Two and a half years ago, after the Buccaneers pasted the Chiefs in Super Bowl LV, the most indelible image from the team’s booze-soaked championship boat parade along Hillsborough River was a plastered Tom Brady returning ashore, tottering past news cameras as he leaned on a teammate who looked more like a bouncer hauling a troublemaker out of a bar.
For the wider football world, the scene embodied how the typically vanilla Brady—who later winkingly blamed his drunkenness on too much avocado tequila—cut loose in celebration of his record-resetting seventh Super Bowl ring. For those inside Tampa Bay’s locker room, however, it spoke even greater volumes about the fellow signal-caller quietly supporting Brady in his moment of bacchanalian need.
As tight end Cameron Brate says, “That’s Griff in a nutshell, that picture right there.”
