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Tom Brady was already in a full, foaming-at-the-mouth lather outside the visitors’ locker room in Cleveland. This was an hour before his first game back from his Deflategate suspension in 2016, and Brady was running in place with a resistance band strapped around his waist, pumping his arms and legs a lot faster than they were moving in his draft combine tape.
Over three decades of walking through the bowels of NFL stadiums, I’ve never seen a quarterback engaged in a pre-dame drill this intense. It was a small window into the soul of greatness and into the price Brady paid to do extraordinary things on a football field with relatively ordinary physical skills.
Tuesday morning, Brady finally announced that he could no longer pay that price.
“For Tom, it’s not about his play on the field,” Brady’s close friend, former Michigan teammate, and longtime NFL kicker Jay Feely told The Post. “It’s the daily grind, and for him that was all-consuming for 23 hours every day. People don’t know all the injuries he worked through every year. He won the Super Bowl last year with a torn MCL in his knee. He doesn’t have the desire anymore to do all it takes in the offseason to get himself ready again to play at that level.”
The way his farewell played out publicly was as odd as Brady’s decision to spend his lengthy Instagram post thanking everyone associated with his seventh Super Bowl victory while ignoring everyone associated with his first six. Brady has always been fueled by real and imagined slights, and though he did entertain Bill Belichick in the Tampa Bay locker room after the Bucs’ victory over the Patriots in Foxborough, this is one quarterback who never forgets. Belichick drafted Jimmy Garoppolo in 2014 to replace Brady, and then did everything but escort him to the door three championships and six seasons later. No. 12 will always savor title No. 7 because he earned it outside the hard borders of the Patriot Way.
But Brady’s retirement shouldn’t be defined by the way he mishandled the terms of his disengagement. It should be defined by the specific gift he gave everyone who watched him compete at the highest level for more than two decades.
Above all else, Brady proved that virtually nothing is impossible in sports.
He was a backup quarterback on a winless freshman team at Junipero Serra High in San Mateo, Calif. He was a pear-shaped JV quarterback whose coach, Joe Hession, described his first-ever start this way: “It was a disaster. Tommy must’ve been sacked 15 times. … We didn’t score a touchdown and they ran all over us. It was the worst beating of my life, and it made you want to walk off and go to a bar and quit.”
Yes, young Tom Brady was so bad he inspired his coach to consider getting drunk.
Even Tommy’s most ardent supporters were concerned he would never play at Michigan, where the kid arrived as a seventh-stringer. “And when I finally got to No. 1,” Brady once told me, “there was someone else they wanted to be No. 1.” A Yankees bonus baby named Drew Henson.
It took a while, but Brady ultimately played Henson back to the bench and got himself drafted 199th overall in 2000. The Patriots’ quarterbacks coach, Dick Rehbein, gave a strong recommendation to Belichick, who wanted to add depth behind the franchise player, Drew Bledsoe. “I’m going there to take Bledsoe’s job,” Brady told his friend at Michigan, Jay Flannelly.
“But Tom still goes to New England as the fourth-string quarterback behind Michael Bishop,” Feely said. “I remember being thrilled that he made the team. That’s how little expectation I had for Tom’s success in the NFL. I just thought it was awesome that he made the team, and then a year later he’s winning the Super Bowl.”
After telling another Michigan buddy, former NFL tight end Aaron Shea, that he feared the Patriots cutting him and sending him into a life of selling insurance, Brady dominated the NFL from the immediate aftermath of 9/11 through the late stages of the Great Pandemic. How in the world did he pull it off?
“He had a belief in himself that was irrational,” Feely said. “And like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, he never allowed his success to impact his desire and work ethic. His humility is really what led to his success, because he let Bill Belichick get on him every day in meetings and use him as an example to everyone else.
“Tom was the ultimate competitor. I watched him get in huge fights in intramural college basketball games, and he once threw a backgammon board because he was pissed that he lost to me.”
Any man who would throw a backgammon board in anger, and who would set a vicious blind pick on an intramural opponent who was heckling him about Henson, would certainly care about beating Jordan on the final GOAT scoreboard, seven rings to six.
Feely agreed that Brady privately wanted to pass Jordan, even though he’d never admit it publicly. He also agreed that a return to the NFL – after a year of R&R with the family – can’t be ruled out.
But Tuesday wasn’t a day to weigh the odds of a comeback or to break down his exit strategy. It was a day to appreciate Tom Brady for knocking down the boundaries of what is possible in sports.
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