Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [92]
Steve and his wife, Jeannette—the Vanderbilt team’s Spanish tutor—welcomed William Stephen to the family in 1952. By 1956, the Belichicks moved to Annapolis, where Steve found a permanent home, coaching and scouting for Navy. Growing up a part of the Midshipmen football program—a perennial football powerhouse until the late 1960s—Bill came to share in his father’s passion.
Each year, as a young child, Bill spent the annual Army-Navy game on the sidelines. At age seven, he saw Joe Bellino, the Heisman Trophy winner that season, score three touchdowns in Navy’s 43-12 win at Philadelphia Stadium. A few years later, the boy started surreptitiously scouting for the Midshipmen.
“There was a real close game,” Belichick said years later. “There was a lot of confusion. I was walking by one of the Army coaches when something dropped out of his pocket. It was the game plan. At that point my father knew the system, and now he had all the terminology. The next year, he’d say, ‘I see you ran the Jones special last week,’ and they’d say, ‘How did he know that?’”
Bill developed into a capable football player and fantastic lacrosse player at Annapolis High School, Phillips Academy, and Wesleyan College. But even at an early age, he showed a tremendous aptitude for diagramming football plays and understanding and interpreting game film.
“This guy decided he wanted to be a head coach when he was about seven,” remembered Ernie Accorsi, the NFL general manager who later hired
Belichick for his first head-coaching job. “I remember when [John F.] Kennedy was running for president. . . . When he first started talking early in his campaign, I said, ‘This guy’s been preparing to be president.’ He knew exactly what he wanted to do if he ever became president. That’s kind of the feeling I had with Belichick. He knew he wanted to be a head coach. There was no question in his mind. That’s what he geared his whole life for.”
Belichick left Wesleyan in the spring of 1975 and went looking for a job in the NFL. Baltimore Colts head coach Ted Marchibroda planned on hiring General Manager Joe Thomas’ cousin as a defensive assistant. Thomas’ cousin became unavailable, and George Boutselis recommended Belichick for the job that mainly included breaking down film.
“That’s when I hired Billy,” Marchibroda said thirty-five years later. “I knew to begin with that he would be a hardworking fella, and also his father was working with the Naval Academy in the football department as a coach. And I thought that once I hired Billy and interviewed Billy, I thought, well gee, if Billy couldn’t do the job, he could always go to his father. But that really wasn’t necessary. Bill was the kind of guy, once you gave him an assignment, you didn’t see him until it was completed.”
Coaching assignments with Detroit, then Denver, impressed Ray Perkins, who brought in Belichick to assist with the New York Giants defense and handle the special teams for the 1979 season. On the plane from Denver to New York, he saw Bill Parcells, who had just left the Air Force Academy to take the linebackers job with the Giants.
Surrounded by tough, hard-nosed military coaches during his childhood, and a coach himself by age twenty-three, Belichick had several mentors. Among others, he patterned his style on the model set by coaches Len Fontes, Dan Sekanovich, and Pete McCulley, as well as his father’s former Navy colleagues, Wayne Hardin and Rick Forzano.
“A lot of my philosophy and background comes from them,” Belichick said during his second year with the Giants. “I apply it to special teams, mainly to be aggressive. Wayne Hardin and Rick Forzano were both a pretty wide-open type of coach. They weren’t coaching to sit back. I’ve copied a lot of their ideas.”
That aggressive approach occasionally frustrated his head coaches.
During the 1981 season (from the press-box level coaches’ booth), he instructed Giants kicker Joe Danelo to “squib kick” after