A Full Life of Football, Till the Very End

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.

An Extraordinary Era

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."