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It was Aug. 5, 1994, the night before Bill Belichick’s new team, the Browns, was going to play his old team, the New York Football Giants, at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands in the preseason opener.

The members of the Cleveland media contingent covering the Browns were gathering in the lobby of the hotel, located just across an interstate highway from the stadium, for their usual road-game practice of going out to dinner together. This time, we were headed into a steakhouse in the city.

In the hotel parking lot, with the stadium in the background, were Belichick and his wife of 17 years, Debby, sharing a private moment of embrace out away from all the hustle and bustle going on around them. It’s hard to find a quiet space to escape to, even for only a short period of time, in the metro area of a city with 8 million people, but the couple had managed to do that. That they did so in the shadow of the stadium where he worked for just over a decade and was the defensive genius of two Super Bowl championship teams, thus propelling him to the head-coaching job with the Browns, served only to enhance the moment. Everyone not just in our media party, but also at hotel overall, was respectful and kept their distance, for even a guy like Belichick, who was knee-deep in football in every waking monent, needed to get away once in a great while and re-charge his battery.

Fast-forward almost exactly 30 years and two relationships later, and there’s Belichick, not 43 anymore but now 73, on stage in major media events with Jordon Hudson, who, at 24, is 20 years younger than Debby was on the that evening long ago. There are rumors now that Debby’s ex-husband may someday become the husband of Hudson.

No one saw that one coming, just the early January-late December romance, let alone any nuptials. A lot has changed since 1995, but nothing more than the love life of a guy whose idea of fashion has long been taking a pair of scissors and cutting off, in a jagged manner, the sleeves of team-issued sweatshirts. Now he dons a tux and puts his arm around a model-worthy woman in a revealing designer dress. It’s wild, absolutely bizarre. It’s hard to wrap your head around it all.

With the 30 years and all, it’s pro football’s version of “Back to the Future,” but only this time, the future has turned out to even more different from the past than it was for Marty McFly.

And that’s saying a lot, indeed.

Hmmm. Come to think of it now, Biff does look a lot like Bill Parcells, doesn’t he?

Steve King

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