It was the day after the Patriots had defeated the Rams in Super Bowl 36, and Tom Brady and Bill Belichick were riding in a limousine together. The previous night, Brady sheepishly asked his head coach if he could skip the team flight back in order to head to Disney World, and Belichick gave him the go-ahead. But before they parted ways, Belichick had one last thing to say to the unheralded sixth-round pick who came out of nowhere to lead the Patriots to their first Super Bowl.
“Tom, you were pretty good this season,” Belichick remarked in his trademark understated fashion.
The seeds of the eventual rupture between the all-time great coach and quarterback were planted right there. For years, Brady put up with Belichick’s austerity and stringency for the sake of winning. But eventually, it became too much. As Gisele Bundchen famously said, her husband just wanted to feel appreciated at work.
Belichick was never going to make him feel that way.
Seth Wickersham’s new tell-all book about the rise and fall of the Patriots dynasty, “It’s Better to Be Feared,” contains an array of juicy details about Brady’s turbulent final years in New England — some of which have been reported previously by Wickersham and others. Wickersham has written multiple definitive pieces about the Patriots throughout his career, ranging from the inside story on Deflategate to the “collision” between Brady and Belichick over the quarterback’s ascension to icon status. While those details — Belichick’s clandestine friendship with Roger Goodell, Brady approaching the 49ers at the start of his free agency — are scintillating, they are the garnish on top of a well-constructed narrative that spans the arc of 20 years.
Brady and Belichick may have changed during their dynastic run, but the two legends never altered their core tenants. Belichick was forcing criminally underpaid assistant coaches to work 19-hour days in 2000; Brady was a maniacal competitor, and confident, from the moment he was drafted. We all know about a baby-faced Brady telling Robert Kraft that drafting him was the “best decision he’s ever made.” But did you know that Brady wanted to buy a condo before he even made the roster as a third-stringer?
“I’m going to make the team,” Brady told his skeptical agent, Don Yee.
The rift between Belichick and Brady was inevitable, because the idea of a superstar quarterback contradicts Belichick’s core football philosophy: everybody is replaceable besides him. Through the early years of the dynasty, Belichick didn’t just find value in every player on his roster. He even extracted value from the most lowly paid gophers on staff: “PHDs” (poor, hungry and driven). That included disguising them as members of Kraft Productions and sending them to tape opposing teams. The subterfuge was always easier to pull off at home, because the Patriots were in control of the media access.
Brady bought into all of it, too. He took below-market deals and vociferously defended Belichick during Spygate. He was the consummate Patriot, except for his interest in celebrity. Belichick’s first apparent frustration with that came when Brady attended the 2002 State of the Union Address.
“The Patriots were ascendant, but there was a grinding conflict in motion,” Wickersham writes. “Their team-first ethos, created and fortified by Belichick, could not fully accept the way society turned quarterbacks into something more than athletes: sex symbols, celebrities, heroes. The coach was obsessed with fame and driven to crush it before it raged out of control.”
When Brady started dating Gisele in 2006 and 2007, Belichick sometimes groused to friends around the league about Brady’s ascendant stardom. He wished he had a quarterback like Phillip Rivers: somebody who wasn’t bigger than the game.
So it should come as no surprise that Belichick didn’t want to entertain the TB12 Method and eventually shunned Alex Guerrero from the facility. Belichick seemed to relish the opportunities to subtly jab at Brady, mostly with Jimmy Garoppolo. When Garoppolo was filling in for Brady during 2016 (pre-injury), Belichick said the transition was “seamless.” When Brady returned and threw three touchdowns, Belichick simply said it was “good to have Tom back.”
Three years later, when Brady delivered an excellent playoff performance with a gashed hand, Belichick griped that it “wasn’t open-heart surgery.”
There are other examples of foreshadowing: Brady doing shirtless yoga as a frat boy rookie; Brady and Peyton Manning persuading the league in 2002 to change its rules regarding the preparation of footballs; Brady’s frustration with Deion Branch’s departure. Wickersham's storytelling is gripping.
Like all good odysseys, the Patriots’ epic journey to the top of the football world happened over the span of many years. So did their downfall.
