Countdown to Super Bowl XLVI: More to Belichick than meets the eye - Ingles

On the phone: Perhaps the only man who can say he's used Bill Belichick as a babysitter.

"As long as we had plenty of ice cream in the house, he was very good,'' Terry Jackson was saying. "The kids never complained. And they still like him, so I guess he did a good job.''

The idea was to study the resume of Belichick — famous stone face and consummate coach, who has been spotted around nearly as many Super Bowls as Budweiser commercials— and find the first sign of leadership potential. Where might the glare that can boil water been born?

Bingo. Lacrosse team captain, senior year at Wesleyan University in 1975. None of his old teammates would talk, understanding to discuss the famously guarded Belichick with a stranger is forbidden. You'd get more openness dialing up the CIA human resources department.

"He was a good skill player, not very fast afoot,'' he began about Belichick. "He was an excellent leader. We had two kids on each side of him who had never played lacrosse before, and he coached them to become very good lacrosse players.

"He knew the game inside and out. He probably knew more than I did at that point … It's always been all about winning with Bill Belichick,'' he added, and this must be starting to sound familiar to any New England player.

"(Before the conference tournament), Bill broke his thumb and wasn't going to be allowed to play by the doctors at Wesleyan. He had so much passion for the game that he went back home to Annapolis and got the doctors down there to give him a waiver to let him play. So he came back and showed it and signed an affidavit taking on the responsibility if anything would happen, and played in the game.

"Everybody looked up to Bill. And he was easy to get along with. Everybody liked him. He wasn't as dry as he is now.''

Dry? As in, the Sahara?

Actually, Jackson remembers Belichick as a fun fraternity man back in Middletown, Conn., who enjoyed life as much as the next guy. Such as the night Belichick was sleeping in the basement because his roommate had company, but woke up panicked and ran for cover when one of the fraternity brothers went after a balky soda machine with a shotgun.

Try that visual. Or Belichick minding Jackson's three children. ("Awww, Mr. Belichick, can we please watch something on TV besides game films?'')

Or Belichick in anti-trust economics class.

"I saw him developing as a very focused, intense individual,'' former professor Dick Miller said. "He was clearly going to be somebody who made his mark. You know how he looks when he's on the television tube most of the time? Very serious, very intense. That's the way he was in class.''

"But what he has is a very good sense of humor. He just doesn't show it to the public.''

Thirty-seven years later, the Patriots say that, too.

"I think those jokes that he tells the team, I've probably heard 20 times,'' Tom Brady mentioned this week.

Jokes? Jokes? You can envision Belichick standing on the sidelines, changing facial expressions less often than Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. Harder to imagine him starting a sentence with, "Did you hear the one about …?''

But his old lacrosse coach and professor know many sides of the man.

MIller remembers how Belichick once said he still uses lessons from economics in managing the salary cap. Jackson brings up 2005.

"When my wife was on her last legs from ovarian cancer, they played the Super Bowl in Jacksonville and he got us free tickets for the game. It was one of the three things she wanted to do before she passed away, and he took care of us. Stories like that usually don't get out about him. He doesn't broadcast them.

"He invited us to a welcoming party that Thursday night. That morning my wife had chemo treatment and I had cataract surgery, and we still went. So there's a little bit of a bond between the two of us.''

He knew a budding leader named Bill Belichick, pre-hoodie.

This article was written by Mike Lopresti and appeared in USA Today.