When Bill Belichick, one of the country’s most famous football coaches, appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” over the weekend to promote his new book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football,” he touched on a number of topics, including his apparent disdain for inspirational halftime speeches.
Football, Mr. Belichick said in his interview with Tony Dokoupil of CBS, is really about strategy: What is his opponent doing? How does his team need to adjust?
“Identifying a problem,” he went on, “figuring a solution and then executing that plan to make it work.”
Jordon Hudson, Mr. Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend, tried to do exactly that at one point in the interview, when Mr. Dokoupil asked Mr. Belichick, 73, how they had met.
“We’re not talking about this,” Ms. Hudson interjected off camera from the producer’s table.
“No?” Mr. Dokoupil asked her.
“No,” Ms. Hudson said.
A spokesman for Mr. Belichick and the University of North Carolina’s football team declined to comment on the interview, but Mr. Belichick’s relationship with Ms. Hudson — and, of course, their nearly 49-year age difference — has been a source of intrigue since the couple went public last year.
As gruff as he is successful, Mr. Belichick re-emerged from a brief sabbatical in December when he signed a contract worth about $10 million a year to become the head coach at North Carolina. It was seismic news that shook the world of college football — North Carolina has traditionally been a basketball powerhouse — and thrust Mr. Belichick back into the spotlight.
He had previously led the New England Patriots of the N.F.L. to six championships in 24 seasons as the team’s head coach. But his tenure with the team came to an end after the 2023 season — the second straight in which New England had finished with a losing record. At the time, Robert Kraft, the team’s owner, described it as a mutual decision for them to part ways. Mr. Kraft, though, later said in a radio interview that he “didn’t enjoy having to fire him.”
In his appearance on “CBS Sunday Morning,” Mr. Belichick insisted that he had not been fired. But when Mr. Dokoupil pointed out that Mr. Belichick had not included a single reference to Mr. Kraft in his book, Mr. Belichick offered a blank stare and curtly noted that Mr. Dokoupil’s observation was “correct.”
One person who is cited in the book is Ms. Hudson, whom Mr. Belichick describes in the acknowledgments section as his “idea mill and creative muse.”
Ms. Hudson has more than 87,000 followers on Instagram, where she describes herself as the daughter of a Maine fisherman, an avid birder and a former college cheerleader. She is also a pageant queen: She is set to represent her hometown, Hancock, Maine, as she competes for the title of Miss Maine USA 2025.
Ms. Hudson and Mr. Belichick met in 2021, reportedly when they were seated next to each other on a flight. They were first spotted together in 2023, and their rumored romance later became official after Mr. Belichick’s split from his longtime girlfriend, Linda Holliday.
As the Patriots’ coach, Mr. Belichick had been averse to social media, going so far as to broadcast his ignorance (real or feigned) by referring several times to “Instaface.” But he has been active on Instagram since he began dating Ms. Hudson, and she has featured him prominently in a number of her own posts — including a Halloween-themed one in which she is posing as a mermaid and Mr. Belichick is reeling her in as a fisherman.
“Never been too worried about what everybody else thinks,” Mr. Belichick said in the “CBS Sunday Morning” interview. “Just try to do what I feel like is best for me and what’s right.”
At the same time, it seems clear that Ms. Hudson has played a role in trying to shape the public perception of their relationship. In emails recently obtained by The Athletic, Ms. Hudson came to Mr. Belichick’s defense after he expressed concern to North Carolina officials about being called a “predator” online.
“Is there anyone monitoring the U.N.C. Football page for slanderous commentary and subsequently deleting / blocking users that are harassing BB in the comments?” she asked in an email in February.
During the CBS interview, in which she was described by Mr. Dokoupil as a “constant presence,” she took care of monitoring things herself.
