Halberstam uncovers insights in book

• By TED GRIGGS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jan 1, 2006

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THE EDUCATION OF A COACH
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, $24.95; 277 pp.

The best thing about David Halberstam's sports books is that they in no way resemble the efforts of so many sports reporters, who rehash games and scores and provide little in the way of insight.

But Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting during the Vietnam War, is still a great investigative reporter. In The Education of a Coach he examines the events that shaped New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. The book is filled with fascinating stories, from Belichick's grandparents' emigration to Pennsylvania and the Darwinian economy of the steel mills to the tutelage of Belichick's father, Steve, a coaching "lifer" and the greatest scout of his era, and Belichick's tortured decades-long relationship with Bill Parcells, now coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

Halberstam's research lends the book a weight other sports books lack, with each anecdote building upon the previous one. Detail by detail, Halberstam constructs a story that shows the shaping of Belichick's philosophy, his emphasis on the team in an era of unbridled athletic egomania, where players commonly celebrate making a first down with their teams trailing by four touchdowns.

"The most obvious example of that old-fashioned emphasis on team came in the first of New England's three Super Bowl victories. The League had asked him, according to tradition, whether he wanted to introduce his offensive or defensive team to both the crowd and the nation at the start of the game, and he had said, neither -- he wanted to introduce the entire team. The League officials argued against it, because that was not the way it was done, and told him he had to choose. Belichick was nothing if not stubborn -- stubborn when he was right and sometimes just as stubborn when he was wrong -- and he refused to budge, so, finally the League caved.

"Out they had come, all the Patriots, joyously and confidently, and it was not just other players and coaches who got it immediately, that this introduction was something different, designed to show this was a team and everyone was a part of it. It was also understood by much of the vast television audience, exhausted not merely by players' excessive egos, but also by broadcasters who failed to blow the whistle on them. A great many people decided then and there that they would root for New England as kind of an homage to the game itself."

The book is as well. Readers won't be disappointed.