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I love that he's the coach of the Patriots. We live in a disgusting self-promoting era in which character is based on superficial image projections. He is the anti-PR man. He is essentially telling everyone that the hype is bogus. He's a man of substance. The anti-Rex Ryan. He is not all mouth. In an era of superficiality and self-promotion, he sneers at it. ESPN is nothing but a haggard show.
It's not just that Belichick works his butt off to give his team every chance, that his charity goes unmentioned because he doesn't advertise it, but the thing I love most about him is that he figured out it is a very good thing to have a very strong middle class. He pays his middle of the road vets well. If Tedy Bruschi was the real face of the Patriots in the last decade, then Ninkovich is that face right now. Nink would be a cast off for many teams. This shows that a sport with 22 starters requires a lot of hold the fort guys. Belichick is more about substance than he is about the glitz of superstars. Market your hype all you want, I am about substance. I am about winning. That's Belichick.
And as this former Red Sox first fan of the 70s and 80s and 90s will say, Belichick won me over. I disowned the Sox when the mercenary Schilling came on board (admittedly, I liked Nomar almost as much as Brady) because I couldn't abide by a league without a real dedication to competition. (I have disowned a franchise and a sport before, and if I could do that with baseball, a sport I trained at, a sport I played 3 games a day in summer, I can do it with the Patriots and the NFL). It was Belichick that instilled real values at the core of this team, and those values are ones that I hold dear.
Excellent post. It reminds me of these quotes from Patriot Reign;
The first quote about Belichick is from a Boston political columnist by the name of Joan Vennochi who rarely wrote about sports. Belichick, she noted, wasn't "glib or glitzy. At press conferences he sometimes seems a little goofy and is often way too grim. But he is a leader without the swagger, selfishness, and pomposity that so many men in business, politics and sports embrace as an entitlement of their gender and position."
The second quote comes from Peter Richmond, a writer from Cleveland. "What's interesting about him, and was judged a weakness in Cleveland, was that he did not play any games. There's nothing fake and there never was. He is what he is. There is no pretense, and he is utterly authentic in a world where, because of television, there is more and more which is inauthentic. What's troubling about all this is that a lot of people are more comfortable with the inauthentic, if it is reassuring, than they are with the truth, if it is not reassuring. He doesn't play the role of the coach. Instead he is the coach."
We've been the luckiest sports fans on earth to have this guy as the leader of our team.