It was four years ago when Seth Wickersham published his first Patriots expose. The longtime investigative journalist wrote about an incoming collision between Bill Belichick and Alex Guerrero, foreshadowing the most turbulent period in Tom Brady’s relationship with his all-time great head coach.
The following January, Wickersham wrote another explosive tell-all piece detailing the tension inside of Patriot Place. Though he received an immense amount of pushback at the time, his reporting was accurate. When Brady left the Patriots in free agency, few were surprised. His exit had been building for years, and we knew about it through Wickersham’s reporting, as well as other journalists.
Now, Wickersham has written his Patriots magnum opus: “It’s Better to Be Feared.” The excerpts contain several bombshells: Belichick’s clandestine friendship with Roger Goodell; Kraft calling Belichick the biggest ‘f— a—hole in his life,;’ Belichick’s unwillingness to meet with Brady when he signed with Tampa Bay. The book is available Tuesday. Surely, there are many more newsworthy nuggets within it.
I recently spoke with Wickersham about how he encompassed a 20-year dynasty into one book, and his extended insights on the three men at the top: Kraft, Brady and Belichick. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
There are so many great sports stories to cover. What fascinates you about the Patriots?
Their sustained greatness, and how that came to be, and what ingredients went into it, and what the cost of that greatness was. You just have these very different personalities who managed to fuse together and create something that was unprecedented. Brady and Belichick became cultural figures in a way that no other head coach or quarterback in modern history have. I wanted to explore that.
When I looked at my own career, one of my very first stories for ESPN the Magazine was in November 2001 when the magazine sent me up to Foxborough to interview this guy who had a good month in relief of Drew Bledsoe, and was probably going back to the bench. I remember Tom Brady looked like a college student. He had grey sweatpants on, a backpack that had beer in it because he had lost a Michigan-Michigan St. bet. I remember he said, ‘Football has always come very easy for me.” And I sort of looked at him like, ‘Well that’s an interesting thing to say.’ It’s moments like that that you look back 20 years from now, and you see little glimpses. Someone like Tom Brady had that self-belief all along. I felt like because of the reporting I had done over the last 20 years, I had a window into them that I could explore, and do more reporting on top of it.
I remember you saying you wrote more about Brady than Belichick at the start of the dynasty. When did that focus start to shift?
I interviewed Bill Belichick most of the time, if not all of the time for Brady stories. But when I really got fascinated with Belichick was 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, when he had just ascended to this cultural presence. He was a fashion figure. He was this introvert who did everything differently than every football coach ever, and had pulled off this dynasty when everything in society and in the NFL was engineered to prevent that from fighting. And what really fascinated me with Belichick was when all of his assistant coaches started to leave, and you just saw such a shadow and personality he was within the lives of them.
New England was winning no matter who left, and they were going out on their own and struggling. What’s more is, there was an inherent irony in the fact that Belichick had given them this unbelievable education, and then when they were allowed to do things on their own, they were struggling to shake the lessons they had learned from him and these impossible expectations, and mimicked him. Eric Mangini in his press conferences; Josh McDaniels wearing a grey hoodie around practice. He was such a powerful force in their lives, it wound up revealing something essential about Belichick. That was really the first long conversation —it was on his cell phone and it was really late at night. He often would do interviews that were longer interviews at like 11-11:30 p.m., when he was done with work for the day. That was when I had the first in-depth conversation with him about this, and I wrote the story for ESPN the Magazine about his coaching tree, and it was a story he really liked. He told me he appreciated the hard work I put into it.
So you have talked to Belichick before?
Oh yeah.
When he says something like he doesn’t think you’ve ever spoken with him, how do you feel?
I don't have any feeling. The public record on it that we’ve spoken over the years is pretty clear. You and I have talked about this. To a certain extent, I’m kind of used to pushback. As an investigative reporter who’s written about the Patriots, NFL and NFLPA and all of these other teams, you get used to the initial denial, but then things panning out as time goes on. I remember you and I spoke after I did the story in 2017 in October on Tom Brady and the TB12 Method. In that story, I had an anecdote that said there’s a collision coming between Belichick and [Alex] Guerrero. Belichick called it ‘fake news,’ and then a month later, the Boston Globe has a story that Belichick curtailed Alex Guerrero’s access. I and others wrote about some of the tension in the building, and the Patriots released a statement about it, and the statement didn’t hold up well. You had Robert Kraft talking about the tension a few weeks after that. You had Tom Brady skip the entire offseason program, and for a long time, wonder if he wanted to return and be a Patriot. I’m used to the initial blowback, and then things can settle down and talk about the meat of the story, which is the fun part.
This book encompasses 20 years. I joke that in the 2014 season, the Patriots winning the Super Bowl was the third biggest story they had. You had the start of Deflategate, the [Aaron] Hernandez guilty verdict. How do you decide what to focus on over a span of 20 years?
I tried to look at Tom Brady and Bill Belichick’s characters, and look at the key moments that were key moments in their career and developments as people, and try to go down that as best as I can. For instance, Tom Brady always talked about his mental toughness, and how he thinks it’s a required thing — not something you’re born with. I really tried to look at the moments of, how did he acquire that?
Yeah, you mentioned there were things that Brady said or did in college that still apply today, even though he’s diametrically different.
He’s like a global presence. Celebrity almost doesn’t do him justice anymore. He’s one of those global figures — a member of the global elite for whom human longevity is almost human destiny. He’s ascended into a presence that we’re not really sure how to categorize, and he’s still not done. That’s the crazy thing.
