Everything They Had (49 page)

Dick was dramatically different. He was not just talented but sensitive, and he had something which would serve him well for the rest of his career—the gift of instant friendship. He reached out to a generation of young black athletes, some talented, some not-so-talented, at a time when few other reporters were doing it, and he brought to his reporting a sense of what it was like to be different.

Dick intuitively understood that something very important, indeed profound, was taking place in our society in terms of race. He was right, of course—nothing less than a revolution was taking place. And if one of the great windows on it was in the South, where the Civil Rights movement was just getting under way, then perhaps the other exceptional window on it was sports, where for the first time the descendants of slavery were being given a chance to display their talents.

In 1956, Dick voted for the great Syracuse running back Jim Brown for the Heisman Trophy. Brown was self-evidently the greatest college player in the country, but a jury of white journalists from another generation obviously thought that it was a bit precipitous to honor him. He came in fifth. Yes, fifth. To Dick's credit, when he found out that Brown had been jobbed, he boycotted the Heisman voting for more than two decades.

Nor was the Heisman incident unique. Some two years ago, along with Glenn Stout, I put together a collection of sports reporting to be called
The Best Sports Writing of the Century
. One of the things we wanted was not merely the very best writing over those 100 years … we wanted to reflect the broad social changes in American society that had taken place over the years. Obviously, that meant we had to pay a good deal of attention to racial shifts as they had evolved over that span.

Here Dick's work was invaluable, because he had focused on such issues so early on. Originally, I wanted to use three of his magazine pieces (the only magazine writer from whom we ultimately took three was the estimable W. C. Heinz). One of Dick's pieces, written in 1958, detailed the anger of Pancho Gonzales, the great tennis player, brought on by his years of mistreatment by the white tennis establishment. Another was a piece in which Dick told of taking Muhammad Ali around New York in 1960 when he was very young, very innocent and still known as Cassius Clay. And the third was a lovely early piece on Wilt Chamberlain.

In the end, because the book was already a bit too long, we had to cut the Chamberlain piece. But Dick was pleased—two out of three, he said, was not bad.

It is hard to think he's gone. He seemed in recent years as youthful and exuberant as ever. Nearly 50 years of covering sports had not worn him down or made him cynical. He was, at the end, as optimistic and enthusiastic as when he started out.

His puns were as bad as ever, his heart as generous as ever. He had become silver-haired, and was a good deal more handsome than he was as a young man.

No one was nicer to younger reporters. One of the few people I ever heard him bad-mouth was a colleague who he thought had mistreated women and younger reporters when we were all much younger.

He remained remarkably tolerant of those he covered. If he could see their flaws as some of us did, he could also find in some athlete who seemed (at least to me) absolutely without redeeming qualities something likable. Redemption came easily to him. He could see in someone else's lesser qualities otherwise submerged signs of their humanity.

He always thought what he did was fun, and as such he made it fun. It is hard to think of his not being at the center of some group and having fun, oblivious to the clock.

When I was young and just starting out, I thought there would be a lot of people like Dick in this business. But now that I am older, I am grateful for the few like him, and that I was lucky enough to meet them.

There was, as the clock was running down in the final seconds of the Super Bowl this year and the New England Patriots were about to win their third NFL title in four years, a wonderful scene that might easily have been scripted in Hollywood. An older man, 86 years old to be exact, who always stayed in the background whenever there were television cameras around, moved from his spot on the sideline to be with his son, Bill Belichick, the coach of the Patriots, in that final sweet moment of triumph, arriving there just in time for the traditional Gatorade bath.

And thus did Steve Belichick, a classic lifer as a coach, 33 years as an assistant coach at the U.S. Naval Academy, who coached and scouted because he loved the life and needed no additional fame (and in fact, much like his son, thought fame more of a burden than an asset), get his one great moment of true national celebrity, the two men—son and father—awash in the ritual bath of the victorious.

Steve Belichick died of a heart attack Saturday night. He had spent the afternoon watching Navy play and win, in the company of some of his former players, and the evening watching another college game, USC against Fresno State, and almost surely rooting for Fresno State because Pat Hill, the Fresno coach, is a former Bill Belichick assistant, and thus an honor's graduate of what might be called Belichick University.

Steve Belichick viewed his son's extraordinary success, rightfully, I think, as nothing less than an additional and quite wondrous validation of his own life as a coach and teacher, not that he needed any additional validation of it in the game he loved (though as a college coach he always harbored a certain mostly covert suspicion of the professional game). Where the poverty of the America he grew up in had placed a certain ceiling on his own ambitions, his son, the product of a much more football-focused environment and a much more affluent, sports-driven society, attained the very highest level of the profession.

He was an exceptional coach himself, classically known within the hermetically sealed world of college coaches as a coach's coach and a truly great teacher. He was considered by many the ablest college scout of his era, first in the period before there was very much use of film and tape, and scouts had to do most of their work with nothing save their own eyes from the press box, to the coming of tape, where he still remained the master, someone who would run the tape back and forth countless times looking for one more clue about what an opponent was going to do.

“Steve had superior intelligence and intellect,” Bill Walsh, the former San Francisco 49ers coach told me, “and he not only saw the game as very few scouts did, but as he was seeing it, he understood as very few scouts did.”

