Tom Brady Sr. Expresses What Can Only Be Called a Love/Hate Relationship With Bill Belichick
When my sons were in school, my relationship with their teachers was fairly transactional. I asked that they teach my kids, tolerate the older one who was a pain in their collective ass ("Well, he has an audience in this class" was the best euphemism I heard in all those Parent-Teacher conferences), and to suffer through the school board-approved reproductive health talk so that I didn't have to deal with the awkwardness. And in exchange, I'd vote for property tax hikes so they could get pay raises and supplies. I didn't learn their names or drill down into the finer points of how they did their job. It was "Live and Let Live." And that worked out just fine.
Their coaches were a different matter entirely. There, I had strong opinions. And between the two sons, I guess a half dozen sports, and probably 50-60 coaches in all, they ran the gamut. From exactly the kinds of guys who make you grateful they live in the same town as you and are willing to volunteer their time, to the type that made you want to build a stockade on the village green so that decent folk of the town could pelt them with rocks and garbage. (Where I was on that spectrum, I'll leave up to the parents. But since it always felt like the moms were giving me the same "LUV YOU" eyes that the coeds in his Archeology class gave Indiana Jones, I think I know where I stood.) The point being that a child's coach brings out extreme emotions in any parent.
Which brings us to the world's preeminent sports dad. The Father of the GOAT. The one who sired the best there ever was in his, or any other, game. Tom Brady Sr. spoke to the Boston Globe about his boy's coach. And had many, and contradictory, thoughts:
Source (paywall) - “I don’t think it’s fair what I’ve seen everybody saying that it’s all Tom. Bill is the best coach in football, bar none. The last three or four years of his tenure in New England have been in the dumper. It’s too bad. …
“Bill is tough. He runs a military system. It’s a different generation. Bill is a great, great, great coach. But his interpersonal skills are horrible. That’s the bottom line. …
“Ego sometimes gets in the way of things. I think it did with Bill. Now, he’s in a situation where he’s gotten crucified for the last few years by everybody and a lot of luster has come off his rose.”
And regarding how Mr. Kraft dealt with the breakup between the two:
“He just said, ‘I made a mistake.’ He told us that back in September. We don’t all make the right decisions, but he’s made a hell of a lot of good ones over the years. But I know that it galls him that Tommy went elsewhere and won. Not that he won, but that he won after Bill said he was done.”
Make of this what you will. Depending on where you land on the most divisive issue of our time, this interpersonal relationship between a preternaturally handsome metahuman, an irascible, enigmatic supergenius, and the enterprising man of the world who kept the dynamic together for 20 years, you're going to pull one of these quotes to make your case:
I don’t think it’s fair what I’ve seen everybody saying that it’s all Tom. Bill is the best coach in football, bar none.
Or:
His interpersonal skills are horrible.
Or:
He just said, ‘I made a mistake.’
One of these will be your headline. The blurb you put on on your movie poster that prove you've been right about whatever it is you've been saying all along, and the rest doesn't matter.
When the truth is more complicated. And it's that they're all true simultaneously. And in equal measure. In the pie chart of the Brady-Belichick relationship, all these wedges are the same size. It's something the journos and talk hosts don't like to admit, but it was all of these men all along. There's no Brady without Belichick. No Brady and Belichick without RKK. They were a trinity in every sense of the word.
At the same time, "Bill is a great, great, great coach." And his interpersonal skills are horrible. Those things can be equally true. Such is often the case with the most capable humans. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a strange cat who once physically assaulted his friend and colleague for the crime of telling him he just got engaged the woman he'd been dating. But when you're trying to build a superweapon that will preserve liberty throughout your hemisphere, you don't look for Pat Sajak.
It's also objectively true that Thunder Kraft made a mistake when he didn't force the issue on Brady's final contract. The 2020-22 seasons stand in mute testimony of that. It was a mistake born out of respecting the judgment of the man who built him a Dynasty. But it turned out to be wrong.
So go ahead everyone, take whichever quote you want to pull and weaponize it to serve whatever purpose suits you. But anyone who is honest about the years we just bore witness to has to acknowledge they're all correct. Any dad who ever signed his kid up for sports knows it as well.