I put him on Oprah’s level. Like you said, celebrity doesn’t do him justice.
He’s a business. He’s a big presence within the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Towards the end of his run with the Patriots, he accumulated more football knowledge than most head coaches around the NFL. I think he wanted to have a larger impact in the organization, and even though I don’t think it’s fair for Alex Guerrero to say Belichick has failed to evolve, there was always going to be a ceiling on how much influence you can have on the Patriots when Bill Belichick is running it. You look in Tampa, he’s not only the quarterback. He’s the de facto offensive coordinator, a pseudo personnel executive. And Alex Guerrero has an office with the Bucs, and he got a Super Bowl ring.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that Brady is a cultural figure. LeBron, for example, always gets involved in a lot of social issues. Many other athletes fall in that realm. But Brady’s cultural presence is centered around him. I think it’s very fitting that he trademarked his last name for his new apparel line. His longevity is his impact.
I once asked Brady, ‘how long do you want to live?,’ because you read his book, the TB12 Method — it was a controversial book when it came out — and in the second edition of it, they removed the more controversial aspects: the stuff about water being a sun preventative. It isn’t in subsequent editions. He clearly was trying to reverse the aging process. So I did ask him, does he want to live to be 100, or whatever? I thought his answer was revealing and actually humbled. He said, ‘It’s not longevity. It’s the quality of life. I want to be able to ski and surf and play with my kids, in addition to having the longest and most successful career in NFL history.' For most people, that would be too much to ask. But for Tom Brady, it’s not.
I’m curious about Brady’s personality and relationship with the media. I look at 2014-16. You have Deflategate, which was huge, obviously. Then Trump happens right after that. Just as an observer, I sensed a change in how he perceived the media. What impact do you think those huge stories had on him?
Deflategate, TB12 and Trump. That was a big trifecta. Clearly, he started to lose his patience for it. You saw him leave his press conference at times when he got too many questions he didn’t like. He ended his WEEI interviews early. He was much more reserved about chatting with a lot of longtime reporters who had known him for a long time. Maybe I’m in that group. Michael Silver was one of those guys who was always around, and then at the same time, he did the ‘Tom vs. Time’ documentary. He wanted people to have a window into his life, and that was when Belichick and Brady had won their fifth Super Bowl, and I think he wanted people to see a side of him beyond the good, top employee as quarterback of the New England Patriots.
‘Tom vs. Time.’ You could dismiss it as a silly Facebook series, but it was a seminal moment. There’s a lot of foreshadowing in that.
Foreshadowing and explanation about what had gone on during that season. Often, it was Tom referring to it in vague and esoteric terms, and people around him, particularly his wife, using much more specific terms. He had that great line, ‘I plead the fifth.’ I think Brady at his heart is a solider, and he’s compliant. But that was about as blunt of a public statement that you’re ever going to get from him about where his life was at that time.
Brady, Belichick and Kraft did not talk to you for this book. How did you try and fill in those gaps?
So they didn’t talk to me specifically for this book, but they didn’t stop anybody from talking to me — at least that I’m aware of. I spent a long time with Michael Rubin, who’s one of Robert Kraft’s best friends. I talked to people in Brady’s inner-circle; I talked to people who know Bill Belichick really well. I thought that I could write the best book that I did combined with some of the things that I had seen or experienced that were on the record but never made public. It’s like that quote from Brady in 2001 that football has ‘always come very easy to me.’ At the time, I just didn’t see the significance of it. Then you look back at that moment now, and you see a lot of significance in it. I really tried to take those moments and hook them into the context of this narrative about how they achieved their greatness.
We talked about Brady’s evolution. What do you think about Kraft’s evolution? I would put him up there now as a global presence as well.
Absolutely. I write in the book about how he’s changed. At the beginning of the dynasty, he was married. He had a very distinct style with the navy suit and white collar over the blue shirt. He was a quiet powerbroker around the league. Then as the dynasty went on, he changed quite a bit. He was single, he grew his hair out, he stopped dressing like the most successful salesman in history and began dressing like a globetrotter. He had his own version of Air Force 1’s. He spent a lot of time with people like Michael Rubin who are younger than him. He’s rolling with a younger crowd. It was one of the things I wanted to learn about, and how he managed these guys. It wasn’t always easy for him. Those guys are ‘Type A,’ and they aren’t the easy ones to manage. At one point, an owner asked Kraft, referring to Belichick, ‘What’s it gonna take for you to fire that a—hole?’ And Kraft replied, ‘8-8.’
What’s next for you?
I’ll continue to do NFL features and investigative stuff for ESPN. It’s been a real blessing to be able to have the time and space and dig into whatever I want to get into. There’s nothing Patriots-related I’m working on, but as we’ve learned with them, they never stop. You never know what’s going to be on the horizon. Brady and Belichick ignore all of the off-ramps. They’re still doing this, even though their legacies and fortunes are well intact. In the book, I wrote about this theme of never being satisfied, and this innate desire to just keep doing this, because nothing makes you feel more alive. You saw it after the Super Bowl. Brady wins the Super Bowl, and Gisele walks up to him, and the first thing she says is, ‘What more do you have to prove?’ And Brady tries to change the subject, because it’s not about that for him. It’s about this level of achievement that is hard for you and I and most people to understand. I try to explain that in the book as best as I can.
