The Ode to Tom Brady
Full disclaimer that this is the least important thing currently happening in the world. Stay safe, well, isolated, and helpful.
Look at those banners. They’re right behind his head. The first one’s obscured completely. (That’s the Rams one. Well, the first Rams one.) The second one (the Panthers one) is a bit obscured. But the rest are in full view. Dangling high above Gillette Stadium, those banners never knew another home. And they never knew a different caretaker than Tom Brady.
Dwayne Wade was a Bull, LeBron James is a Laker, Michael Jordan was a Wizard, Shaq was everything he could be. Carlton Fisk split his Sox, Hank Aaron rounded out some time with the Brewers. Joe Montana? A Chief. Brett Favre? A Viking. Peyton Manning? A Bronco. Even Ray Bourque, one of the most beloved Boston athletes ever, spent his career twilight with the Colorado Avalanche, only to take the Stanley Cup he won in the Centennial State back to Boston because it felt like the closest thing Bruins fans had to a title.
It was the closest thing any Boston sports fan had to a title. Bird and Russell were long gone, the Bruins were drowning, the Red Sox were cursed, and the Patriots were hapless. Despite a barrage of success in the ’70s and ’80s (reserved solely for the teams at the Garden), Boston was still somehow Loserville at the turn of the century.
So to see Bourque bring back a trophy of any kind felt like a win. And he wanted to share it with the city, too. A moral victory, even if a banner for it wouldn’t be raised in the Garden.
But the point is, everyone leaves. Athletes become lifers with cities when they attain greatness and it’s their very greatness that convinces them they can still do it. That they can still perform at the levels of their primes. And their teams never agree.
Sometimes the players are right. LeBron was just competing for an MVP trophy before the NBA season got suspended. Shaq was better with the Lakers than he ever was with the Magic. Favre was still elite after his second, fifth, seventeenth retirement. But sometimes, they’re wrong. Sometimes, the writing is on the wall and retirement is an obvious answer to everyone except them. But can you blame them? Give me an entire life dedicated to playing a sport and I wouldn’t be so quick to accept its random, sudden ending either.
Tom Brady is forty-three years old and it’s been said that Father Time would catch up with him any minute now for what seems like a decade. There’s never been an athlete like him, so we don’t know his trajectory. We don’t know what Tampa Bay will hold for him.
Because the truth is, it’s hard to go out on top. Happily ever after is rare in sports. The storybook ending for Brady would be to retire after the Rams Super Bowl (the second one). Six championships to his name, more than any other player in NFL history. The greatest to ever do it, now indisputable! If his life was a movie (that sixth round pick suggests he just might be in one), that would be where he would retire. It was his Roy Hobbs moment! But that’s not in Brady’s nature. Now, he’s trying to prove that he can keep creating storybook endings for himself. Maybe the only way to get him off the football field is to put him in a retirement home in his eighties. For now, he’s defied every precedent we’ve ever seen in sports. But even though he has a chance, he still might not go out on a top.
That’s because Ray Bourque is an anomaly. Bourque played 1,826 games in his career before he finally hoisted the Stanley Cup, longer than any other hockey player had to wait. And when he finally attained the ultimate glory for an athlete, he wasn’t keen to tempt 1,826 games again to win a second. He retired. He went out on top. He celebrated with Boston. The only sports title the city ever thought they would see. That was 2001.
Remember the autumn of 2001? I don’t (I was only three), but you might.
An NHL without Bourque saw the Bruins perform well, beginning in October. They’d later return to the playoffs, only to lose in the first round. Their top goal scorer was Bill Guerin, but their best player was Joe Thornton, an injury-prone star kid whose trade away from the Hub was imminent.
Led by Antoine Walker and Paul Pierce, the Celtics were resurgent that fall. They would later claw their way to the Eastern Conference Finals, but it wasn’t enough for them to do on their own. Help for The Truth was still six years away.
Help for the Red Sox was still three years away. They had Trot Nixon and Jason Varitek, Manny Ramirez and Tim Wakefield, but they hadn’t made the leap yet. Pedro and Nomar felt like they were supposed to be the savior wunderkinds, but still, the Red Sox did not qualify for a spot in the playoffs.
And the Patriots, the sports step-child of the city; they were the only one of the four to never win a championship. Autumn had just begun and the chances of reversing that fortune looked even more dire than before. September 23, 2001: Drew Bledsoe is knocked from the game against the Jets with an injury. Sixth round backup Tom Brady enters the game. The Patriots lose 10–3. Great. Back to Pierce, Pedro, and Thornton. Bledsoe’s gone.
Do I really need to say the rest? (Yes.) Brady returns for week three and the Pats clobber the Colts, 44–13. The Patriots roll through the rest of the season, on the heels of clutch play from Brady, a steel defense, and the lurking genius behind Bill Belichick, a figure not many in the NFL yet feared. New England won the Snow Bowl in the playoffs, en route to their first ever title in Super Bowl XXXVI. Two years later, they won again. And then the next year. Two more appearances, an undefeated season (hark!), a couple more years and they’re back in XLIX. Two years later, a win for LI. Two years later, a win for LIII. An appearance in between. Twenty seasons with six Super Bowl championships, nine appearances, thirty wins in the playoffs and 219 in the regular season, sixteen division titles, eight consecutive AFC Championship appearances, and thirteen first round BYEs. The greatest run any sports team, any dynasty has ever embarked on. Anchored by Belichick, sure, but also by Tom Brady, the greatest winner in the history of team sports.
