A Full Life of Football, Till the Very End

If anything, some of the players thought, he might have been a better, more gifted coach than the more laid-back Edwards. There was always something original in the way he went about his work. For one quarterback who did not keep his throwing arm high enough, Belichick built special wooden sawhorses, so that if the quarterback's hand ended too low at the end of his throw he would bang it on the sawhorse. He tried to get some of his running backs and receivers to improve their peripheral vision by first walking and then running down the field alongside them, and holding up different numbers of fingers, getting them to see more even as they ran.

Edwards and Belichick did reasonably well there, but Vanderbilt's coaches do not last a long time, and they were fired after four years. From there he went to North Carolina with Edwards, where they were part of another ill-fated coaching team before being let go.

With that, in 1956, he took a job at the Naval Academy. He and Jeannette loved Annapolis, the value system of the academy, the exceptional young men who went there and were so receptive to coaching, the feel of the entire community. He was, he remembered, paid about $7,000 a year when he started -- assistant coaches did not get rich back then. He was shrewd about it, and in some way he sensed when he first arrived that he had found a permanent home; he had been shot down in two previous jobs and he was wary of the life of a coach, the abundant pitfalls and the ever-tricky politics that went with the game itself and above all with the job of head coach.

Within the profession his talents were hardly a secret and there were repeated offers to go elsewhere for a good deal more money, either in the college world or as a pro scout. But he had everything he wanted, and he was content to be an assistant and a scout; he had an absolute sense of the value and the quality of his work. He was also shrewd enough, on the advice of a friend, to get tenure as a physical training instructor. That meant that, as a family, the Belichicks had a permanent base, one that gave them immunity from the normal viruses that struck at men in the coaching world. He coached there until 1989.

Nothing to Be Wasted

For the shadow of that hard childhood, being an immigrant's son in the Depression, always fell on their home, even in Annapolis in an ever-more affluent America. In the home of Steve and Jeannette Belichick, the values were old-fashioned and came right out of Monessen and Struthers. Nothing was to be wasted. Nothing was to be bought on time. Anything that could be repaired was repaired. He ran a summer football camp each year, and the money saved from it went to Bill's education. When he scouted at another school and the trip was 1,000 miles, which he drove in his car, and the government was paying eight cents a mile, then the $80 expense check went into a separate bank account to be used for the next Belichick car.

One of his best players of the Vanderbilt era, Don Gleisner, was a farm boy in Ohio and recalled for me the day that Steve Belichick showed up to recruit him.

"I was," Gleisner told me, "very cocky back then and when Steve came to the farm, I said something like, 'Coaching, that sounds like a pretty good deal -- is there any money in it?' "

Belichick proudly pointed to his brand new car and said, "That's a '49 Chevy, son, and there's not a penny owed on it."

That extraordinary work ethic was passed on to his son, and is one of the reasons he has done so well in the same profession. Nothing with the son, as with the father, is ever to be wasted, least of all time.

In every book a writer does, there are side benefits -- the bonus of dealing with people whom you come to like more and more as the book progresses. So it was with Steve Belichick for me with this book. If he had been a crusty man with a rather tough interior when he was younger, then the interior had long ago softened, in part because of both his own success, and that of his son, and the sheer richness of his life. I loved talking to him -- there were always stories, and each story begat another story. We became, as my work on it continued, the most unlikely of pals.

In the months I worked on the book I dealt with him almost every day, and he got quite accustomed to my calls. Sometimes he would answer the phone and say, "I thought that was going to be you -- why are you so late calling this morning?" There was always something more he had thought of, something more he thought I should know about the game, always something more to be learned and to be taught. I thought he was straight and smart and funny, and quite brilliant. Because he was so tough and so focused a person, I think many people did not realize how truly smart and original he was. If he did not get all the recognition he deserved himself, then it was his good fortune in his own lifetime to see his son recognized for the uses of his mind as he himself had never been.

David Halberstam is the author of the recently published "The Education of a Coach" about Bill Belichick, his 20th book, and has just finished a book on the entrance of Chinese troops into the Korean War.