I feel awful for the journalist who got shut down by Bill Belichick in the New England Patriots head coach’s Wednesday press conference. I know what it’s like to think you have the best question ever…only to have the subject crush all your hopes and dreams like the Harvard graduate school application process. It stings. You deeply question not just your choice of profession, but your own understanding of the English language. Then you drink a beer, tell yourself there are worse things, and move on with a new found habit of obsessively reviewing every single interview question 17 times before asking it.
Given that my sports consumption habits are approximately half Boston focused and half Western New York focused, I hear a lot of Belichick press conferences. My go-to midday show (Christian and King on ESPN New Hampshire) plays the weekly Belichick press conference at the top of their show every Wednesday. The morning news and sports recap shows I watch show clips from Belichick post-game press conferences. And every single time I listen to one of his conferences, I think of what I would ask him if given the opportunity. What could I ask that wouldn’t get a grunted or bored response?
Mind you, I’ve been in the same breathing space as the man, the myth, the person-responsible-for-the-Giants-defense-that-crushed-my-Bills-fan-dreams once. It was at a lacrosse tournament I was covering at Gillette Stadium that included Ohio State. His daughter Amanda was the assistant coach for the Buckeyes women’s lacrosse team at the time. (She is now the head coach at her and her dad’s alma mater, Wesleyan.) Belichick had been lurking on the sidelines during Ohio State’s tilt against Northwestern, engrossed in the action.
After the game, I was waiting in the hallway for Northwestern’s head coach, Kelly Amonte Hiller. I looked over my shoulder and found a positively beaming, excited and jean-clad Belichick directly across from me. I nearly jumped up in surprise.
The hallway we were in was quite wide, so it’s not like I could strike up a conversation with him without yelling. (“PLEASED TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE, BILL!”) Plus, I had a job to do – interview Hiller, a legend in her own right – and was focused on preparing for that.
With all of that on the table, and given that I’m a far more experienced lacrosse journalist than NFL journalist, I know what I would ask Belichick that would prompt the tightly wound and tight lipped coach to be happily loquacious. I would ask the lacrosse-obsessed coach about the sport. (It works for the Baltimore media.)
Here are my three questions, in no particular order:
- What are your thoughts on the trend of young lacrosse players to drop all other sports and focus solely on lacrosse at an increasingly early age?
- Hypothetically, if Bob Kraft purchased a professional lacrosse team and asked, “Bill, I’m not allowing you to pull double duty as head coach of both teams as much as you want to. Who should I hire as head coach?” who would you recommend and why? Living, dead, retired, active – say you could have anyone ever in the history of lacrosse.
- We have seen a lot of lacrosse/football player hybrids play tight end, including yourself and Will Yeatman, who you brought in for a time. Most recently in Massachusetts, we have Marblehead’s Brooks Tyrrell, who is one of the best tight ends in the last 10 years of high school football, but is headed to Notre Dame to play lacrosse. From both your coaching and playing days perspective, what skills does a good tight end have that compliment one’s lacrosse game?
I would like to imagine that at the end of this conversation, Belichick would be smiling and so gosh darn happy he’d say, “Golly, Kat, let’s go pick up our lacrosse sticks and go outside and play.” And then during our shoot around, I’d get all the actual dirt on the Patriots.
No, I wouldn’t do that to him, though I would try to sneak in one football question:
- How much did the Bills’ use of Steve Tasker – who your mentor, Bill Parcells, once called one of the most difficult players to defend against – influence your uses of Wes Welker and Danny Woodhead when they were with the Patriots?
I understand most beat journalists don’t have the luxury of asking such questions – they have a quite defined job to do. But maybe someday down the line, in an off-season, I would love to see a Boston media outlet do the grand “Belichick Talks Lacrosse” interview so that fans and media alike can see an entirely different side of the man.
