In early May, the 73-year-old former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick published The Art of Winning, an autobiography of sorts, laying out the principles that made him the greatest coach in the history of professional football.
It’s the book fans have been waiting to read for 20 years. Yet hardly anyone noticed, not even people thrilled at the prospect of Belichick’s move to the University of North Carolina next fall – his first crack at coaching college ball. People are distracted by his relationship with a 24-year-old beauty queen: two-time Miss Maine finalist Jordon Hudson.
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In early May, the 73-year-old former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick published _[The Art of Winning](https://bookshop.org/a/3057/9781668080832)_, an autobiography of sorts, laying out the principles that made him the greatest coach in the history of professional football.
It’s the book fans have been waiting to read for 20 years. Yet hardly anyone noticed, not even people thrilled at the prospect of Belichick’s move to the University of North Carolina next fall – his first crack at coaching college ball. People are distracted by his relationship with a 24-year-old beauty queen: two-time Miss Maine finalist Jordon Hudson.
You can see why. Forty-nine years is an attention-grabbing age difference and Hudson is a force in her own right. Her father was a mussel-harvester in Hancock, Maine – which sounds like a vocation out of a different century. Environmental regulators apparently thought so, too. When they banned dredging in the local inlet, Hudson’s long-settled family became refugees of the Green Transition. Her agitation on behalf of displaced fishermen like her father has been truculent – almost Trumpian. She spent last Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago with Belichick and the President.
Hudson’s mother, meanwhile, moved to the gay resort town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she manages a sex shop. That has given Jordon some progressive street cred. A neighbor interviewed by the _Washington Post_ said Provincetown “reaffirmed her belief that you should be able to love anybody you want, as long as it’s legal.” Young Jordon, born this century, took a degree in cosmetology from the New England Hair Academy in Malden, Massachusetts. She’s never looked back.
Hudson’s relationship with a five-decades-older boyfriend would be of no interest to the public were that boyfriend not a genius. And Belichick is a genius at something Americans care about very much.
> Belichick ordered his players to stay off ‘SnapFace,’ his name for every social media network
In _The Art of Winning_, the greatest strategist, personnel manager and motivator ever to pursue his line of work lays out what he got right and what wrong. He shouldn’t have tried to blitz the cool-headed Kurt Warner in the first Patriots-Rams game of 2001, he now thinks. Things worked better in their second meeting, though. That was Belichick’s first Super Bowl as head coach, enabled by his shocking decision to replace all-star quarterback Drew Bledsoe with a rookie no one had ever heard of, at least up till then. His name was Tom Brady.
Belichick points to hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio’s bestsellers as a model for his own books. He aims to use play-calling and roster selection the same way Dalio uses debt management – as a specialist discipline that can teach us broader lessons about human nature.
For Belichick, the core of excellence, in life as in football, is mistake avoidance. “Don’t beat yourself… above all, do not beat yourself.” This means not turning the ball over to the other team through fumbles and interceptions. Year in, year out, Belichick’s Patriots were the least-penalized NFL team. Why did his players so seldom lose yards by jumping offside or swearing at a referee? Such lapses can’t be addressed in games, the coach explains. But players can be humiliated, and thereby conditioned, during practices, through the use of collective punishment: lose your temper or forget the snap count and the whole squad must run laps.
Belichick’s success has less to do with inspiration than strategy, and less to do with strategy than management. He hates the Hollywood cliché of the coach as a giver of pep talks. He has no desire to “hop up on a folding chair at halftime and shout nonsense to a group of grown men.”
Winning comes from developing good habits that can be carried into any situation. Belichick’s descriptions of such habits are aphoristic, almost biblical. Big playoff games are no different from seemingly unimportant ones early in the regular season: “Fundamentally, your process for getting to the big moment is the process that is most likely to win the day,” he says. That’s why games are “all highly consequential.”
There is one way in which Belichick’s amatory setup might impact his coaching philosophy. In decades past, he was a technological fuddy-duddy, an outright cave-dweller. He ordered his players to stay off “SnapFace,” his name for every social network. This turned out to be a tremendous advantage. Once social media hit locker rooms, star athletes, vain to begin with, were mesmerized and distracted. Belichick’s ban on tweets and reels won the Patriots hours of extra preparation every day. That’s not practicable any longer. By Belichick’s last year with the Patriots, in 2023, discipline was breaking down badly.
Hudson, by contrast, is chronically online. When Belichick was going no-screens in his locker room, she was a toddler, probably being silenced with a tablet (not in the old sense of Dramamine but in the new sense of an iPad). Her view of the world might look slack to 20th-century Bill, but 21st-century Bill should see it as savvy, disciplined, even ruthless. Hudson is an internet-content dragon. The _Boston Globe_ notes that she recently asked the University of North Carolina whether there was “anyone monitoring the UNC Football page for slanderous commentary and subsequently deleting it/blocking users that are harassing BB in the comments.”
The salacious gossip, up till now, has been a way for those who will never understand Belichick’s complex defenses and brilliant substitutions to be part of the conversation about him. For this is a man who has mastered, as almost no one else has, “what makes human beings excel and what makes human beings want to excel.” At a competitive time in the life of a very competitive nation, that’s a conversation everyone wants to join.
_This article was originally published in_ [The Spectator](https://thespectator.com/subscribe/)_’s July 2025 World edition._