It’s hard to imagine football without Tom Brady on the field, and it must be harder still for him. This year’s retirement may stick, at age 45. Brady could probably find another team, and we’ll see what happens when one calls. He’d probably play forever if he could.
Nobody can, of course, but Brady came closer than any non-kicker since George Blanda. His retirement video was stark and simple, after last year’s manicured goodbye that was actually a ploy to get Brady to the Dolphins, and which lasted 40 days. This one was a middle-aged man saying it was for good this time, fighting back the emotion that got caught in his throat.
“Thank you guys for allowing me to live my absolute dream,” said Brady. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
If anyone ever had the right to say that, it was Brady, but it was telling of a sort of torture, too. His football accomplishments are peerless: seven Super Bowls, five Super Bowl MVPs, three regular-season MVPs, more pass attempts and completions and passing yards and touchdowns than anyone, but only 22nd in interceptions.
Nobody had ever won more than five Super Bowls, and Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw were the only QBs to even get four. Brady didn’t have Aaron Rodgers’s arm, or Peyton Manning’s pedigree, or even the collegiate success of Drew Brees. But with Bill Belichick teaching him how defences work, the sixth-round backup at Michigan became the absolute master of the simple throw, the smart play, how to perform under pressure. The only other football player with a claim to greatest ever is probably Jerry Rice, but in the era of the quarterback, Brady surpassed everyone, ever.
And it ended, as it had to, with mortality.
Brady won that seventh ring against the Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes after leaving the Patriots for Tampa in 2020, and then in 2021 he led the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns and throws and completions and nearly came back from 27-3 down against the Rams to reach the NFC championship game. It would have been a bitterly worthy ending.
But Brady had chased perfection forever and couldn’t stop, and after he retired and unretired came the unravelling. Buddy Rob Gronkowski and coach Bruce Arians had retired, Tampa was beset by injuries, and Brady clawed his way through a 8-9 season and a disconsolate playoff loss to Dallas. He still limited bad plays; he just had more trouble making good ones.
And his marriage dissolved. Brady and Gisele Bündchen, the Brazilian supermodel, had been married for 13 years and have two children. She has wanted him to walk away since at least the 28-3 game in Super Bowl LI against Atlanta in 2017, which was the biggest Super Bowl comeback by miles. After he won his seventh Super Bowl, Gisele said to Brady, “What more do you have to prove?” Brady hugged her and changed the subject.
Lots goes into a marriage and the end of a marriage, but it was clear his wife wanted Brady to stop giving so much of himself to football, and it was clear that Brady couldn’t, and wouldn’t, stop. He missed 11 days of training camp this season to “deal with some personal things” in the Bahamas, and explained it by saying, “I’m 45 years old, man, there’s a lot of s—t going on.” Somewhere in the last year he lost 15 pounds, and you could see it in his face.
He became the oldest quarterback to start a game. Tampa struggled. The divorce was finalized in October, and the court documents called the marriage “irretrievably broken.” A little over a week later, Brady led the 43rd fourth-quarter comeback of his career in a win over the Rams, tying Peyton Manning for the most all-time, and became the only QB to exceed 100,000 combined passing yards, including playoff games. A few days after that, he said he had “zero regrets” about coming back for one more year. In another interview, though, he said, “I just have a competitive fire that got the best of me.”
And then Tom Brady said goodbye to playing football, and he’ll be fine in most ways. He’s got a 10-year, gazillion-dollar contract to call games for Fox Sports, which he signed a year ago. He has founded a menswear company that’s doing well, an NFT-shilling sports fandom company — Brady also pushed crypto. And given his forays into pseudo-science over the years, the man who once said drinking water prevented sunburns will probably find something to do with that.
Brady watched Kobe Bryant carefully, and Kobe’s death rattled him; he felt they shared an all-encompassing passion for their sports, but for more than the sport, too. Kobe, before he died, seemed to be somewhat at peace.
But I wonder about Brady, because that great strength — his ferocious persistence and ambition, to the exclusion of so much — is now a weakness. Brady needed football so much that his marriage collapsed, and it reminds me of what Michael Jordan told Wright Thompson of ESPN when he turned 50, about competitiveness: “I can’t help myself. It’s an addiction. You ask for this special power to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can’t. If I could, then I could breathe.”
Gisele will apparently talk about the divorce in a cover story with Vanity Fair, and Brady has talked emotionally about how he knows he hasn’t been the dad that his own father was for him, and how he hopes his children don’t carry whatever they love to the extreme that he did. He called it torment.
Tom Brady was the greatest quarterback there ever was. He eschewed his perfect endings, and he will be remembered forever.
And now comes the rest of the life, and how to reckon with the cost.
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