The disturbing truth behind Tom Brady’s troubles.

Derek Jeter is the only other professional athlete whose persona matches Tom Brady’s in modern times.

Brilliant, handsome, leader, shoo-in Hall of Famer.

As the world knows, all that changed a little for Tom Brady this past January following his Patriots’ 45–7 victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC championship game.

At halftime, with the Patriots went in 17–7 up, Colts officials (bizarrely) decided to test the air pressure of two intercepted Patriots balls and found them to be beneath the legal NFL-allowed lower limit of 12.5 psi. General manager Ryan Grigson found NFL officials and complained. (An odd thing for somebody to be doing in the heat of an NFL Championship Game you might think…)

While there’s still some disagreement/misinformation regarding the exact number of Patriot footballs that were found to be beneath the legal minimum, the generally agreed number is 14 out of 15.

Match officials re-flated the illegal balls and the game continued. Brady and his Patriots proceeded to post 28 unanswered points (odd with balls allegedly not to their QB’s liking.) Final score Patriot 45 — Colts 7. The rest is history.

Following months of chest-beating from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Pats owner Bob Kraft, a day or two ago Kraft and the Patriots decided not to appeal against the NFL’s stunningly harsh penalty of a $1 million fine, loss of draft picks, plus a 4 match ban for Tom Brady.

While Kraft is all but a father to his superstar quarterback, the billionaire businessman didn’t get where he is today without looking at the bigger picture. That picture includes the importance to Kraft of his own powerful standing among of the other 31 NFL owners, as well as the New England Patriots’ legacy.

Meanwhile, Brady’s own appeal is going forward.

On May 21st, over 4 months and a thrilling 4th Super Bowl victory for the Patriots later, ‘Deflategate’ — as the incident has inevitably become immortalized — NFL commissioner Goodell took the frankly bewildering step of appointing himself the adjudicator of the Brady appeal. This mainly on the basis that it was he but a deputy, Troy Vincent, who handed down the Brady sentence — a bit like saying that it was your left hand that pulled the trigger of the gun and your right hand had nothing to do with it.

The Patriots received their massive penalty after Attorney Ted Welles’ exhaustive and hugely expensive NFL-commissioned report into Deflategate had reached the somewhat anti-climactic conclusion that Brady “probably” knew about/had something to do with the alleged deflating.

New England and its polarizing head coach Bill Belichick had ‘form’, as they say in the crime business: in 2007 Belichick had received the all-time record NFL fine ($500,000) for filming the rival New York Jets’ defensive signals.

The Patriots football club itself was fined $250,000 and lost a first round draft pick for 2008. All acknowledge that this ‘repeat offender’ status contributed to the ‘harsh’ Deflategate decision. (I guess you have to be a gridiron expert to understand why some filming of opponents’ plays is something deserving a fine of any kind, let alone the biggest fine ever.)

Not for the first or last time, the NFL idea of ‘cumulative punishment’ so to speak, runs contrary to the law of the land, which deems defendants’ previous records inadmissable.

Needless to say, ‘probablies’ would also be thrown out on their ear in any actual criminal judicial proceeding — but the NFL is not a court of law. It’s a multi-billion dollar business. Like all multi-billion dollar corporations it has its own ways of doing things.

Also unlike the law — certainly the spirit of the law before which all are considered equal and innocent until proven guilty — corporate punishments (and rewards) are entirely internal matters of politics and personalities.

Eg., the post boy found stealing $20-worth of office supplies is reported to the police, the superstar hedge-fund manager caught fiddling $500,000 of expenses is slapped on the wrist.

Bill Belichick is as much at the opposite end of telegenic as you could hope to find. He comes across like a grumpy, low-talking potato and he compounds this sin of the televisual age by not giving a damn.

Meanwhile, the Boston area itself is highly polarizing within America, with its strange, to some harsh accent flattening the ‘a’ sound in words like car and hard. Yes, there are plenty of regional accents in this huge and wonderful land, but Bostonian seems to owe more to Australia or, God forbid, England. It’s almost… unAmerican.

This relatively small north-eastern catchment area, physically closer than anywhere else in America to the old rulers, compounds its ‘eccentric insularity’ by being utterly indomitable, and completely unapologetic about the way it punches so very much more than its weight in the nation’s sporting arenas.

Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins, Patriots — it takes the entire West (Lakers/Clippers, Giants, Kings, Seahawks) to come close in overall sporting achievement— the field that hundreds of millions of Americans, enthusiasts and couch potatoes alike, regard as an invisible American civil war that plays itself out daily.

Even as the horrors of the Boston Marathon bombing introduce America to the marvelous side of the Boston area’s humanity and fighting spirit, tight-lipped Wild West-style ‘bad guy Grimacing Bill Belichick’ seems to drag America’s attention back to the other, darker side.

It doesn’t take a psychiatry PhD to understand how any possible snippet of an excuse to find Belichick’s endeavors somehow tainted would be avidly lapped up by the majority of America — led, of course, by New England’s vastly more politically powerful yet comparatively massively under-achieving next door neighbor, New York.

(Intriguing aside: the New York Giants have twice overcome the vastly superior bookies’ favorite Patriots — -15 combined — in their two Super Bowls during the last decade. Let’s call them two big slices of luck/one-off displays of fighting spirit. Or let’s put ourselves in the shoes of history’s greatest quarterback and recall the two key moments of those Bowls: Tyree’s miracle ‘catch’ to effectively ruin the Pats’ perfect year in the first SBowl, and Wes Welker’s drop from Brady’s pass as the Patriots seemed about to win the second. If you’re Brady you could be forgiven for wondering how a journeyman like David Tyree manages to ‘squash’ Eli Manning’s Hail Mary-esque pass against his helmet while under severe pressure from the normally lights-out Rodney Harrison— while Welker — one of the greatest catchers in receiverdom, drops Brady’s effort in the second Bowl. If you’re Brady, you could be forgiven, perhaps, for wondering whether Tyree was helped by a conveniently soft ball in that final Giants drive, and whether Welker might have held on had the ball Brady threw at the end of the second Super Bowl been similarly ‘squishy’…)

2007's Spygate, an incident sparked and led by New York (it was the Jets who reported New England) was a blessed and cathartic release for a jealous New York and wider nation. Now here was Deflategate with another.

So, in piled the pundits by the truckload (led by ESPN’s openly Jet-mad Mike Greenberg who used his televised radio show to get the deflation hashtag adopted world-wide) hanging, drawing and quartering Grimacing Bill the moment the first ‘e’ of deflate was uttered.

As events unfolded, though, so did the universal horror that Belichick actually had zero to do with the affair: “You’ll have to ask Tom” was the head coach’s refrain at his presser.

In short, ‘it came to be deemed’ that the amount of air in a football was simply too far below Bill’s radar for any kind of connection to be so much as suggested. (Oddly, the fact that even experts couldn’t tell they were handling a deflated ball when handed one, didn’t make anyone see that perhaps the issue was beneath anybody’s radar.)

Close on Mike Greenberg’s heels, a couple of the most rabid New York pundits did their very very best to stick it to Belichick (“Nobody will ever convince me that a man so utterly in control of everything, a control-freak like Bill Belichick doesn’t know about every single tiny thing that his players and staff, etc etc etc” was the summary of their refrains) but it didn’t take.

It quickly became clear that Bill Belichick was pure teflon when it came to Deflategate.

An unprecedentedly-coordinated ambush hatched God alone knows where and launched in the very middle of an NFL Championship Game suddenly had nowhere to go.

Sports mad America held its breath as somewhere in the darkness conspirators scrambled to decide whether to take a step back and admit that this was a whole lot about nothing but air, or whether to keep moving forward.

Somebody somewhere provided some pretty strong impetus at this point to ensure that the air didn’t go out of Deflategate. I personally was felt it was bizarre that the name of Colts owner Jim Irsay was never mentioned — when has anything even vaguely Colts-related ever happened without Irsay being front and center? His unprecedented invisibility in all this speaks volumes to me.

Without so much as a beat, this immovable conviction as to Belichick’s guilt shifted with the same baseless certainty to Tom Brady.

Every Boston-hater/Brady-envier in America now exploded out from beneath their rocks.

Though even arch Patriots-haters were staggered when Goodell applied a two-times longer ban for perhaps deflating footballs, than what he gave to a man caught on camera spitting in his wife’s face before punching her unconscious.

Just take a moment and digest the significance of that last paragraph. So depressing for any lover of this great country, its institutions — and, perhaps most of all, for every American woman.

