team, he doesn't want to talk about individuals, but he has an ego!
Halberstam: Oh, yes.
Dale: You can't do
what he does and not have a very healthy ego.
Halberstam: He's
very interesting. I mean, turning down an 'as to' book, and all this other
stuff, very consciously not doing ego things. But the ego is very considerable. You can't do what he did …
Dale: Right.
Halberstam:
… and
go all the way to the top, and then excel. He's excelled at the top for
twenty years – Giants, Jets, Patriots, and even, actually, underneath all the sturm und drang in Cleveland there is a good coach at work there [even
though] he didn't excel. You can't do that without an ego. What it is is
he's not into self-celebration. He's into meeting the challenge, to being
the best, to pushing himself, following his desires to the ultimate
ability. And that's where the satisfaction comes, from being the best. Going
into the toughest arena and triumphing. And there's a quiet satisfaction.
Someone said, 'Is it any fun for him?' I said, 'I don't think fun is an
applicable word. I think it's about, and probably the culture he grew up
in – the father, immigrant son, raised in the depression, very hard times, the
name Bilicic mangled to Belichick, all this stuff – laughter was not a
natural gift. It was to do well, not waste anything, and excel in a certain
arena. And that he's done, and the ego works there, and he doesn't do – nor do
his players, by and large – celebratory war dances.
Holley: I'll tell
you what, David, I have to be careful with how I say this because you're
talking to a guy who tears up during The Godfather. I tear up at
unusual moments.
Halberstam: They're
killing people, and the bombs are going off … [Laughter]
Holley: Not that part, though. But I'll tell you, part of this story, I think, is
very beautiful and sentimental. The relationship between Steve and Bill, and
the relationship – a great story – between Bill and Ernie Adams.
Halberstam: Yeah.
Holley: I mean,
think about how many times you were able to have the same career as your
prep school buddy. You both know you want to be coaches, you do it, you have
entry-level positions in the NFL and you go all the way up to the highest
point of your profession where you win three Super Bowls together with one
of your best friends.
Halberstam: Thirty
years they've been together. 1975, another great football powerhouse, Andover,
and there's Ernie Adams who is a seemingly nerdy guy, not a very good, a
particularly good player, but a football nut. I mean, he's already a coach.
He's been coaching since he grew up in Boston at the Dexter School and they
had intramural, and he's about ten years old, and they had intramural
football, and he didn't think the teacher was doing a very good job
coaching. He started telling the teacher what to do and the teacher said,
'Well why
don't you coach?' And so he did. And they did better. And he gets to Andover
and he's already, I mean, he goes to a B.U. practice, a spring practice, and
he's up in the top level taking notes. He's got his films, he's read every book. In his senior year
– they do these things called a PG, post-graduate – he
notices, and he's got a book on how to scout, the most boring book in the
world – sold 500 copies – but it's written by one Stephen Belichick, assistant
coach of Navy, and it's how to scout. That year at football practice in the
fall shows up a young man named Belichick who's from Annapolis. And he goes
up, can barely contain himself, 'Are you the son of the famous writer/coach
Steve Belichick?' And out of that, I mean, they have been in sync in how
they think for thirty years. And Ernie Adams, who's a wonderful, shy,
incredibly smart guy, is Belichick's Belichick. As good with film,
computer-like memory of everything that ever happened in football – who did
what, what the score was, what plays – I mean, it's a great little computer in
there, and they have stayed friends all these years.
Dale: We do a show
down at the stadium every Monday. We're there every week. I've been
around this team for a long time. I wouldn't know Ernie Adams if he
walked through that door. [Laughter] And you know what? Ninety-nine percent
of Patriots fans couldn't pick him out of a line-up.
Halberstam: One day
they were doing things up on the screen in the Patriots drill session, in the film session, they did a huge photo of Ernie's and it said under
(the caption), 'Who is this man and what does he do?' That is a question
that Art Modell once asked when they were all in Cleveland. Modell said,
'I'll give $10,000 to anyone who can tell me what Ernie Adams does. He's on
my payroll, he's a coach, I just would like to know what he does.'
