A Full Life of Football, Till the Very End

"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.

Finding a Home

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."

"Okay, maybe I did," he would answer, "but you never helped any of them."

In 1949, Bill Edwards took the job as head coach at Vanderbilt and brought Steve Belichick along as an assistant. At Vanderbilt he was viewed as a tough, smart, extremely original coach and a brilliant scout -- he always gave his players an edge with his scouting reports.