Bill Belichick won six Super Bowls as the head coach of the New England Patriots, but was not voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.Steven Senne/The Associated Press
Diego Maradona was one of the greatest of all time. He was also a low-grade bad person.
He was a substance abuser, a cheat and wasn’t nice to his family. He used to swan around Napoli with a prosthetic penis in order to fake out drug testers.
There’s a term of art for this sort of person in sports: interesting. They are the rarest and most precious resource in an entertainment-based business. Without them, no one would bother writing books.
International soccer doesn’t have an active hall of fame, but if it did, would Maradona be in it? I’m no longer sure.
This occurred to me upon hearing a report on Tuesday claiming that Bill Belichick has not been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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No announcement is scheduled for another week, but U.S. outlets are already ferrying quotes from Belichick sources (i.e. Belichick) about the snub.
In order to make the hall, 40 of 50 voters (most of whom are journalists) had to check his name.
If the report is true, we know why this happened. People don’t like Belichick. He is a curmudgeonly, unpleasant fellow. He cheated like a rascal, was vain and self-aggrandizing.
This describes a lot of people in sports. The difference between Belichick and the rest of them is that the New England coach made this shlumpfing Dickens villain bit his whole personality.
Belichick holds up the Vince Lombardi Trophy as he celebrates the Patriots' victory over the Seattle Seahawks at Super Bowl XLIX in 2015.Patrick Semansky/The Associated Press
I always thought it was a shrewd branding decision. No one was going to out-glamour Tom Brady. So why not go in the opposite direction? More people talk about Iago than Othello.
It’s not the worst thing in the world that, as a result, Belichick has been embarrassed by some of the people he used as props in this act. He showed them up for years. They’re showing him up for a 48-hour news cycle. That seems fair.
If anything, it usefully highlights the moralizing fixation that is the north star of current culture. You can be good, but you must also be righteous. This need is in constant tension with the basics of storytelling – without bad guys, nobody cares about the good guys.
Nowadays pros (and performers and influencers and other people who do highly observed, mostly pointless jobs) feel the need to be many things at once. They want to be perceived as interesting, and maybe a little edgy, but not so edgy that they might step on any landmines, which means they can’t be edgy at all. In the entirety of the 21st century, no very famous person has said a genuinely interesting thing. But plenty still want to try, which means you must be good at saying sorry.
Brady was as much a party to the deflated balls controversy as Belichick, and probably the greater beneficiary of it. Will he also be denied entry to the hall? Of course not. Because Brady can look sad.
Elsewhere, you can commit crimes, but there can’t be a video of you doing it. Better to go to jail than to be recorded.
The most important thing to remember is that there are no rules to this thing. The enforcement mechanism operates much like current U.S. immigration policy – the people doing the rounding up are working on vibes. You wandered into the wrong parking lot or the wrong memeable moment at the wrong time? Too bad for you.
If you think the Belichick case is worth getting exercised over, where were you when Barry Bonds was being snubbed nearly a dozen times by baseball hall of fame voters?
You could mount an argument that Belichick didn’t win those Super Bowls – Brady et al did. But no one hit 762 home runs for Bonds. He definitely did that himself. There’s video.
Former San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds, seen here in 2023, has been denied induction to baseball's Hall of Fame repeatedly, because of allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs.Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press
He was juiced? So was everyone else. Go back and watch footage of a baseball game from the early Aughts. Every second guy looks like a pumpkin with eyes. None of the rest of them had an OPS over 1.000 for 13 consecutive years.
Bonds’s sins are the same as Belichick’s. It’s not that he cheated. It’s that he wasn’t nice about it.
I don’t think this is a bad thing because it doesn’t matter. People deserve to be in the hall of fame in the same way they deserve to be famous – not at all. If the hall of fame was your goal, you should have learned everyone’s name.
My only concern is the rampaging confusion between the art and the artist, and where it gets us.
Aside from their work, I don’t care what pros (or writers or actors or whoever you want to think of who isn’t in a position of real authority) do because they aren’t my friends. I’m not bothered if they’re good or bad.
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(Before anyone tries stretching this definition out to include really very bad, that would be a matter for the police, not the media.)
All I care is that artists and entertainers produce something that amuses, informs or confounds me enough to engage with it. To behave otherwise is to shut yourself off from the possibilities of human experience.
When it comes to the pros, I prefer an anti-social malcontent to a drip. Malcontents create a target-rich environment for knifemen like me.
Belichick was a jerk and a corner cutter. But he won, so people celebrated him. He’s not winning any more, so his debts of comportment are being called in. This is justice.
Should he be in the hall of fame? I couldn’t care less. But if it’s a question of whether his type should be forced by the ethics overseers to change their shifty ways, that’s where you lose me.