[Laughter] Well he's Bill Belichick's alter-ego. And in the high watermark
of Belichick's coaching career, the great first Super Bowl win over a St.
Louis Rams team that was an NFL golden team – one of those perfect teams, I
mean, on a roll, they should have won by 21 points – the game plan to take
the Rams out of their timing was equally Bill and Ernie Adams. They
both saw the thing that the timing didn't come from [Kurt] Warner, it came
from the great Marshall Faulk. And if they could take Faulk out of his rhythm they could disrupt the whole attack. That is the great coaching
job of all time. They shouldn't have been on the same field with the
Rams.
Dale: The book is
called The Education of a Coach, published by Hyperion, available
in your bookstores right now, David Halberstam is the author. We're talking
to David. I was actually stunned a little bit as he was describing
Belichick a few moments ago. I'm thinking, 'He's describing Theo
Epstein.'
Holley: And Theo is
a huge Belichick fan. I think Theo's trying to model himself, in some ways,
after Bill Belichick.
Halberstam: Is that
right?
Holley: Yeah.
Dale: They
sound identical as you were describing him. We'll come back and talk more
with David in just a moment. Sports Radio WEEI.
[Break]
Dale: The book is
called The Education of a Coach. It is all about how Bill Belichick
got to be Bill Belichick. There's a lot of Bill in there, there's a lot of
Steve Belichick, and a lot of other people, as well. It's published by
Hyperion, and it's available in your bookstores and on your amazon.com and
all of that stuff even as we speak. And the author, David Halberstam. Quick
interjection…
Halberstam: Sure.
Dale: As much as I
enjoyed all of the books that I've read of yours, there was a little tiny
book of yours that I loved, and that was Firehouse.
Halberstam: Oh,
thank you. That's a heartbreaking book. We live on the West Side of
Manhattan, right near Lincoln Center, and on September 11th our local
firehouse, about three blocks from our house, answered the call. They sent
13 men down and 12 of them died. So I did a small portrait of a firehouse
and of the men who had died – who they were, what had happened to them, what
their lives were. It's a book I'm inordinately proud of. And I'm
inordinately proud of my friendship with those men and their families.
Dale: Loved that book.
Halberstam: Thank
you. Thank you.
Dale: We're talking
about Bill Belichick, and we were just having this discussion off the air
and David put up his hands and said, 'Wait a minute, we should be doing this
on the air.' And he's right. I don't know that Bill Belichick could have a
more perfect quarterback than Tom Brady. And I'm not talking about the
physical skills, which are obvious, I'm talking about he is the perfect
person to run Bill Belichick's team.
Halberstam:
Intelligence. There's a quote, I think, in Michael's book that Brady is
Belichick with a better arm. He's got the intelligence, he's got the toughness, the sense of what's important, how to run the offense that
his coaches want. He does have a touch of the Montana thing, which is to be
able to see so many different receivers on a given play. I don't think he's
quite as kinetically blessed as Montana was. I think Montana would win if
there were a pinball game based on kinetic quickness and eye to brain to
muscular response. I think Montana would win every single time. There was a
great Princeton football player, when I was a young man, named Dick
Kazmaier, who was very good – ran out of the old single wing and could do the
pass run to the very last split second. Montana was the best. Brady's right
there, and Brady's got a stronger arm, I think, than people think. I
remember the first year, when he came in and replaced Bledsoe, I thought,
'Oh my god' – it was about the second or third game – I said, 'It's the second
coming of Montana.' You could see it. In his case, Brady, he's not as quite
as gifted, but an enormous amount of studying, of film, of knowing the
offense, of knowing – because of what Belichick says – what the defense is going
to do, that he can do. He can almost compensate for that half-second lead
that Montana would have had. He's very tough. And I judge toughness
not – two years in Vietnam made me very wary of sort of guys who thunder
around, how tough they are, and flex their muscles and whatever. Toughness
to me is about knowing who you are, knowing the price you want to pay for
something, being willing to do it, studying hard enough, focusing all your
energies to do what it takes. Belichick has it, and Brady does. And he came
in really hungry. He'd been really, sort of, I don't want to say abused, but
he'd been short-changed at Michigan. They didn't know how good he was. Scott
Pioli keeps on his desk a photograph of the guy they took in the 5th round
[Laughter], a tight end from Boise State who never played a down. As if to
say, if you're so smart why didn't you take Brady in the 5th round?
