New North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick holds up a UNC branded sleeveless hoodie presented to him during news conference announcing his hiring, on Dec. 12, in Chapel Hill, N.C.Ben McKeown/The Associated Press
In his prescient 1986 takedown of higher education, Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield plays a horny, profane, crooked kajillionaire who bribes his way into university. His son goes there and isn’t doing so hot. Dangerfield’s Thornton Melon wants to get closer to him.
The college refuses Melon because he’s a boor and because he’s old as the hills. Dangerfield was 65 when the movie was released, but that was a 1980s 65, which is a 2020s 75.
Cut to the dean welcoming Melon into the college family, while Melon brays, “I hereby dedicate this building to myself.”
You may feel you’ve seen a remake of this classic recently. You’re right. With a little bit of reworking, it’s now called The Bill Belichick Story.
Until recently, the former New England Patriots’ coach was living through the successful retiree’s nightmare.
He’d had a job he was good at, until he wasn’t. He clung to it like Kate Winslet on a floating door. Eventually, the Patriots tricked him into the parking lot and locked the doors behind him.
“We’re going to move on,” Belichick, then 71, said.
Like a lot of people whose professional raison d’être has just collapsed, Belichick redirected his energies into destroying his personal life as well. He ditched his long-time age-appropriate partner and took up with a twentysomething cheerleader.
The world was alerted to this dalliance by the release of a Ring camera video of Belichick, shirtless, slinking out of a house in the early hours of the morning.
“Hey, you still got it!” Tom Brady said to him later, which, in normal-person language, translates as “Are you sure you’re okay?”
A lot of people thought the Dallas Cowboys would call, but they didn’t. Turns out that when your professional brand is being a winner and a jerk, and you lose your grip on the winning part, there is a limited market for dedicated jerks. Except in college.
Unlike back in Dangerfield’s day, colleges no longer bother sifting wheat from chaff. They’ve realized the chaff has money too, and they’d like it.
‘This is how much money you have?’ the college wonders to its prospective chaff. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to borrow some more?’
As a result, the top tier of U.S. colleges is so flush with cash they don’t know what to spend it on (except that it can’t be campus security).
Take the University of North Carolina. It is a public institution, like a hospital or a municipal parking lot. But unlike those other things, UNC has a more than US$5-billion endowment fund. What’s the use of money if you’re not going to spend it?
My first idea might have been something educational. Back in more innocent times, Dangerfield’s backhander pays for a new business school.
In this version, the dean’s big brain wave is to give Bill Belichick US$10-million a year to coach a 6-6 football team. Nothing says, ‘Your dollars at work’, like making some rando who will never teach a class the highest paid public employee in the state.
This is all quite normal for U.S. colleges, but then the twist. Bill Belichick, whose entire life has been dedicated to a baroque sort of misanthropy, grew a personality.
He showed up at UNC this week looking as if he’d had corrective maxillofacial surgery that allowed him to smile. It was like watching a blind child see her mother for the first time.
His father worked at UNC, and Belichick brought along his old sweatshirt to show an audience. The athletic director wore a suit with the sleeves torn off – a nod to Belichick’s sloppy sideline look – and Belichick didn’t look at him like he was wishing him dead. In his remarks, Belichick said this was all “a dream come true.”
Watching him up there was like watching Dangerfield at the end of Back to School – after he’s won the diving championship and given the commencement address and learned the value of hard work. Like a man reborn.
You could make a decent argument that Belichick is the most successful coach in history. He’s won more at North America’s No. 1 sport than anyone.
But did he enjoy himself? It didn’t seem that way. I was at a postgame news conference he did once. The Patriots had just won. He was barking out one-syllable answers.
Someone asked an admittedly loopy question about nickel defence. Belichick stared at him for a second, and then walked away from the podium. Like a lot of things he said and did, it was not the mark of someone who was loving life.
Having spent 50 years climbing the mountain, it took Belichick just a couple of months to get the down the other side of it. Most of that distance was covered at terminal velocity. I’m sure it changes a man’s perspective.
So here he is now, diminished and enlarged at the same time.
The UNC job is a ridiculous one, in the same way that all U.S. college coaching jobs are ridiculous. You’re running a steroidal peewee program, but treated like you are a Joint Chief of Staff. If you beat Duke, they’ll buy you a new house. Lose to it twice, and they’ll light the front lawn on fire.
But watching the best in history take a step down and look newly delighted by what life has to offer gives you a weird kind of hope.
Late in the day – after the day was over, actually – Belichick has discovered a rule that some people never learn. Success isn’t defined by promotion, or money, or praise. It’s fun. The most successful person is the one who has the best war stories, took the most chances, occasionally failed with honour and had the most fun.
If your find that kind of joy in your work, regardless of what that work is, you will never labour.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Rodney Dangerfield was 55 when the movie Back to School was released. He was 65. This version has been updated.