Norbert Leo Butz’s sinister version of New England Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick first appeared in American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez as a king surrounded by a loyal court. He’s introduced in the FX series on NFL draft day in 2010, where Belichick’s obsession, knowledge, passion, builds to a mid-round draft pick. Stakes are lower—and risks more acceptable—than the expensive players in the early rounds.
Belichick’s assistants resist when Belichick mentions drafting Hernandez in the fourth round. The Patriots have already drafted a tight end, Rob Gronkowski.
“F--- it. I’ll use both of them,” says Belichick, and Butz plays him distant from the other coaches, chuckling as he sees two steps ahead to the forthcoming season. “Two tight ends with a full-back offset strong side. No one’s ever done that before.”
Butz conveys the scope of a coach high above his lackeys, working things out.
The National Football League demands that obsession, captured in Butz’s icy and intense portrayal. Gambling, fantasy football leagues, how a child’s emotional investment becomes a lifelong part of an adult’s identity: The NFL’s destructive and unhealthy game succeeds because the country has surrendered to that dark passion. For the league’s employees, the obsession must be magnified—then reduced until all that matters is whether the ball gains an inch, or loses a yard.
Norbert Leo Butz and Josh Rivera in American Sports Story
FXIn the scene preceding the draft selection, Hernandez (Josh Andres Rivera) and his brother D.J. (Ean Castellanos) brawl in their backyard, bitter that Aaron has slipped into a later round. For Hernandez, the NFL can help him overcome life’s obstacles, but by the end of American Sports Story, he cannot. The series covers Hernandez’s youth, his star-crossed college and pro careers, the murder he committed, and his death by suicide in prison in 2017. Belichick is among many who might have changed that trajectory.
In Netflix’s Bloodline, Butz played Kevin Rayburn, a scheming brother in a disjointed family, sharing some of Belichick’s laconic style. Like Rivera, and many of Sports Story’s cast, Butz’s background is in theater. Three of Butz’s significant stage performances create a narrative to show that Belichick and Butz are both song-and-dance men.
In 1999, Butz performed in the national tour of Cabaret. The tour arrived in Boston that May, still a few years from the Patriots’ and that city’s championship ascendance. His take on the Emcee was a “vampiric, lascivious bisexual cross between Sting and Billy Idol,” according to the Boston Globe review, which gave Butz tepid praise, and the show a poor notice. Pre-9/11, maybe Cabaret’s message of hidden fascism and intolerance seemed like an old-fashioned worry.
Butz’s Emcee doesn’t physically fit Belichick’s hoodie with the cut-off sleeves, but Belichick’s an Emcee all the same—welcoming Hernandez into the NFL’s world where every inch counts, so every hustle counts.
“We are here to serve you,” Butz sang in Cabaret’s opening number, “Wilkommen.” “Outside it is winter, but in here it is so hot.”
The NFL was Hernandez’s chance to come in from the cold—to meet his father’s expectations and reach the heights he trained for. After the draft selection, the scene cuts back to dingy Bristol, Connecticut, to Aaron running in celebration to hug his brother.
But as he visualizes Hernandez’s boost to his offense, Belichick prepares to move on, putting any player out to winter again.
Butz puts a nasty half-smile on Belichick, running numbers: “We guarantee him a hundred grand, we cut him loose for nothing: ton of upside, no risk.”
Bill Belichick and Aaron Hernandez
MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty ImagesThe NFL is that long con for many of its players: short-term rewards, with long-term risk of brain damage. In Sports Story, the players watch a news report of Junior Seau’s suicide, Hernandez is dazed after repeated helmet hits, and coaches like Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck) and Belichick watch, demanding as players crash into each other, “Do it again.”
The con hooks the rubes, like the targets in the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. In 2005, Butz won the first of his two Tony Awards, portraying the hustling Freddy Benson, a low-rent conman running hustles in the French Riviera. Butz’s showcase number is “Great Big Stuff,” where he wishes for riches from his conniving talents.
