BELICHICK SAYS HE’S A HAPPY MAN — AND HE DOESN’T REALLY CARE WHAT WE THINK
Without Jordon Hudson, he took questions from ABC’s MIchael Strahan and actually smiled, though his former players are ripping her as a “distraction” as he prepares for his first North Carolina season
He smiled, from cheek to cheek. I had to replay the scene on my computer. Bill Belichick was asked by Michael Strahan on ABC, “Are you happy?” He is, by most official counts, the unhappiest man in football and one of the unhappiest men on Planet Earth. It was possible he might say no.
“Yeah,” Belichick said.
He even nodded.
“You look happy,” Strahan said.
“Yeah,” said Belichick, popping a public grin for one of the first times in life, at 73.
It shouldn’t matter to the rest of us if he’s loving days and nights with 24-year-old Jordon Hudson. What happened to Belichick is that she tried to control the content of his interviews about his new book, “The Art of Winning.” Imagine, the coach who has commanded the minds of professional athletes — to the majesty of six Super Bowl titles — yielding power to a girlfriend young enough to be his great-granddaughter. Tom Brady grew so sick of Belichick’s authority that he left the New England Patriots for Tampa Bay, where he won his seventh championship, one-upping Bill. Players went home cussing about him and never stopped. He was a bastard.
Now, Jordon is telling off a CBS reporter on a studio set as Bill sits there? Jordon is bigger than Bill? How will she deal with players at North Carolina younger than her? Will parents wonder if she’s also coaching them? She has become a distraction, the ugliest word in the grouch’s vocabulary. What is Belichick doing as an active septuagenarian who shares a bed with a former cheerleader and beauty pageant contestant? I am not the only one asking.
“The No. 1 thing we talked about all the time in New England was distractions,” said his former receiver, Julian Edelman. “ ‘Let’s not make distractions. The game’s already as hard as it is. To prepare for it, to play, to coach.’ And regardless of what her role is, Jordon, yeah … now that it’s gained and snowballed to what it’s become right now, where we’re talking about it three weeks later, it’s become a distraction. That’s what we all think right now. This is becoming a distraction. We gotta practice what we preach here.”
Edelman is calling him a phony. So is Cam Newton, who played quarterback for Belichick in 2020. “I find it extremely interesting for a person who always led with this: ‘Do not be a distraction,’ ’’ he said. “We talking more about Jordon Hudson than talking about who’s our starting quarterback. You can’t name me three players on North Carolina’s roster right now besides Jordon Hudson. Now you have that same situation with a 16-year-old that you’re trying to recruit. And you got to talk to his momma? This ain’t a good look. Eh, what you got going on, coach? Got girl problems just like me?’’
Brady has taken one crack. Asked by a comedian if he would rent Hudson a car at her age, he said, after laughing, “I don’t want any … liability.” Then he said, “I don’t know. I don’t follow it much.” Snoop Dogg has followed it. “I’ve been a football fan for a long, long time. I mean, I remember back when the Cowboys was good,” he said. “I remember back when the Chiefs were bad. And I remember … what was it — Bill Belichick’s girlfriend wasn’t even born yet?”
The best news about the Strahan interview, on “Good Morning America,” is that Hudson wasn’t in the studio. Wisely, Belichick arranged for North Carolina to hire a former Chicago Bears publicist, Brandon Faber, to help with certain chores. He was in New York for the interview and joined him at Atlantic Coast Conference meetings. The less we see of Hudson, the more we speak about Belichick as a college football coach. And the less we see of media material prepared by Pablo Torre, who has been dead wrong in suggesting Belichick won’t make it to the regular season. The school continues to allow Hudson to be part of the program, not that Belichick would have it any other way.
“Bill's been great to work with," UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham said. "He talked about practicing like a pro and he runs a professional organization that is teaching students how to be professional in all aspects of their life. He is a very determined, professional individual, and that's the way he carries himself and the way he conducts the program. Bill is an incredibly focused person.”
If Belichick’s family members are concerned abut Hudson, he made it clear that she is a special part of his life. “Well, we have a good personal relationship, and I'm not talking about personal relationships. You know, I’m not talking about personal relationships, Michael. You know that,” he said.
“She's been terrific through the whole process, and she's been very helpful to me. She does the business things that don't relate to North Carolina that come up in my life, so I concentrate on football, and that's really what I want to do. I acknowledged her in the book. She was very helpful on that with the tribute pages and also giving a perspective of the book from kind of a business side. Sometimes I get a little football technical, and she did a good job of keeping me on balance there.”
It’s May. He sounds ready to coach for the first time since 2023, when he finished 4-13 with the Patriots and was fired by owner Bob Kraft. “I've learned so much being back in the college environment whether it be recruiting, the college game, the rules, the hashmarks, some strategy and putting a team together," Belichick said. “I learn every day. The players are so eager. They're hungry. They have dreams. They want to be good. I want to help make them good, and I want to help make them good on a good team. They've been very enthusiastic, and we've made a lot of progress. We've got a long way to go, of course.”
He spent last weekend at the Miss Maine USA pageant, where Hudson finished in third place. He watched inside a Holiday Inn in Portland, where she said, “I’m feeling an immense amount of pride right now. I’m hoping that anybody who’s watching this finds the strength to push through whatever it is that they’re going through ... and embodies that hate never wins.”
Hate won’t fester if she lets Chapel Bill coach the Tar Heels. He is in charge of the program, not her. He will be judged on victories and defeats for a team that finished 6-7 last season. Let him be the grouch.
A happy grouch.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.