FOXBORO, Mass. With the announcement yesterday that a meeting between NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Matt Walsh has been arranged, insiders have begun to speculate on what hard evidence the former New England Patriots’ video assistant has to back up his claim that the team engaged in illegal taping as far back as 2002.
Matt Walsh
“What he’s got on tape is disturbing,” said a former employee of the team who preferred to remain anonymous. “Bill Belichick, in the shower, with soap on a rope.”
Brut Soap-on-a-Rope
Belichick became obsessed with soap-on-a-rope after the New York Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969, when Belichick was 16. Joe Namath, the Jets’ quarterback who brashly predicted the stunning upset, had been featured using Brut Soap-on-a-Rope in television commercials, and the two became linked in the aspiring coach’s mind. Belichick asked his parents for Brut Soap-on-a-Rope as a birthday present three months later, and has used the product normally associated with adolescent boys ever since as a good luck charm.
Namath: “It’s impossible to fumble soap-on-a-rope in the shower, even when the other guys blitz you.”
Walsh, a minimum wage go-fer for the Patriots, fell out of favor with Belichick following a summer camp scrimmage in which Belichick shouted out “right guard” after a blown offensive assignment. Walsh interpreted the coach’s command to refer to men’s toiletries, and subsequently gave Belichick a Gillette Right Guard boxed gift set that included deodorant, shaving cream and after-shave. Walsh was dismissed from the team shortly thereafter, and grew resentful of the $10.95 he had spent for nought.
Negotiations between Walsh’s lawyer and the NFL had dragged on as the league initially refused to provide legal protection to Walsh for his evidence. “There was a genuine concern that you’d expose your client to prosecution for pornography if you turned over a videotape of Belichick in the shower,” said Robert Bostrom, a professor of criminal law at Boston College Law School. “He wears that hoodie thing for a reason.”
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