“I thought I had a gift, that penny-ante grift,” Butz sings with enthusiastic classlessness. “I want a mansion with a moat, around which I will float.”
Belichick gives that to Hernandez: a $40 million contract, enough for the mansion that Hernandez soon buys for his wife and new daughter. But when Hernandez fears for his safety, as his crimes come home to roost, Belichick makes clear what the money bought.
Rivera’s portrayal shows Hernandez’s desperation. The contempt Butz’s Belichick feels for Hernandez’s plea for a trade to another city feels real, and cruel.
“I’m building a whole f---ing offense around you and Gronk. Trade you because you got neighborhood troubles? No f---king way,” Butz scoffs.
“I watched a kid this morning run a 4.2 in the 40. Kid comes from a trailer park in Houston. I’m going to draft that kid, Aaron,” Butz says, his voice dropping into scheming malice. “I’m going to draft him low. Real low. And then I’m going to turn him into a star. You know who else I did that for?”
That description doesn’t seem to match an actual 2013 Patriots draft pick, but it matches the mindset that can see the advantages of players overlooked by others. At 7 am one rainy morning in April 1995 shortly before that year’s draft, Belichick, then-head coach of the Cleveland Browns, was interviewed as he scouted players at the rural backwater of the University of New Hampshire, a Division I-AA school whose biggest rivalry was Maine.
“Every year, there are guys who are not Division I-A players that turn out to be good players,” Belichick said then. The Browns signed two free agents from New Hampshire that year, though neither lasted beyond training camp. One of them, defensive lineman Joe Fleming, was the Canadian Football League’s Outstanding Defensive Player of the Year in 2003. Belichick saw something, even if it wasn’t NFL-ready.
In 2011, Butz won his second Tony Award for Catch Me If You Can, where he played FBI agent Carl Hanratty, chasing the young conman Frank Abagnale Jr. across the country.
Belichick’s drive is internalized in the snappy patter Butz gives Hanratty’s single-minded nature.
“No shiny suit, or fancy cars, no open tabs at uptown bars…it’s not my cup of tea,” Butz sings in “Good At What I Do,” cut before the show’s Broadway run. “No charge accounts at fancy stores, my name won’t open any doors. Here I am to save the day, wouldn’t know it from my goddamn pay.
“At least I know I’m good at what I do.”
Belichick is famous for that “do your job” mentality. He’s known for giving the begrudging press conference, and for refusing to look backwards or give the pithy quote to make a sportswriter’s job a little easier. A multi-millionaire, he acts a slob, with a ratty hoodie and sullen glower that Butz captures very well.
Butz shows Belichick’s act that hides the con, to pretend his obsessions are an amusing affectation.
At a Patriots’ gala, Belichick calls Hernandez over, giving a football version of Hanratty’s song, that Belichick is very good at what he does. He gives Hernandez the history of football’s spread formation, explaining that “a spread done right can make every pass look like a run, every run like a pass. Thing about the spread is you can literally hide in it. I can hide you in it.”
Butz shows Belichick’s eyes losing interest in Hernandez, who’s right beside him.
“Defense won’t know where to find you. Kind of gives me an idea. Who says a tight end has to be…” he says, his voice trailing off as he gets up and leaves Hernandez baffled on a couch.
Josh Rivera in American Sports Story
FXBelichick has been criticized for an inability to draft an iconic wide receiver, but Patriot tight ends have been amazing—some geniuses get stuck trying to prove their own thesis.
Earlier, Belichick demands that his practicing players, “Do your jobs. Do them well.”
He encounters Hernandez, then a rookie carrying the veteran’s pads back from practice, naked as a prank. Butz shows disgust in a measured way, an implied sneer that Hernandez either fits in, or moves on. Hernandez’s past, his troubles, his destiny, are no concern of Belichick or the NFL.
“Coach (Urban) Meyer said I need to stay on you,” Butz says, icy like a high mountain above it all. “I’m not going to do that. That’s not my job.”
