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different
levels,” Belichick says. “I had seen a lot of different players and
head-coaching styles. I had been in the AFC and NFC. I felt I had four good
years studying special teams, two years studying offense, and two studying
defense.”
    He had worked for four coaches in three cities. He was
beginning to acquire the education that he couldn’t get in school, no matter how prestigious those schools are. He was
twenty-six years old, almost twenty-seven, and now he knew what it meant to
take control of a meeting. He understood how dangerous it is to be surrounded
by yes men, sycophants who silently nod along with you even though your premise
or approach may be faulty. He saw how rapidly an employment status can change.
Sometimes it’s because the owners are cheap, sometimes it’s because the owners
want the teams to win more, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.
    Belichick was headed to New York, a city where he would become idolized
as a prepared and visionary coach. In exactly twenty years he would go to court
for the right to leave New York. It wouldn’t be leaving New York as much as it
would be professionally separating himself from Bill Parcells, a boss with whom
he was tired of being associated. One day he would feel as if he were an
established country that some haughty explorer claimed to have discovered. One
day he would take exception to the notion that Parcells was his mentor.
Belichick had watched his father. He had watched Marchibroda, Shurmur,
Glanville, Reese, Red Miller, lots of people. However, he would be linked to
Parcells for many years. That link would gradually weaken in the late 1990s. It
would pop, dramatically, at the end of 1999 and in the first few weeks of the
new millennium.
    But no one could have imagined that in ’79, when
New York Giants head coach Ray Perkins was looking for a special-teams coach.
The foreshadowing was there, but who could see it? Who would guess that Adams,
who also began working with the Giants in ’79, would still be a key member of
Belichick’s football Cabinet? A sergeant’s son, Romeo
Crennel, would arrive in New York two years after Belichick. Who would guess
that he would one day become the top coordinator in the NFL as part of
Belichick’s staff?
    There was one clue that the
twenty-seven-year-old Belichick would be just as forceful as the fifty-year-old
Belichick. He made it known in the beginning that he was a coach, not one of
the guys. He looked young. He was young. He was in good shape
from his days of playing football and lacrosse. It would have been easy for
players to look at this assistant coach as a peer, not as someone charged with
giving and teaching them assignments.
    “It was an awkward
relationship because in a lot of cases I was younger than the players,” he
says. “Each year I was older than a couple more guys. But for a lot of years
there were a bunch of players, certainly the higher-profile guys, who were
older than I was. You know, I was never one to go around with the players
anyway. I could relate to them because I was their age, but I was never gonna
hang out with them and do some of the shit that they did.
    “And I
knew it wasn’t the right thing to do anyway. It would be great for a night, but
in the long run it could really deteriorate your relationship. Everybody that
I’d worked with told me that too. Ted told me, Rick told me, Red told
me.”
    They told him because they knew there would be a point when
he would be challenged. Some player was going to step up, and the young coach
was going to have to prove that he was in authority. That happened in New York,
and it happened during one of Belichick’s first meetings in front of the entire
team. He was trying to explain how the Giants were going to handle a technique
when he noticed a conversation to his left. One of the players was laughing,
trying to get the attention of his buddy. Belichick called
the player out, and the player replied with a verbal jab of his own.