Editors for ESPN writer Seth Wickersham wittingly scheduled his book on the New England Patriots dynasty, It’s Better To Be Feared, to be released close to Tom Brady’s return to New England.
That fact meant Bill Belichick would hear about all of the different storylines dug up from its pages. According to NBC Sports’ Chris Collinsworth, the six-time Super Bowl-winning coach was not happy about it.
“Bill Belichick was hot. Getting ready to play a game like this. All the stories, all the books, all these things start coming out,” Collinsworth said. “And he was like, ’20 years, and you’re going to take 10 seconds out of this conversation this year and 20 seconds out of that conversation in that year, and somehow you’re going to make this into something it wasn’t? We had a great relationship. We learned a from each other. I learned a lot from Tom Brady.’”
Belichick is probably one of the last coaches anyone expects to feed into media narratives, but we are all human, and the Teflon mentality wasn’t working this time around.
“When he got to talking about ‘you guys in the media,’ we both threw up our hands and said ‘Woah Woah,’” Collinsworth said. “But it was an emotional thing for Bill. He did not like that people were trying to portray it besides something very, very positive for the two of them.”
Wickersham actually answered pointed questions about his sourcing and vetting process when weaving a tale like the one in this book. The writer went in-depth on the topic last week on WEEI as he sat in-studio with Merloni and Fauria.
“The people who I quoted in the book,” Wickersham said on last Friday’s show. “For the most part, were people who witnessed things firsthand. Who were in those meetings. Who were playing in those games. Those are the primary sources I relied on.”
Wickersham prefaced that with his process for smelling out BS. He interviews each subject then picks out a few things to use from conversations held over hours at a time. After he identifies those key nuggets he then goes back to the source and makes sure he has all of the context correct about the information.
The painstaking process is a necessary evil to make sure aggrieved parties like Belichick can’t just cast aside well-reported journalism as fake news. The book’s title is fitting after Wickersham showed no fear in his quest to accurately report on the greatest dynasty in NFL history.
