Football takes its turn at bat as a metaphor

book review

The Education of a Coach

David Halberstam

Hyperion Books/277 pages

It should be noted somewhere that no author of any real regard ever went broke attempting to romanticize the sport of baseball, or the men who played it.

For decades, through the media of fiction, nonfiction and occasionally film, writers such as John Updike, W.P. Kinsella, Gay Talese, Roger Angell, Bernard Malamud and Roger Kahn have waxed poetic about the sport, telling us, occasionally without much subtlety, that the game is a metaphor for something bigger, something weightier. It's not just a man trying to hit a round ball with a round stick while crouching in the dirt. It's about courage, about social progress, about the country's desire to embrace a hero, about the loneliness of celebrity, the magic of an Iowa cornfield, and about fathers' and sons' secret desire to connect through a simple backyard game of catch.

David Halberstam is no different. The distinguished journalist (most famous for his accounting of the Vietnam war in The Best and Brightest) mined several of those topics in his critically acclaimed baseball books, Summer of '49 and The Teammates. But with his most recent biography of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, titled The Education of a Coach, Halberstam may be the first serious author - at least since Buzz Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights - to capture what so many of us have known for years, but have never quite figured out how to say properly. Football is the new baseball. Minus the magic Iowa cornfield, it has all the romantic trappings that previously made baseball the national pastime, plus an emphasis on complex strategy, father-son bonding and gladiator violence. And by telling Belichick's story, Halberstam has found the perfect metaphor for this theory.

Despite the Patriots' recent success, Belichick has remained somewhat of a mystery to the world. Who exactly is this frumpy, sweat shirt-wearing defensive genius? What drives him? And how did he fail so spectacularly in Cleveland, when he's been so clearly brilliant in New England? Halberstam maps out most of the answers in this very readable book, which focuses often on Belichick's relationship with his father, Steve, a former Navy football coach and scout (and son of Croatian immigrants) who was uniquely gifted in understanding the game's subtle nuances.

There are some minor bones to pick here - Belichick's flaws, both major and minor, are mostly glossed over - but the chapters on Belichick's complex relationship with Bill Parcells and the emergence of quarterback Tom Brady are worth the sticker price alone. In the end, most readers will come away with the impression that a coach's arrogance is far more tolerable when it's backed up by superior knowledge and results. A Baltimore coach who just so happens to have the same initials as Bill Belichick would be wise to put this on his offseason reading list.

Grade: B+