No Pats on His Back

The father stands in the back of the hotel ballroom, brittle in the embrace of a world that doesn’t understand.

“We’re not the sort of family that goes around laughing,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody ever saw my teeth unless I took them out.”

The son stands in the front of the same ballroom, pinning that embrace behind our backs.

“For better or worse, this is who I am,” he says, later adding, “however that is interpreted, I’ll leave it up to you to interpret.”

He smirks.

“I guess you already have.”

We have. Or, we had. At this point, we have no idea what to think.

Bill Belichick was a jerk. The biggest jerk in headsets. The easiest conclusion in football.

He insulted the city of Cleveland and its beloved quarterback Bernie Kosar before being thrown aside.

He insulted the city of New York before walking away.

He insulted classy quarterback Drew Bledsoe in New England this season before ... one of pro football’s classiest quarterbacks this season before ... this is where it gets confusing.

Before he stepped into the Super Bowl.

Before he showed up here this week with the scrawny Patriots to challenge the mighty St. Louis Rams for a Super Bowl title.

Before some of his players claimed they are winning because he has changed.

Says defensive end Anthony Pleasant, a former Belichick target: “He’s no longer some of the things we used to call him back in Cleveland. You know, like, ‘Butthead.’”

Says punter Ken Walter, a former Belichick ballboy: “There was a time when you couldn’t even look him in the eye, you had to just stay out of his way. Now, you can actually talk to him.”

So, wait a minute.

The man the Browns once also called “Little Hitler” is now a Little Prince?

Like we said, wait a minute.

His highest paid player is so angry with him, his jaw clenches when he utters his name.

It’s hard for Bledsoe to forget that while he lay nearly dying after suffering internal injuries earlier this season, his coach was telling the media he would be back in two weeks.

“We have a player-coach relationship, nothing more,” Bledsoe says.

That punter with all those nice words? He is here only because, five games into the season, starter Lee Johnson was cut after dropping a snap.

Just listen to safety and team leader Lawyer Milloy.

“The man doesn’t want to be your friend,” he says. “If you win, he’ll smile at you. If you lose, he won’t even look at you.”

Then there’s veteran Bryan Cox, who tells a story about playing for Belichick when he was assistant head coach of the New York Jets two seasons ago.

Cox said that, other than barking coaching orders, Belichick never spoke casually to him until thanking him while walking off the field after the final game.

“There’s not much to him,” says Cox.

Oh, but on that point, everyone is unanimous in their disagreement.

This week showed that there is plenty to Bill Belichick.

It also showed that we’ll probably never have a clue how much.

Yet, there being a slim chance this dour soul could be the brightest star in the sports world come Sunday night, we must hunker down and investigate.

“You guys didn’t like last him last year, did you?” barks his father Steve, an 83-year-old former coach. “You didn’t think he was too smart, did you?”

The football coach and the schoolteacher wanted their only child to learn about decisions.

So when little Bill Belichick was 4 and accompanying his parents to a restaurant, he was instructed to order by himself off the menu.

“Imagine that, a little kid making his own choices,” recalls Steve.

Until those choices became wrong.

Little Bill, you see, liked fried chicken. So everywhere they would go, he would order fried chicken. Until he was ordered to conform.

“I told him, ‘Dammit, you don’t understand, you just don’t do that,’” says Steve. “You order steak at steak places. Fish at fish places. That sort of thing.”

Part of you feels sorry for Belichick.

His father, an admitted “tough-ass,” remembers attending only one of his son’s football games in the kid’s entire childhood.

“I was always traveling, scouting, working for my teams,” says Steve, who was an assistant coach for four decades at several colleges, most notably the Naval Academy. “What was I going to do?”

His father also never remembers his son, not once in his 49 years, telling a joke.

“He’s never said, ‘Hey Dad, I’ve got a good one for you.... ‘“ Steve recalls.

Part of you, however, is envious of Belichick.