[Laughter] Scott is a wonderful, wonderful man. I mean, he's such a good
extension of Belichick, and Belichick of him. He's the first great graduate
of what I call [chuckling] Belichick University. Anyway, Brady comes in, and
at Michigan they brought in Drew Henson even as Brady had been the starter
and had done well and had taken them to a bowl. And everybody, even the
coach, said, 'Greatest quarterback I've ever seen,' cover of Sports
Illustrated before he gets to college, and they would cheer – Brady would
go out and start a game, and get them a lead, and they'd cheer when he came
off because the real quarterback was coming on: Henson. So he was
sort of wounded and he was really disappointed when he was taken in the 6th
round. And he came here on a mission. And the coaches would tell you they
didn't know how good he was, they didn't know how good he was going to be,
they didn't see the Montana thing, but they knew he had something. They
could see the toughness, the work ethic, studying – quietly – film, every day.
Going out after practice, when everyone went home, maybe in the bubble or
maybe in the stadium, and getting marginal receivers who were on the bubble
to work with him. And not just throwing long, but calling situations out of
a playbook. By the beginning of the second season he not only had passed and
become the #2 quarterback, but I think their doubts about Bledsoe were
growing. And I think that's because Belichick is Belichick. He saw that
Bledsoe – and I don't want to put him down, he'd been here in probably too
many bad seasons, too many coaches, and he'd been the big guy who threw it
all the way down the field. It was hard for him to adjust to a Belichick
system – throw short, throw here, mix it up. But I think Belichick being
Belichick, knew that he could defense, and create a defense that would beat
Bledsoe most of the time. And if he could do it, he figured I think,
other coaches could do it, too. And he began to have these doubts – how far
can he take us? I mean, as you get into the playoffs, or near the playoffs,
the better the coaching and the better the secondaries and the defenses. And
as those grew, I think, when Bledsoe went down the coaching staff was
already beginning to tilt to Brady.
Holley: In this
book you do a great job talking about Bill's years in Cleveland. I'm
wondering what your impressions are of a couple people who weren't there with Bill in Cleveland but are here with him now. You mentioned Scott
Pioli, but also Berj Najarian, who does many things that can't be
categorized in Foxborough.
Halberstam: Well,
[chuckling] I've got a lovely 25-year old daughter who's just lovely and
teaches school in New York. If Berj weren't married and about to become a
father, I'd really like him to meet her. He's just the loveliest man. Bill
is a very somber man; we talked about the voice on the phone. There's an
instinct to put up a little wall around himself, as if anything coming in is
likely to be bad news. Berj, who seems to me one of these sun-kissed people
of intelligence, goodness and charm is, in effect, kind of a
secretary/ football wife. He's open, he's smart, he's positive; he reads
Bill, his moods, he knows when it's a good time to talk. I think one of the
things that hampered Bill in Cleveland was he wasn't good at public
relations and didn't make much of an effort. Parcells had always done…in
fact, Parcells came in one day to Cleveland when he was working for the media
and said, 'Where's Gloom, where's Gloom?' Berj out there would have, in that
job, would have made it easier – known when to open the door, when to open the
window, or not. I think he's just a lovely person, and I think it's a very,
very healthy thing for Bill Belichick that he has him there because there's
almost a natural instinct that he has to withdraw and to be wary in so many
situations.
Dale: You talked
about, people ask you all the time, 'Is he happy? Does he enjoy this?' And I
admit, I wonder all the time. The game ends – Sunday night's game – they've won
the game, they've won 21-16, they haven't played well, they've come from
behind, game ends, it's over, they've won. How long is he happy after that?
And at what point is it, 'Okay, now I've got to worry about the Indianapolis
Colts'?
