Sportswriter uses Hall of Fame speech to roast Bill Belichick over his 25-year-old girlfriend

Bill Belichick is 73. His girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, is not. Belichick seemingly won his first Super Bowl as the New England Patriots’ head coach (2001’s Super Bowl XXXVI) a month before Hudson was born. Despite this gap, the North Carolina Tar Heels coach and his boo have found love, striking up a relationship in 2023 that's still going strong (a relationship that both are very protective of).

However, if there’s anyone who could take a playful jab at Belichick's near-50-year age gap, it’s someone who knows him well, someone who has covered his work long before he traveled east to Foxborough. Such a person is Mary Kay Cabot, who gave a nod to her early sports writing career during a recent Pro Football Hall of Fame event.

Sportswriter Roasts Bill Belichick's Relationship With Hall of Fame Speech

Cabot accepted the Pro Football Writers of America’s Bill Nunn Memorial Award at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Gold Jacket Dinner on Aug. 1. Cabot is the second woman to win the award, which the PFWA gives to reporters who have made a long and distinguished contribution to pro football coverage.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer / Cleveland.com writer has been on the NFL beat for decades, including when Belichick began his head coaching career with the Cleveland Browns in the 1990s.

Cabot discussed how she overcame obstacles and shattered glass ceilings. “Fortunately, I went to the school of hard knocks in the NFL because Bill Belichick was the first Browns coach I ever covered,” she said during her speech.

“You see, if you start out with Bill Belichick, no one can rattle you after that. If Bill didn’t like something I wrote, he’d call and yell at me. If you asked a dumb question, he’d call you out,” she said. “Eventually, I had to learn to stand up to him. During one of those yelling matches, I told him, 'If you don’t have the ‘footballs’ to say that to the guys, then don’t say it to me. Bam.”

“But now I totally understand why Bill gave me such a hard time,” she said. “I was 28 at the time, and he just couldn’t relate to a woman that old.”

However, when the media wrote up her speech as her taking a “savage shot” at the former Browns coach, Cabot downplayed the severity.

“It was a joke! Not a ‘savage shot.’ Just a little joke!” she wrote on X. “You can see that from my delivery. All in good fun!”

Meanwhile, Hudson wasn’t joking when she shut down an interviewer in April when they tried to get some further details about her and Belichick’s relationship. Both Bill and Jordon appeared on an episode of ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ to discuss his book, ‘The Wart of Winning.’ 

Interviewer Tony Dokoupil described Hudson as a “constant presence” during the interview. When Dokoupil asked how they met, she interjected. “We’re not talking about this,” she said. When the video circulated online, Hudson reposted messages supporting her decision to “keep [her] private life private.” 

Though, there's some speculation that they broke up over the summer. I