NFL teams
Ian O'Connor, ESPN Senior Writer 9y

Bill Belichick's true inspiration

NFL, New England Patriots

PHOENIX -- Steve Belichick was on the phone with a complete stranger 11 years ago, making the case for Paul Brown as the best football coach of all time. I told him I was a Vince Lombardi guy all the way, and that there wasn't a close second, but Belichick was not giving much ground.

Steve played golf with Brown and attended his camps, and he reminded me that the founding father of game film and the playbook had won championships in high school, college and the pros.

"But as great as Paul was," the 85-year-old Belichick said then, "I don't think he ever walked into a room and took it over."

I recall being a little apprehensive about calling the man out of left field. He was Bill Belichick's father, after all. A Navy man who had seen action at Normandy and Okinawa and had played a bit with the Detroit Lions, somehow earning a promotion from equipment man to full-fledged member of the roster. It stood to reason that a military guy and football lifer who had raised the reticent and suspicious coach of the Patriots wouldn't have much use for a reporter hunting for some insight into what made his son, you know, his son.

And yet Steve Belichick did not say he was already on to Cincinnati. He had studied opponents and pieced together game plans for the Naval Academy for more than three decades, and he had written a book: "Football Scouting Methods," that had become something of a mandatory textbook for those breaking into the business. Steve Belichick had some things to say. He loved talking about football coaches, and wouldn't you know it, his boy was one of the best around.

But he did have a few concerns about Bill's place in a sports world forever putting a greater premium on showmanship, sex appeal and all that style-over-substance bunk.

"You didn't have to be a personality in the old days," Belichick said through a sigh. "[Television] changed the whole picture. Now you have to be a storyteller or have a TV presence in order to get hired."

I remember telling Steve Belichick that his son had proven that you can be the polar opposite of a rock star, and walk the sideline looking like half an unmade bed, and still end up among the very best coaches in the NFL.

"And he was an idiot five years ago," Belichick shot back.

His son had four losing seasons in five years in Cleveland, and he had quit the New York Jets after 24 hours as their head coach in a news conference funnier than any Mona Lisa Vito scene he'd quote from one of his favorite movies, "My Cousin Vinny," in an equally bizarre news briefing many years later. Nobody thought Bill was an idiot, but I was among those who thought he was the prototypical great coordinator who wasn't cut out to be a head coach.

As it turned out, Steve Belichick didn't push him to get into the business; he wasn't that kind of dad. He did say that Bill was breaking down Navy game films as a fourth grader, that he was already memorizing the Midshipmen's plays by age 6, and that he often tagged along at scouting meetings and practice.

"I never pushed Bill," Belichick said. "He was just always so interested ... and so attentive to detail. He went to prep school at the Phillips Academy, where the Bushes went, because he once heard me advising recruits that they needed an extra year at prep school. Then Bill told me he wanted to go to college in New England, and I said, 'You've never even been to New England.' Bill said, 'Yeah, but I've done some studying and found there are more good schools in New England than anywhere else, and I want to see them.' So we spent two weeks seeing them."

Long before Bill became a college football player at Wesleyan in Connecticut, he wanted to be another Joe Bellino, the Navy halfback who would win the 1960 Heisman Trophy.

"We were at the Academy's graduation ceremonies when Bill was 8," Steve Belichick said near the end of 2003, "and when the cadets all threw their caps into the air, he just walked over and picked one up without looking. There must've been 700 caps on the ground, and he picked out his idol's, Joe Bellino's. Bill finally gave it back to Joe this year so he could give it to his grandchildren."

As Steve Belichick was telling his stories, it struck me that he had a forceful delivery and presence; Bill's media voice has always been anything but, perhaps by design. I thought Steve actually sounded more like a head coach than his son did, and yet he served only briefly in that role at Hiram College before spending the rest of his career as an assistant at Vanderbilt, North Carolina and the Naval Academy.

"Steve had a unique position at the Academy," Bellino recalled Monday from his Massachusetts home. "He was a teacher on the physical education staff, and he was on loan to the football team. Steve was really a professor, and all the different head coaches who came in leaned on him. Steve knew what his strengths were as an assistant, and that was studying an opposing team and developing a plan to beat that team. That was his forte."

As Steve Belichick's friend and Bill Belichick's hero, Bellino was touched by the emotion Bill showed Sunday night in the immediate wake of New England's incredible 28-24 victory over the defending champion Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. While facing reporters as the second head coach to win four Super Bowls -- joining Pittsburgh's Chuck Noll -- Belichick choked up when talking about his old man and his 94-year-old mother, Jeannette. "I guess the last thing I'll say before I open it up," the Patriots coach said, "is the last time I won and I got Gatorade-d, my dad was here. I was certainly thinking about him tonight, and I'm sure he was watching. I hope my mom is watching too, so, 'Hi Mom.'"

Steve passed away while watching college football on TV on a November night in 2005. "His heart just stopped beating," Bill would explain the following day after leading his team to a victory over the New Orleans Saints. Bill Belichick was doing that day what his Patriots often did -- he was playing hurt -- and all these years later he still cites his father as the coach who shaped him like nobody else.

"Steve was like a general," said Bellino, a Vietnam vet. "He was a guy you wanted to lead you into battle. He was going to give you a plan, and you knew if you executed his plan you would win that game, and there was no doubt about it. For us, what Steve Belichick said was gospel."

Bellino recalled that Belichick conducted his scouting sessions with the players on Monday nights inside the baseball field house, with little Bill sitting in. Bellino also recalled that one of those sessions in 1960 produced the scheme that inspired Navy's upset of the powerhouse Washington Huskies, the defending Rose Bowl champs. Belichick thought Washington's defense would be vulnerable to swing passes to Bellino to the left side.

"And I took one of those swing passes about 30, 40 yards," the Heisman winner said, "and that set up the winning field goal."

Funny, Bellino said, but Steve Belichick almost never attended the Navy games he so dramatically impacted -- he was too busy scouting the next opponent. Belichick was a constant at practice with little Bill, and those memories make Bellino smile these days when he sees little Bill all grown up on the Patriots' sideline with his 27-year-old son and assistant, Steve, at his side.

Back in 2003, with his son's Patriots about to beat Carolina for ring No. 2, Steve Belichick was declaring Paul Brown the best coach in pro football history. I wish I could call him up one more time, remind him that I'm the Lombardi guy who phoned him a couple of times in the past, and tell him that I now think we both got it wrong.

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