The name "Bill Belichick" has been said a whole lot throughout the legendary coach's football career; but how many people have been saying it correctly?
For as long as we can remember, everyone has been pronouncing Belichick's name as follows...Bill-A-Check or Bill-A-Chick. However, in a recent video clip shared by the New England Patriots, Belichick pronounced his surname differently while reading out his father's name.
Did you hear that? "Bu-luh-chick." You would have to assume that the man knows how to pronounce his own name correctly, which makes us think that we've all been pronouncing it incorrectly this whole time.
For the Win shared an excerpt from the David Halberstam book, The Education of a Coach, which sheds a bit of light on how the current iteration of Belichick's surname came to be.
The name was originally Bilicic, and it was phoneticized or Americanized, not, as happened with so many immigrant families, at Ellis Island, by immigration officials reluctant to master the names of the old world, with their weird mixtures of vowels and consonants, but rather by a first-grade teacher in Monessen, Pennsylvania. That teacher, told by Anna Bilicic, Steve’s oldest sister and the first family member born in the United States, that her names was Bell-uhchick, wrote it down as Belichick, thereby earning the undying hatred of Mary Barkovic Bilicic for corrupting the family name.
Honestly, we just don't know what to think now...
