Steve Silverman

The phone rang in the middle of the night. My wife and I looked at each other, knowing that it could only be bad news. Nobody calls at 12:30 a.m. just to talk or talk business. Even telemarketers know you can’t call anyone after 10.

So I picked up the phone and answered with a tentative hello. It was August of 1991 and this was long before the day when everybody had caller ID.

“Hello, Steve, this is Bill Belichick,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

It was the summer of 1991 and Belichick was conducting his first training camp as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. I was a senior editor at Pro Football Weekly and it was my assignment to interview Belichick on the eve of his first season as a head coach. I had called him at training camp and left him both my office and home numbers. It was getting toward the end of camp and I was beginning to think that the interview was not going to happen.

So there he was on the other end of the phone. “Bill, I’m glad you called me back,” I said. “But it’s 12:30 in the morning.”

“Well if you don’t want to talk I can hang up right now,” said Belichick. His tone was not punitive, just the same matter-of-fact voice pattern that would become so familiar.

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I was looking at my wife, who was more than a bit perturbed that some “football person” would call at that hour. She didn’t realize who Bill Belichick was and if she had, she wouldn’t have cared.

I had to make a decision. “No, that’s fine Bill, just give me a second to get my notebook,” I said. I put down the phone, went downstairs and got a 20-minute interview that included everything I wanted to talk about.

He spoke about his first training camp as the man in charge, his quarterback Bernie Kosar, what it was like coaching under Bill Parcells and what he expected from the team.

While he spoke with the same monotone then that he has now, I never felt for a second that I was bothering him or taking up his time in an unwanted manner. I wouldn’t say that I thought he was enjoying himself, but he was definitely cooperative. I understood what he was saying and if I had a question or didn’t understand a particular point he explained it to me.

The picture of Bill Belichick that has since been painted by the media as a single-minded tyrant was nothing like the man I talked to that August night. I came back to bed and I was in a good mood. I had gotten my interview — and my wife was asleep.