Halberstam: I think
it always overlaps. I think he's already … I mean, as the 60th minute
clicks off he's thinking 'Colts' if he wasn't thinking even before –
I mean, I
think he's thinking before goes. I think the pressure on these guys, coaches
at his level, in football – I've done baseball, I've done
basketball – I think the pressure is so great. I've never seen anybody in any
of the professions I've covered, you know, politics, media, I've never known
anybody to work so hard as Bill. I think it's twelve months. There's a
semi-soft season in May and June, but the pressure [of] everybody's good,
everybody's equal, the league makes you more equal, I mean, the league
isn't content to say well one team, one organization is better, these teams
aren't run well, so be it. The team falsely creates parity by giving those
who are good a much tougher schedule than they did ten or fifteen years ago,
and making it easier for bad teams to look better. So the more you win, the
fewer breaks you get. In addition, I mean, you're in a world where so little
can be controlled – injuries, the bounce of a ball, a referee's call. So that
I think the pressure to do everything you can that is within your control – to
do it well, to get the right players, to get them in the right mood, to
create the right ambience, to coach them well, to make sure that you've got
the right backup players, to make players seemingly interchangeable, that
pressure is so great because there's so little you can control – puts a stress
on him that is relentless, I think.
Holley: I'm
wondering, how do you think Bill became so fascinated with the Northeast? I
mean, let's think about it. This is a guy who grew up in Maryland, went to
Andover, went to Wesleyan. Even after he went to the Giants, and you point
out in your book he had a chance to go to Minnesota to be a coach, he said,
'Well wait a minute, I don't like the instability there, and I think I like
the Northeast.'
Halberstam: He's a
New England guy.
Holley: And
Nantucket, as well.
Halberstam: Well
he's – I mean, this is the most beautiful part of the country
[chuckling]. I'm a chauvinist because, I was born in New York, in the Bronx,
but the best part of our childhood, my father had gone back in the service,
was in northwest Connecticut, in Winsted – the values, the beauty of the
countryside, the fact that you get four real seasons. And then Nantucket, I
went there when I was 34 and fell in love. He went there – there was a family
at the Naval Academy, the Fredland family, father taught at the Naval
Academy, there were five boys, so everybody gravitated to the Fredland
family. And the Fredlands would bring him up in the summer. And as any kid
would, you fall in love with Nantucket. Particularly then when it was really
kind of a funky little New England Quaker community. It wasn't a rich
person's, you know, two million, three million, four million dollar house
thing.
Holley: [Chuckling]
Keep going up. Four million, five million.
Halberstam: Ten
million, twenty million, thirty million. A house went for thirty million
this year. Average house was two million. He went there and fell in love
with it. And Mark Fredland is one of his oldest friends, they went to high
school together, and Fredland became a builder. And Bill very shrewdly said,
'Let's buy a little bit of land, you build the house, we'll sell it on spec,
and then we can buy there.' And so he bought there. I think the kind of
education he had – Andover, Wesleyan – if you don't fall in love with New
England … I can see falling in love with the Pacific Northwest in the same
way. Or maybe San Diego and that part. I mean, there are certain parts of the
country you visit and think, 'That's for me.' I went to Nantucket and I
thought, 'I'm going to buy a house here.' Now, I was 34-, 35-years old when
I did it, and it has been the great sanctuary for me. And I can just easily
see him doing it and loving it. And I think the values, you know, this is an
area that puts a lot of value in going to college, in being educated, there
is a civility to political discourse here that you don't necessarily find at
all places in the country.
Dale: Will he ever
get sick of this?
Halberstam: Well, I
think it's very exhausting. I mean, what else do you do? He's a relatively
young man, I think he's 53 now, I think he'd like to keep coaching for a
while. I mean, would he eventually become a general manager, would that be
fun, is that direct enough? He's really a coach and a teacher. You could
almost see him when this is done, saying – you know if he's done it and won x
number of rings – saying, 'Okay, I'm going to go and coach at an Ivy League
school,' or something like that. 'I'm going to do something smaller without as
much pressure.' I mean, he's very glad to take
the exorbitant salaries they pay, but I don't think money means anything to
him. I don't think that's what drives him. I don't think he cares that much
about endorsements, I think it's in the satisfaction. Would he go to a
different level? I don't think you can tell with him. I think he likes the
challenge. I think something like this could grind you down at a certain
point, but he's a pretty young man.
