PHILADELPHIA — Happy Tom Brady Day. It’s Feb. 1, the day each year that Tom Brady retires.
This is the second annual TBD, and, while we wish you all many felicitous returns, we do not wish the same to Brady, the greatest athlete you’ll ever hate. We wish for him to stay retired this time. We wish him the best of riddances.
Brady posted a retirement video on Twitter at 8:12 a.m. in front a beachfront condo, during which he said, “You only get one super emotional retirement essay, and I used mine up last year.’
Then, in typical Brady style, he proceeded with a super-emotional retirement video. Narcissism is a disorder to be pitied, not mocked.
The first comment under Brady’s announcement was, “See you next year.” Exactly. Let’s see how that ages.
With several prime openings at quarterback today, and with the inevitability of more need in hot spots around the league, and with a dearth of developed QB talent in the NFL, it will be fascinating to see if Brady moves to TV for $540 million and stays there. What if Trey Lance isn’t full-go in San Francisco? Would the Colts be enticing enough if they move on from Matt Ryan? The Saints have baffled Brady for years; might he consider another encore, this time in Nawlins?
Or, consider this scenario: Jalen Hurts goes down in Week 9 of the 2023 season, the Eagles are 8-1, Blaine Gabbert is Hurts’ backup, and Brady’s bored in the booth.
It could happen. Philadelphia might choke on its, er, pride, but Jeffrey Lurie is a Boston native who still loves all things Brady and New England, so yeah, it could happen. And Philadelphia would experience self-loathing unlike anything we’ve seen since Michael Vick traded prison clothes for an Eagles uniform.
Brady, the millennium’s poster boy of smug, quit football a year ago today, then returned about two months later, forsaking his family, his marriage, and, from his evermore youthful appearance, millions more nerve cells. Now he’s divorced, and diminished; he lost 15 pounds, and whatever remained of his dignity. Not that the cheating, lying, bullying boor ever displayed much dignity.
Brady will be remembered for winning seven Super Bowls and 251 games, winning five Super Bowl MVP awards, passing for nearly 90,000 yards, throwing 649 touchdown passes, and making 15 Pro Bowls, all records. He also won three MVPs, the most recent after the 2017 season, when he was 40, which made him the oldest to win the award.
He will be revered for these feats, but mostly just by people who live in New England, where he spent his fist 20 seasons with the Patriots, or by people in Florida, where he spent the last three in Tampa. Pretty much everywhere else Brady will be remembered like sauerkraut; useful on its merits, but generally rank and unpleasant.
Consider: When you’re a tall, gorgeous NFL quarterback who lived a storybook career, it takes an enormous amount of smugness, bad judgment, and general priggishness to be among the most despised athletes of all time in a society that reveres an underdog story.
Brady was a sixth-round pick in 2000 who, in his second season, replaced injured superstar starter Drew Bledsoe and turned the worst-managed team in NFL history into the only real NFL dynasty in the salary-cap era. He did so not only on the East Coast, but in the cradle of American independence and democracy. What’s not to like?
Buckle up.
Not so G.O.A.T.
Brady will be best known for benefiting from the NFL’s most notorious cheating scandals.
He was the Patriots’ quarterback from 2001-07, when they were found guilty of illegally taping opponents’ signals in a scandal called SpyGate, which cost them $750,000 in fines and a first-round pick in the 2008 draft. Eagles coaches in Super Bowl XXXIX suspected in the moment that the Patriots knew what was coming.
“When you go back and look at that tape, it was evident to us. … We believe that Tom [Brady] knew when we were pressuring him because he certainly got the ball out pretty quick,” said former Eagles assistant Steve Spagnuolo in a 2018 radio interview.
This scandal made Brady and the Patriots utterly hated in Philadelphia. The rest of the world would soon follow.
In the playoffs following the 2015 season, the most damaging incident of his career spawned from an innocuous ploy for a minor advantage. The Patriots were caught using illegal, underinflated footballs. An investigation uncovered Brady’s involvement in the practice, and, eventually, led to a four-game suspension. The harshness of the suspension lay in the fact that Brady destroyed evidence during the investigation; specifically, his cellphone. What might have been a slap on the hand turned into a media circus.
Brady’s serial malfeasance had long before revealed his absence of character.
His pristine image took its first real hit when he dumped actress Bridget Moynihan in early 2007 and quickly started dating Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, then learned that Moynihan was pregnant with his child. The timeline provides little evidence for scandal, and Brady has been involved in the life of his son, Jack, but this sort of development taints a fella.
Brady’s brand has taken repeated hits because of his relationship with Alex Guerrero, a snake-oil salesman once fined by the Federal Trade Commission and stripped of his fake “doctor” title after he shilled for a product called Supreme Greens, which, Guerrero said, could prevent and cure everything from cancer to AIDS to diabetes. Brady hired him after this.
Then, for years, Brady hawked a product called NeuroSafe, which he claimed prevented concussions, until an FTC investigation compelled Guerrero and Brady stop selling it in 2012. More recently, Brady and Guerrero introduced a vitamin supplement called Protect on his TB12 website that he claimed boosted immunity. He announced the supplement’s release in May 2020, at the height of COVID-19 pandemic hysteria, suggesting that the unapproved product might provide protection against the coronavirus.
In April 2020, Brady twice violated pandemic quarantine protocols in Tampa, once visiting a coach’s home and practicing in a closed city park.
Brady contracted the coronavirus less than a year later after a drunken, documented Super Bowl celebration parade. Pity, that.
Clearly, off-the-field morality plays no part in Brady’s existence, so it follows that Brady’s on-field petulance is as unmatched as his on-field records. He routinely screams at teammates, destroys sideline equipment, and snubs opponents after losses.
He refused to shake hands with Nick Foles after Foles and the Eagles won Super Bowl LII ... then refused to shake again in 2020, when Foles and the Bears beat Brady and Tampa Bay.
Little wonder that, around NFL locker rooms, he’s known as “Tom, Petty.”
Tom, Terrific
Brady won with teams known for their defense, teams known for his offense, teams with old talent and with young, and he won with flair: His 46 fourth-quarter comebacks and 58 game-winning drives in the regular season are the most in history, as are his nine comebacks and 14 winning drives in the playoffs.
He had four fourth-quarter comebacks this past season, the second-highest total of his career. Those sent the Buccaneers to the playoffs as Brady, at the age of 45, broke the record for passes completed in a season. He also held the previous record, which he set at the age of 44. He also ranks first, third, and fourth in attempts, all within the last three years.
And he can’t play in a league with Geno Smith?
Does anyone believe that a freshly divorced athlete will ignore a market teeming with need in order to hit the red carpet at campy movie premieres with octogenarian women?
I didn’t believe he was gone for good last Tom Brady Day.
And I don’t believe it now.
