‘She put everybody ahead of herself’: Stephen and Brian Belichick remember their grandmother, Jeannette
“She made you feel like you were the most important person in the world."
Jeannette Belichick, the mother of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, has died. She was 98.
Patriots spokesman Stacey James said Belichick died Monday night of natural causes in Annapolis, Maryland.
Belichick was preceded in death by her husband, Steve, who died in 2005 at age 86. In addition to their son, Bill, she is survived by three grandchildren: Holy Cross College women’s lacrosse coach Amanda Belichick and Patriots assistants Stephen Belichick and Brian Belichick.
Both Ohio natives, the former Jeannette Munn met Steve Belichick in the 1940s at Hiram College, where she taught French and Spanish and he was a football, basketball and track coach. They were married in 1950 and had their son, Bill, in 1952.
Following her husband’s assistant football coaching stints at Vanderbilt and North Carolina, the couple moved to Annapolis when Steve took a coaching job at Navy.
Bill Belichick made a donation to Hiram College in honor of both of his parents in 2015. It established a reading room named for his mother in the school’s library and purchased resources to aid the foreign languages department. It added his father’s name to the college’s fitness center.
Stephen Belichick said his grandmother lived “an amazing life.”
“She put everybody ahead of herself,” he said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “Everything she did was geared toward helping other people and loving her family. She was just such a caring person. I learned so much from her.
“It was tough losing her; very close to her and the rest of my grandparents. She lived an amazing life . . . I was excited that my daughter was able to meet her and spend some time with her before she passed. That meant a lot to me and my wife. That was really great. She was a very special person . . . She was just so loving and so selfless.”
Brian Belichick said she taught him was how to be positive and treat other people.
“She made you feel like you were the most important person in the world to her,” he said. “She was a great influence on me and influencing me on how to treat other people, how to bring great energy every day [and] be positive.”
Material from The Boston Globe was used in this report.
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