Holley: You point
out that when he was in high school, at Annapolis High, he dated a young
woman named Debby Clarke.
Halberstam: Yeah.
Holley: They
dated and they married. Was it difficult for you to bring that up? Because
now they have, as you point out in the book, they've gone their separate
ways. Was that a tough subject to bring up?
Halberstam: Well,
when we were first thinking of doing it he came by one day and he said,
'Debby and I are separating.' Because they had come to dinner together. And
I said, 'Is there someone else? Because I don't want to be thinking you're
one thing, and then it turns out there's this…' 'No,' he said. And I think
it was two people – very nice people, she's
lovely – live this very difficult
life of a football wife to a – you talk about workaholic. Squared.
Workaholic by workaholic by workaholic. And I think they went separate ways
at a certain point. I think he's a good father. You know, the question when
you do a book, the question was, who is he and how did he get there? I wasn't
interested in his personal life. In fact, at the end of the book I noticed
that I hadn't mentioned his children. And I called him and said – because he's
very private – 'Do you want their names in or out? Because it doesn't matter
to me. That's not what I'm after in this book.' And he said, 'Put them in.'
In other words, I wasn't going to try and break that part of his
privacy, his personal life. Other than, I think the burden that it puts on
his wife to work that hard. There's a great story, I called his lineal
predecessor, Bill Walsh. It's the football coach wife syndrome. Bill Walsh,
at the height of his 49er years, is having dinner with his wife Geri in this
beautiful restaurant overlooking the Bay Area. You know, there's the city,
and it's wonderful, great food, and he's looking off a thousand miles away.
And Geri says, 'What is it, Bill, third and eight?' [Laughter] And I think
at that level it's always third and eight. There's always something you're
worried about – the draft choice, the injury, the field, the weather,
whatever. So, when you do a book you don't want to get into messy stuff. And
that seemed to me, the private stuff seemed to be private. Some day someone will come along and write a book, probably
a very good one, on what it's like to be married to super-driven coaches,
whether it's Tony LaRussa or Bill Belichick or Bill Walsh, or whoever, or
Joe Torrey. You know, that there's not as much left over. Someone can do it
about writers, too. What it's like to be, you know, because they're
obsessive. There's a wonderful story about James Thurber, the great writer
and humorist, and he's at a cocktail party and his wife is with him, and she
suddenly looks at him and says, 'Thurber! Stop writing!' [Laughter] And he's off. My wife catches me at that. Suddenly you're away from where
you're supposed to be, and you're flying out there, thinking stuff. It's the
burden of wives of obsessed men.
Dale: David
Halberstam will be appearing at the Brookline Booksmith tomorrow night at 7
o'clock, you can stop by there. Friday he will be at Phillips Academy, with
Ernie Adams, for a Q&A and a booksigning there, as well.
Halberstam: On
Friday, I think. Right?
Dale: Friday. Yes.
And Brookline Booksmith tomorrow night, Thursday night, at 7.
Holley: One of the
great bookstores in America. Truly my favorite bookstore in town, Brookline Booksmith.
Halberstam: Ernie
likes it, too. He says how good it is.
Holley: It's
awesome.
Halberstam: Yes. I
said, 'Are you going to be there?' 'No, no, no,' he said. 'I've got to
coach.'
Dale: The book is
called The Education of a Coach, written by David Halberstam,
published by Hyperion. Available in bookstores. It is always a pleasure for
us.
Halberstam: What a
pleasure. I mean, we could just go on for another hour. They don't need to
listen to Theo's …
Dale: That's Theo's
press conference, by the way.
Halberstam: We
don't need to listen to World War III going on. What happened, is it all
just about ego, or what?
Dale: I think that
there are a lot of similarities between Theo and that guy you wrote about.
Holley: Lots of
similarities.
Halberstam: The
classic one, of course, is Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones. The four J's.
Dale: Yes.
Halberstam: Jerry Jones thought he could win with anybody. And for one year he could.
Dale: [Laughter]
Yeah, with anyone is exactly the word. David, it's great to see you again.
Halberstam: Thank
you for having me. What a pleasure.
Holley: Thank you
very much.
Dale: David Halberstam joining us. Sports Radio WEEI. |
|
