As Tom Brady ponders whether to call it a career or not, it’s important to remember where Brady started, and how he became the greatest quarterback who ever played the position. It isn’t just the seven Super Bowls he won, six for New England, one for Tampa. It isn’t just that he threw for more yards (84,520) and more touchdowns (624) than anyone else, or that he was 35-12 in the playoffs. It’s where he came from.
It’s going from the 199th pick in the 2000 draft, buried on the Patriots’ depth chart, to his status as the GOAT. In its way, it is a story that mimics that of another elite resident of American sports, Michael Jordan, who, legend has it, was cut from the varsity at Laney High School in Wilmington, N.C., and used that as fuel all the way to immortality.
Both stories ought to come with context: Jordan was placed on the JV team as a sophomore. He had time to rebound become a High School All-American, start at North Carolina as a freshman at a time when that was as rare as a Honus Wagner baseball card. Brady’s draft stock might not have been impressive, but he was a starter for the University of Michigan; he didn’t sneak into the league out of Sheboygan State.
“I don’t feel I was ever given anything, ever, on a football field,” Brady said a few years back, during media day at his final Super Bowl as a Patriot. “I know that I’ve had to work for everything good that’s ever happened to me. And I know I need to keep working if I want that to be the case for as long as I play.”
At the time, Brady had started hinting about playing until he was 50, and he was by then fully engaged in a training regiment in which he looked far stronger and fitter at 40 than he had at 25. By then, we had stopped believing there was anything he couldn’t do as a quarterback. Yes, he was forever surrounded by great players, and he was coached most of his career by the greatest coach, Bill Belichick.
But those players and that coach were made greater by their proximity to Brady, too.
And Brady’s greatness didn’t take years to percolate. We saw it as soon as we could. We saw it as soon as the Jets’ Mo Lewis knocked Drew Bledsoe out of the second game of the 2001 season. Brady didn’t beat the Jets that day. But by season’s end, he was in the Super Bowl.
And at the end of that game against the Rams, Belichick — whose gut probably screamed at him to play it safe — instead entrusted Brady to take the Patriots down the field and win their first title together. Brady did that.
And for the next 20 years, that was who Brady was. He didn’t have to win all of his games in the final minute — the Patriots were the better team on the field almost every game he ever played for them, and the Buccaneers were pretty damn good the last two years, also — but you always knew: If you had a lead, you couldn’t rest. You couldn’t breathe easy.
In case anyone with the Jets — whom Brady tortured more than anyone else — had forgotten, there was the quintessential Brady comeback from two touchdowns down in Week 17 this year, the final straw a 33-yard scoring pass with 15 seconds left in the game.
And then, of course, there was last week, at Raymond James Stadium. Brady had already won a Super Bowl once when he trailed 28-3; now, trailing 27-3, the Bucs were left for and presumed dead. Except everyone watching the game, in Tampa and everywhere else, knew: as long as No. 12 is on the field …
And damned if he didn’t bring them all the way back.
They didn’t win the game, because sometimes not even the greatest can author their own script. Jordan didn’t retire after the step-back that won the 1998 NBA Finals. Ali didn’t retire after the Thrilla in Manila. Brady walked off the field for the final time on the wrong end of the scoreboard. It happens to the best of them.
And to the greatest of them.
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