Bill Belichick's book is out today
Smile, Bill. Your book is out today.
Of course, the man who doesn't smile much might not be inclined to smile about anything at all, when it comes to The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football.
He wouldn't even smile about the title.
'The publisher, a couple of other advisers on the book, that was really their choice,' Belichick said in his now-notorious CBS interview, before it went fully off the rails. 'My choice would have been, How I Did My Job or Lessons From My Life in Football.'
The title has taken a back page to the many stories about Belichick, sparked by his girlfriend interrupting the CBS interview with a stern refusal to answer the hard-hitting question of how the two met. Her commandeering of the Q&A sparked an avalanche of reporting, with Belichick landing squarely on the radar screen of the likes of TMZ and Page Six.
While the book will make plenty of news for what it says, what it doesn't say has been the biggest story yet. Belichick deliberately omitted any mention of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, offering up a flimsy and not credible explanation for the slight: 'It's about my life lessons in football, and it's really more about the ones I experienced directly.'
Regardless of whether and to what extent Belichick gets credit for the six New England Super Bowl wins, Kraft had the foresight to pick Belichick, at a time when Belichick was only slightly more attractive to NFL owners than he currently is.
'Everybody who [Kraft] knew in the league — everybody — said, 'Don't do this. This will be a disaster. Don't do it,'' Peter King recalled regarding the hiring of Belichick in King's recent appearance on the Sports Media with Richard Deitsch podcast . 'And he said, 'No, I got a good feeling about Belichick.''
So now the man who saw something in Belichick when few others did gets nothing at all in Belichick's ultra-long-form look at his career? It's ludicrous. It's juvenile. Hell, it's infantile.
Belichick's book tour continues later today in New York, in an appearance at NYU with Suzy Welch. We'll see whether he (or his girlfriend) makes any news. And whether he'll be wearing a suit and tie or a moth-ridden football jersey from the days before the invention of the forward pass.
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