New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick drew raised eyebrows on Wednesday with his choice of T-shirts when social media users began passing a photo of the coach wearing a shirt that depicts an attack on an armed man wearing a turban.
The photo shows Belichick wearing a green T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. Across the shirt’s front is a crude drawing of a green-clad soldier armed with an automatic weapon and standing smiling, as a yellow dog seems to be attacking a bearded man wearing a turban and dropping his own weapon. The turbaned figure has x’s for eyes, in the cartoon convention for death. Underneath the drawing is the phrase “Life is great.”
The photo brought mixed reactions, but many criticized the coach for his shirt.
On one hand, the Boston Herald called Belichick a “true patriot,” but Vice Sports called the shirt “offensive.”
The shirt came from Trident K9, a company that sells police and military equipment for K9 units.
“If you are a military K-9 handler, then life is great! Celebrate the end of Osama Bin Laden with this T-shirt,” the store website reads on its page selling the shirt.
Jim Amann, the president of Trident K9, told the Boston Herald that the T-shirt “tells a cartoon story of a deployment in Afghanistan where SEAL operators are chasing bad guys.”
“These dogs have saved more lives than we can count,” Amann said. “They’re more than a dog. They can do things that no man or machine can do.”
Coach Belichick is well known for supporting the military. It is thus far unknown how Belichick came to own the shirt.
The photo was reportedly taken as the coach vacationed on Nantucket Island.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.