It's hard to leave an impression, and even harder to make history in a place as ancient and significant as New England. The standard is so high.
But Bill Belichick, who stepped down as head coach of the New England Patriots on Thursday after 24 years of unmatched dominance in America's most popular sport, will be remembered alongside New England legends like Ted Williams, Bill Russell and Paul Revere.
OK, Paul Revere is a long shot. Besides Paul Revere, only Tom Brady will exist forever.
Still, Belichick, whose teams won an NFL-record six Super Bowls with Brady at quarterback, is big enough in the Boston area that he could qualify as an honorary Kennedy.
Belichick's departure as Patriots coach after consecutive losing years, including a 4-13 record this season, marks the end of an era in a time when sports heroes can outshine almost any senator, civic leader or artist. Belichick, known for his rumpled appearance, serious face and monotone voice, was hailed as a scholar, savior and sage. He also became an influential and popular role model in New England.
He wasn't even blamed for moving from New York to New England.
Ben Ravelson, a lifelong Patriots fan who lives in Boston, believed Belichick's impact on the region was almost mystical.
“Every move he made, even if we as fans had doubts at first, we were conditioned to just know that this guy, Bill Belichick, was all-knowing and wise,” Ravelson, 34, said Thursday, playing off of it to one of Belichick's nicknames: That's “Yoda.”
“We never really questioned him.”
This is not a success story that anyone expected. On January 27, 2000, nothing about Belichick's arrival from the Jets as the Patriots' new field general suggested that the region's cultural identity was poised for a fundamental transformation. The Patriots were ignored and were frequent losers. Brady was still an obscure former college quarterback with no concrete job prospects.
And yet Belichick's Patriots became a pervasive source of pride, emblematic of how New Englanders like to see themselves: reserved but cool and efficient, innovative, wealthy, hard-working and stealthy about their methods.
(For the Patriots, some would call that last trait a cover for cheating, but more on that later.)
Under Belichick, whose Patriots coaching record was 266-121 in the regular season, the influence of a winning Boston sports team increased. For about a century, the importance or influence of New England teams was largely limited. But with Belichick at the helm, the Patriots became a recognized national phenomenon. However, that was partly because fans in the 44 states outside of New England hated them.
The almost wordless Belichick was the perfect poker face of the emerging Patriots movement that would dominate the once staid NFL for nearly two decades. Belichick was not a son of New England, although he spent summers on Nantucket as a teenager and spent formative years at prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, and at Wesleyan University, but he naturally embodied personal characteristics that people in the area, especially working ones, had people, distinguished. New Englanders of the class may look familiar.
Belichick was born in Nashville and grew up mostly in Annapolis, Maryland. He had no birthright to be made for New England, and yet he was, perfect.
He rewarded performance over potential and devalued lineage. Belichick, who generally acted as his own boss when it came to assembling a roster and making college draft picks, had developed a sensitivity and desire to see the versatile, undiscovered player ignored by others.
No one fit the bill quite like Brady (drafted with the 199th pick of 254), unless it was wide receiver Julian Edelman, who Belichick also selected late with the 232nd pick of the 2009 NFL Draft. As Edelman, who became an integral part of three Patriots Super Bowl-winning teams, said of Belichick, whose 333 career NFL victories are 14 fewer than the record for coaching victories set by Don Shula: “Bill wants winners, He doesn’t care what.’ That’s what these winners look like.”
If that was a sombre team motto, tens of thousands of Patriots fans nodded in agreement as they huddled against the wintry wind in the stands of creaking Foxboro Stadium, the dilapidated building where Belichick's early New England teams had to play, yet he laid the foundation for a dynasty.
“Bill became an adopted New Englander pretty quickly, perhaps because he embraced the challenge of coming here,” said Richard Johnson, the curator of the Boston Sports Museum, who attended his first Patriots game in the 1960s. “This is a difficult area in sport because expectations are high and people tend to be more critical. You sink or swim pretty quickly, but he didn’t shy away from that and people appreciated that.”
Johnson, the co-author of “The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots,” added: “He's certainly one of us in many ways.”
The all-odds ethos of Belichick's teams became a byword in New England, as did his reputation as a silent, stony leader, especially in team practices. For Patriots fans fed up with decades of losing, their coach had every reason to be grumpy.
Fans wanted someone grumpy, like an old man trying to “send back soup” (to borrow a line from “Seinfeld”) at a Boston chowder restaurant. The fans got it – they were grumpy too.
As the Patriots began hoarding Super Bowl trophies, the 71-year-old Belichick became the epitome of a new kind of New England chic. Fans came to games wearing the coach's signature hoodie, with the sleeves cut off above the elbow. Novelty stores sold Belichick costumes for Halloween, complete with shapeless sweatpants and a drab ski hat. As always, the key to making an impression on Belichick was to almost never smile.
The Patriots' successes sparked a golden age for New England's professional sports organizations. From their first NFL title in 2001 to their last in 2018, the Boston Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins combined to match the Patriots' six Super Bowl victories.
However, in the case of the Patriots, there was at times a fierce, nationwide backlash to the team's continued success, centered around cheating scandals involving the team and Brady. The fraud allegations, some of which were played out in court, appeared to have merit to many, including NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who ordered the team to pay a hefty fine, forfeit draft picks and ultimately four games of the 2016 season without Brady to deny. In another incident of apparent cheating in 2007, Belichick was fined a maximum of $500,000.
Outside the six New England states, the Patriots' chicanery will never be forgotten, but within the region it has only reinvigorated an already familiar us-versus-them mentality. The scandals with hot names like Deflategate and Spygate simply made Patriots supporters stand firm and fight back. The reaction on social media was like a modern version of the Boston Tea Party.
In New England, Belichick and Brady had the last laughs and then some. After Brady returned from his four-game suspension in 2016, the Patriots advanced to the Super Bowl, and despite trailing by 25 points in the game, they battled to victory. Then two seasons later they won another Super Bowl.
That was Belichick's last crowning performance in New England. In his last five seasons, he lost more games than he won.
But that's not how Belichick will be remembered. He leaves behind a transformed New England landscape. At the dawn of a new century, Belichick's unforeseen revival of a downtrodden sports franchise brought new energy to an old domain.
Most fittingly, Belichick can take solace in the fact that, like the man, his legacy in the region will be low-key.
It's a legacy that is perhaps most clearly seen on the streets of hundreds of villages across New England on the afternoons and evenings when the Patriots play their games. They resemble ghost towns.