Quiet Coach Bill has no place to hide

America at Large:Should the New England Patriots defeat Indianapolis in Sunday's AFC Championship game, they will return to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in six years, but a sizeable portion of this weekend's armchair audience will be pulling for the Colts.

Some of them doubtless would just like to see an infusion of fresh blood added to the mix for Super Bowl XLI, while others hope to see Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning overcome his play-off jinx and finally win a big game.

And then there are those who, aware the coaching staff of the losing team in Sunday's encounter will take charge of the AFC all-stars in the Pro Bowl in Honolulu, can't wait to see what happens when Bill Belichick starts giving orders to LaDainian Tomlinson. Tomlinson, the NFL's Most Valuable Player in the recently concluded regular season, lashed out at the Patriots in general and Belichick in particular in the aftermath of New England's come-from-behind upset of the Chargers in last Sunday's play-off game in San Diego.

After Tom Brady rallied the injury-depleted Patriots to score 11 unanswered points in the final five minutes to oust the AFC's top-seeded team 27-24, several of the winning team's players uncharacteristically celebrated at midfield by (a) mocking Charger Shawne Merriman's unique "lights-out" sack dance, (b) pointedly stomping on the Charger logo painted at midfield and (c) in at least one case, taunting the losers by pantomiming the "choke" sign.

Tomlinson, who had performed valiantly in the crushing defeat, had to be restrained from going after the visiting antagonists, and refused to shake hands with several New England players. He was still seething in the locker-room over what he termed the Patriots' "disrespect".

"I can't sit there and watch that," he said. "I was very upset. They showed no class at all - and maybe that comes from their head coach."

A day later Tomlinson reiterated his criticism of Belichick. "It all starts at the top," said LT.

Having known Bill Belichick for two decades, I think it's safe to say he's probably as unhappy over the comportment of his players in San Diego as was Tomlinson, but it goes without saying that the episode could portend a decidedly chilly relationship in Honolulu next month.

Widely acknowledged to be the NFL's best coach, Belichick has traditionally, and deliberately, affected a public image as colourless as the drab grey sweatshirts he wears on the sideline on game days. But for a guy who shuns the limelight, he'd been in the public eye a lot more often than he'd care to be over the past year even before Tomlinson made him part of Sunday's post-game story.

Fourteen months ago Belichick, riding the crest of two successive (and three in four years) world championships, was the subject of an insightful book by a distinguished author. David Halberstam's The Education of a Coach detailed the relationship between the Patriots' boss and his father, Steve Belichick, a longtime coach at the US Naval Academy.

"He was not a man of charisma, as one expected of coaches, but a quiet man of chalk," wrote Halberstam of Bill Belichick.

That November, just as The Education of a Coach was climbing the best-seller lists, Steve Belichick succumbed to heart failure and died at 86. Six weeks later the Patriots were eliminated from the Super Bowl chase by a 27-13 play-off loss in Denver.

During the off-season last summer, Belichick's name abruptly surfaced in the gossip columns of New England newspapers when he was named as the "other man" in a New Jersey divorce case. The complainant, a construction worker named Vincent Shenocca, charged in court documents that his wife of 10 years, a former receptionist for the New York Giants, had engaged in a relationship that lasted several years.

With word of the New Jersey case, Belichick's own divorce, which had been proceeding quietly in Massachusetts, also became the subject of undesired scrutiny. Two months ago, the Belichick family was back in the news when Stephen Belichick, the coach's 19-year-old son, was arrested for possession of what was even by police standards a "very small amount" of marijuana and placed on six months' probation.

Following each of their regular-season games, the post-game handshakes between Belichick and his former protégé, New York Jets' coach Eric Mangini, had been so pointedly chilly that a massive posse of cameramen had staked out a midfield position following the Patriots' play-off win over the Jets two weekends ago.

As it turned out, this time Belichick and Mangini shared a warm embrace, but not until Belichick had manhandled one of the photographers, Jim Davis of the Boston Globe, shoving him out of the way because he was blocking his path to his one-time acolyte.

Although Belichick later phoned Davis to apologise, the incident was captured on national television and, much to the New England coach's embarrassment, replayed countless times.

There is no evidence that Belichick condoned, much less approved, the post-game antics in San Diego last Sunday. An educated guess would be that the miscreants have already been dragged to the woodshed for a verbal hiding, though the coach would never admit as much.

"I'm just trying to win a football game," is Bill Belichick's guiding credo, and the Patriots will have their work cut out for them at the RCA Dome. Although New England famously ousted more talented, Manning-led Colts teams in play-off games en route to each of their last two Super Bowl wins, the fact Indianapolis prevailed in two regular season meetings this year and last by an aggregate 67-41 returns Belichick squarely to the place he likes least: the spotlight.