New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick lead his team to three Super Bowl victories in a span of four years. In a time where the National Football League actively encourages parity—and therefore discouraging the sort of success enjoyed by the Patriots—Belichick’s accomplishments are already approaching legendary status.

Halberstam asks what sort of upbringing, training, and experience could produce such a coach. His answer is this facinating professional biography.

The son of a football coach, Belichick started thinking like a coach from childhood. His father Steve literally wrote the book on the art of scouting opponents, Football Scouting Methods. At an early age, Belichick learned from his father how to analyze an opponent from game film and scouting trips. “Very early on,” writes Halberstam, “Bill Belichick, not surprisingly, started seeing the game through the eyes of a coach.”

Halberstam chronicles Belichick’s football life through high school, prep school, college and, from there, into coaching. Belichick emerges as a man centered on coaching from early adulthood, bringing an extraordinary amount of talent and devotion to the task. If his father’s name sometimes opened an employer’s door for him, it was nonetheless his immense skills that kept him employed.

Of the classmates and colleagues who influenced Belichick, Halberstam takes special care to highlight the roles of Ernie Adams and Bill Parcells. Adams, a prep-school classmate, would later become Belichick’s key scouting and research assistant. Parcells, of course, was the head coach who made Belichick his defensive coordinator during the Super Bowl runs by the New York Giants and, later, the New England Patriots.

The road to head coaching is not an easy one, full of low-paying and tenuous assistant coaching positions. Assistants usually serve at the pleasure of a head coach, and their jobs are usually gone when a head coach is fired. Halberstam also provides insight into some of the other hardships of the coaching life: battles with members of the press, dealing with troubled but talented players (Lawrence Taylor being Halberstam’s key example), and the sometimes tough relationship with NFL owners.