“I called Bill the next morning,” Parcells said. “I told him to call Kraft. I told him he should make sure to get at least four years in his contract.”
Belichick’s New England deal was announced less than 24 hours after Darth Vader’s phone call.
“I always felt we had a little bit of simpatico,” Kraft said. “It’s like a woman. A spouse. What’s right for me might not be right for some other man. In a football sense, he had product knowledge. Troy Brown. I listened. I remembered. Honestly, it was like when I bought the team. I thought I was going to pay $115 million, maybe $118, $120. I ended up paying $172 million, the most for a team ever at that time. I broke every rule in business when I did that. But you know why I did it? It’s my hometown team. I loved that team. I knew I’d never get another chance to buy it. So with the coach, I wanted Belichick. I was getting what I wanted if I got him. I’m not thinking about the next year or two. I’m thinking about three years, five years, 10 years. He was going to be with us for a long time.”
Now he has been. And Kraft has no regrets. Four Lombardi Trophies, a few spats … and no regrets. You hear about differences inside the upper echelon of the Patriots, the kind of differences that happen when strong-willed successful people disagree. But the thing about the Patriots is, the disagreements rarely reach the front page of the Globe.
“We’re like a family,” Kraft said. “When we disagree, we disagree in private. In all my businesses, we do not tolerate division from within.”