So it might seem crazy that a player so synonymous with his team is now gone, but everyone’s done it. It’s just that no one this good has done it before because no one’s ever been this good! We all know Brady is a Patriot forever. We all know he’ll never truly be a Buccaneer. But it’s almost unfathomable to think about the GOAT, racking up more stats and trophies in colors that aren’t red, white, and blue. It’s unfathomable to think about what Sundays in the New England fall will look like (if we have them at all) without Brady under center because he’s been there for two decades. He’s been there my whole life! I don’t know what it means to have a football team without Tom Brady. I never wanted to learn what that meant, but we had to eventually. Just rip the Band-Aid off. If the pain lingers, there’s Lombardi-encrusted metal to cool the wound.
I didn’t know how to rationalize my feelings about Brady leaving. Shouldn’t I care more? Why don’t I care more? Is it because the world is shut down and Brady’s contracts matter the least of anything when thousands are infected and hundreds are dying? Probably.
But it’s also because, I feel content. I’m Chidi at the end of The Good Place and I’m curious to see what the door looks like from the other side. We had six Super Bowls and four World Series titles and an NBA title and a Stanley Cup sprinkled into the mix. No two decade span has ever been more fun. But I’m content. I’m happy. And I’m ready.
If this is the end of Titletown, so be it. It was a privilege to be in it all these years. To see everyone who passed through these streets with perhaps only Big Papi comparing to what Brady did for this city, this state, this entire region. That earns him the right to do what’s best for him. And I feel happy for him. I feel at peace. I feel ready to root for the Bucs (secondarily). I feel like we should avoid Boston sports talk radio.
On Twitter, @ TatumsWorld helped it all make sense.
It’s because it’s true. Brady gave it all for us and for the team over the past twenty years. He did whatever he could to win and it worked. He was brave, kind, and smart, yes, but he really didn’t ever give up on the game, or on us. You can look to the Falcons Super Bowl for that, sure. It’s probably his best moment, his best game, in terms of what he was beyond the box score. But I’ll always remember him in the way that I could watch the Patriots play every Sunday. Maybe it was a late afternoon game against an NFC team I’d watch with my friends or a Sunday Night Football game to help forget about school the next day or any one of the myriad 1:00 games against divisional rivals with my family. I loved them all.
Towards the end, I tried to appreciate them all. Loving who I was watching and making sure I’d never forget it. Brady never gave up on us and it showed when I never doubted that every week would be a win for the Patriots. Maybe that made every non-Boston fan just close the tab (if they haven’t already). Maybe that’s wrong because the Patriots did lose from time to time. But it never felt like they would lose. It always felt like they’d find a way to win. No matter the deficit or the momentum. They had Tom Brady! How could they lose?
And how could they lose him? Who’s to say? Maybe we’ll get an oral history, maybe there’s not actually any drama, or maybe we’ll never know the whole truth. What remains is that we are officially in a new era now. It just feels a bit melancholy, a bit bittersweet, a bit (dare I say) right that there will be no more Brady memories on the field with the Patriots. They’re over now. That chapter of the storybook has ended. Boy was it fun to have that in our lives? I wish every fan could experience it. Maybe Tampa fans will now. But we had our time with the best to ever do it. I’ll be thankful as long as I live.
I’ve appreciated the memes and tributes that have come about from this. It’s made me feel even more connected to the world than I already do, especially through the bonds with other Patriots fans. The above Toy Story 3 image, a video that turned Ben Affleck’s Good Will Hunting character into Julian Edelman. They’re all fun. But the most resonant thing this week has been Bill Simmons reading his old Page 2 column on his podcast. Ahead of that famed Snow Bowl, Simmons wrote a column about the tortured history of New England Patriots fandom.
He wrote, “And that’s where we stand today, a suddenly rejuvenated franchise with a new quarterback, hungry veterans, young players with something to prove, and a bright coach who gives us a fighting chance every week.” Hah. “A new quarterback.” Would that we knew then. But he continued.
“So think about me when you’re watching the Pats on Saturday. Maybe you root for the Bengals, Seahawks, Lions, Jets, Falcons, Cardinals, or Titans (the old Oilers), so you can totally sympathize. Maybe you’re just a casual fan. Maybe you don’t care at all. But the fact remains, my black-sheep football team is three wins away from winning the Super Bowl. And if you don’t mind, I thought I would savor the moment.
Who knows? I might not be here again for a while.”
The goosebumps I felt reading that are indicative of everything we didn’t know was coming after that. Everything that made this the greatest thing any sports team has ever done. The greatest thing any athlete has ever done.
There were plenty of moments to savor. I’ll always love the times we spent on Sundays with him. I’ll always love the Super Bowls we shared together. But who knows? With Tom Brady gone, we might not be there again for a while.