As if its very existence would somehow be threatened by Belichick/Boston/NewEngland/Brady ‘getting away with it’, the NFL and the owners who legitimize and power that once unimpeachable institution, have used every single resource at their mighty disposal to squash what remains of the Patriots’ resistance to accepting their ‘medicine’.

Recently, even Bob Kraft ‘decided’ his Patriots as a club would drop their appeal.

Which just left Brady.

The main ‘evidence’ against Brady (now that Patriots arguments for atmospheric changes on a cold January day — no less probable than the suggestion that the greatest quarterback on earth fiddles with the psi of his football — have been summarily and arbitrarily dismissed) is the quarterback’s failure to co-operate, plus allegedly incriminating text messages found on the phones of the two ‘ball guys’ deemed responsible for the actual deflating.

Brady’s lack of cooperation centers around his refusal to hand over his own cellphone.

Tom Brady is a painfully private person married to one of the world’s most famous and beautiful women, supermodel Giselle Bündchen.

The mere idea Tom Brady would turn over his personal cellphone to an organization so clumsy (and I’m being very kind using that adjective) that it “was unable to find” the infamous ‘second videotape’ with footage from inside the elevator where Ray Rice beat his fiancée unconscious — despite the sender of the tape producing a recording of her conversation with the NLF receptionist — boggles the mind!

(For the record, Goodell’s motive for lying about seeing the second tape all along was so that he could belatedly seem in step with public opinion over his original, disgustingly out-of-step 2-game ban for Rice and have cause to increase it to a level that he hoped might appease those calling for his head.)

Who knows what compromising snapshots or snippets Tom Brady’s personal phone might contain? ‘Personal’ photographs of his wife? Text messages from his mistress? Or his boyfriend? Who knows — it’s Brady’s business and his alone. And he’s going to hand information of that order over to Goodell’s clownish, butter-fingered NFL?!

All this stuff seems obvious once you do the one little thing that the whole of America outside New England has been unable to do: take a step back and look at everything objectively.

Such a step might allow people to, I dunno, imagine the following exchange:

Over-zealous, brown-nosing ball-guy to his legendary superstar God quarterback: “I got the balls nice and soft how you like ‘em Tom!”

Brady: “Er, great! Thanks!”

Sure. I can imagine that exchange, no problem.

But no amount of effort allows any balanced, sensible, neutral person to imagine Tom Brady losing quality-time with the world’s most beautiful woman and their children to huddle in some dark corner with some ballguy discussing psi’s.

Frankly, it’s laughable.

Which is why, to the self-righteous fury of assembled media/most of America outside Boston, Tom Brady did laugh at the suggestion when he first publicly addressed it.

Repulsive arrogance of a multi-millionaire sporting superstar with the world’s most beautiful woman for his wife? Or normal guy laughing at a laughably abnormal suggestion that was being blown out of all normal proportion?

It’s the question that’s the crux of the entire sad story: it depends which way you look at it; if you’re a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. And right now it doesn’t look as though America will rest until Brady gets nailed.

Cut to Friday September 17 2010. Tropicana Field, Tampa, Florida. Yanks v Rays. America’s most famous baseball player, Derek Jeter, as much Tom Brady’s baseball equivalent as it would be possible to find in another sport, faces a pitch at the top of the seventh.

From the mound, Tampa Bay’s Chad Qualls hurls a fastball inside — deep inside — a wicked delivery that not only arcs in to Jeter from the start but has a little vicious extra left-to-right movement at the end leaving the Yankee skipper no chance for evasive action.

Plunk!

Cbsnews.com’s Stephen Smith takes up the story:

Howling, hopping and hurting… Jeter even got the team trainer to examine his left arm. And then the All-Star often hailed as a model of good sportsmanship took his base.

More like stole it, fans in Tampa Bay hollered.

“Jeter cheater!” they chanted.

Replays clearly showed what really happened: Chad Qualls’ fastball squarely struck the knob of Jeter’s bat, not him. But Major League Baseball doesn’t use instant replay in these situations…

To his legion of admirers, Derek’s deke was a savvy play. The bat flew, he spun around, doubled over and convinced the home-plate umpire he’d been plunked. He wound up scoring a key run in the seventh inning.

To Jeter’s detractors it was a cheap trick.

