Patriot Reign (12 page)

The Patriots were 8–5. They weren’t winning games
impressively, but everyone had a similar thought: they hadn’t always been
impressive the year before, and they won their last six regular-season games
and captured the Super Bowl. As much as they had struggled in 2002, they didn’t
see any good reason why they couldn’t go on a run of their own again. The
reasons may not have been seen, but the reasons were there. In three weeks
everyone would be forced to acknowledge that the season’s best wasn’t good
enough. Why wasn’t it good enough? That was something they’d have to argue
about in their meetings.

The driver was early. He was told to be at the main entrance of the Sheraton Music City Hotel at 8:15 on Sunday night, and he was there at 8:00 idling in his
black sedan. He was just following instructions. He didn’t know that the hundred-mile trip he was about to take would hold so much significance for the head coach of the New England Patriots. He didn’t know that this trip from
Nashville to Monterey would jog a lifetime of Bill Belichick’s memories and, eventually, sadden his heart.

It was December 15,
2002, about twenty-four hours before the Patriots would play the Tennessee
Titans on
Monday Night Football
. Belichick’s day, which began
in Foxboro, had already been full. He had overseen a Gillette Stadium practice
at 10:45 that morning. There was a flight out of Providence at 1:30, an arrival at the hotel three hours later, a
production meeting with ABC’s John Madden, Al Michaels, and Melissa Stark, and
finally a meeting with the coaching staff.

Now he was sitting in
the backseat of a car, being driven eastbound on I-40 toward a small town near
the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. He was on his way to see his cousin,
Jean Freeman. He had a feeling that it would be the last time he saw her alive.
Jean had terminal cancer that had attacked her pancreas. Jean and Bill had
spent a lot of time together, especially during holidays with his mother’s
family in Florida. They had always gotten along, talking about everything from
school to music. She followed his career when he got into coaching, encouraged
him, and bragged about him.

“Since I was an only child, she was as
close to a sibling as anyone,” he says.

He was going to make the
trip as normal as possible. Christmas was ten days away, so he had a bag full
of gifts for her in the trunk. After ninety minutes of driving, he was at her
house, just off the highway. It was one of her good days, so she ran out of the
house and met him at the car. She was a small woman, about a size 2, with a
quick smile. She told him to come inside the modest house, and as he petted a
brown dog named Bear she insisted on getting him a cup of coffee. Her aunt was
in the living room, knitting and watching the Cardinals and Rams play the late
NFL game on ESPN. She pulled Belichick close to her and whispered, “I’m so glad
you came. This is good for Jean. You don’t know how good this is for her.” She
smiled as her eyes filled with tears.

“So what’s going on?” Jean
shouted from the kitchen. “How are you?”

She
told her famous cousin that she had been rooting for his Patriots to recapture
what they had the previous season. She mentioned an interview she had seen with
him on one of the networks. After she returned and handed him his coffee, she
sat on the floor with her legs folded. She opened one of his gifts. Inside the
box was a stylish shirt, a matching belt, and a bracelet. She was excited about
the gifts and teased him: “Tell Debby I said thanks for picking these out.”
Belichick smiled.

They had a lot of fun that night. They caught up
on family news. They played with Bear. They halfway watched the game, although
Belichick did pay close attention when a promo for
SportsCenter
used a cheap tease and mentioned that the Red Sox
had acquired Giambi. “What?” the coach said. “That can’t be right.” It was. The
Red Sox had acquired the marginal Jeremy Giambi, not Jason, his All-Star
brother. At one point the cousins got into a discussion that could have
continued for hours. They were talking about some of their favorite music and
favorite concerts. They went on and on about the Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi,
Bruce Springsteen, Santana, and a group that Jean remembered seeing open for
the Stones on their “Steel Wheels Tour.” “Living Colour,” she said. “Those guys
were a lot of fun.”

As they reminisced and laughed, she had a
sudden thought. The driver—what had he been doing all this time? “You should
have told him to come in,” Jean said. “I feel bad that he’s out there all by
himself.”

She knew that Belichick didn’t want to leave, but she
could also tell that he was tired. It was sneaking toward midnight, and he had
a game the next night. She told him that he should probably head back to
Nashville. Her aunt, who had sat in the living room the
entire time they were there, knitting and smiling, told Belichick again how
happy she was to see him. Jean walked her cousin to the car, gave him a hug,
and told him she would talk with him later.

He really was tired.
She had known him long enough to notice his fatigue before he did. She lived
near a gas station, a Burger King, and a convenience store. Belichick asked the
driver to stop at the store so he could pick up a Coke. He was trying to hold
off sleep for twenty-five to thirty more minutes. Soon he would leave the
little town with the beautiful scenery and affordable real estate.

He had been born in Tennessee fifty years earlier, way back when his
father was coaching at Vanderbilt. This return to the region, with towns called
Sparta and Algood and Pleasant Hill, was primarily a business trip. He had told
Michaels, Madden, and Stark earlier that night that he was looking forward to
seeing the Patriots play a good team on the road. “It will let us see where
we’re at,” he said.

But it was a family trip as well. His visit to
Monterey was uplifting in a way because he had seen Jean smiling and enjoying
herself. But her condition would worsen six weeks later. She wasn’t going to
make it and he knew it. She died in January 2003.

He was going to
remember this visit to Tennessee. Professionally, it was going to be humbling.
There were going to be things in the Titans game that were going to make him
question entire segments of his team. Personally, the trip was going to cause
him to reflect. He was going to remember how friendly and extroverted his
cousin had been the last time he saw her, even though she was in pain and not
expected to survive until the spring. He was going to remember how quickly life changes. As a coach and as a cousin,
he sometimes found himself looking back to the joy of last year.

T
he 2002 season was so good,
early, that Tom Brady had to tell one of his teammates about it. Before the
fourth game, at San Diego, Brady was standing next to receiver David Patten.
The quarterback called Patten by his nickname.

“Chief,” Brady said, “I was just thinking: we might go undefeated this
year.”

It felt that way in the beginning. In the first game
against the Steelers, the Patriots were helped by new additions Deion Branch,
Donald Hayes, Christian Fauria, and Victor Green. It was their first
regular-season game in dazzling Gillette, their new stadium, completed in May
2002, and they won, 30–14. Branch’s third-quarter block on Pittsburgh safety
Lee Flowers was so impressive that it was a high- priority headset topic in the
coaches’ box. “Make sure you go over and congratulate his ass,” assistant coach
Jeff Davidson said to Charlie Weis. “He made a great block on that
play.”

The play was a touchdown pass from Brady to receiver Hayes,
whom the Patriots had signed as a free agent from Carolina. At six feet four
inches, Hayes was the Patriots’ tallest receiver. The idea was that he would be
able to use his height on routes that couldn’t be thrown to the team’s other
wide-outs, all six feet and under. But there weren’t many games that Hayes was
comfortable with the offense, and there was a good reason for it. He hinted at
it in October in an interview with Nick Cafardo of the
Boston
Globe.