Belichick learned well from dad

November 21, 2005|Bob Ryan, Globe Columnist

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When Steve was 5, the family moved to Struthers, Ohio, near Youngstown. When he came of age, he was immersed in a football culture. Football would do for he and his brother John what could not be done for his elder siblings. Football would get him to college, in his case Case Western Reserve University.

Combine what he learned at home with what he learned at school and you have the special human being that was Steve Belichick. ''The values of that era and of that particular ethnic culture were basic," wrote Halberstam. ''You worked hard. You saved. You did not waste anything. You did not complain. You did not expect anyone to do anything for you. Discipline was not so much taught as it was lived, as an essential part of life for which there was no alternative."

There was one other thing. You followed good advice when it was offered. While at the University of North Carolina, Steve Belichick had become a friend of basketball coach Frank McGuire. When McGuire heard that Belichick was heading to Navy, he advised him to do what his friend Ben Carnevale, Navy's basketball coach, had done -- take steps to become a physical education teacher in addition to coaching to protect himself from what Halberstam refers to as the ''volatility and uncertainty of the coach's life." That is how Steve Belichick came to retire from the Naval Academy as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Education.

It was a tough day at the office for Bill Belichick, and it was a rare shared solemn moment between a normally unemotional coach and the team he has led to three Super Bowl championships when he informed them that his father had passed away. ''He didn't break down," said Richard Seymour. ''But it was clear the weight was on him."

Steve Belichick had gone his professional way and the son had gone his, and a lot more people know about the son than the father, which is understandable when the son has won three Super Bowls and the father has remained in Annapolis for more than three decades. But does this mean the son has been a greater success than his dad?

The son who now mourns him knows better.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.