At age 5, he would sit with his father and a fellow Navy coach on the front porch of the family’s Annapolis, Md., home, listening to them devise a game plan.

“After a while, an envelope would be delivered to Bill with our game plan in it, and he would study it on his own,” Steve says.

“Even as a little kid, he knew all of our terms and understood our plays.”

It was from this environment of wildly ranging temperatures that a most interesting football coach was incubated.

Turning down a chance to become a young executive at Procter & Gamble, Belichick graduated with a Wesleyan economics degree directly to the Baltimore Colts, where his father’s connections helped him land a job breaking down film.

Today, reputedly, nobody does it better. Nobody is considered smarter at understanding an opponent’s weaknesses, or more adept at exploiting them.

At 38, Belichick devised a game plan that helped the New York Giants freeze the high-scoring Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV.

It was considered such football genius, the game plan hangs today in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The next season, the Cleveland Browns made him a head coach.

An impersonal, brooding, nasty head coach.

“He was terrible,” says Pleasant, who played for Belichick with the Browns. “Nobody liked him.”

Belichick was a pupil of Bill Parcells who tried to win with the swagger of Parcells.

But he couldn’t pull it off. He didn’t look the part. He didn’t know when to back off.

“He was like, here’s how they won in New York, so here’s how they were going to do it here, no questions asked,” Pleasant says.

Unlike the rest of the league, the Browns practiced every day in pads, until finally the players had enough.

“We had a meeting and decided to boycott a practice,” he recalls, smiling. “It didn’t work.”

Pleasant says by then, Belichick wouldn’t even talk to most of the team. After his first two years, folks wondered how it could get any worse.

Well, in the middle of the 1993 season, it did.

That was when Belichick stunningly cut town favorite Bernie Kosar, even though the quarterback had led the team to a 5-3 record and the Central Division lead.

His reason? Kosar didn’t agree with a Belichick scheme on offense that clearly was wrong.

Kosar’s immediate replacement? Because backup Vinny Testaverde was injured, it was somebody named Todd Philcox, who committed four turnovers in the first half of his first game. The Browns went 2-6 the rest of the season.

Many folks forget that Belichick used Testaverde to lead them to the playoffs the next year.

Most only remember his next act, five years after being fired by the Browns, when a contract stipulation elevated him to coach of the Jets after Parcells quit.

He lasted one day, resigning at a news conference scheduled to coronate him, leaving the Jets because he was worried about their financial future.

Even though he was contractually bound to stay, and had received a $1-million bonus the previous season as a good-faith gesture.

He didn’t even have the decency to give the Jets a complete resignation letter, writing only that he was “ ... resigning as HC of the NYJ.”

The Patriots eventually agreed to give the Jets a first-round pick for him but, by now, his reputation was complete.

Great mind. Rotten guy.

But then something happened.

“Nothing happened,” says Steve. “I don’t believe people change personalities. The problem was that everybody in Boston believed what they heard from everybody in Cleveland before even knowing Bill.”

No, something happened. Even though you could never tell from looking at that eternal frown, he lightened up.

Insiders say he finally realized he was not Parcells.

With Parcells finally retired for good, he would never have to be Parcells.

He could finally order fried chicken whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. He could finally be just Bill Belichick.

“It’s not that he’s suddenly this great, outgoing guy,” says one longtime observer. “But where he was once subhuman, now he’s just a regular human.”

Not that he would ever admit it, of course.

In one moment, he says, “I think that I’ve learned a lot in the last 10 years.”

But in the next moment, he says, “I still am pretty much who I am. My intention is not to try to have conflict, or be iron-fisted, or tyrannical, but to get across a message.”

That message, mixed as it may be, was clear earlier this year when, long after a Sunday afternoon game, stunned writers spotted the Patriot coach running across the Foxboro Stadium field.

He was playing touch football with his three children.

As only Bill Belichick can play it.

“I can cook up some stuff out there,” he said the next day. “They just don’t know what to do.”

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com