“I would never do that,” Tampa Bay’s catcher John Jaso said.

Within days the whole thing was history.

I’m a British Giants and Yankees fan of 10 years standing and Jeter is a hero of mine. You certainly couldn’t call me a Patriots fan.

To any even slightly objective observer there are only two differences between the ‘Jete Cheat’ and Deflategate.

First one: compared to the cameras which caught the Yankee icon red-handed — or should I say -faced — there’s zero proof of what Brady is alleged to have done.

Even if there was, my response would be identical to the common sense shown by former Yankees manager Joe Torre when asked about the Jete Cheat:

“Hell, yeah, he did the right thing. It’s not like running a red light. Stuff you can do out on the field, whether you can get away with it, it’s not being immoral… Anything you can get away with is fine.”

Torre has always been an unusually calm voice in American war, er, I mean sport.

Though on the Jete Cheat all America (except for Tampa and who cares about that?) was unanimous: no case to answer.

But on the so-identical-it’s-almost-spooky case of Deflategate, the country continues to be gripped in a mystifyingly perverse and often self-contradictory fervor to bring somebody — anybody connected to the upstart north-eastern enclave— down.

ESPN radio sports would-be shock jock Colin Cowherd is a prime example of the twisted, bizarre internal combustion of Deflategate.

Cowherd decided to take the ‘Brady Is Guilty’ position and is sticking with it, no matter what. On his best days, Cowherd is nothing of not an exemplar of Shaw’s famous assertion that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds (he is also, of course, toeing the ESPN party line.)

Cowherd is one of those guys characterized by the Phil Dunphy character in the hit tv comedy ‘Modern Family’: because he’s skinny and his hair hasn’t yet turned grey he thinks he can hang with the (utterly mortified) kids.

Unfortunately, Cowherd’s angry old man cod-factual style betrays the bitter middle-aged man inside, the one who never cracked the big-time and whose radio days were numbered when he passed 50.

His signature ‘statements of fact’ always conclude thus: “XXX is guilty! HE JUST IS!” (Fellow ESPN New York radio guy and Yankees network blow-hard Michael Kay has also adopted this phrase to disguise personal emotion as incontrovertible fact.)

The addition of “He just is!” or “It just is!” is the ultimate Cowherdian ‘seal of fact’ that always concludes his rants.

Just yesterday as I drove to a meeting, ESPN playing on the radio, Cowherd decided to take against sports stars bringing their children to post-match press conferences. The one thing he said that he would 100% guarantee all great athletes have in common without exception is this: if you give them an inch they will take a mile. If you give them the slightest opportunity to maximize an edge, they’ll take it and be all over it. It’s sports. “It just is.”

He then proceeded to link this thought to sports stars’ clothing at press conferences and how they dress outrageously to show they’re cooler and better and he then linked the whole thing of them showing off their adorable children as just another way of having an edge.

Er, maybe, Colin, maybe not. (I very much suspect not.)

At the same time, astonishingly, Cowherd can devote entire sections of his program to pillory Tom Brady for allegedly trying to maximize his edge deflating balls, to agree that this should cost Brady losing a quarter of the season, and then, in the very next segment, present athletes maximizing any possible edge as a charmingly unconscious and acceptable fact of top athletes’ lives!

It would all be laughable if not for the damage it all threatens to wreak on one of the greatest figures in American sports history.

Which brings me to the second difference between Deflategate and the Jete Cheat: Brady, New England, Boston — you’re outgunned baby.

New York, LA, the real media markets and power centers of America don’t take getting beaten lying down.

They’ll use all their power to stifle the crystal clear video-supported edge-gaining of one of their icons: you’ll be lucky to find more than a couple proper references to the Jete Cheat on the internet.

And at the same time they’ll use all their energy to blow the alleged, supposed edge-gaining of any enemy out of all proportion; they’ll have him banned, they’ll have his reputation sullied — hell, ESPN MLB commentator Buster Olney co-hosted Mike Greenberg’s show yesterday and said if Brady was a baseball player, Deflategate would have cost him the Hall of Fame!!!

Any right-thinking neutral sportsfan can only sit slack-jawed in amazement as possibly the all-time most reprehensible creep-show in American sports history grinds to what seems a hideous conclusion for all concerned. For the United States of America above all.