Bill Belichick and Randy Moss high-five at Gillette Stadium on Oct. 20, 2008. (Jim Rogash/Getty Images)
BOSTON (WBZ-AM) -- Last Saturday night in Canton, Ohio, Randy Moss carved out time at the end of his Hall of Fame induction speech to single out his former coach, Bill Belichick.
"Last but not least, Bill Belichick, I'm not gonna forget about you," he said. "I wanna thank you for being a friend when it wasn't always about football. You showed me how much I love the game. You challenge me every day to go out and be great."
Belichick beamed at the attention--and when asked about Moss's words Tuesday morning before training camp practice, he reciprocated.
"I learned a lot from Randy," Belichick said. Randy had a big impact on me as a coach. He taught me the game from a perspective that I had never really seen before or understood before. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. He's a great person to have on the team. He did a lot of, in his own way, team-building events--like the Halloween party, things like that--that a lot of times went below the radar. He didn’t do them for publicity. He didn’t do them because he wanted to be recognized for it. He did it because he wanted to do it and it was the right thing to do."
He said there was a lot Moss did behind the scenes.
"You know, he brought a lot of kids up to games every week, bused kids up from West Virginia, gave them tickets, bought them tickets so they could come to the games here at Gillette Stadium and things like that that a lot of people don’t know about. But, that was just how generous and what a big heart Randy had.
That's quite a bit of praise--especially from a guy who currently coaches players who, during the offseason, expressed how much they felt underappreciated. As for those guys, what's next on the training camp docket?
"Getting ready for Washington, obviously there's a lot of things that we need to work on no matter who we play," Belichick said. "We're in the start of preparing for a team process, so that's the next phase of what we're into, just doing things that we need to do and starting to prepare for opponents and so forth, as that transitions into a regular season type of schedule. So, hopefully we can go out there and have a couple good days of practice and be ready to go Thursday night against Washington."
Kickoff for that pre-season game against Washington is at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.
WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Chris Fama (@cfama_wbz) reports