He taught many younger men how to scout and how to watch film and how to prepare their teams for the next week's game, but his best pupil, fittingly enough for the Hollywood scenario, was his own son, who started watching film with him when he was all of 9 years old, and one of whose greatest skills as a coach to this day remains his ability to analyze other teams, figuring out both their strengths and their vulnerabilities, and shrewdly deciding how to take away from them that which they most want to do. In that sense, perhaps more than any other, Bill Belichick is his father's son.

Steve Belichick was active until the end, a crusty, zestful, honorable, amazingly candid man, someone uncommonly proud of his son's success. He both enjoyed it, and knew the limits and the dangers of it, and he was very shrewd when other coaches and writers spoke of his son as a genius. He knew the G-word was two edged, potentially something of a setup, that if they used it for you on the way up, they might just as easily use it against you on the way down. “Genius?” he would say. “You're talking about someone who walks up and down a football field.” At the end of his life he still went down to the Naval Academy regularly to check in with younger coaches, active still, though somewhat irritated that a minor stroke now limited his ability to go surfcasting off Nantucket in the summer.

His life spanned an extraordinary era in American life, and in American sports. He entered the game after an exemplary career at Cleveland's Western Reserve University, enjoyed a very brief career—one season—as a professional player in 1941, playing the game when the rewards were, in the financial sense, at least quite marginal. He was paid about $115 a week during his brief tour with the Detroit Lions.

But even as he began his coaching career at the Naval Academy in 1956, Steve Belichick watched as television changed the nature and importance of football; both college and professional football moved to the very epicenter of American popular culture, and his son, as the most successful of contemporary professional coaches, eventually drew a salary of $4 million a year.

His was quite a remarkable American story. The name was originally Bilicic. But it was phoneticized, much to the irritation of his mother, by a first-grade teacher in Monessen, Pa., when his older sister entered school and the teacher seemed puzzled by how to pronounce Mary Bilicic's name. His parents were Croatian immigrants—his father could not read or write in his native language—who settled in the coal-mining and steel-making region of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.

Steve Belichick was the youngest of five children, and because of the Depression, his father was unemployed during most of his high school years. As a high school student, though he was obviously very bright and got very good grades, he did not take college-track courses. The principal of Struthers (Ohio) High once pointed this out to him and asked him why he didn't take physics or chemistry. “Why should I take them?” Belichick answered. “I'm only going to work in the steel mills anyway.”

“Well,” the principal answered, “you never know—maybe there'll be something out there for you.”

There was. He was a very good high school running back, a little small, playing at around 160 pounds, but fast with very good peripheral vision and exceptionally good hands. His parents never tried to stop him from playing football—but the importance of sport in the process of Americanization eluded them and they never went to see him play.

By chance, a local basketball coach connected him with a football coach named Bill Edwards, an old friend of the legendary Paul Brown, the greatest of Ohio coaches; because Brown was legendary, Edwards, his pal, was at least semi-legendary and he coached at Western Reserve in Cleveland, where he had to recruit the kids that the Big Ten schools did not go after. Bill Edwards, for whom William Stephen Belichick is named, offered him a scholarship and in time he became a star running back there. In the process, Edwards became a great family friend and a lifelong mentor.

For a brief time right before World War II began, Bill Edwards coached the Detroit Lions, and brought Steve Belichick, then waiting to go into the service, to the team, first as an equipment manager and then as a fleet fullback who could handle the ball better than the all-American who was supposed to play fullback. Steve Belichick played on the same team as the famed running back Whizzer White. Belichick averaged 4.2 yards per carry, had his nose broken repeatedly, once quite deliberately by a player named Dick Plasman, who played for the Chicago Bears, “the last player to play in the NFL without a helmet, if that places him for you,” Steve Belichick told me.

He scored two touchdowns in one game against the New York Giants, and then in a game against Green Bay, a play he never forgot, and the details of which he could recount to his last day on this planet, he took a punt, got it on a perfect bounce, one he said that you dreamed about getting because you did not have to break stride, slipped to the outside with all the Green Bay defenders clustered in the middle of the field, and ran it back 77 yards for a score. During the war, he served with the Navy on merchant marine ships that made Atlantic crossings and then repeated trips from England to France after D-Day.

After the war, Bill Edwards helped him get a job as a coach at Hiram College in Ohio. There he met a young, vivacious instructor in Romance languages named Jeannette Munn. He asked her out and for their first date took her to a Western Reserve game. The date was not a great success. She thought she might learn a great deal about football, which seemed extremely important to everyone else in Ohio. But he did not talk very much during the game, and instead spent a lot of time smoking cigars.

After the game they went out for a sandwich, but all sorts of people kept coming up to their table—and he repeatedly failed to introduce her. At first she thought he had exceptionally poor manners, but it turned out that he simply did not know their names—they were fans who recognized him. He was, she realized, something of a local celebrity. He persevered with her. She did not think him particularly handsome, but there was something about him—his obvious raw intelligence, his fierce sense of purpose and his innate honor that she did admire.

In 1950 they were married, much, as he liked to say, to the surprise of all her friends who were not necessarily football fans and a bit more
raffin
, and he suspected looked down on him and his world.

As they grew older and they spoke of their Hiram days, it was like hearing two great comedians who had a routine down perfectly on the question of whether he had tried to get her to give his football players a break on their grades. “I never asked for anything for them,” he would say.

“Yes, you did,” she would answer, “but you did it subtly—you would ask about how the player was doing, but I knew what you wanted. You didn't fool me a bit.”