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Maybe he really is just different, wired in such a way that the usual worries of middle age — or, in sports terms, advanced age — simply will never affect him. Maybe Tom Brady truly is immune to all of that, and he will blissfully throw tight spirals until he starts receiving literature from AARP in the mail.
Maybe his guardian angels will protect him better than a five-man front of Anthony Munoz, John Hanna, Jim Otto, Bruce Matthews and Forrest Gregg.
But before we simply assume that Brady can be Brady forever — since we really have no proof otherwise — perhaps it’s time to ask a different question.
Instead of: Why shouldn’t he play forever?
Maybe we should ask: Why should he?
What’s left to prove? What’s left to gain? And look: We aren’t merely talking about him risking the embarrassment of being another great athlete who stuck around the party an hour too long. Willie Mays battling the sun, Michael Jordan dealing with aching knees, Wayne Gretzky adjusting to life as just another star, rather than a deity: those were all hard to watch and, you would imagine, harder still to be.
But there was a difference.
There wasn’t the weekly risk of serious, permanent damage lurking on the other end of a blitz, or a scramble, or simply a wrong step. Football is different. Contact sports are different. It would have been nice for Jordan to go out after breaking Byron Russell’s ankles in Salt Lake City, winning the ’98 NBA title. His return as a Wizard was anticlimactic. It wasn’t sad.
Muhammad Ali, that was sad.
There were any of a half-dozen times when Ali could’ve stayed away from boxing with his legend and his senses at least reasonably intact. He walked away a bunch. He kept walking back. Maybe he was already on the way toward Parkinson’s when he stepped in the ring with Larry Holmes, or that awful last bout with Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas.
But we’ll never know. What we do know is his final retirement was at least one retirement too late. Same with Sugar Ray Leonard, who could never stay away and paid a punishing surtax for that. So were any of a hundred glorious boxing names scattered across time, tough guys who could never quite equal the fix of life in the gym until it was solved for them.
Football?
Look, by the end an enfeebled Peyton Manning could barely hand a ball off, let alone throw one with any semblance of accuracy. His final moment came amid a shower of Super Bowl confetti but forever he will be known as having been carried there by his Broncos teammates, not the other way around. And listen to Brett Favre’s halting cadence; you have to wonder if those final two years with the Jets and Vikings were truly worth it.
Or you could simply watch “Concussion” again.
Again: maybe Brady is invulnerable to all of this. You can understand why someone still playing at an MVP level might be reluctant to permanently pass on Sunday afternoons. You can understand how addictive life as a GOAT is. You can certainly appreciate the salary involved in such a trade, and the adulation, and the camaraderie with teammates that no athlete is ever again able to replicate no matter if the final game is in CYO or the NFL.
But those who wonder how Brady’s unretirement might affect his legacy are missing the point. For one thing, it’s already secure, same as Mays was regardless of the Oakland sun field, same as Jordan’s was when he played closer to the ground than to the rim, same as Ali’s was after the Rumble in the Jungle, or the Thrilla in Manila.
It’s his knees that’ll be at risk. And his shoulder. And his skull. Life in the NFL means always existing one hit away from the hospital. And that’s a shorter trip at 45 than it was at 25. With longer consequences.
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