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Everybody’s losing their collective minds about the Bill Belichick interview on CBS about his new book that exploded into a massive story about his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson – some 50 years younger than him – interrupting the interview to say Bill would not be talking about their relationship.
Let me tell you what I really think about all this. I think she doesn’t have enough media relations experience – maybe none at all – to understand that when you pitch an interview to a media outlet you can’t dictate what questions will be asked. She made a mistake. All of us make them. It’s human.
It wasn’t savvy and now the entire world is criticizing her and making fun of her naivete and taking the opportunity to question Belichick’s judgement about dating a woman so much younger and whether she’s now running his life and whether he’s 72 and losing solid decision-making capabilities.
I think this is all about money and power and the instincts of human beings to hurt each other when they get the opportunity.
First the money. Belichick wants to sell his book to make money on it. The girlfriend wants to be with him because he has lots of money. CBS wanted him on the show because he’s famous and that draws people to watch their show. The University of North Carolina hired him because they want more football revenues and they figure he can help them win more games which leads to more money for them.
The power angle is CBS wants to influence how we think and how it covers stories. It had this opportunity to make fun of a famous man which makes them feel good about themselves because they’re the ones laughing at him – along with so many other people now – and they’re not the ones being laughed at.
They look like the honest brokers in this deal – don’t let them fool you – who just ran into an annoying situation with the girlfriend so they blasted it out to the world. They made themselves look and feel more powerful and Belichick and his gal – be embarrassed and humiliated.
They portrayed themselves as smart and the two of them as kind of stupid. People who work in the media love to make themselves feel smarter than other people. The whole business comes down to intelligence and being highly literate and writing well. To get to the top you have to be wicked smart, process and synthesize information super fast.
This probably means you went to an Ivy League school, scored high on your SAT, found high school classes pretty easy, and attended an elite prep school. You lived in a nice neighborhood and your parents were white collar professionals with six figure salaries.
The media is all about brains. The whole industry is driven by outsmarting other people, asking gotcha questions to make others slip and fall on themselves. I know because I have been one of them. You get rewarded to write negative stories because more people read those.
In this interview situation they got Belichick and his girl to look silly and that’s what they love, showing they’re more sophisticated and articulate and worldly and quicker on their feet than others. The media won this power game and that includes battalions of other media outlets such as a few gazillion podcasters who posture as astute, insightful, and clever media members.
They talk about this story and blast the man and woman. This makes them feel powerful and emboldened. It’s other people who look and stupid and that’s what they live for. They’re all about self-righteousness because being right is about being intelligence which, again, is their main obsession.
It’s all kind of disgusting when you really think about it. People behaving in shallow and selfish ways across the entire situation. People chasing money and ratings and book sales and a free ride with a rich man. People not being nice to each other. People inflicting pain. People trying to control each other and not wanting to be controlled. Sounds like the human condition pretty much.
A few years ago I read every page of a book of some 600 pages called Dynasty. It dove deep into the entire story of the New England Patriots football program with a sharp focus on three key people in that interpersonal saga: Belichick, Tom Brady, and owner Robert Kraft.
I read the book for one main reason: to find out if Belichick had tried to trade Brady. You might say who cares? Some backstory is needed. Belichick made it an annual thing to cut some of his best players while they were productive. It was viewed as innovative and proved effective to get rid of such players a year or two before they started to decline because he would get more value from them in trades.
At the end of Brady’s tenure there was plenty of murkiness about why he decided to leave the team. It was never really clear when it happened. In the book it was revealed Belichick tried to trade Brady in 2017, three years before Brady announced he was leaving. Brady had worked his whole career – maybe harder than any football player ever has – to become great and that won them five Super Bowls.
I believe he figured Belichick wouldn’t cut him as he had so many others because he had been too loyal to the coach and made the coach into arguably the greatest NFL coach ever.
But Belichick tried to get rid of him.
It turns out that may have been the worst decision he ever made as the coach of that program. Because it made Brady so mad he decided to leave, then won a Super Bowl leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and solidifying a case that he – and not Belichick – was the biggest reason the Patriots were so successful.
And I believe that broadly accepted perception that Brady was the bigger factor eats at Belichick because he doesn’t think he gets the credit he deserves. The legacy he can’t stand is “Belichick won all those Super Bowls because he had Brady not because he was a great coach.”
So he’s unfulfilled. What do unfulfilled 72-year-old men do? They start grasping for glory in any way they can get it. They accept a job coaching college football for the University of North Carolina, which makes little sense to most of us because he spent basically his entire career coaching pro football.
Then he made another decision that doesn’t make sense to us at least in some important ways: to date a woman nearly 50 years younger than him and go public about it and go to some beach and pose for some pictures where he’s lying on his back while balancing the woman on his feet. This we never saw him doing in photos while coaching the Patriots, not when it was still thought maybe he was the bigger reason the Patriots won the Super Bowls than Brady.
The man appears to be letting loose, or desperate, or just in need of love, and he sure seems to like the power he has as coach of the Tar Heels where he’s getting millions of dollars with all kinds of freedom.
There we go again: money and power.
I honestly think this whole thing speaks to something larger going on in our society and that’s the superficial and shallow pursuit of self-interests. We’re set up to reward media companies who make fun of people – and I don’t see how that’s honorable behavior. We’re set up to want to win college football games so alums can brag “hey our team is great at football.” That seems rather selfish and unbecoming.
I think it’s bad. I think it’s sad.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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